Zarathustra on Post-Truth: Wisdom and the Brass Bell

E. Johanna Hartelius, John Poulakos

Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 52, Number 4, 2019, pp. 384-406 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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 Zarathustra on Post-Truth: Wisdom
and the Brass Bell

E. Johanna Hartelius and John Poulakos

A B S T R AC T

Notwithstanding recent controversies involving echo chambers and social

media, “post-truth” has always been central to philosophical investigations of
what is knowable and good. The internal tension of the term offers a choice:
to gasp in feigned astonishment at the hell-in-a-handbasket state of public
discourse, or to reflect critically on what is beyond, after, or other than the
truth. In this essay, we approach post-truth via elements of narrative, biogra-
phy, and myth, portraying Friedrich Nietzsche’s polytropic figure, Zarathustra,
as he might have spoken to the contemporary moment. We demonstrate how
Zarathustra affords access to the idea that truth (in all its deceptiveness) and
life (or possibly, aliveness) are inextricable in the human condition. To temper
this tension, we depict a character whose disposition toward post-truth spans
from certainty and doubt to exuberance and despair. Our hope is to indicate
how, for the humans of Motley Cow, post-truth is ubiquitous, institutional, and
infrastructural.

KEYWORDS: Nietzsche, post-truth, Zarathustra, Motley Cow, overman

Notwithstanding its recent fame in the context of social media, echo

chambers, and live-streamed fact checking, “post-truth” has long marked
philosophical investigations of what is knowable, real, valid, and good. The
internal tension of the term references the possibility of something that
is other than true, that “true” does not mean what we think it means, or
that something emerges after truth has ceased to exert influence. In a 2018
special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric edited by Barbara Biesecker, sustained

doi: 10.5325/philrhet.52.4.0384
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 52, No. 4, 2019
Copyright © 2019 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
 zarathustra on post-truth

attention was directed to the implications of post-truth for the study of

language. Contributors variously positioned the concept vis-à-vis contem-
porary controversies and perennial lines of inquiry. In his brief “Editor’s
Note,” Erik Doxtader framed the issue with a piercing indictment of the
ill-informed and historically disoriented commentary on “post-truth” that
permeates public media. Using Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth
(2018) as an exemplary offender, Doxtader compellingly characterizes the
commentary as “unrelenting terminological conflation,” an “incoherent and
cherry-picking tirade,” fetishism for the “recover[y of ] a pure and proper
language for public life (and, on the down low, the unquestionable virtue
of pragmatic prose, aka journalism),” and “shoot-from-the-hip warnings”
(2018, vi). Likewise critical of Americans’ astonishment and outrage at the
corruption implied by post-truth, Elizabeth Goodstein argues, “We must
set aside the stupefaction that prevents us from confronting the implica-
tions of the incontrovertible evidence that scientific and technological
advances do not go hand in hand with political and cultural progress” (2017,
484–85). To Goodstein, intellectuals’ stupefaction—the wide-eyed “what-
ever happened to the value of truth?”—is at best disingenuous and at worst
an obstacle to political ethics and agency. Post-truth, in her reading, “epito-
mizes pretense parading as insight” (2017, 489).
In this essay, we approach post-truth via elements of narrative, biog-
raphy, and myth, portraying Friedrich Nietzsche’s polytropic figure,
Zarathustra, as he might have spoken to the contemporary moment. We
do so in part to avoid the sins and troubles that Doxtader and Goodstein
cogently describe, which we, too, see as a hindrance to critical reflection and
scholarly engagement. Through Zarathustra, we depict a character whose
disposition toward post-truth spans from certainty and doubt to exuberance
and despair. Like no other, Zarathustra affords access to the idea that truth
(in all its deceptiveness) and life (or possibly, aliveness) are inextricable in
the human condition. Our hope with this performative approach is to tol-
erate risk, scrutinizing even those social fictions that serve noble functions.
Specifically, we hearken to Zarathustra’s words to explore what it means
for knowledge, ethics, and discourse that the other-than-true wields power.
We submit that in Motley Cow, the settlement of fools in Nietzsche’s tract,
post-truth is ubiquitous, hierarchically institutionalized, indeed infrastruc-
tural. Without it, precisely the same as without truth for that matter, the
species that inhabits Motley Cow could not live. Post-truth is to be found
alive and well among the townsfolk, because where else would it be, and
what else would serve its functions?

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A Timely Meditation
In his most recent reincarnation, Zarathustra awoke on the morning of 16
October 2016, sat at his table, and read the Washington Post. The front-page
article read, “Truth is dead. Facts are passe” (Wang 2016). With servile def-
erence to the authoritative airs of the Oxford English Dictionary, the arti-
cle defined “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals
to emotion and personal belief.” “Ha!” Zarathustra exclaimed, and bit into
his burnt toast, missing the touch of honey. He saw that the other papers
on the table propounded variations of the theme that, more than any other,
has tyrannized philosophers, journalists, scientists, and the faithful. The
BBC attributed the prominence of the term “post-truth” to social media’s
circulation of “fabricated” news, and quoted the Oxford English Dictionary’s
president Casper Grathwohl, who crowned the term “one of the defining
words of our time” (BBC News 2016). The Guardian credited it to a 1992
essay by the playwright Steve Tesich, eventually landing on a “transparent
meaning” of “post-truth” as “after the truth was known” (Guardian 2016).
Other contenders for the annual distinction, Zarathustra noted, included
chatbot, woke, and coulrophobia. “Out with the mellifluous, and in with the
superfluous!” he cried (Nietzsche 1982, 162).1 Then he thought of the jour-
nalists responsible for the morning’s headlines and scoffed, “They are always
sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper!” Zarathustra stared at his
unfinished toast. He had lost his appetite for food and rumors. A timely
meditation was stirring.

