My review of Rosen's "The Mask of Enlightenment, Nietzsche's Zarathustra"
Posted by Thomas on 2/8/2008, 11:54 am
83.202.151.26
I just posted this review of Rosen's book on Amazon. Any criticism of my text is welcome.

Zarathustra by an anti-Nietschean, February 8, 2008
By Thomas (France) -
That Stanley Rosen is strongly anti-Nietzschean is made quite clear in his Conclusion (p. 249): "Nietzsche's doctrines are 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."
I'm afraid that this hostile position toward Nietzsche leads to a certain insensitivity to Zarathustra's message. An example is eternal return. Rosen at one point views this as just a "noble lie" (p. 185) to mask what he thinks is Nietzsche's real vision of a pointless, random chaotic universe (p. 246). (The overman is also to Rosen a "noble lie" meant for the many who cannot grasp eternal return). Yet I think that eternal return involves an experiential aspect that Rosen bypasses, a vision of time as a perpetual joyful "now", as in the section "On the Great Longing" in Book 3 that Rosen doesn't even discuss:
"O MY soul, I have taught thee to say "today" as "once on a time" and
"formerly," and to dance thy measure over every Here and There and Yonder.
O my soul, there is nowhere a soul which could be more loving and more comprehensive and more extensive! Where could future and past be closer together than with thee?"
To find a sensitive understanding of of such essential aspects of the Zarathustra, one can turn to Laurence Lampert's classic commentary "Nietzsche's Teaching" (1986), or to the wonderful new one by Robert Gooding-Williams "Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism" (2001).
http://www.amazon.com/Mask-Enlightenment-Nietzsches-Zarathustra-Second/dp/0300104510/

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