On the Flies of the Market Place
Occasionally, one happens upon a certain page of classic literature at a strikingly appropriate moment, such that its evergreen insights appear to have fallen directly into one’s immediate midst and experience like a gracious snowfall of cleansing wisdom, leaving one feeling almost as though a long-dead author had mysteriously inserted this commentary into his work anachronistically, or just yesterday, for your personal benefit. An example of this sort of spiritual snowfall from beyond time descended upon me this past week.
These days, I am guiding a student through a careful private reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book I probably had not read continuously from start to finish since my graduate school days, though I frequently peruse isolated chapters. As is true of any reading of Nietzsche, every page of Zarathustra invites serious reflection, challenges comfortable assumptions, and inspires one to focus one’s attention far beyond the dizzying din of today. Regarding the last of those three benefits, however, the early chapters of this book comprised of the sage Zarathustra’s aphoristic speeches on various philosophical themes are particularly piquant, or at least must appear so to a thoughtful person living through this age’s collective dive into the abyss of unceasing chatter interspersed with the ever-present scream of urgency from all around insisting that one must never miss a thing, must never fail to choose a side and commit, and above all, must act now. And perhaps the most shocking of all the great clarion calls of Part One, vaguely addressed to a young admirer of Zarathustra seeking a path out of despondency and self-doubt, is the chapter entitled, “On the Flies of the Market Place.”
Every sentence, every image in this chapter is a gift beyond price for the reader of today — a gift of cold, brutally fresh clarity to combat our time of suffocatingly dank obscurity. In seeking to do justice to its purpose and value, there is nothing to do but read the speech in its entirety, taking the time to muse on each and every equally indispensable idea. And so let us embark on such a reading together now. I will follow the Walter Kaufmann translation1Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Kaufmann, Walter, translator), New York: Penguin Books, 1966, pp. 51-54. (All other references to this book will cite page numbers from this edition.), and simply proceed through the chapter.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you dazed by the noise of the great men and stung all over by the stings of the little men. Woods and crags know how to keep a dignified silence with you. Be like the tree that you love with its wide branches: silently listening, it hangs over the sea.
As we shall quickly see, the “great men” of whom he speaks here are in fact only superficially separable from the “little men” who follow them. Collectively, these produce a noise that distracts the noble soul that needs silence to find, or rather to await, its best thoughts. Hence Zarathustra advises a voluntary and hasty retreat from this noise, to the solitude where one may “be like the tree that you love.” This tree image is a reference back to the chapter “On the Tree On the Mountainside,” in which Zarathustra confronts a youth who has been avoiding him, and whom he finds leaning despondently against a great tree. The youth spews out his self-loathing over his failure to find what he has been seeking in his painful climb, and is on the verge of surrendering all hope. Zarathustra compares the boy’s longing to the tree’s ever-reaching branches, reminding him that, like this tree which has indeed outgrown its surroundings and yet still waits patiently for the lightning it seeks, one needs courage and patience to overcome one’s all-too-human fear of defeat in isolation. To which the boy replies, weeping, that Zarathustra himself is the lightning he was waiting for, but that finding him has only persuaded him of his own smallness. Zarathustra, who despises the dubious virtue of pity, nevertheless feels great compassion for this youth, understanding the difficulty of his crisis, the precarious position of the good soul teetering on the edge of giving up its best impulses in self-hatred, and gently admonishes him: “Alas, I knew noble men who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. Then they lived impudently in brief pleasures and barely cast their goals beyond the day. Spirit too is lust, so they said. Then the wings of their spirit broke: and now their spirit crawls about and soils what it gnaws.” [p. 44]
Now, in “On the Flies of the Market Place,” beckoning the young soul away from the crowd and toward its proper aims, he alludes again to the great tree, this time invoking it as the friend who defends the silence for you and “hangs over the sea,” this latter addition being an echo of an image from the immediately preceding chapter, “On the New Idol” — this idol being the modern progressive State — in which Zarathustra had contended that “even now,” if one has the spiritual strength for freedom, “There are still many empty seats for the lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas.” [p. 51] That is, it is still possible to find the fragrance of profound, independent thought and natural conversation, away from the stuffiness and stench of societies sunk in the mire of ever-suffocating government.