Impressionism and Realism

In the great galleries of Motley Cow’s Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Zarathustra wandered. His ragged shoes squeaked on the marble tile.
Annoyed visitors frowned at him. Their faces blended together, indistin-
guishable. Salty beads of sweat broke on his upper lip as he felt their annoy-
ance for him colliding with his contempt for them. He turned to what was
hanging on the walls. Upon his return home, thus wrote Zarathustra:
As art movements go, Impressionism is more honest than Realism. It was
in the spirit of honesty that its painters declared on the canvas that our senses
do not experience anything “real,” in its unmediated, unnamed, irreducible
isness—they only catch momentary, fragmentary, and fuzzy impressions of
objects and scenes. Reading philosophy realistically, that is, in itself, is equally
impossible—the act of reading re-excites the reader’s words, which insinuate

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themselves onto the author’s only to find themselves now collaborating, now
competing as author and reader reverse roles. Yes, the point of reading phi-
losophy is not to master what it has said over the centuries but to create hith-
erto unspoken vistas of thought, in a word, to philosophize. Personally, I read
philosophers impressionistically, with an eye to the few prominent features in
their oeuvre. Today’s academics label this practice “superficial,” attribute it to a
short attention span, and employ the phrase “amateurish dilettantism”—they
insist on a comprehensive and expert grasp of the “reality” of the textual mate-
rial. The French academics of the mid-nineteenth century were nastier: they
berated the impressionists for portraying what is not there. They were too
enamored of their “certainty” that painting had to be in their image, their con-
ventionalized perspective and bias. Today’s academics have been aptly called
“learned ignoramuses” (Ortega y Gasset 1957, 112). The trouble with academics
in all epochs is that they take themselves too seriously—their trained incapac-
ity to laugh, especially at themselves, is their Achilles’ heel (Burke 1935, 40).
“Post-truth” may very well be signaling the birth of Intellectual
Impressionism. If so, we must not be surprised that its brush strokes and
color schemes are both irresistible and nauseating. It would seem that the
sentence “Truth is dead” is a premature obituary that has Truth’s courtesans
perplexed. Was the Truth ever alive? No, all we can say is that she eludes us,
again and again, in our game of hide-and-seek. Yet we keep searching for
her without knowing what she looks, sounds or feels like. Perhaps we still
hope to run into her unexpectedly. Perhaps we imagine that she looks “like
a blaze kindled by a leaping spark” (Plato 1973a, 341d). “Facts are passe” is a
more modest sentence—it only proclaims a change in fashion. It does not
deny that facts are what we the creators make, construct or manu(fact)ure
(from facere); nor does it deny that it takes many interpretations to create a
single fact; nor that a fact provokes one interpretation after another. No, the
journalist’s first mistake is that she understands herself as a noncreating and
nonfeeling contraption in the service of revealing “reality” itself. Her second
mistake is that she believes she can find the Truth in her hiding places and
that she can bring her out in the open for the rest of us. Her third mistake
is that she treats via juxtaposition “truth” and “fact” as synonyms. And to
prove her mistakes, she quotes the OED!

Dictionaries for Journalists

To clear his mind and stretch his aching back, Zarathustra took a walk in
the garden, which was blossoming prodigiously. Unlike the placid lilies he

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had seen in the art gallery, the crimson poppies were intruding into his field
of vision. While in their midst, Zarathustra thought about cultivation and
barren soil.
Taxonomists are best known for the rational tedium of classifying
plants and animals. The most arrogant among them taxonomize words into
thick volumes of thin paper. To taxonomize a word is to call it by every
name except its own; it is to privilege a category over its individuality, to
deny it its unique and rightful place in the kingdom of sound. In every dic-
tionary I see a registry of words, archived, officialized and separated from
their kin. Did Homer have a dictionary next to him? Did Turold? What
would their epics have sounded like had they been made from items tested
for lexical correctness? Looking inside a dictionary fills me with tears fol-
lowed by laughter—tears because words there have been rendered voiceless
(thus impotent); and laughter because of the comedy of errors entailed in
the rendering. Silent semantic designations leave me cold, longing to hear
words make their soft or thunderous announcements. Words that ring true
attract me. It is their ring that writers of aphorisms anticipate. And it is that
very anticipation that has them commit here and there a contradiction, the
cardinal sin in the tablets of philosophers. A dictionary has no room for sin.
But the words’ contradictions cannot be attributed to perversion or mind-
lessness. Rather, the words they carry inside them are not lined up alpha-
betically—no, they are crowded next to and atop one another, each anxious
to be the one to exit and disturb the silence. At its best, my own writing is
a musical score in the only key there is: the beat of my heart.
But behold! The Oxford Dons have devised a fiendish scheme—to
colonize the English language (O! ED). They have declared themselves its
lords and stewards, demanding compliance with what they proclaim “Our
Time.” Oh, people of today! You could scare a scarecrow (Nietzsche 1982,
222).

Shaping Public Opinion

Personal opinion is a weak form of belief, subject to easy change; public
opinion is an even weaker form. The weakness of the former is due to the
angle of vision, which changes as one moves from location to location; that
of the latter to those who shape it by virtue of their assertive whims. How
do they shape it? Not by “objective facts” (for there is no such thing) but
by means of synthetic judgments, all of which bet on the herd’s wish to be
a normal herd. The idea of “the public” goes back to the phenomenon of a

