28
wrong path.”
71
If Strong is right, Zarathustra’s failure is problem of epistemology; to say
that the crowd does not have the experience to understand is to say that they lack data.
To experience is, at bottom, to gather data, and data provides the grist for comparing and
contrasting what is known to what is unknown. To learn via experience is therefore to
employ controls. It is, in modern parlance, to be empirical and it betrays a particular
epistemological relation to one’s world and one’s community.
If we keep in mind that experience, empirical, empire, and imperial all grow from
the same Greek root, this will be clearer. The Greek root is peras, which means end, or
limit, or boundary. What Zarathustra, the teacher of the eternal recurrence, the teacher of
the “madness” is teaching, is a friendship that defies these limits. It resides outside the
artificial boundaries begotten of pity and reason. The problem in the market place,
contrary to what Strong would have us think, is not one of epistemology. The problem is
that the crowd lacks taste. They lack taste for the exception, for what is different. They
yearn for certainty and predictability. As Zarathustra puts it, they are they herd, and
“everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes
voluntarily into the madhouse.”
72
The herd of Ultimate Men cannot have had the same experience as Zarathustra.
They simply do not have an ear for Zarathustra’s song. They look, but cannot hear,
prompting Zarathustra to say, “There they stand (he said to his heart), there they laugh:
they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears.”
73
He knows they have
ears. He knows they can hear. But they look at him and can only blink. To found the
71
Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), 174.
72
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 46.
73
Ibid., 45. The line is repeated almost verbatim at 49.
Convention