The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra

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). "Nietzs

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