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large, visible, and noisy aggregate (hence my preferred term “herd”); as for
the concept “normality,” it can be traced to geometry (norma, the carpen-
ter’s square), and from there to statistics. Take ten numbers, add them, and
divide the sum by ten; the result is “the average.” Now take the number
of all living persons in the world, add them (Is that even possible?), and
divide the sum (Is that even possible?) by the same number; the result is
the “normal” or the “average” person. Is it unreasonable to ask what such a
convenient nonsensicality would think and feel?
Unlike opinion, belief resists the will of the shapers or the “truth” of the
experts. That something is thus and so has staying power, all the empirical
evidence or every rational argument be damned. We don’t need cognitive
psychologists to tell us about the character and tenacity of beliefs—they
cannot be willed into existence; nor can they be reasoned out. Once the
belief in a geocentric universe had taken root, the heliocentric challenger
fought an uphill battle. Behold Galileo! It took the Catholic Church more
than three hundred years to admit that he was onto something; and it will
now be quick to add that his “something” is nothing next to a theocentric
universe. Zarathustra thought of his friend Frank, who used to say that
fictions “are not myths and they are not hypotheses; you neither rearrange
the world to suit them, nor test them by experiment, for instance in gas-
chambers” (Kermode 1966, 41).2

Listening to Words and Their Shadows

On a sleepless night, Zarathustra paced his library, running his fingers
along the spines of the books and listening to the wind howling through
the cracked window. He picked Thucydides out, and opened the book to
the Corcyran revolt and read, “The ordinary acceptation of words in their
relation to things was changed as men thought fit. Reckless audacity came
to be regarded as courageous loyalty to party, prudent hesitation as specious
cowardice, moderation as a cloak for unmanly weakness, and to be clever in
everything was to do naught in anything” (Thucydides 1972, 4–6).
Thucydides understood the will to power long before I did. He saw it
in the contestation of words against other words, and understood war as
the condition in which words lose their stability. Thucydides lamented the
recklessness of this condition. What makes me sympathize with him, and
admire his commitment to listening for meaning, is that he defends words
against corruption. In a way, Grathwohl is the dumber knight of the same
roundtable, fixing words in the page of a dictionary. The quest is, as it always

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was, to secure meaning against itself. Grathwohl holds post-truth and all
the other entries of the dictionary in place by force of occupational fiat.
He believes truly that his job is to set definitions, and that accomplishing
this task is possible. But Thucydides, although his concern that meaning
competes with meaning is genuine, does not presume to ordain himself.
He implored historians to overcome the temptation to record mere dates,
events, and characters, and, rather, to listen. Gathwohl, a man of foolish
impatience, rushed to define his (not “our”) time before its time. Thucydides,
by contrast, listened to the words whirring around in his time. As a descen-
dant of Homer and Heraclitus, he had read in the Iliad and the doctrine of
strife, respectively, the unending contest of words; and he understood the
Odyssey and the flux of the river, again respectively, as the ceaseless shift in
the meaning of words by the rolling of circumstances and the plastic pow-
ers of the imagination. He discerned that the truthfulness of every word
always struggles with its own shadow, that is, its own post-truthfulness.
Both the poet of epics and the obscure philosopher of Ephesus had taught
Thucydides well. Had he been a moralist for the future, he would have
legislated courage, suspicion, cleverness, deception, and fearlessness as the
cardinal virtues of the one and only life, this life on this earth.
As a listener, Thucydides could tell that every word tries to hide its
flimsiness from the guardians of orthography and, from the morphologists,
its shame for the loss of its earliest brilliance. No one knows how many
indignities any one word has suffered in the hands of the transgressors of
the morality of grammar. If words ever had any integrity, it has gradually
been lost in their passage through every era’s makeshift gates of meaning.
Neologisms, the result of unhappiness with the available vocabulary, are not
exempt from gaining or losing the camaraderie of their elders. As a new-
comer from the mint of language, “post-truth” is enjoying the attention of
today’s wordsmiths. How it will actually fare in posterity is too early to tell.

Between You and Me and the Lamppost

In the beginning of the Logos was the axiom, the rock-bottom assertion
in the immense spaciousness of language. Axioms have long provided the
solid ground upon which we have been erecting edifices of achievement
and worship. “Post-truth” marks the beginning of a massive dig initiated
upon the realization that the rock-bottom of our hitherto favorite archai
has turned into a powdery substance that no longer supports buildings that
suit our aesthetic and other tastes. The goal of the dig is to create a new idol

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in the twilight of the Truth. But, behold the obstacles: the skeptics’ doubt,
the logophobes’ anguish, and the philosophers’ despair.
The skeptics always keep me honest even though “skepticism is a con-
sequence of decadence” (Nietzsche 1968, 43). The logophobes’ paranoia over
anything new amounts to an incurable pathology. And Plato warns of the
“inadequacy of language,” noting that “names . . . are in no case stable” (Plato
1973a, 342e–343b). No wonder the inscription at the gates of his Academy
disallows entrance to nongeometers. But the numerical measurement of
the earth is one thing; the linguistic e/valu(e)ation of everything else is
quite another—relations between numbers are much more reliable than
those between words. Verily, a miniscule clarification of the Protagorean
dictum, which uses “metron” for both.
If I ever had a case of logophobia, my short-lived career as a philolo-
gist turned me into a lover of logos, which is to say that it cured me. I live
with the inadequacy and instability of language every day. We all do. But
whereas Plato dreamt of stable entities in heaven, and wrote to point to
them by admittedly defective means, I write in order to create the sustained
sense that we live charged with the task of announcing a world, again and
again, every step of the way—that is why I am drawn to art; and that is
why I wear a mask bearing the features of all prior announcers as well as
my own.
Question: Are the inventors of “post-truth” ready to face the skeptics,
the logophobes, and Plato? Parenthesis: If I were a painter whose works
had not drawn the highest of praises for exhibiting imperceptible forms,
I would not curse my brushes, my paints or the canvas for their imperfec-
tions. Statement: Now that we have the axiom of “post-truth,” we await
anxiously the theorems. Note: “Post-truth” cannot proceed by using too
many familiar terms. Another note: A prefix may be necessary but it is
neither suffixent nor sufficient.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.

