Marcin FabjańskiCorresponding authorORCID id

Walking-Derived Metaphysics in Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

Article
29/1 – Spring 2024, pages 29-41
Date of online publication: 28 juin 2024
Date of publication: 28 juin 2024

Abstract

 

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the protagonist of his most famous book, can be regarded as a philosopher who works towards becoming a sage—something that, towards the end of the narrative, ultimately seems to happen. Over the course of the account, he travels between his lonely cave and human society several times, walking up and down a mountain. In this article, I focus on how Nietzsche describes those walks using language that breaks with Cartesian dualism through its employment of such expressions as “lead-drop thoughts.” As a systematic frame of reference intended to support the analysis of these descriptions, I make use of Antoni Kempinski’s concept of energetic-informational metabolism. Then, motivated by the preceding observations, I outline the philosophico-therapeutic hypothesis of a human transformation taking place as a two-phase procedure: (1) replacing the view of Cartesian dualism with what I call the “theatre of forces,” and (2) “de-selfing” the stage, or regarding this theatre as impersonal. Finally, reaching out to a Buddhist philosophical conception of the impersonal, I consider the possibility of a metaphysics entirely derived from sensations.

Keywords

Cite this article

Fabjański, Marcin. 2024. "Walking-Derived Metaphysics in Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”." Forum Philosophicum 29 (1): 29–41. doi:10.35765/forphil.2024.2901.02

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Copyright

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License