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.Together we learnt everything; togetherwe learnt to mount above ourselves and smile uncloudedly to smileuncloudedly down from bright eyes and from miles away when under us 108 Nietzsche s Philosophy of Religioncompulsion and purpose and guilt stream like rain.This however is myblessing; to stand over everything as its own sky, as its round roof, its azure belland eternal certainty: and happy is he who thus blesses.For all things are blessedin the fount of eternity and are beyond good and evil.The world is deep:deeper than day has ever comprehended.But day is coming: so let us part!There are, it seems to me, four ideas contained in this wonderful,poetic passage poetic, as we will see, for a particular reason.1.The soul s ascension from its mortal shell (as in Plato s Phaedrus)so that it becomes the all-embracing starry sky, that is, the totality of things you are my depth , Zarathustra says to it.(In Twilight of the IdolsNietzsche speaks of the insight that one belongs to the whole, one isthe whole (TI vi 8).) The same metaphor of transcendence to the starsappears in Hermann Hesse s poem which Richard Strauss set as the thirdof his Four Last Songs : And the spirit unguarded/longs to soar on freewings/so that in the magic circle of the night/it may live deeply and athousandfold. It also appears in Human, All-too-Human s description ofBeethoven s dream of immortality : all the stars seem to glitter aroundhim and the earth seems to sink further and further away.(Being atthe time, however, in his anti-Dionysian phase, Nietzsche tries to debunkthe dream (see p.64 above).) And it appears, elusively, in section 3of Zarathustra s first part where it is said that the afterworldly wantedto escape from their misery into another world because the stars weretoo far for them.The afterworldly look, in other words, for other-worldly transcendence because they miss the possibility of this-worldlytranscendence.2.The idea that through becoming the totality of things one enters,becomes, the fount of eternity , an eternal certainty ; in other words, thatone transcends mortality.3.The idea that one smiles down on the earth because once one hasentered this perspective things are beyond good and evil.This is some-what tricky to interpret.The temptation is to read backwards from TheGenealogy of Morals, from, in particular, its insistence that beyond goodand evil does not at all mean beyond good and bad.But, for threereasons, this will not, I think, do.First, because reading backwards is abad idea the distinction between good/evil and good/bad still lies someway into the future.Second, because what is important about the world sbeing beyond good and evil is that if it is to be the object of the kind ofecstatic identification Nietzsche is talking about there must be nothingquestionable about its nature at all.But, in fact, if it is, in some measure, bad , this blocks identification just as much as would its being, in some Thus Spoke Zarathustra 109measure, evil.And third, because the smile of ecstatic transcendence is unclouded , and because Nietzsche says that all things are blessed.(Notethat this phrase is strongly reminiscent of the quotation from Emersonon the title page of the first edition of The Gay Science : to the poet, tothe philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all eventsprofitable, all days holy, all men divine my emphases.) So whatNietzsche means is not that the world is beyond good/evil because itis good/bad but rather it is beyond the contrast between good and evilbecause all things are good and are in some sense necessarily so.How could there possibly be a perspective from which that were thecase? To answer this question we need to return, I think, to section 370of The Gay Science.1 There it is said that the Dionysian god or manaccepts, indeed desires, the terrible and questionable.every luxuryof destruction, decomposition, negation , the reason being that he feelshimself to be surfing a wave of fertilizing forces that are capable of turning any desert into bountiful farmland.In ecstatic transcendence,in other words, one performs a kind of theodicy: the world is divinebecause one is sublimely confident that everything contributes to somegreater good.This is of course the state in which one can will the eternalrecurrence , in which one says never have I heard anything more divine(GS 341), to the idea of the exact and eternal recurrence of the historyof the world to date.It is also the state in which all it was finds its redemption in a thus I willed it.thus I will it (Z ii 42).(Notice that,since the individual self cannot possibly have willed all it was , redemption is something that can only occur from a transcendent pointof view.)4. The world , Zarathustra says to the sky, is deep: deeper than day cancomprehend. This same refrain appears at the very end of Zarathustra (Ziv 19.6) where Nietzsche talks about an ancient [i.e.Greek] happiness.intoxicated midnight s dying happiness which sings: the world isdeep: deeper than day can comprehend.Joyfully deep, he adds. Forthough woe be deep: joy is deeper than the heart s agony. Intoxication takes us back to The Birth and the Dionysian.There areperspectives on the world, Nietzsche, I think, is saying, other than the sober , ordinary perspective of the day.As extra-ordinary they can of1 It may be protested that this is reading Nietzsche backwards, too, since the section was writtenafter Zarathustra.But this is not entirely so, since the basic idea of the section what I havecalled the you-can t-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs principle appears already, inembryonic form, in The Birth and in the fourth Meditation (see pp.24, 56 above). 110 Nietzsche s Philosophy of Religioncourse only be reached, evoked, in extra-ordinary language hence themagnificent poetry of Before sunrise.Specifically, there is the sky sperspective, the perspective of identification with the god who is veiledby his beauty , the causa sui, the divine totality and fount of things.Thisis the perspective of being God ,2 a perspective which guarantees notonly that one inhabits is a perfect world but also that one is ontologic-ally secure, that one is immune to harm and death; in Wittgenstein swords, that one is safe, whatever happens.Nietzsche s view, I think, is that there is no right or wrong about thesedifferent perspectives.3 There is no epistemological reason to privilege theeveryday mortal-individual perspective over that of poetic, Dionysianpantheism or vice versa, just as there is no reason, in the famouslyambiguous drawing, to privilege the duck over the rabbit or vice versa. Intoxication is no closer to truth than sobriety nor sobriety than in-toxication
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