The Wax and the Truth

At a campfire one night, Zarathustra told the children of Motley Cow sto-
ries from the Odyssey. As one by one were falling asleep in the waning light,
Zarathustra whispered:
Orators have always played the role of the civic Sirens of the demos.
Their orations have always been lyric odes disguised as prosaic prose, that
is, fanciful blends of charm and promise designed to bring unsuspecting

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pedestrians into the orator’s house. That is how they have been moving
the herd for centuries. Philosophers have understood this very well but
have yet to reconcile themselves with the hither of charm and the thither
of promise. So they invented the technology of Wax and the concept of
Truth. Wax was designed to prevent the Sirens’ songs from flowing into
people’s auditory canal, striking the tympanic membrane and vibrating
the liquid in the labyrinth. Philosophers have all along realized that, once
in the labyrinth, words make its mazes their home, unable or unwilling
to escape (Nietzsche 1982, 164). This is how influence (from fluere) works
and how belief takes hold. As for the Truth, it was invented as a univer-
sal standard, absolute and not beholden to persuasion, by which all other
words would be measured. Nota bene: Agreement on its final shape has yet
to be reached.
Alas! Both inventions came too late. Seafarers and others had already
let many words flow in; and the Truth had to contend with beliefs, just as
it still does. Besides, Wax melts under heated words, and the Truth can
neither persuade nor measure impact (Plato 1973b, 663e). Hence, whatever
comes after Truth, whose inventors claim that Wax is unnecessary, that it
can free any word from Daedalus’s masterpiece, and can uproot any belief.
But nobody has asked: Isn’t “post-truth” also wandering in the labyrinth of
language without Ariadne’s thread? And won’t “post-truth” have to battle
with post-lies and post-beliefs in the new moral sense?

The Truth on Sight

The town’s optometrist invited Zarathustra to meet her at one of Motley
Cow’s darkest bars. When he arrived she was sitting alone in a booth.
Cowering and shrouded in a scarf, she appeared defeated. As soon as
Zarathustra sat down, the woman burst out, “My customers despise me.
They sneak into my shop only after making sure that no one has seen
them enter. They want glasses, but when I ask about frames, they shush
me, look over their shoulders, and give me the evil eye. Have you ever seen
a person stand in a place while trying to appear as though she is not?”
Zarathustra interrupted, “You sell glasses? And the inhabitants of
Motley Cow wear them? Why would they despise you? You’re mistaken.
I have heard many people rave about your tinted lenses; they love the rose-
colored world that they see when leaving your shop.” “You don’t under-
stand!” the woman sobbed. “They want my goods, not to correct their sight
but to feed their insatiable vanity. When I accommodate them, they malign

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me behind my back as a depraved distortionist. Yet, after buying two frames

they come back for two more. It is never enough.”
Zarathustra responded, “Don’t you see? You make their shame visible.
Your glasses allow them to claim to see the world clearly, that is, truthfully.
But it is not the Truth that brings them pleasure; it is their sense that they
are in the Truth. Seeing the rosy shimmer of the world, they have the assur-
ance they need that the truth does exist and they are privy to it. They giddily
think of themselves as ‘woke,’ as seeing through the shady chicanery of the
marketplace. This makes you a conspirator in the making of truth, and that
is why they sneer at you as they would at a drug dealer or a prostitute. You
are proof that truth is what you see with the right framing.”
“Do you want to know the worst part?” the woman said as she rose
from the table. “The lenses are plain window pane.”

Post-Morality
After reading many books on jurisprudence, Zarathustra wrote in his note-
book: To understand the morality, not the legality, of the law, one has to
play in earnest the role of the legislator. Once I had this thought, I put all
my might to the task of creating a code of honor for my own person and
nobody else’s. You see, there were many corpses around me, and compan-
ions were hard to come by (Nietzsche 1982, 135). I carried that code with
me at all times as a prompt to the affirmation of life, its cultivation and
beautification, and thus its augmentatio. Creating such a code dictated that
I see myself as a herd of one, fated for the Isles of the Noble, where I would
one day admit unapologetically: “Yes, I did write such a code and did not
share it. If some did notice how I lived and were impressed to the point
of imitating my ways, well and good. If nobody noticed because they were
busy writing their own code to the same end, I would be happier still. If,
on the other hand, no one noticed because they were following, mind you,
not the shepherd’s Bible but that of the head sheep, who was I to preach
to the oblivious what must have sounded like an absurd gospel?” Today, I
must admit that I could not totally contain my code to myself the con-
tainer—every time I spoke, part of it spilled out of me. Thus my confession:
my secret hope was “to lure many away from the herd.” To be more modest,
one or two would have sufficed.
Against this autobiographical fragment, the Washington Post article
makes me ask, Who are the legislators behind the age of “post-truth”?
And who are its unacknowledged legislators? In whose cup is “post-truth”

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contained? And if it spills out, on whom will it spill? Will any of the
affected rejoice for being lured from the herd? If so, will the proclaimers of
“post-truth” assent to the view that “deception, flattery, lying and cheating,
slander, false pretenses, living on borrowed glory, masquerading, conven-
tions of concealment, playacting before others and before oneself, in sum,
the constant fluttering about the flame of vanity, is so much the rule and the
law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and
pure desire for truth could arise among men” (Gilman, Blair, and Parent
1989, 247)? If the answer is yes, I will take the risk of the tight rope walker.
Thus wrote Zarathustra.

