A New Interpretation of Nietzsche's "The Riddle and the Vision"

Excerpted from N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2000).

Zarathustra proclaims: "I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.  And behold, then this ghost fled from me."⁷⁶ Self-overcoming is of course self-transformation, and Zarathustra has carried to the mountains the ashes of the conventional self that he has destroyed.  There he has fashioned a new self: "How could you want to become new without first becoming ashes."⁷⁷ Like the Daoist sage whose self has become "daemonic," so has Zarathustra's self attained a "brighter flame" for itself.  (This is the closest the Übermensch comes to divinity: just as the Daoist sage is filled with shen so is the Overman the supreme embodiment of the will to power.) And just as the Daoist sage rejects the superstitions of gui, so too is Zarathustra freed from the ghosts of popular religion.

Much of Daoist imagery and mythology is based on life in mountain wildernesses far from the cities and farms of the plains.  The dog deity Panhu once helped emperor Gauxin win a military victory and Gauxin gave him his youngest daughter in marriage.  Panhu took her to the mountains where she gave birth to twelve children, who learned the language of animals and who "disliked level land."⁷⁸ One of course is reminded of Zarathustra's missionary failures in the villages of the plain--they found him "wild and strange"--and his preference for his mountain cave and his animal friends, particularly the eagle and serpent, with whom he feels more safe than with humankind.

The mountains are also a place where one can accumulate one's de--one's will to power--so that one can recapture the fullness of de one had as a child.  (Those who live in the mountains do not eat the five grains, a diet that dissipates de rather than preserves it.)  The way of the sage is also crooked like a mountain path rather than straight like a city street, a moral code, or a Mohist argument.  In Chapter Four of the Zhuangzi the madman of Chu yells out to Confucius: "Leave off, leave off--this teaching men virtue!  Dangerous, dangerous--to mark off the ground and run!  Fool, fool--don't spoil my walking!  I walk a crooked way--don't step on my feet."⁷⁹ Zarathustra also says that "all good things approach their goal crookedly. . . all good things laugh."⁸⁰ One of the higher men says that Zarathustra is evidence for the truth that the sage walks "on the most crooked ways."⁸¹

In one of Nietzsche's most powerful parables--"The Vision and the Riddle"--we find Zarathustra walking a mountain path with a crippled dwarf riding on his shoulder.  Our initial impression of the dwarf is a negative one: he is "the spirit of gravity" and he is Zarathustra's "devil and archenemy."  He is "half dwarf, half mole, making lame, dripping lead into [Zarathustra's] ear."⁸² Earlier in the book Zarathustra says that his "devil" is a serious and solemn "spirit of gravity"; and this spirit is opposed to his dancing god and to his newly found power to fly.  Zarathustra's powers are very similar to Zhuangzi's zhi ren: "Now I am light, now I fly, . . . now a god dances through me."⁸³  (Zarathustra's bright flame and his power to fly is the Nietzschean equivalent of the spiritual enhancement [shenming] of the Daoist sage.)  The spirit of gravity also "orders" that our children be taught self-loathing so that they then become camels of slave morality--loaded down with "too many alien grave words and values."⁸⁴ The person who has discovered herself says: "This is my good and evil," but the "mole and dwarf," representing the spirit of gravity, counters with moral universalism: "Good for all, evil for all."⁸⁵ 

Returning to "The Vision and the Riddle," Zarathustra finally challenges the dwarf: "Stop, dwarf! It is I or you! But I am the stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal thought.  That you could not bear!"⁸⁶ Zarathustra then presents the dwarf with a vision of eternal recurrence, but, curiously and surprisingly, the dwarf is not only able to bear this terrible truth but he also appears to know all about it and its implications.  Speaking like a Daoist sage he declares: "All that is straight lies . . . All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle."⁸⁷  (Laurence Lampert's cannot possibly be correct in claiming that the dwarf is somehow the spirit of rationalism.⁸⁸  The rationalist prefers a "straight" idea of truth and a linear view of time.) In the Joyful Wisdom it is a demon who brings the news of eternal recurrence, but those strong enough to accept the message will declare: "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly."⁸⁹  Zarathustra's devil-dwarf may have a more positive role to play than we first thought.

