Friedrich Nietzsche's Overman, Eternal Return, Camel Lion Child, Young Shepherd Black Snake
The overman is a new type of woman/man capable of accepting the Dionysian dimension of existence, who accepts life as it is without expecting anything from the conditions that are due to him. He is the one who holds the death of God, the absolute certainties and overcomes nihilism. The overman is the one who has the courage to replace Christian morality and has a transmutation of values with the ideal model of the Homeric world. He accepts the perspective of eternal return, that is, of the conception, according to which the course of the events of the world, having completed its cycle, returns to itself, in an indefinite series of identical repetitions, and will be able to relive the same moments by giving them always new meanings, placing himself as a will to power. The overman is the one who recognizes his vital and worldly nature, totally accepting life. It understands the non-existence of the soul and is substantially recognized as a body. This metaphor would explain it,
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The camel represents the man bent under the weight of tradition
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The lion is the man who frees himself from the alleged metaphysical and ethical certainties, arriving at freedom that has a negative connotation; it is freedom ‘from’ and not freedom ‘of’.
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The child is the overman, or a creation of a Dionysian nature who, in his playful innocence, says yes to life and becomes a ‘free spirit’.
… Arrived in front of a driveway door, on which the word ‘at moment’ is written, and from which two infinite paths depart in opposite directions, (the driveway door and the two paths symbolize time and eternity) Zarathustra asks the dwarf ‘Do you, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?’ and the Dwarf ‘All things straight lie. Every truth is curved, time itself is a circle.’ Although the dwarf referred to the circle of eternal return, he didn’t guess the riddle, because he took things too much to the light. Subsequently, Zarathustra asks the dwarf a second question ‘And if everything has already existed what do you think, O dwarf, of this moment? Doesn’t this driveway also have to have been there before? And aren’t all things firmly knotted to each other in such a way that this moment draws all the things to come behind it? So himself too? In fact, each of the things that can walk - even this long way ‘outside’ – it has to walk once again!’…
Nietzschean necessity is then the necessity of the same eternal repetition of chaos ‘chaos implies the need for the eternal return of chaos, of the lack of meaning of the whole. Precisely for this reason Nietzsche writes that ’the overall character of the world is … chaos for all eternity, not in the sense of a defect of necessity, but of a metaphysical-epithemic defect of order’.
Subsequently, a shepherd appears ‘whose a heavy black snake dangled from his mouth’. ‘I saw a young shepherd rolling, suffocated, convulsed, upset in the face, from which a heavy black snake was dangling from his mouth. Did I ever see so much disgust and bruised frock painted on a face? Perhaps, while he was sleeping, the snake had crawled into his jaws and bitten himself there. My hand pulled the snake forcefully, it pulled and pulled – in vain! He couldn’t tear the snake out of his jaws. Then a cry escaped from my mouth Hun! Bite!. Detached his head! Bite!, so he cried from within me, my horror, my hatred, my disgust, my pity, everything in me – good or bad – cried from within me, fused into a single cry. The shepherd bit as he was shouted and spat away from himself the head of the snake. He got up. He was no longer a shepherd, much less a simple man but a transformed, surrounded by light, who laughed! Never before in the world had a man laughed as he laughed!’
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