Next, Zarathustra steps right into this chapter’s main theme, identifying more precisely the noisy domain from which he has urged his listener to flee.
Where solitude ceases the market place begins; and where the market place begins the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of the poisonous flies begins too.
The market place. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche chooses this exact name for the location from which the soul must extricate itself in seeking freedom; for the market place, in Greek the agora, is the exact location where Socrates eagerly went to seek his conversations. The difference between Socrates’ choice to spend his days philosophizing in the market place and Zarathustra’s call to escape from it has less to do with Nietzsche’s famous critique of Socrates and the Platonic philosophy than with the difference between the Greek city-state, which Nietzsche greatly admired, and the modern national state, which he has just isolated as perhaps the single most essential corruption of modern Europe, in a chapter that damns progressive politics in terms that go so far beyond anything today’s “far right” minions, milquetoasts, and muckrakers could ever hope to muster.
Today’s muckrakers, on the contrary, whether of the left or right, are very much in Nietzsche’s sights in this chapter, a fact which we now face head-on. For in the above short paragraph he refers to “the great actors” and “the poisonous flies,” obvious next-level parallels for the opening paragraph’s “great men” and “little men.” The great men he speaks of, then, are in fact “great actors,” an identification he elucidates in the next two paragraphs:
In the world even the best things amount to nothing without someone to make a show of them: great men the people call these showmen.
Little do the people comprehend the great — that is, the creating. But they have a mind for all showmen and actors of great things.
What is truly great is beyond communication for general ears. In order for great minds and their ideas to reach the people at all, they must be “popularized” for easy consumption by showmen who themselves, being essentially little more than the mask of the many, lack the ability to understand what they are presenting, let alone to realize that they are in fact only actors and mimickers of a greatness they cannot appreciate. But the people, for whom the show is everything, see only these mimickers and mistake them for the truly great, which is to say they mistake the actor for the playwright, the pitchman for the thinker, the peddler for the inventor.
This leads us to one of Nietzsche’s defining insights, both in this chapter and in his philosophy as a whole:
Around the inventors of new values the world revolves: invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and fame: that is “the way of the world.”
Invoking his perspectivism, his heavy reliance on the force he later establishes under the name “will to power,” and his belief that the history of philosophy is not a story of the search for Truth so much as a dynamic war among the creators of the most attractive and salutary beliefs, Nietzsche draws an unbridgeable divide between genuine and apparent greatness. The former is the realm of silent and invisible activity, the domain of the unseen intellects around which “the world revolves,” in an obvious echo of Aristotle’s metaphysical divinities, the immaterial unmoved movers, which forever sustain the everlasting motions of the heavenly spheres as final causes, i.e., as the primary objects of thought and desire. The latter, by contrast, is the realm of “the people and fame,” which is to say public attraction and reputation; this sphere stands to the former as temporality stands to eternity, the human to the divine. The revolutions of popular effect and fame exist as a pale reflection or performative representation of the unseen spirit of great ideas that actually drives the world, and yet by definition the popular and transitory are all that most men can see. Thus, the people will inevitably believe their leading showmen of the moment are the true movers of things, rather than mere earthly distortions of ideas they themselves cannot recognize. And so must it always be, for….
The actor has spirit but little conscience of the spirit. Always he has faith in that with which he inspires the most faith — faith in himself. Tomorrow he has a new faith, and the day after tomorrow a newer one. He has quick senses, like the people, and capricious moods.
Possessing the capacity to inspire and move others, but without any of the substance or foundation of those who are true goals and originators, the actors (the popularly understood “great men”) substitute chutzpah and self-satisfaction for the seriousness they lack. And yet these very traits — the actor’s imitation of substance — are the powers that draw the people to him, such that he is able to hold the people through his capricious moods and changeable “great goals,” always calculated to maintain his immediate influence over the many, even to the point of merely mirroring the people’s own changeability, all the while convincing them that he is leading rather than following.