On Genealogy and the Face Value of Truth

Throwing the gears of his genealogical project in reverse, Zarathustra began
writing a keynote address on the Truth. It was to be delivered in the far dis-
tant future, when “post-truth” would be self-evident, at a conference titled
Naked Faces. This is the address:
Why does every human, every sinner, wish to see the face of God,
but shudder at the prospect? Because the face of God would put even
the faintest doubt about his existence to rest. It would put an end to the
unstated question that haunts the recurring invocation: “May the peace
of God which passes all understanding be upon you and remain with you
always.” Then, why the shuddering? Because shame always overpowers the
gratification of empirical proof. Every liar, which includes every woman
and every man, wants to see the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth. Notwithstanding all their professed devotion to chastity, they want
the truth naked. Personally, I have “seen truth naked—verily, barefoot up to
the throat” (Nietzsche 1982, 242). When I saw her, she looked more beauti-
ful than I had anticipated. Her body drew me to her the way that a magnet
draws a nearby piece of metal. She was orchestrating the movements of
my eyes, as bearing witness to her precarity was nearly intolerable. With
her feet firmly planted on the ground, she seemed to have grown from the
earth’s insides. This all lasted but a few seconds. Then from the throat, she
spoke. She thanked me for being her maker and lauded my artistry. She
asked if I was pleased with her. I responded that a work of art is infinitely
revisable. With all this throating, my encounter of her was ruined. Upon
leaving the scene, I had only one question: What did the truth see in my
face? Was she overtaken by coulrophobia at the sight of my red rubber
nose and pasty white makeup? I, too, was naked but painted as a clown,

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concealing that I am an immoralist, a warrior, a forger of new values, and

a sermonizer who, more than anything else, appreciates theater. To lament
the era of “post-truth” is easier than to experience the shame of witnessing
truth directly.
A voice rose from the conference audience, “Go back to your cave and
leave the truth alone.”

On the Truth of Superman

At the park, Zarathustra sat on a double bench. Right behind him were
sitting a mother and her son, feeding the pigeons. The son asked with the
earnestness that only a four-year-old possesses: “Is Superman pretend
or is he real?” The mother was quiet for a moment, and then said, “Yes.
Superman is real. The stories about him are real. We tell them in comic
books, which helps grown-ups pretend that they no longer look to the sky
for help. But we also tell superman-stories in epics. And in history. And
on the news. In epics, Superman slays the dragon and gets the princess
and half the kingdom. In history, Superman wins the war and redraws the
map. On the news, Superman wins the election or brings a tech-startup
to its initial public offering. The point is, Superman is ‘the meaning of the
earth’ (Nietzsche 1982, 125, 144). The ubiquity of stories about him induces
us all to ‘remain faithful to the earth’—or simply not to give up hope that
humans can rise above conveniences, preferences, and fears. So yes, the
stories are real. As real as gravity; you can see them in the effects that they
have on human behavior. Most of the time, what you see is a poor soul
falling from a rooftop because it turns out that a cape doesn’t make you
fly. As long as our courage as well as our faith are smaller than a mustard
seed, humans remain ‘something that must be overcome’” (Nietzsche 1982,
124, 160, 379).
“Ok, the stories are real,” the child said. “But are the stories true?”
“True?” his mother replied. “No.” She paused. “Stories can’t be true. But we
are the ones who fail the stories when we ask them to be.” She paused again.
“To be honest, I think Superman’s problem is that he doesn’t really want to
save the day at all. He is secretly disgusted by flattery, ‘wearied by poisonous
flies, bloody in a hundred places’ (Nietzsche 1982, 165). He fears that, having
become a fisher of men, all he is going to catch is a corpse (Nietzsche 1982,
132). Superman is no hero. So the stories could be real and good, or true, but
I suspect they cannot be both at once.”
Thus it was spoken to Zarathustra.

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A Disquisition on the Elsewhere

After mother and child left the park, Zarathustra took out his notebook
and wrote:
In speech and song, people’s sounds stand out not for being audible but
for their self-transformation into pleas, commands, groans of pleasure or
pain, prohibition or affirmation. When observing two-year-olds play imita-
tion with what they hear all around them, I surmise that at that age I, too,
was amassing words, those invisible materials with which I later made lexi-
cal worlds of impossible loyalties, or demolished worlds crowded by herds
goaded by a slovenly morality and pitiable emotions like pity.
Making or demolishing worlds takes familiarity with the material,
its strength, durability, elasticity, etc. Familiar words are familiar because
they are used often—often, too often. But what is used frequently gets
worn out, weakened. Weakened words say less and less; and the less they
say, the less useful they are. By contrast, new words, or familiar words
used in new ways, do not seem readily useful. At least initially, they face
rejection or suspicion—rejection because they introduce disorder and
uncertainty into a world that familiar words have built; and suspicion
because we are generally guarded before becoming openly friendly to
what is foreign. “Post-truth” is one of these “newer” words. No wonder,
then, that believers in the Truth are mocking “post-truth” by equating it
to a shameless disregard of long-standing agreements (Sykes 2017). But
agreements are always subject to renegotiation, aren’t they? My sympathy
to “post-truth” for its troubles! I recall vividly the mockery I incurred
when the phraseology of the overman, the transvaluation of values, the
eternal return of the same, ressentiment, genealogy, and the philosophy of
the hammer came out of me.
A word is not an end in itself but a tendency, a thrust to elsewhere. The
elsewhere of a word may be an idea in the making, another word, a person
or a beast of burden, a nearby hill, a faraway cave, or a piece of fantastic
nothingness in the beyond. When propelled to an elsewhere, users feel at
home or on edge. When at home, their feeling is fleeting; when on edge,
it is long-lasting. In the first instance, a few choice words have sufficed; in
the second, no word will do. Why don’t words go away even when deleted?
Why do they haunt us until we come to terms with their thrust to the out-
ermost periphery of their domain? When the elsewhere of the same word
conflicts with another, how do I decide? Of all the available paths, which
one do I take? Which one leads home? Can “post-truth” take me there?

