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The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Modern European Philosophy)

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Cutting to the quick we can say that Rosen's interpretation of Nietzsche as here presented comes to this: Nietzsche's teaching is twofold and follows roughly esoteric and exoteric doctrines that are incompatible. The esoteric doctrine is that all truth and reality is Chaos and ultimately unknowable. There is no ontology or epistemology found in Nietzsche. The exoteric doctrines of will to power and eternal return are attempts to create a quasi-Platonic distinction between noble and base values by jettisoning the Christian morality that has overtaken Plato's exoteric teaching and championing a more aristocratic system of valuation. Rosen tells us these two aspects of Nietzsche's thought are contradictory and therefore we are unable to follow Nietzsche one way or the other. We might respond by saying that of course they are contradictory, just as there are contradictory arguments in a Platonic dialogue. Why does Nietzsche make them contradictory and what does it mean?

This is Rosen's attempt to cover his own Nietzscheanism (his own esoteric teaching) by shrouding the thought of Nietzsche in a self-contradicting duality. We have reason to reach this conclusion because Rosen tells us that he accepts Nietzsche's critique of Western kultur but does not believe Nietzsche's rhetoric is appropiate for his task. In this Rosen is more or less (and a I am not sure which) in line with his mentor Leo Strauss in that he leaves quite a bit unsaid. For example, Rosen never attempts to explain to us why Nietzsche repeats several times that he is not a skeptic or why the Ubermensch is talked about in books one and two of Zarathustra but not the rest of Zarathustra and is generally absent from Nietzsche's published work thereafter. Rather, the writings that follow Zarathustra refer to eternal recurrence as the most important lesson of Nietzsche's teaching, not the Ubermensch. I submit that Rosen--who is quite exceptional, as Nietzsche would say--does not simply fail to examine these aspects of Nietzsche thought because he does not recognize them. The truth of the matter is that Nietzsche's thought is one of naturalistic materialism (which Rosen tells us) that affirms that being is both chaos and order. (This, incidentally, prefigures contemporary scientific cosmological theories.) The doctrines of will to power and eternal return are "ontological" and put forward by Nietzsche as exoteric explanations of order that results from Chaos. Nietzsche's political philosophy is based on his naturalistic ontology, which does indeed correspond to Plato's political philosophy, with a great deal more "brutal frankness," as Rosen says. It is Nietzsche's brutal frankness about dangerous truth that makes Rosen wary. Again, Rosen accepts the truth as Nietzsche tells it, but does not agree (like Plato) that it should be revealed. "With all its compelling beauty and profundity, Nietzsche's portrait is a distortion of the Platonic conception he attempted to assimilate" (249).

"Nietzsche, as the pale criminal, has nothing to lose: Either he will succeed in clearing the way for an epoch amenable to the happy few, or he will fail, and the inevitable epoch of the last men will institute itself, as would have been the case had he not launched his revolutionary campaign" (92). As Rosen knows, this is not exactly the order of events as Nietzsche described them. The epoch of the last men has arrived despite the happy few and will reign until the philosophers of the future gather the strength to overthrow the tyranny of the many. Of course Nietzsche himself did not believe this literally, as Rosen knows, but rather used it as a metaphorical image of the decline of philosophy in democratic modernity. Literally intended or not (true philosophy is always the preserve of a happy few, democracy as such being irrelavent), this is obviously not the kind of stuff people imbibed in the spirit of democratic politics and human rights want to hear. To Rosen's credit, he does not avoid Nietzsche's anti-democratic political thought (as Nietzsche's interpreters from the left tend to do), but then he purposely points the reader slightly off path by overplaying the importance of the Ubermensch and unsympathetically delineating the contradiction of Nietzsche's esoteric and exoteric teaching. In the preface to _The Mask of Enlightenment_ Rosen suggests that we read Laurence Lampert's book on Zarathustra, _Nietzsche's Teaching_, as a supplement to his. This is good advice. For Lampert explains the "way out of the labyrinth" that Rosen is content to leave us in. Perhaps the real Zarathustra lies between the interpretations presented by Rosen and Lampert.

That Stanley Rosen is strongly anti-Nietzschean is made quite clear in his Conclusion (p. 249): "Nietzsche's doctrines are at least as dangerous politically as those of Marx, and in a post-Marxist epoch, obviously even more so. Once the Marxist dream of wakefulness is punctured, the temptation intensifies to turn to the Nietzschean effort to derive individual significance from chaos."
Rosen contends that Nietzsche is a nihilist (p. 247) who sees the cosmos as only random chaos. This may be an over-generalization since, on the human plane, Zarathustra says that Will to Power is the foundation - see Lampert's classic commenatary: Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and Z. Book I.15: On the Thousand and One Goals: "A table of excellencies hangeth over every people. Lo! it is the table of their triumphs; lo! it is the voice of their Will to Power." or Albert E. Gunn in The Review of Metaphysics 1998.
Rosen thinks that Nietzsche's "metaphor" of eternal recurrence could destroy the myth of linear Progress of the Enlightenment, but that this is totally deterministic (amor fati); Rosen then concludes that all Zarathustra's calls for a "creative transvaluation of values" (p. 247) and for the coming of a Superman are impossible and are a "noble lie" (p. 183)
I think that this contradictory vision is by no means inevitable. It is possible for example that the two aspects (determinism and creation) refer to successive phases in Zarthustra's own evolution in the course of the text. Robert Gooding-Williams' commentary Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (2001) pays closer attention to the connections between Zarathustra's beliefs and the dramatic sequences of the text.
Rosen's reading of Book 4 is very stimulating though. He points out the very ironic tone used towards the "higher men" who have stopped their progression, their self-overcoming, on the way towards the Superman, because of fear, or too much prudence. Rosen notes: "Zarathustra then warns them to restrict their will to their capacity. There should be no doubt here that he is condemning rather than praising the higher men." (p. 235)

This is the most intelligent commentary on Zarathustra yet written. Stanley Rosen's book is heedful of Nietzsche's warning that Zarathustra is a book for "every man and for no man." This work reveals the genuinely conservative nature of Nietzsche's thought.

Nietzsche is a man who was centuries ahead of his time. Buy this book