To overthrow — that means to him: to prove. To drive to frenzy — that means to him: to persuade. And blood is to him the best of all reasons. A truth that slips into delicate ears alone he calls a lie and nothing. Verily, he believes only in gods who make a big noise in the world!
Lacking ideas or reasoning, the little “great man” knows only coercion and destruction, which are the popular substitutes for the force of logic. To lead, in his world, means only to whip the people up to irrational enthusiasm for an ill-conceived cause, or against an alleged threat. The sacrifice of others’ lives, spirit, and hopes for his own sake, or in the name of his own glorification, is, for him, self-justifying. Ideas and arguments that are audible only to “delicate ears,” which is to say ideas and arguments that are not screamed from bully pulpits or couched in the dramatic and haunting undertones of urgency and danger, are anathema to his power lust and vainglory, and hence he dismisses and ridicules them. The only gods he acknowledges are those who make “a big noise in the world,” which is to say those who, like himself above all, identify truth with dominance, popularity, and winning, and reason with the gratification of their egos. All profound thought and quiet sobriety they malign and dismiss from their pulpit, thus perpetuating that separation of the sages from the perception of the people that Zarathustra mockingly dubs “the way of the world.”
Full of solemn jesters is the market place — and the people pride themselves on their great men, their masters of the hour. But the hour presses them; so they press you. And from you too they want a Yes or No. Alas, do you want to place your chair between pro and con?
The great men of the people, Zarathustra here identifies with the paradoxical epithet “solemn jesters” — deadly earnest clowns, which is to say laughable men who wish to seem, and who do seem to their followers, utterly serious. Indeed, they appear to the people as “masters of the hour,” indispensable men of the moment, although, as Zarathustra immediately implies, their indispensability is entirely tied to the illusion of “the hour” itself, namely that this hour is “the moment of truth,” upon which all things hinge. This sense of urgency is necessary to the influence of the showman’s act, for as soon as the tautness of urgency upon which such a man relies is slackened, his power over others ceases. Hence it is essential to him to have no visible counterexamples, least of all from among the thoughtful. Thus “the hour presses them; so they press you.” Popular movements and their leaders hate nothing more than the man who refuses to admit the urgency of the hour, whom they must try to sway to the side of commitment and action, lest the frenzy upon which their world depends should be undermined.
Do not fall for this urgent plea, Zarathustra warns the young thinker. Do not accept the premise that this or any moment requires an immediate and unequivocal Yes or No from you, such that your failure to commit would make you personally culpable for the defeat of “everything we love.” And here we meet the special danger facing the thoughtful man: the anxiety of one who, not having reconciled himself to the way of the world, but wishing to be serious, longing for the truth, feels “the hour” pulling him away from his highest thoughts and into the mire of urgency, toward the din of those who are heard.
Do not be jealous of these unconditional, pressing men, you lover of truth! Never yet has truth hung on the arm of the unconditional. On account of these sudden men, go back to your security: it is only in the market place that one is assaulted with Yes? or No? Slow is the experience of all deep wells: long must they wait before they know what fell into their depth.
The noisemakers and muckrakers with their urgent demands for committed action — for the unconditional in thought and deed — will, if heeded, short-circuit or derail one’s serious thinking, which by definition must eschew easy endpoints and certainties in favor of the slow patience required of one who probes the depths, not in search of finality or in the name of practical decisiveness, but rather in search of truths which may never be achieved. In other words, the truest thinking man lives for an activity that is essentially the opposite of the aims which drive the men of action and fame, those “sudden men” for whom the life of the “deep well,” which is to say he who is prepared to remain quiet and listen attentively and indefinitely for the clarifying sound he desires, would be anathema.
