Lou Salomé and I he Quest for Intimacy 259sion from "supernatural hopes"! Nothing would appear to be further
from the truth. Zarathustra comes with a message, but he does not know
the people and consequendy his pathos rings hollow. Nietzsche pur-
posely set up this discrepancy because Zarathustra needed to learn at the
end (of the prologues) that he had to go about his missionary work in a
different manner: "It became clear to me: let Zarathustra speak not to
the people but to companions!" (4,25; Ζ First Part, Prologue § 9).
Since Zarathustra subsequendy steers clear of the open market and
preaches only to "companions," he has no need to modify the tone of
his sermon. He avoids not pathos but only the situations in which it
would come across as embarrassing. He speaks to "all and none," to
"brothers" and "friends," and yet confesses to himself that his speaking
is a monologue that invents the existence of a third party—be it friends,
disciples, or mankind as a whole—so that the conversation between "I
and me" does not remain inward directed. "The third is the cork that
stops the conversation of the two [I and me] from sinking into the
depths" (4,71; ZFirst Part, "On the Friend"). But after the prologue, in
which a commonplace audience provides the opposing "third,"
Nietzsche refrains from matching a real disputant to his Zarathustra, at
which point Zarathustra's speeches take a turn for the monotonous as
non-oppositional monologues. Once Zarathustra has retreated from the
open market—the locus of his possible disgrace—he speaks into the
void. Nietzsche should have left the "last people" on the stage so that
Zarathustra would have had to contend with them. Only in this way
would the doctrine of the Übermensch have emerged in sharper contours.
But what is the Übermensch, and how are we to picture him? First of
all, this term is just a new expression for a theme Nietzsche had already
broached in the period of the Untimely Meditations, namely that of self-
configuration and self-enhancement. In the essay "Schopenhauer as
Educator," he showed, using the example of his own experience with
Schopenhauer, how a young soul finds the "fundamental law" of a per-
son's "real self" (1,340; SE § 1) by examining the series of exemplary
models that have molded the person. A soul that is determined and