The transition from the conceptual characters of Dionysus and Apollo to the Greek man offers a deeper answer to the Sielnic truth and extends the reader perspective on the human condition’s trouble. Hence when the reader of The Gay Science is identified with the Greek man, he can listen to a second crucial note that will lead him towards the whole sound of Zarathustra’s enigma, the ethical note.
Nevertheless the reader has to listen to a third note before he gets the full opening symphony of the opera. Indeed he has to pass through another matter that born once he got the conscience of time and it is the question: what is time for me?
It is a question that arises from the same The Gay Science, a sort of open conclusion of this book that ends where has to start something else. The answer is relevant, because it can makes the conscience of time as the most precious gift or the cruellest sentence: is in the fragment named “The Heaviest Weight”.[11]
In front of such a dreadful image, the Greek man turns slowly in the new conceptual character, Zarathustra. The transition happens when takes place an idea of time as “eternal recurrence” of the same that makes the “gay science” concept no longer useful. The Zarathustra figure indeed arises together with the need of a new concept, the “will to power”, that can answer to a new existential question about time: how can I dominate time, if it dominates me and swallows my existence through its continuous repetition of instants that are equal to themselves?
It is the last note of the opening symphony of the Zarathustra’s opera. The Overture is accomplished because the reader is inside the atmosphere of the opera through his ability to listen.
- Aria
Nietzsche’s answer to the new existential question about time lies inside of Thus spoke Zarathustra. And naturally it is expressed by the conceptual character of Zarathustra who shares his vision with some sailors, as they are the worshippers of the enigmas. It is exactly the chapter titled “The Vision and the Enigma”.[12]
Here the reader finds the real sound of the opera, the “Aria”: it is the lyric melody sung by the lead voice of the main character, Zarathustra, and it allows the reader to listen to the key theme of the enigma. Zarathustra’s monologue indeed offers to the reader a concrete image of this latter and of the idea of eternal recurrence of the same: the dwarf. Nevertheless the dwarf is not just an image, but is a conceptual character as well as Zarathustra. It is exactly the opponent of Zarathustra, as well as the eternal recurrence concept that it embodies is the antagonist of the will to power concept embodied by Zarathustra.
Therefore the dwarf is the same demon of The Gay Science that here burdens on the Zarathustra’s impetus towards his self-determination. Anyway here the demon does not burden anymore on a simple man (the ancient Greek man), but on an übermensch who is not scared of it and who despises it indeed. In this way the eternal recurrence is no longer the “heaviest weight”, but a wrong perspective towards which the shepherd’s face transfigured by a smile.
- Duetto
The reader is naturally dazed and confused by Zarathustra’s words, because he listened to a pure enigma. But he listens to a sound so harmonious that he can sense something deep, such an intuition of a concept that he cannot completely rationally gets. It is a sort of aesthetic comprehension of a special perspective about the time that dominates him: do not escape time to refuse it and do not think to change its nature, but do accept it and do want it, so to convert the trouble for the condemnation in a pleasure.
In this way the reader can sense the dramatic vision of the shepherd’s bite to the snake as a specific behaviour: a way to rule the eternal recurrence governing himself inside the existential condition of the eternal recurrence. Thus the reader can feel the need of an ethical decision in which the action is full of responsibility and freedom.
It is now the time for the “Duetto” of the opera, where Zarathustra expands his voice to alternate it, to intertwine it and to connect it with the reader’s voice that is now instinctively trying to sing the sound of the enigma: it is in the chapter named “On Self-Overcoming”.[13]
Hence the will to power is such a movement of creation that the reader shall act inside the temporal condition of the eternal recurrance of the same: he shall seize the instant and he shall want it, and he shall destroy the instant to go beyond it, and then he shall want the Instant back, in a personal brand new perspective.