However, merely knowing this in principle is not enough to protect the “deep well” type to whom Zarathustra addresses himself here. For it is one thing to declare one’s understanding of “the way of the world” as a matter of abstract awareness, but quite another to live in the midst of that world with its unvarying preference for, and elevation of, the sudden and unconditional men, the masters of the hour, without feeling the stabs of isolation and invisibility, the jealous pangs of, “Why him, and not I?” Which is to say, “Why his rabble-rousing noise and not my energizing ideas?” Hence, Zarathustra urges the youth to save himself from the soul-corrupting sirens of the market place who promise attention and “significance,” the little man’s substitutes for the natural invisibility of those around whom the true world revolves, albeit unseen by the many with their shallow standard-bearers.
Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee where the air is raw and strong.
The great emotional weakness of the deep well, when assaulted by the calls of “right now” and “choosing a side,” is the temptation that has spoiled more rare souls than one might wish to believe: the temptation to ignore or overlook “the way of the world” as revealed through historical precedent, and to convince oneself that one may be the exception, the all-encompassing man who can indeed embrace the urgency of the moment without simultaneously compromising the higher path. In an anticipatory response to this temptation, Zarathustra invokes the experience of eons: “far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.” There are no exceptions. Do not allow yourself to be deluded by flattery, least of all self-flattery. In the market place, whatever you imagine you are accomplishing will be paid for in blood, as the flattering many who satisfy your vanity are in truth a swarm of poisonous flies. The only solution is to flee to where the flies cannot follow, i.e., to elevations where the air is too raw and strong for them. (In this, Nietzsche alludes in part to his own method of writing, outlined by Zarathustra in an earlier chapter, “On Reading and Writing”: “In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks — and those who are addressed, tall and lofty.” [p. 40])
Flee into your solitude! You have lived too close to the small and the miserable. Flee their invisible revenge! Against you they are nothing but revenge.
This is the first mention of a specifically malicious motive for the people’s attitude toward the thinking man. Revenge. Why revenge? We see a hint of the answer in the emphasis on the relationship between the “masters of the hour” and the “deep well”: “But the hour presses them; so they press you. And from you they want a Yes or No.” Those for whom life’s meaning, and their own spiritual substance such as it is, depends on the perpetuation of a sense of urgency, will resent no one as much as he who refuses to submit to their air of immediacy, he who insists on remaining aloof (or so they must see it) with his thought and his ironic perspective on their notions of greatness. And the people, entranced by the pursuit of their great men’s caprices, will truck no exceptions to their enthusiasm, for exceptions, by their very presence, are deflating. “You are either with us or against us” is the eternal mantra of the many. They can see no other option, let alone understand the possibility that being against them might be the truest way of being for them.
And here, by way of explaining this revenge further, Nietzsche enters upon the chapter’s longest paragraph.
No longer raise up your arm against them. Numberless are they, and it is not your lot to shoo flies. Numberless are these small and miserable creatures; and many a proud building has perished of raindrops and weeds. You are no stone, but you have already become hollow from many drops. You will yet burst from many drops. I see you wearied by poisonous flies, bloody in a hundred places; and your pride refuses even to be angry. Blood is what they want from you in all innocence. Their bloodless souls crave blood, and so they sting in all innocence. But you, you deep one, suffer too deeply even from small wounds; and even before you have healed, the same poisonous worm crawls over your hand. You are too proud to kill these greedy creatures. But beware lest it become your downfall that you suffer all their poisonous injustice.
The harshness of the imagery of shooing away blood-sucking flies is tempered only by the repeated reminder that these flies sting “in all innocence.” Like the great edifice slowly destroyed by endless rain on its roof and weeds growing up through cracks in its foundations, so the strong soul, suited to deep and patient thought — thought of timeless matters — can be weakened by the slow, erosive draining of its substance through endless small bites, the proverbial death by a thousand cuts, to which harm the deepest souls are particularly susceptible due to their tendency to “suffer too deeply even from small wounds.” The natural melancholic loner, the thinking reed (to apply Pascal’s great phrase in its most appropriate sense), being most sensitive to the noise and strain of the market place and its sudden and unconditional men, is therefore also most likely to experience lasting damage to his essential and essentially private substance, if left exposed to the storms and weeds of public life.
