Volume XI, Issue II, Spring 2018

THE AGONIST
How to Sing the Practical Sound of the
Enigma
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra for Everyday Life
Alessio Tommasoli
Most of Nietzsche’s philosophy is expressed through a particular style of
writing made of cryptic lyricism and symbolic images. Such a unique
philosophical expression makes Nietzsche’s thought a “tool” that requires the
mental elaboration of the reader, so to engage him in a hermeneutic
interpretation that starts from everyday life.
Therefore Nietzsche’s reader seems to be more than a listener that just hears
some words reading a book; he is a listener that feels the need to sing the words
he reads. That is because he guesses that the sense of these words is not in their
possible meanings, but in the sensations that they give him.
Anyway it does not mean that Nietzsche’s philosophy is open to all sorts of
interpretations. That is because it is rooted in a specific matter that is the
concept. The time-space dimension of human “hic et nunc” indeed always refers
to a theory and vice versa, so that philosophy is an existential practice and the
existential condition is a philosophy.
In Nietzsche’s production the concept has a double role of importance: on
the one hand, it pulls together the fragments of his cryptic expression (such as
the aphorisms), and, on the other one, it is fragmented itself, to show all its
possible perspectives. If the first one is a theoretical approach, the latter is
practical, because in this way the concept allows the reader to find in itself all
the existential possibilities.
As Gilles Deleuze wrote, 1 every concept has always a “conceptual
character”, that is a figure able to embody and perform it through his actions
and his life. It is exactly the way through which philosophy, according to
Deleuze, is rooted in an immanent dimension, translating its theory in the
practice of life.
1 Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., What is Philosophy?, translated by Tomlinson H, Burchill G,
London; New York : Verso, 1994.
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