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Speculative (from specere) philosophy offers those who engage in it

respite from the “claim-proof ” regime. Respite comes to those who ask:
What if ? For example, what if philosophy has always been about “health,
future, growth, power, life,” not about knowledge and the Truth? (Nietzsche
1974, 35). “What if existence were nothing but an aesthetic phenomenon?”
(Nietzsche 1989, 245). What if “post-truth” is not what the OED says but
a daring expedition, even a revolt, for a new set of values and against the
confines of stubborn conventions? This kind of philosophy requires a third
eye, which can see beyond the doors of ordinary perception; doors, that is,
without keyholes. Doors mark limits, which function as commands to obey
or dares to trespass. Great minds begin by obeying and go on to the next
stage—trespassing; when they obey, the herd applauds them; when they
trespass, it condemns them to ostracism. What is “post-truth” but a dare to
trespass?
Thus wrote Zarathustra.

On the Home
Refugees descended upon Motley Cow, families with tattered bundles
and wide-eyed children. They were displaced, out of their place, far from
their home, homeless. They were, in truth, lost. Motley Cow was not theirs.
Everything they saw in the new place was false, a reminder of what it was
not. Every blanket and loaf of bread marked the absence of the nourish-
ments of home, lingering like an afterthought (post-thought). And “home”
had become the figure of their faces, searching for comfort.
Zarathustra gathered the members of the Migration Council, and thus
he spoke:
The newcomers have left behind a home turned to smoldering rubble.
What was there is gone forever; the shards and splinter-wood are now hous-
ing for the Algea, the spirits of grief. Sorrow blows through the devastation
like a haunting wisp. Still, as you intuit the refugees’ loss, do not pity them.
For pity is the weakest emotion. Rather, let us turn our thoughts of home
to a state of a being. In this state, there is no dis-placement, no dis-ease, no
dis-comfort. In this dwelling, the soul remembers what it had forgotten,
and, most importantly, what it had forgotten about forgetting. Home greets
you like a mother upon the return of her wayward child (Nietzsche 1982,
295). She may wag her finger, knowing as only mothers do all the truths of
your infractions. In welcoming you home, she confounds the relationship
between home and truth.

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I could not rip from your hands the idea that home and comfort go
together. Most of you could not sleep soundly without it. Still, I have come
to insist on discomfort. My purpose in Motley Cow is to point toward
the choice between discomfort and truth, or comfort and death. So I tell
you that rising above the cackle is discomforting. The pursuit of Truth, the
rainbow and all the steps upward are anything but comfortable (Nietzsche
1982, 236). Proximity to truth is not at all “homey” but rather, as it will even-
tually be called, “unheimlich.” So then. Are all discomforts reliably true? Of
course not. But if being out of one’s place is a prerequisite for encountering
truth, being in one’s place may be always and by necessity false. Is being at
home a lie? A necessary lie perhaps, but the question spins again and again:
Are any experiences of comfort also experiences of what is True? Is true
comfort inconceivable? Is some measure of comfort necessary for a person
to endure the discomfort of a truth encounter?
My own home, Zarathustra pivoted, is solitude. That is where I breathe
the mountaintop’s clean smells and happy silence is all around. Here, I am
alone but not forsaken. My ethos, my dwelling place, finds me comfort-
able with myself. And in the comfort, I know Truth despite myself. Here,
“things are open and bright” and “the words and word-shrines of all being
open up before me” (Nietzsche 1982, 298). “With happy nostrils I again
breathe mountain freedom. At last my nose is delivered from the smell of
everything human. Tickled by the sharp air as by sparkling wines, my soul
sneezes—sneezes and jubilates to itself: Gesundheit!” I am well here, burst-
ing sonorously with health. I am not afraid, though the memory of fear
stays with me like a nightmare. As I bless myself post-sneeze with good
health, I consider that it almost never coincides with happy contentment.
God bless me? Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll take health over the analgesia. If
wishing made it so, I would welcome each one of Motley Cow’s refugees
to make a home on the peak beside mine. They are looking for a home, but
I cannot judge what kind of home, whether of health or ailing happiness.

Good Intentions and True Words

When Zarathustra opened his front door, the well-digger of Motley Cow
was sitting on the stoop. “Teach me the overman!” the man implored.
“I, too, want to live up here on the mountaintop. I have tried to heed your
word among my neighbors, but the alleys close in on me. It is getting
harder and harder to breathe” (Nietzsche 1982, 279). Zarathustra sat next to
the man, and said, “Is it your wish, my brother, to go into solitude? Is it your

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wish to seek the way to yourself ? Then linger a moment . . .” (Nietzsche

1982, 174).
The well-digger told this story: “Every morning I walk to the bakery for
a loaf of bread. The woman behind the counter smiles. As I take the bread
and leave, I always wish her well. And every time I do, it pains me, I am
virtually certain that she does not believe what I say. To her ears, my speech
is a cough and a cackle (Nietzsche 1982, 280, 297). It is a mere sound, much
like the sound of the brass bell hanging from the door, jingling every time
someone enters or exits. Inside of me, the care is trapped by the words that
signify it. I am incapable of saying truthfully, ‘Be well!’ I am incapable of
saying anything.” Burying his face in his palms, the well-digger sat silently.
Then Zarathustra spoke, “Indeed, the woman does not believe in your
sincerity. Having learned bad faith, she dismisses your wishes as perfunc-
tory and polite. And your feelings for her wellbeing—the weight that you
want your words to carry—never reach her. The pain of this realization
will accompany you across the bridge that leads away from Motley Cow
(Nietzsche 1982, 310). What you now realize is that not only can you never
give your love truthfully; you can never tell your neighbor anything at all in
truth. Words are not to be trusted. They are always on the verge of betray-
ing you. And silence is no better alternative. Robotic speech is designed to
chatter continuously; a silent chatbot is a broken chatbot, but a functioning
bot keeps on chattering.”
The well-digger said, “I have heard you shouting among the people, ‘I
am Zarathustra the godless: where shall I find my equal?’ (Nietzsche 1982,
283). I do not doubt that your singularity pains you. My problem is that I
see my equals, my brothers and sisters, everywhere around me but I cannot
reach them. Truth isn’t what unifies us but what keeps me apart from them.
Whatever comes after truth may be a coughing cliché, but at least it keeps
me coming back to the bakery.”
Imagining the rising of water and of bread, Zarathustra said, “It is eas-
ier to dig a well than to dig for words of sincerity.”