Refusing to be angry, for to feel resentment toward the people is to grant them too much power over one’s soul, this deep well tends rather to abide and accommodate, thus enabling and failing to appreciate the constant assaults that are slowly, imperceptibly draining his strength, which is to say the intellectual independence and individual will required of one who would stride atop mountains and traverse the coldest regions. Hence, his pride having obscured the danger that the ever-breeding flies represent to him, having refused even to kill the maggots crawling over his hand, he becomes easy prey to their injustice. The injustice consists in feeding on his substance in the name of incorporating him into their “side,” drawing him to their “causes,” cajoling him toward his spiritual prison of commitment and “relevance.”
They hum around you with their praise too: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want the proximity of your skin and your blood. They flatter you as a god or devil; they whine before you as before a god or devil. What does it matter? They are flatterers and whiners and nothing more.
“Obtrusiveness is their praise.” The conspicuous presence of the social, the inescapability of the involved, is the strategy, as it were, whereby the world conspires to weaken its highest souls, unless and until these few have the nerve and self-awareness to separate themselves. The enticing flattery of being loved or hated by the many — the flattery of being treated as an object worthy of the people’s love or hatred — must be forsaken in the name of freedom. The complaints that flatter you with the implication that you and you alone may alleviate their suffering must be forsaken in the name of spiritual detachment. These are explications of the dangerous “innocence” of which Zarathustra is warning, and also of the sense in which the people’s innocence is the Trojan horse of their vengefulness, as they defeat and diminish the aloof and independent man by means of their expressed need for him — this Zarathustra emphasizes with the reminder that what they need this higher man for is, in the final analysis, his lifeblood.
Often they affect charm. But that has always been the cleverness of cowards. Indeed, cowards are clever! They think a lot about you with their petty souls — you always seem problematic to them. Everything that one thinks about a lot becomes problematic.
The outsider, the detached soul, the independent thinker — this is the ideal of human strength and the standard of life, and is implicitly understood to be so even by those for whom such independence, detachment, and isolation would be impossible. But for those who cannot be the highest type, and who lack even the nobility to appreciate what they themselves cannot be, there is an ignoble but all-too-human third alternative: Bring down the highest type. That is to say, reduce him to what you are — or better yet, for those who lack the instinct for violence, charm him into reducing himself to what you are. Nietzsche must not be misunderstood to be describing any kind of overt intention or conspiratorial action on the part of “the flies” here. Rather, he is describing, albeit in the starkest and most rallying language, the natural or quasi-natural impulses that determine the social dynamics governing the relations between the “deep wells” (i.e., potential creators of values) on the one hand and the “great men and little men” (i.e., the people) on the other.
They punish you for all your virtues. They forgive you entirely — your mistakes.
Here, in the simplest terms, Zarathustra summarizes the mechanism of reduction. The people punish the deep well for his virtues, which is to say for the peculiar virtues which they, the people, do not have and therefore resent and envy. The honest thinker must, therefore, be damned for his non-commitment, ridiculed for his isolated aloofness, mocked for his proud resistance to any temptation to prove himself to them. “If you really have such superior thoughts,” they sneer, “then why don’t you have as great an audience or influence as [insert name of popular leader/intellectual here].”
Meanwhile, as the flipside of this process of psychological diminution, the people are more than happy to show forebearance and leniency — forgiveness, like pity, implying power over that which is forgiven or pitied — toward the deep well’s mistakes, i.e., those weaknesses and compromises which cause the serious soul to experience his most painful fits of self-loathing and self-reproach, but which, from the opposite perspective, constitute the little victories of the “flies” over their host, the hundred stings with which his blood is gradually drained. The levelling stupidity of the drinking party he feels ashamed of having succumbed to, the “unconditional” enthusiasm of the political tribalism he allowed himself to get swept up in, the excitement with which he leapt into this or that fray under the heady influence of flattery and applause — all those large and small fits of Normalcy that make him nauseous at the nagging awareness of having given in — are, in his mind, almost unbearable burdens of shame. To the great men and little men of the world, on the other hand, these compromises are the most agreeable signs of their success in breaking down their envied adversary. “He is one of us now, and even he cannot deny it.”
