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Abstract
Although images of rock and stone play a significant role in Nietzsche’s thinking, from his earliest writings to his ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra about will to power and eternal return, this stratum of his imagery has not been much discussed. Initially rocks come across as ‘witnesses of prehistory that are eager to acquire language’, as well as border markers of, and means of entry to, the ‘dead world’, or inanimate realm. Later, stone becomes an image of the raw material that we have to work if we want to make something of our lives by fashioning them, which we can do with all strata of the soul except the deepest. At that level granite signifies what is unalterable, being the sedimentation of a very long past, and so rock comes to be associated with the past that is recalcitrant in the face of will. But when will can will as will to power, stone takes part in the play that is the consummate affirmation of life. It also has to be a dance, a dance on the force-field of will to power, overcoming for the moment the Spirit of Heaviness by lifting lightly from the earth. And finally flight: when ‘the boundary stones themselves fly into the air’, with a few of us shifting along with them.
Notes
1 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 36. Translations of passages from Nietzsche’s works are my own, since the extant English versions fail to capture some of the nuances necessary for the argument. The German texts are from the editions by Colli and Montinari.
2 For an overview of the role of unhewn rock in the development of the classical Chinese garden, see my essay, Parkes, 2005. The parallels with Nietzsche’s understanding of stone are remarkable, though it’s not possible to draw them here. And for a comparison of Nietzsche’s ideas with Emerson’s, see Parkes, 1997.
3 Nietzsche, ‘From My Life’, KGW I,1: p. 288.
4
5 Nietzsche, Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), vol. 8: 41[21], 1879; 11[11], 28[6], 1878.
6 Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 49.
7 Nietzsche, ‘From My Life’, KGW I,1: p. 283; ‘The Course of My Life’, KGW I,2: p. 259; ‘My Life’, KGW 1,3: pp. 189–91.
8 Nietzsche, ‘The Course of My Life’, KGW I,2: p. 256.
9 Schopenhauer (1967), The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, § 21; see also §§ 22 and 23.
10 Nietzsche, KSA 1:715–16.
11 Ibid.: p. 716.
12 Emerson (1960–82), vol. 5: pp. 496.
13 Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[125], 1881; 9: 11[207], 1881.
14 Nietzsche, Dawn of Morning, aphorism 541.
15 Emerson, ‘Goethe’, in Emerson, 1983: p. 746.
16 Emerson, ‘Fate’, in Emerson, 1983: p. 949.
17 Ibid.: pp. 951–52
18 Schiller, ‘Ode to Joy’, lines 9-10, 73-74.
19 Nietzsche, KSA 7: 176.
20 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, § 1.
21 Nietzsche, KSA 9: 7 [213], 1880.
22 Emerson, ‘Fate’, in Essays & Lectures, p. 953.
23 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 225.
24 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 201.
25 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, aphorism 356.
26 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2.2, ‘In the Isles of the Blessed’.
27 Schopenhauer, ‘On Self-Overcoming’; esp. vol. 1, § 55.
28 Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, § 1. The word translated by ‘talus’, Schuttwerk, carries a connotation of boulders, scree, or rock-fragments.
29 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, §1.
30 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, aphorism 109.
31 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2.12; Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 36.
32 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2.11.
33 Ibid.
34 Compare Matthew 27:51–3: ‘And the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection.’ (Luther translation)
35 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 2.20.
36 See Luke 24:2, where after the Resurrection the women ‘found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.’
37 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3.1, ‘The Wanderer’.
38 Goethe, 1982, vol. 13: pp. 253–8.
39 Nishitani, 1990: pp. 91–2.
40 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 230.
41 Ibid.: aphorism 231.
42 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3.1, 1, ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.: 3.11, 2.
48 Ibid.: 1.22, 2.
49 Ibid.: 3.11, 2.
50 Ibid.: 3.12, 2.
51 Ibid.: 3.12, 23.
52 Ibid.: 3.16, 6.
53 Ibid.: 3.16, 7.
54 Ibid.: 4.1, ‘The Honey Offering’.
55 Compare Faust’s challenge to Mephistopheles: ‘If I should say to the moment [Augenblick] / “Do stay! You are so fine!” / Then may you put me in chains / Then gladly will I perish [zu Grunde gehn]’ (Goethe, Faust 1, 1699–1700). Zarathustra’s song uses zurückwollen to mean ‘want … back’ as a counterpart to ‘will backwards’ (as in ‘On Redemption’).
56 Ibid.: 4.19, 10.
57 Ibid.: 4.20, ‘The Sign’.
58 Ibid.: 3.12, 1, ‘On Old and New Tablets’.
59 Ibid.: 4.20.
60 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 106, 36.