1

Come on Baby, Light my Fire:

Narratives and Images of Fire in Nietzsche’s Engagement

with the Traditional Metanarratives of Western and Indian Philosophy

The narrative structure and vivid imagery of Thus Spoke Zarathustra has led some philosophers to

dismiss it as a literary work rather than a legitimate philosophical discourse, and yet it is through

narrative and image that Nietzsche’s thought often unfolds. A strategic use of narrative and image

marks not just this text but is a distinguishing feature of much of Nietzsche’s writings. His writings

also have often been understood as inaugurating that postmodern condition which has been

famously characterized as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” It has been noted that in1

Nietzsche’s writings one finds “a constant vigilance with regard to the possibility and limits of

narrative” and an especially deep suspicion “of the claims to originality, authenticity, and

exclusivity accompanying the grand stories or metanarratives that would provide a final

accounting of first and last things.” Nietzsche employs a variety of narrative strategies in2

responding to the traditional metanarratives and their implicit teleological metaphysics. In

Nietzsche’s narratives there is a constant engagement and play with images in which the images

in the traditional narratives are often reused but reworked and cast in a different light,

destabilizing the traditional discourse. This strategy is evident throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

beginning with its opening scene in which Zarathustra emerges from his cave in addressing the

morning sun.

Dionysus and the Dolphins, Kylix by Exekias 530 B.C .

Çiva Nataräja,

Chola Dynasty, c. A.D. 1000

2

Several narratives and images of fire play important roles in Nietzsche’s thought. Of course,

Nietzsche had a certain affinity with Heraclitus, the thinker who made fire something of a first

principle and who depicted the whole cosmos as an “ever-living fire.” Of course, the figure of

Dionysus played a very key role in Nietzsche’s thought and Dionysus was the god sometimes

called pryigenes, an epithet meaning “born in fire.” Nietzsche’s suggests in The Joyful Science that

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a tragedy, and this is but one indication of a connection between his

narratives of Dionysus and Zarathustra. Although the image of Dionysus and the dolphins

depicted in the famous Exekias kylix does not directly depict fire, the narrative the image refers to

tells the story in which Dionysus turns the Tyrrhenian pirates into dolphins; and it is this capacity

for transfiguration that Nietzsche considered to be the key to Greek tragedy and which then comes

forth through the fire imagery in the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The story that unfolds in

Thus Spoke Zarathustra involves the protagonist’s warnings about a crisis facing humanity, a time

when the day of the last human may come. Zarathustra comes to teach a new teaching, a teaching

that challenges the dominant metanarrative of Western thought by turning away from

otherworldly hopes and instead “remaining faithful to the earth.” In Nietzsche’s narrative,

Zarathustra comes not only to speak of this transformation of human being, he also must undergo

this transformation, and this transformation is one in which Zarathustra must emerge, Phoenix-

like, from the ashes. As Zarathustra puts it: “You must want to consume yourself in your own

flame: how could you want to become new unless you have first become ashes!”3

Various narratives and images of fire played a central role also in ancient Indian thought.

The gods of the Vedic pantheon can be classified into three classes of gods—the heavenly gods, the

gods of the atmosphere and the gods of the earth—and the three fire gods—Surya, the god of the

Sun, Indra, the god of the Thunderbolt, and Agni, the earthly fire god—were all major figures in

.the Rg Veda hymns. The ritual sacrifices which dominated Vedic culture required proper

knowledge of the forms and utterances of the sacrifice, and thus the narratives in these hymns

played a key role for the Vedic priests in the maintenance of the cosmic order. Among these

sacrifices none was more important than the fire sacrifice as it became “the essential instrument

of man’s participation in the cosmic sacrifice” through which “man took his place among the forces

of Nature.” By the time of the Upaniñads something more powerful even than ritual sacrifice4

emerged, and that was the knowledge or insight that led to release from saàsära, the endless round

3

of rebirth. In the narrative of the Båhadäraëyaka Upaniñad fire is used as an image for the whole

cosmos and the round of rebirth. In this narrative a man is a fire, he is conceived in the fire of a

young woman, and when he dies, “They carry him to the fire. Then his fire becomes the fire; his

fuel the fuel; his smoke the smoke; his flame the flame; his embers the embers; his sparks the

sparks.” Fire is once again crucially important in another narrative of liberation in the famous5

image of Çiva Nataräja, the lord of the dance. In the image, reproduced in numerous South Indian

copper sculptures, four armed Çiva dances within a circle of flames. The flaming arch represents

again the fire of saàsära and Çiva‘s dance takes place within a burning ground. The burning ground

is, however, “not the place where our earthly bodies are cremated, but the hearts of His lovers, laid

waste and desolate. The place where the ego is destroyed signifies the state where illusion and

deeds are burnt away: that is the crematorium, the burning-ground where Shri Nataraja dances.”6

Fire is once again the central metaphor in one of the most well-known of the early

discourses of the Buddha. In an echo of the fire narrative in the Båhadäraëyaka Upaniñad, the Buddha

explains, in the Ädittapariyäya-sutta, or The Fire Sermon, that to live is to burn. Proceeding through

the various sense bases and resulting mental phenomena, the eye and visual consciousness, the

ear and auditory consciousness, etc., the Buddha explains that each is burning. In the repeating

refrain the Buddha concludes each verse: “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with

the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion; I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with

sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.” A common interpretation of7

The Fire Sermon is that the point of the Buddha’s teaching is that it is necessary to put out this fire,

and that it is through that extinguishment that nirväëa is reached. It is perhaps possible, however,

to understand that the point of the narrative of The Fire Sermon is not to extinguish the burning, but

rather to change the fuel with which we burn. This view, which might perhaps be said to mark one

of the distinguishing features of Mahäyäna Buddhism, is nicely illustrated in a contemporary

painting depicting the bodhisattva Avalokiteçvara standing within a radiant mandorla, burning

with the light of his enlightenment.

As Nietzsche understood nirväëa, influenced by Schopenhauer’s pessimistic interpretation,

to be the extinguishment of the fire of life, he regarded Buddhism, along with the other quests for

enlightenment in ancient India, to be manifestations of the ascetic ideal, of the “will turning against

life” and thus “the great danger for mankind.” Nietzsche sometimes referred to the crisis of8

4

modernity, the problem of nihilism unfolding in narratives of “the death of god” and “the history

of an error,” as a “European Buddhism.” Fire imagery plays an important role in the teleological

narratives of both Western and Indian philosophy and in Nietzsche’s response to these narratives.

In this paper I will reflect upon these various images and narratives of fire as well as the problem

of narrative that is addressed in Nietzsche’s thought.

Pin Drop Silence: Eleven-Headed Avalokitesvara, Tenzing Rigdol,2013.

5

1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington

and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv.

2. Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,

1989), pp. 2-3.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005), p. 56.

4. Alain Daniélou, The Myths and Gods of India (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions

International, 1991), p. 68.

5. Valerie J. Roebuck, ed. and trans., The Upaniñads (London and New York: Penguin Classics,

2005), p. 93.

6. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “The Dance of Shiva,” in The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian

Essays, Revised Ed. (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), p. 73.

7. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, 2nd. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. ?.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996), p. 7.

Notes