Earlier in the story the dwarf offers other sagely advise: "O Zarathustra. . . you philosopher's stone! You threw yourself up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall."⁹⁰ Is it possible that Zarathustra by climbing too high and by presuming to fly needs to be reminded by this alter-ego dwarf of his own motto "Be true to the earth"?  Commentators have identified several alter-egos in Zarathustra, so it is quite possible that the dwarf is yet another one of Zarathustra's multiple selves.  We should always remember that all overcoming is self-overcoming, and that even Overmen will have "overdragons" who are worthy of them.⁹¹ Zarathustra goes on to advise the higher men that they should not fear the devil, and that they should not be so obtuse as to call the Overman a devil, as surely the people of the plains will do.

Could it be that the dwarf is a symbol of Zarathustra's most abysmal thought that he has always "carried"?⁹² After all, the motto "What goes up must come down" is simply the vertical version of "What goes around comes around."  Earlier in "The Way of the Creator" Zarathustra warned his "brothers" that "lusting for the heights" is "so many convulsions of the ambitious."⁹³ The dwarf's point is confirmed in the section "The Spirit of Gravity," which reminds us that even when humans learn to fly "the boundary stones themselves will fly up into the air before [them], and [they] will rebaptize the earth--'the light one.'"⁹⁴ Even those who fly should remain true to the earth; for all those who fly, Johnathan Livingston Seagull and Zhuangzi's Peng bird notwithstanding, will eventually have to make a landing.

"The Vision and the Riddle" ends with a shocking scene where Zarathustra comes upon a shepherd with a snake in his throat.  The snake--"the heaviest and the blackest"--could symbolize the choking effects of the slave morality, and, as my students have suggested, the snake's head, which Zarathustra exhorts the shepherd to bite off, could represent the Christian God himself.  At the passionate urging of Zarathustra, the shepherd does decapitate the snake and is immediately transformed: "No longer shepherd, no longer human--one changed, radiant, laughing . . . a laughter that was no human laughter."⁹⁵ After the death of God, there is only eternal recurrence, and this "cosmic" laughter of Hesse's immortals is the only proper emotional response to such a meaningless existence.  As Graham Parkes says: "laughter [is] an often necessary concomitant of insight into the way things are."⁹⁶  Eternal recurrence is meaningless only in the sense of being nonteleological, not in the sense that humans cannot create meaning from it, as Nietzsche's Übermensch and even Camus' absurdist heroes must do.  Only the Daoist sage must repress the urge of value creation.

Cosmic laughter is different from the laughter of the child who is the only being capable of loving herself and embracing every moment without any awareness of the terror of the inevitable return of many similar moments. Cosmic laughter is instead the "Olympian laughter" of the "deeply wounded,"⁹⁷ those, like Nietzsche, who have suffered greatly, who know eternal recurrence as an "abysmal thought," but who still realize that they must embrace it with a child's acceptance. It is the laughter of the lion, who has come home to Zarathustra's mountain retreat resigned to the futility of all his Nay-saying and protesting-- in short, a reformed Titan.⁹⁸ It is also the laughter of the Daoist sage or Zen master who says "Yes" to anything and everything in the universe, even though at its core it is a faceless hundun. (The hundun as belly; Nietzsche's "belly of being speaks";⁹⁹ the mountain sages beat on their bellies; the belly laugh.) As the Daodejing says: "When the inferior person hears the Dao, he roars.  If Dao were not laughed at, it would not be Dao."¹⁰⁰

Contrary to the Mahayana scholastics who claim that a true Buddha would never "laugh a great afflicted laugh, openly showing his grinning teeth,"¹⁰¹ the Tantric Buddhist would revel in such behavior.  We are also reminded of the pagan gods who laughed themselves to death, both because the Christian God took himself so seriously and because the gods of course knew the truth of eternal recurrence all along.¹⁰² Finally, there is the Goddess and her laughter.  There is the Gnostic Goddess Sophia, who ridicules Yahweh for being blind and selfish;  Durga, who emits blood curdling laughter at the impudence of the Asuras and the presumption of Mahishasura, especially his feeble attempts to seduce her; and Ramakrishna's Goddess, who laughs at human beings for their possessiveness and for their futile strategies to beat death.¹⁰³  Ramakrishna also believed that in the Kaliyuga one does not hear God's voice "except through the mouth of a child or a madman or some such person."¹⁰⁴

