What did Nietzsche mean by "down-going"?

Take the following with several grains of salt because I could be wrong. If you are looking for a really good companion to the book then pick up Lampert's Nietzsche's Teaching. Its his interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its good quality.

Daftendirekt wrote: »

I'm still on the first part, so maybe this will be elaborated on later in the book, but in the first few chapters Nietzsche talks about Zarathustra's down-going, or going-under. Can anyone shed some light on what he means by this?

Theres a few things going on there.

First of all, Jesus went off into solitude for 10 years at some point didnt he? Well I think Z goes off for over 10 years or something like that, and what his going down references is the fact that although he has become more himself/a "better" human, he recognises that his place is in the earth.

It also evokes the image of the Boddhasatva (sp?) which you can learn about in the Buddhism forum . Basically, you achieve transcendence yourself (i think) but you come back out of a sense of compassion for others and try to help them also gain enlightenment. The whole transcendence thing is v much against Nietzsche's thought though, immanence all the way...

It also connotes a kind of passage or movement, an excersion which mirrors the continual project which one must undergo(excuse the pun) in order to become/set the way toward the overhuman or to overcome oneself.

Finally, I think hes using it in a dialectical manner, there is a heavy reliance on the metaphorics of height and ascendence in the book to give image to Z's teachings. Like he talks about having to crawl, walk, run and eventually fly much later in the book. Also much talk about climbing mountains etc, I think the "going under" is used to offset this and deconstruct the notion of height=good, earth=bad.

(also image of death but im not sure how that fits into his philosophy...)

Does this down-going have something to do with preparing for the coming of the superhuman, or am I missing the point? A quick Google is showing me some pages that suggest that it refers to overcoming yourself somehow; could anyone elaborate on this? Does it relate to the three transformations he talks about (camel to lion to child)? Also, is the scene with the tightrope walker supposed to symbolise this?

The tightrope walker is a good metaphor for the overhuman. Z talks about the human being a bridge from beast-overhuman, a bridge over an abyss which we must navigate.

Z makes sure never (at least in part 1, not sure about later) to call himself the overhuman. He says at one point "I am a heavy drop" (or something) where the drop is to herald the lightning which is the overhuman. So his job, and ours, is to lay the groundwork for the emergence of the overhuman, not necessarily to actually become one yet, although Im really not certain of that at all, just my interpretation.

I dont think it relates specifically to the camel-lion-child thing, although one would assume it is necessary to enter into the world and leave ones solitude in order to assume the weight and responisibility and systems of valuation which is assumed in the progression into the camel stage.

Overcoming yourself is absolutely essential to the book, not gonna go into too much detail, but the image of "going under" definitely gets the kind of worklike/effort meaning of the idea anyway. Look up the derivation of our translation of Ubermensch and see what the word actually means in german, because we lose a lot of the meaning when it is translatied...

Also, on the superman/overman/superhuman: I'd be interested in hearing how you folks interpret this. Again, I haven't finished the book yet, so excuse my ignorance if this is addressed in more detail later on. Parts of the book are written almost like a prophecy of some sort.
Does Nietzsche believe this is something anyone (or most people) can aspire to, or does he believe it's our job to make way for the (hopefully) more enlightened people of the future ?

The first couple of chapters are quite ambiguous about this. I'd lean towards the former upon reading the text alone, but any internet research I've done would seem to indicate otherwise.

Yeah Im not too sure myself.

The best answer I can give, the one that made most sense to me, is at one point Z is "teaching the overhuman" to some crowd, and he says something like that the overhuman is like a rainbow.

A rainbow is uniquely different for everybody who sees it because the perspective from which you observe the defraction(if thats the right word) of the raindrop affects the exact rainbow you see and its position. In the same way, you cant teach someone the overhuman, maybe only what they need to look for, or the project/skills/task which they must undertake in order to acquire the capacity to see it.

Thats what I love about the book, one metaphor can explain it as well as any Kant-like or Wittgenstinian systematisation of ideas. It also fits in with his whole idea about there being no fact, only interpretation (where does that quote actually come from does anyone know? im always afraid im taking it out of context and molesting its original meaning or something).

This seems to have went on a little longer than intended, so I'll stop here.

Me too