Missed Opportunities
Plato’s dialogues are missed opportunities for depicting conversations, the
kind that would have given philosophy a glorious name once and for all.
His controlling questions and Procrustean logic mar what could have been
profitable forays into joyful wisdom. I say he was too intelligent not to have
realized that a conversation amounts to an agreement between self and other

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to live together for a short while (Am I expecting him to have o­ verlooked
the Greek dialegesthai and anticipated the Latin con- and v ­ ersare?); what
brings the two together is neither blind greed for knowledge nor a search
for the Truth via interlocking propositions but the will to pierce the walls of
inartistic habits and thus initiate the project of a stronger solitude; perked
ears and vibrating vocal chords serve clumsily the participants’ effort to
shed the remnants of their earlier and lower forms of life, to discard their
fraudulent perfections, that is, to overcome themselves, and thus find joy
in their folly and wealth in their poverty. A dialogue reverberates after its
eventfulness, the hope being that it will resume, always undirected, ineffi-
cient and open-ended, and that it will add a precious jewel to the interlocu-
tors’ secret treasure chest. The agreement is renewed every time the two sit
across or next to one another once again. If the aftermath of a conversation
is “Heavens! I contradicted myself several times. I had better straighten my
lines of reasoning!” then self and other have walked away empty handed,
back to their untruthful selves. Thus spoke Zarathustra.3

Contradiction: Revision and What Might Be True

Wikipedia was the funniest thing that Zarathustra had ever seen, and he
visited the site often. It wasn’t so much that the cacophony of it dismayed
him; rather, he enjoyed the conflicted encounters that the project staged.
Such intensity and such speedy flux in the shapes of the text! The urgency
to be right about this matter or that was at the forefront of every exchange.
Zarathustra couldn’t get enough. Indeed, “the free encyclopedia” was the
most brazen casuistry of truth and post-truth that Zarathustra could imag-
ine. Like watching children play-act a battle scene; or professional wres-
tling. The text-meetings of the Wikipedians, he thought, are like those of
the scholars—so earnest. “They watch each other closely and mistrustfully.
Inventive in petty cleverness, they wait for those whose knowledge walks
on lame feet: like spiders they wait. I have always seen them carefully pre-
paring poison,” Zarathustra thought (Nietzsche 1982, 237). As soon as a
nontruth appears, they come running with their tongues hanging out and
call their lasciviousness pity (Nietzsche 1982, 330). I see through the “volup-
tuous delight that is in all such lamentation and accusation.”
According to Wikipedia, “Going postal, in American-English slang,
means becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of
violence, and usually in a workplace environment.” So, Zarathustra thought,
the word bears no connection to the “post” of a time-stamped prefix. And

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yet he couldn’t get past the emphasis of Wikipedia’s definition on violence

rather than, for example, sanity. Encyclopedically, a person is postal who
has lost control of his or her anger and is prone to violent acts in an institu-
tional context. He or she acts out from within a highly regimented, almost
militaristic, structure of authority, thwarting the duty of assignment. He or
she has chosen not to deliver, and not to accept deliverance. To go postal
is to confront the failure of a structure’s promised dependability and the
safety it affords in its certainty. It is to attempt to destroy the safety of the
home, the post office, and the agents responsible for maintaining the myth.
Thus, to go postal is to have a reaction to the trauma of seeing truth and
post-truth fade into each other like two photographs on top of one another,
melting on the dashboard of a hot car.
What would make the optometrist go postal? Zarathustra wondered.
What would be required for the spider-scholars to reject the authority of
their institutions, and go post-all? Before he arose from his desk, Zarathustra
donated the petitioned single dollar to Wikipedia, the referential institution
insisting that “Verifiability isn’t up for postmodern debate” (Wikipedia n.d.).

Imperfection
Listening to the sound of his own steps echoing in the empty street,
Zarathustra was uneasy about his role in Motley Cow (Nietzsche 1982, 123).
“Oh the loneliness of all givers!” he thought (Nietzsche 1982, 218). He walked
around all night in the sleeping town, worrying about the well-­digger, the
optometrist, and the refugees. What were his gifts to them? Were they
received as gifts? Did the people assign him ulterior motives? Had they
rejected the gifts as bribes? Had they dismissed them as worthless?
The aftermath of many an experience bruises our pride by showing
us how prone to imperfection we are—saying too much or not enough,
speaking too soon or too late, observing in haste, tending halfheartedly,
concluding prematurely, reacting rather than responding. If our personal
histories were recorded in a diary, the entries would describe one blun-
der after another. They would also show our haughty promises to ourselves
and their frustration by ourselves—high aspirations and mediocre achieve-
ments, determined resolutions to accomplish goals and lip service to their
actualization, a thorough examination of our sufferings and feeble strategies
for deliverance. But the diary would also include unwritten entries pointing
to the compensatory fantasy of an errorless entity—let us call this conjec-
ture God (Nietzsche 1982, 197)—who knows the Truth a priori, before the

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vagaries of experience. But we are condemned to ­experience, that is, to

commit mistakes. And to those who say that being human means making
mistakes and learning from them I answer: “Indeed, but it takes a hundred
years to learn something well; and by then, it is too late.” The optometrist’s
pain and the well-digger’s fear encapsulate the inadequacy of experience for
humans. Perhaps, “post-truth” is that which we wish to learn long before we
reach a hundred. Its lessons would hint at an ontology that acknowledges
our fragmented selves, the randomness of our thoughts as well as the inti-
mate dimensions in our most abstract writings. To this we might also add
the tyrannizing facts of our psychic makeup, our competing and conflicting
sentiments, and those intangible and ineffable things serenaded by the lyre
and the flute.

