T. K. Seung - Nietzsche's Epic of The Soul (2005)

Nietzsche's Epic of The Soul (2005)

In Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Seung develops an innovative reading of Nietzsche’s most abstruse work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Seung’s primary contention is that Nietzsche’s readers have not paid sufficient attention to the narrative unity of Zarathustra. Indeed, many readers have treated the work as nothing more than a collection of disjointed aphorisms, speeches, and parables. The most generous interpretations prior to Seung’s have allowed that the first three Parts of Zarathustra do, in fact, constitute a coherent narrative. However, Seung finds troubling the tendency of these interpretations to view the fourth and final Part of Zarathustra either as an embarrassing addition to the first three Parts or as a low comedy following a tragedy, after the manner of ancient Greek theater. Seung maintains that Part IV, rather than constituting a burlesque that is irrelevant to what precedes it, actually depicts the fulfillment of Zarathustra’s previously unrealized ambitions. Hence, Part IV represents the epic conclusion to a spiritual journey, the trajectory of which spans from Part I to Part IV of Zarathustra.

Seung accomplishes his reading of Zarathustra by decoding the distinctive meaning and role of each Part of the narrative. In Part I of Zarathustra, Seung argues, the protagonist sets out an agenda to spiritualize the secular world. Seung is careful to point out that Nietzsche’s opposition to Christianity should not be mistaken for antagonism to all things spiritual. Zarathustra harangues the bourgeois ethos of secular humanism, embodied by the townspeople in the marketplace in “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” for neglecting the soul. The secular humanists are too readily satiated by material prosperity and other petty forms of comfort. In an effort to save humanity from the pitfalls of secular humanism in the wake of God’s death, Zarathustra erects an ideal which Seung dubs the “Faustian superman.” The Faustian ideal, so Zarathustra hopes, will serve as a viable replacement for the old Judeo-Christian God. Whereas God formerly functioned as the guarantor of the world’s value, now it is up to the Faustian superman to endow the world with meaning through the power of his creative will. Seung refers to this Faustian ideal as the ideal of the “sovereign individual.”

Zarathustra’s notion of a sovereign, or autonomous, individual is linked inextricably to the traditional Western notion of an ego, or agent, situated outside the chain of natural causes and effects. The agent is a sort of unmoved mover, capable of willing events into existence without itself being the effect of causes beyond its control. Passages in Part I accordingly show Zarathustra exulting in the power of the creative individual who successfully inscribes the edicts of his sovereign will in the raw material of the cosmos. Many of Nietzsche’s commentators have seen no more in Zarathustra, or in Nietzsche for that matter, than the elevation of the Faustian ideal. Seung, however, does not see the ideal propounded by Zarathustra in Part I as the considered view either of Zarathustra or of Nietzsche. In fact, Part II sets the Faustian ideal in conflict with another ideal, that of the Spinozan hero.

The Spinozan hero, unlike the Faustian hero, accepts that he belongs to the inexorable knot of cosmic causes and effects. He acknowledges his lack of agent causal (i.e. metaphysical) power and affirms his physical/animal being. Seung refers to the Spinozan self as the cosmic self, that is, as the self that is coextensive with cosmic necessity. Whereas the Faustian hero wishes to be positioned outside of Nature and necessity and to assert his will against them, the Spinozan hero knows he lacks the power to combat necessity. Although Nietzsche expresses his admiration for Spinoza on multiple occasions, Nietzsche scholars have been remiss to draw any link between the two thinkers. But as Seung perspicaciously notes, “The problem of being trapped in the inexorable web of causal chains…was Spinoza’s central problem.”

The connection between Spinoza and Nietzsche, then, is that both are concerned with preserving spiritual meaning in a deterministic cosmos. Zarathustra, however, in Part II is unable to stomach his being no more than the sum effect of causes beyond his autonomous control. Lacking free will means he cannot realize the Faustian ideal, because he lacks the autonomous will which was to stamp itself upon the yielding cosmos. Rather than molding the cosmos, he must be helplessly molded by it. Consequently, the spiritual agenda laid out in Part I is doomed to fail, much to Zarathustra’s chagrin. Thus, Part II of Zarathustra chronicles the suffering of the human will that aspires to autonomy under the onus of cosmic necessity. Indeed, the central struggle of the book is the antagonism between the Faustian conception of the self and the Spinozan conception of the self. Nietzsche has, in essence, turned the problem of free will and determinism into the existential struggle of his hero, Zarathustra.

Part III stages the battle between Zarathustra’s Faustian ideal and the Spinozan ideal, represented by a dwarf. Most readers of Zarathustra posit the dwarf of Part III as a force which Zarathustra must overcome if he is to affirm eternal recurrence. Seung, on the other hand, forcefully argues that the dwarf, not Zarathustra, is the custodian of the thought of eternal recurrence in Part III. Zarathustra reacts violently against the dwarf’s rendition of eternal recurrence, because it seemingly reduces humans to nothing but puppets whose every action has already been decided by the cycles of eternal recurrence. The dwarf’s version of eternal recurrence, Seung contends, functions as a poetic metaphor for determinism. If time is a circle, as the dwarf proclaims, and each life has already been lived innumerable times before, then nothing new can happen this time around.

