Abstract

As in the case of his predecessor Machiavelli, Nietzsche presents his interpreter with the problem of how to understand his rhetorical calls to arms: are they stimulants to action or part of the action of an argument that is ultimately in the service of a cognitive end? In his study on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Stanley Rosen initially appears to wish to combine these two interpretive approaches. He understands the intention of the book to be both theoretical, as “a critical commentary on the history of European culture,” and political or practical, as a rhetorical “incitement to revolution” or the creation of a radically new order of things. According to Rosen, however, in the interest of his practical intention Nietzsche adopts a rhetorical “mask” that is, as it were, Janus faced: he employs a “double rhetoric” that includes both a destructive and a creative moment. Within each of these distinct moments the same doctrines, namely, those of the will to power and the eternal return, are employed, but to contrary ends. In the former case they serve as the chief weapons in Nietzsche’s assault on the regnant tradition—“Platonism” in both its philosophical and popular guises—and in the latter, they are redeployed in an effort to found the new epoch of the Zarathustrian superman. Rosen argues, however, that these doctrines ultimately prove to be fatal not only to the old tradition, but also to the creation of any novel order as well. For, on the one hand, the historical and cosmological necessity of recurrence renders all so-called production merely reproduction and all apparent freedom of the will illusory and, on the other, what Rosen takes to be the truth behind the doctrines of the will to power and eternal recurrence—namely, nature as the random “accumulation and discharge of points of force” —reduces all life, human or superhuman, to the status of an insubstantial expression of this underlying and unintelligible ground: “chaos”.