Even with this new interpretation of the dwarf's identity, his negative attributes may still outweigh his positive ones.  In Thus Spake Zarathustra the camel is the one who accepts the lie that "life is a grave burden," and this is a load that the camel carries "faithfully . . . on hard shoulders and over rough mountains."¹⁰⁵  Is the dwarf crippled because of the slave morality, or is he more like Zhuangzi's sage-cripples?  Recall that the hesitant and fearful tightrope walker in the town of Motley Cow is called "lame foot" by the jester, who taunts the man for his lack of courage and knocks him off the rope.  (Zarathustra promises to give the mortally wounded man a proper burial but leaves his body in the crook of a tree!)¹⁰⁶ Nevertheless, as with all things Nietzschean, we must interpret the dwarf dialectically not dualistically.  The latter view, expressed by Lampert, sees the confrontation between Zarathustra and the dwarf in a Manichean way: "To club the Dwarf to death is to club to death the whole rational, Socratic tradition . . . ,"¹⁰⁷ which is seen as an evil that must be completely destroyed.  We have already objected to seeing the dwarf as a rationalist, and we now must question whether the dwarf's disappearance actually means that he has been annihilated.  Nietzsche hated dualism just as much as he did rationalism, so the best solution is that the dwarf dissolves into the dialectical unity/difference that is Zarathustra's character.

One way to see this dialectical interpretation is the Tantric one, expressed most appropriately in the Hevajra Tantra:  "whatever demon should appear before him" is an integral part of himself.¹⁰⁸  The eschatological pilgrims in the Bardo Thödol are told to take the wrathful deities that threaten them as simply psychological projections of their own evil deeds.   (Even in dualistic Zoroastrianism the soul sees his good and evil deeds projected as a lovely maiden and an ugly hag respectively.)¹⁰⁹  As Zarathustra is beyond good and evil, the dwarf is an alter ego projection of his most abysmal thoughts; or he is, as suggested earlier, a counter to his attempts to climb ever higher and to ignore the truth of "What goes up must come down."

Yet another dialectical reading rests on the recognition that the cripple, the monster, the fool, the madman, and the child are all allies in the spiritual instruction of the convention-bound and the unenlightened.  ("La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants et des fous," as the French say.)  In his analysis of the deformed and monstrous in the Zhuangzi, Robert Allinson states: "The higher realization . . . is [that] monsters . . . are our greatest blessing and without them we could neither progress in a spiritual direction nor would we have a constant reminder and embodiment of that progress."¹¹⁰ As with the Daoist and Hesse's immortals, the monster, the fool, and the child's greatest value is their spontaneity and freedom; and as such they can speak the truth when society's conventions have either obscured it or prohibited its proclamation. (In taking her jester's advise the queen was allowed to go against convention and tradition.)  Allinson sees the effect of this liberating speech and behavior very incisively:    "In the clear-cut separation between form and content (monster and true speech), there is the greatest chance for the cancellation of the analytical judgment at the same moment as the engagement of the receptive, intuitive function . . . . The acceptance of the monster as a brother takes social and philosophical courage.^"111 Thus we celebrate Beauty's courage in her acceptance of the Beast.   While we are shocked and puzzled by Zhuangzi's strange creatures (particularly master Yu with his internal organs on top his head), we also learn from the people of Wei, who accept their ugly man (even encourage their daughters to marry him) and eventually make him their ruler.¹¹² Not only do we learn that monstrous appearances deceive, but they can also preserve and protect--e.g., Zhuangzi's deformed youth who does not have to work or go to war and the gnarled tree that is never cut.  For the Daoist what each of these have in common is that they have kept their power and their virtue (de) whole.