Concerning every action I will perform, I lack the freedom to bring about a result different from what has happened in previous cycles and what must happen again. But this lack of human freedom and the consequent absence of alternate possibilities is precisely what is entailed by a deterministic view of the cosmos, given Nietzsche’s metaphysical commitments. So Zarathustra must affirm the dwarf’s doctrine of eternal recurrence if he is to come to terms with what it means to live in a deterministic universe. And to accept living in a deterministic universe is just to accept being a fully natural being—that is, a being that lacks the metaphysical power of free will. Coming to terms with eternal recurrence thus will force Zarathustra to give up his pretense to being a Faustian superman. Instead, he will be forced to acknowledge his belonging to cosmic necessity. However, by the end of Part III, Zarathustra still has not acknowledged his cosmic self. When Nietzsche expresses his longing for Eternity (the cosmic knot of necessity) at the end of Part III in “The Seven Seals,” Seung observes that Eternity is nowhere to be found. Hence, Zarathustra’s purported love for Eternity cannot be consummated in Part III.

Seung’s groundbreaking reading, as already mentioned, centers on Part IV of Zarathustra. He contests that in “The Drunken Song” Zarathustra finally embraces his Spinozan self. Ceasing to aspire to autonomy, Zarathustra instead envisions himself as coextensive with cosmic necessity. As Seung puts it, Zarathustra becomes infused with the power of Mother Nature, which is interchangeable with cosmic necessity. Seung’s conclusion is borne out by the highly comical section of Part IV entitled “The Ass Festival.” Seung argues that the ass represents Dionysus and that Zarathustra and his followers are actually involved in a sort of Dionysian nature worship. Zarathustra has finally learned to love the deterministic forces of Mother Nature and to love his animal self—or, his self as nothing more than part of the cosmic chain of causes and effects. The zenith of Zarathustra’s spiritual journey is, in the final analysis, religious. He has conceded that the autonomous will is illusory and has accepted that his life, like all lives, is directed by Mother Nature. His power thus consists not in his ability to assert his autonomous will against the cosmos, but rather in his giving himself over to Mother Nature. This relinquishing of autonomous will and subsequent acquiescence to necessity seems, so Seung argues, to culminate in a highly religious experience of Mother Nature for Zarathustra.

It might seem ironic that Nietzsche’s answer to the death of God is itself religious. Seung confesses that this is the last thing he expected to discover when he embarked on his work. But Nietzsche’s Dionysian religion, unlike the Judeo-Christian religious tradition which preceded it, is a naturalized form of religion. It repudiates the metaphysical view of human agency that girds the Judeo-Christian tradition, substituting a naturalized vision of the self and of what it means to be human. Seung, however, issues a final warning against taking Zarathustra’s Dionysian transformation for the end of Zarathustra’s travails. At the end of Zarathustra, it appears that the hero’s Faustian self might make a resurgence. Seung explains this by contending that part of what it means to be human, at least at this stage in human history according to Nietzsche, is to be torn between what our Western tradition teaches us about ourselves and what science teaches us about ourselves.

Tradition would have us believe in the existence of our autonomous wills, and subsequently in our power to become Faustian ideals. Science would have us believe that we are no different than Mother Nature’s other children, which are subject to the deterministic mechanisms governing the cosmos. Nietzsche may not think us capable of resolving this conflict, and Seung is reluctant to draw any hard conclusions about Nietzsche’s final views. But Seung’s work does open up interesting questions about Nietzsche’s commitment to naturalism; and perhaps most importantly to Nietzsche scholars, his reading of eternal recurrence is highly provocative. While Seung’s contention that eternal recurrence is a metaphor for determinism is not original, his argument that Nietzsche galvanizes eternal recurrence to make us rethink what it means to be human in a deterministic world is highly original. Nietzsche’s readers might profit from reconsidering the trend in Nietzsche studies to see Nietzsche as the herald of a purely Faustian ideal. The Spinozan themes in Nietzsche’s work might deserve more attention.

Although only relatively recently published, it has attracted much positive attention. Robert Gooding Williams (University of Chicago, Political Science) wrote in a review for Ethics that Seung's book constitutes a "major addition to the philosophical study of Also Sprach Zarathustra". Robert Weldon Whalen (Queens University of Charlotte) wrote that "Neither Zarathustra nor Seung's Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul are for the timid, but the rewards each offers justifies the work demanded. Seung's argument may not convince everyone, but no one could deny his argument's power, creativity, and wisdom. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul is a groundbreaking contribution to Nietzsche scholarship". Finally, the work has served as inspiration to at least one study of Nietzsche, Kyle Evan Mask's 2008 MA thesis in Philosophy at Texas A&M University, "Eternal Recurrence and Nature," which applies Seung's Spinozistic reading of Nietzsche to texts beyond Zarathustra.