Because you are gentle and just in disposition you say, “They are guiltless in their small existence.” But their petty souls think, “Guilt is every great existence.”
“All that is rare for the rare,” writes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. This is his invocation against resentment or anger directed at those who cannot abide or condone the thinker’s private ways; how unjust it is, he argues, to hold against the majority their inability to understand that which they are, after all, unable to understand. Here, however, Zarathustra is harsher and more emphatic about the divide between the thinker and the people. The goal in this context is not to stave off feelings of frustration and resentment, but to highlight the special danger faced by the soul that is fit to live as a deep well, the danger of being drawn up to the shallows. Hence in this context the language, though not angry or resentful, is stark and ominous. It is right to see the people as guiltless in their lack of understanding, but it is also necessary to remember, as Zarathustra adds here, that their lack of understanding leads them not merely to innocent confusion, but to suspicion and accusation, seeing the deep soul’s difference as proof of guilt, which is to say of immorality.
This idea is fleshed out in the next paragraph:
Even when you are gentle to them they still feel despised by you: and they return your benefaction with hidden malefactions. Your silent pride always runs counter to their taste; they are jubilant if for once you are modest enough to be vain. That which we recognize in a person we also inflame in him: therefore, beware of the small creatures. Before you they feel small, and their baseness glimmers and glows in invisible revenge. Have you not noticed how often they became mute when you stepped among them, and how their strength went from them like smoke from a dying fire?
Even the thinking person who has overcome his resentments and frustrations, taken a sober and rational view of his position in life, and learned to approach the social world with uncondescending equanimity, empathy, and a principled sense of usefulness — not noblesse oblige, but something like fellow feeling and a sincere desire to be helpful — will feel at times that his best intentions are being met, if not with overt hostility, then at least with those “hidden malefactions,” the dangerous stings given “in all innocence,” which consist largely in demanding that one sacrifice the slowness of the deep well in the name of the unconditional Yes or No, in deference to “the masters of the hour.”
“Your silent pride always runs counter to their taste.” The very fact that you know yourself well enough to remain aloof from the easy certainties and easy comforts of the crowd puts you at odds with the nature and inclinations of the members of that crowd. They need to see your susceptibility to the allure of acceptance, your weakness for the pleasure of their approval. And if they do not see these things, which is to say if they come to suspect that you are truly immodest enough to walk away from them without fear, to remain separate and rejected if need be, then they will view this as evidence of your disdain for their worth, and this apparent disdain, being jarring to their own vanity, will make them all the more vociferous in their demands for your sacrifice and submission. In Zarathustra’s language, they demand blood.
Indeed, my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors: for they are unworthy of you. They hate you, therefore, and would like to suck your blood. Your neighbors will always be poisonous flies; that which is great in you, just that must make them more poisonous and more like flies.
“You are the bad conscience of your neighbors” has a certain Socratic gadfly ring to it — the philosopher, as Socrates teaches in The Republic, being the man doomed to be forever judged “useless or vicious” by the people, due to his annoying doubts about all unconditional certainties and his refusal to play any of the social roles expected of the educated and talented, i.e., the kinds of roles understood by the people. To the extent you rise and remain above those expectations, you will incur ever more relentless efforts to bring you to heel, one way or another.
Finally, the chapter ends with a typical recapitulation of the main theme.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude and where the air is raw and strong! It is not your lot to shoo flies.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
The best hope and natural abode of the inventor of new values, the individual whose true work must always be invisible to those whose existence comprises “the way of the world,” is to live where the air is cold and brisk enough to be free of the stinging flies. A realm where solitude and the fragrance of silent seas protects the soul from the noise of the market place, where the slow waiting of a deep well is uninterrupted by the “great men’s” sudden demands for an unconditional Yes or No, and where one’s best energies are not depleted by the endless exertions of waving off the “little men’s” innocent, hateful, vengeful craving for blood, which is to say for one’s soul.
