Appreciations of Nietzsche as a so-called poet-philosopher reveal little about Nietzsche’s thinking about the poets and they pay insufficient attention to his conception of philosophy. This chapter offers a corrective by examining how he figures the task of the poets in his middle writings. The focus is on what he has to say about the poets in relation to the passions, as this provides the best way of approaching the problem. His criticisms of the poets – that they are fundamentally melancholic and that they too readily give vent to naturalizing impulses – is best seen in the context of his upholding philosophy’s classical concern with and teaching of the mastery of the passions. The concern with self-cultivation informs Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy at a deep level, and it also drives his reflections on the poets. Poets are significant because they assume the task of providing signposts to the future by developing images of what he calls “beautiful human beings.” I attend to Nietzsche’s interest in Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer in the final section of the chapter, since it is from Stifter that Nietzsche may have derived, at least in part, his conception of the cultivation of beautiful human beings.

Building on Pierre Hadot’s influential reminder that thinkers in the ancient world used to practice philosophy as a total way of life, they show that Nietzsche was inspired by these precursors to craft TSZ as a narrative exemplification and personification of this ideal. In their view, Nietzsche presents his performative book as a crucial intervention in an age when professionalized philosophy has become a merely theoretical and contemplative exercise that is textually propagated by university-dwelling scholarly specialists who have little interest in the kind of commitment to knowledge and wisdom that would transform them and their lives. Nietzsche knew that the philosophical texts he wrote in his own voice could be easily assimilated into this bloodless academic culture, so he deliberately designed a new kind of philosophical text that would resist any such assimilation. Instead of just arguing that philosophy should be practiced as a way of life, Nietzsche writes a new kind of philosophy book that dramatically models this practice and hopes to provoke a radical spiritual conversion in its readers.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and for No One (TSZ) (1883–1885) is a text that was celebrated by creative artists and writers in the twentieth century and it continues to have a wide readership outside academia. This book has also been appreciated by some seminal thinkers in the history of continental philosophy – notably Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Karl Löwith, and Gilles Deleuze. However, recent philosophical scholarship tends to marginalize TSZ and to downplay its significance in our engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. This neglect is no doubt understandable. The text is perhaps the best example we have of his self-confessed philosophical heterodoxy, and he himself pointed out its unusual relation to the rest of his corpus: “Suppose I had published my Zarathustra under another name, for example, that of Richard Wagner—the acuteness of two thousand years would not have been sufficient for anyone to guess that the author of Human, All-Too-Human is the visionary of Zarathustra” (EH “Clever” 4; EH 1989).

The chapter presents Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a way of life, as a thinking that seeks to make contact with the creativity of life as a whole. This endeavor to alter our vision of the world, and ultimately, our action and sense of being in the world, seeks to operate a “conversion of attention.” For Bergson, such a conversion is tied in with what he calls the “true empiricism” that allows us to experience and think change as that which makes up living reality as a whole. Bergson conceptualizes this move beyond the human in terms of sympathy, a term employed both descriptively, to develop the notion of a sympathetic whole of life in which philosophy as a way of life resituates the self, and prescriptively, as urging us to overcome our estrangement from “the ocean of life” to which we owe our existence. This effort of sympathy takes the form of a spiritual exercise. Not limited to mere contemplation of the world, it transforms the manner in which we perceive the reality of duration and thus opens the path for a different way of living.

We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves, – so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing – to ‘bring something home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’, – who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it – and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being – oh! and lose count … We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto ‘everyone is furthest from himself’ applies to us for ever, – we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves …

– My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further.