On Theo-asininities
At the awakening, Zarathustra found all the higher ones kneeling devoutly
before a censed ass. The two kings, the retired pope, the wicked magician,
the voluntary beggar, the wanderer and shadow, the old soothsayer, the con-
scientious in spirit, and the ugliest man were all gathered, wrapped in merry
laughter and cud-chewing noise (Nietzsche 1982, 422–24). Grabbing one by
the collar, Zarathustra shouted, “What’s gotten into all of you? I thought
these shenanigans were finally beneath you. I have spent so much of my
voice on you, visiting in your midst.” He turned to the pope. “You especially,
Pontiff. Your truth was so important to you, and now you’ve lost it. That
you of all people should kneel before an ass, when you know the story of
the golden calf, is tragic. Those guys didn’t fare so well, did they?” He then
turned to the magician, “And you, Mr. Science! Dr. Empiricism! ‘What
have you done? Who should henceforth believe in you in this free age, if
you believe in such theo-asininities? It was a stupidity that you commit-
ted; how could you, you clever one, commit such a stupidity?’” (Nietzsche
1982, 426). The magician shrugged, “You are right, it was a stupidity; and it
was hard enough for me too.” The conscientious man stepped in to defend
the pope and the magician: “There is something in this spectacle that even
pleases my conscience. Perhaps I may not believe in God; but it is certain
that God seems relatively most credible to me in this form.” Sheepishly
avoiding Zarathustra’s eye, he kicked up dust at the ugliest man, “who still
lay on the ground” (Nietzsche 1982, 427).
The pope spoke up: “Better to adore God in this form than in no form
at all!” (Nietzsche 1982, 426). We appreciate your efforts, Zarathustra, and

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we admire your zeal. But we took a vote, and the results are in: The ass
is more pleasant than the Lamb. Bury your hands in its warm hair and
you’ll know. Surrender to the festival of the awakening, and you, too, will
know the truth that we have found. Zarathustra looked at the pitiful ass
sniffing the dry dirt. He said, “Everything you create is small. And yet you
cannot keep yourselves from praising it, and raising it. If this creature is
your new redeemer, you really ought to appear more redeemed” (Nietzsche
1982, 204).
The soothsayer spoke, gesturing toward the conscientious man: “What
my friend is saying is that, while he cannot believe in truth in its true form,
he can accept the truth of an ass. He may even rejoice and be glad in it. The
triune God has nothing on the beast who walks on straight and crooked
paths toward a kingdom beyond good and evil. The beast may walk as he
will, or indeed be tethered to a Post.”
Zarathustra walked away, shaking his head and coughing from the
frankincense.

The Eulogy
When the tightrope walker plummeted into the marketplace, “a whirlpool
of arms and legs,” Zarathustra knelt by the shattered body and said, “By
my honor, friend, . . . all that of which you speak does not exist: there is no
devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear noth-
ing further. . . . You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing con-
temptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you
with my own hands” (Nietzsche 1982, 131–32). The people of Motley Cow
asked Zarathustra with some reluctance to deliver the young man’s eulogy.
Standing at the gravesite, he spoke thus:
“There is the isle of tombs, the silent isle; there too are the tombs of
my youth. There I wish to carry an evergreen wreath of life” (Nietzsche
1982, 222). The young performer is well on his way there, and soon we all
will join him. I am not here to fulfill the expectations of the genre born of
the age-old ritual of burial. Rather, I am here to remind you that to “bury
one’s head in the sand of heavenly things” is to die, to surrender the will
and force to live (Nietzsche 1982, 144). With one’s head in the ground, one
speaks muffled words; indeed one speaks posthumously, hacking and spit-
ting dirt. One murmurs after the soil has been thrown onto the gaping
grave. “Post-truths” are the utterances of posthumous speech, uttered as the
sand gives way.

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I am here to unpack only the “eu” of eulogy, and in so doing unseal the
young man’s will, that is, his inheritance to us. You see, he was an excep-
tional disciple of the overman. Unlike most of us, walking as we do on the
flat surface of the streets, he walked on the stretched rope of life, always
negotiating the gravitational forces and the pulls of right and left. He knew
he was no bird but admired the ease with which they take to the high wires
of our town. He was a free spirit determined to discipline his body in order
to cross the air from balcony to balcony on a rope. And he did it without a
safety net. Not because he was reckless but because he wanted to taste life as
it is—dangerous, temporary, and meaningless. The advice of the cowards—
safety, eternity, and meaning were not part of his form. In short, he believed
in life and in himself. And that is more than I can say about most of us. So,
as we prepare to turn his body into nutrients for the ground, let us not bury
his gift to us. “He that has ears to hear, let him hear” (Nietzsche 1982, 269).4

Department of Communication Studies

University of Texas at Austin

Department of Communication
University of Pittsburgh

NOTES
1. Education is what “the superfluous” call what they have stolen from the inventors
and the sages. “Mellifluous” is one of the ten words reported by Merriam-Webster as the
people’s favorite.
2. In Kermode’s discussion of historical and literary fiction, truth and the conse-
quences thereof are at stake. He writes with reference to Hannah Arendt that “the philo-
sophical or anti-philosophical assumptions of the Nazis were not generically different
from those of the scientist, or indeed of any of us in an age ‘where man, wherever he goes,
encounters only himself.’ How, in such a situation, can our paradigms of concord, our
beginnings and ends, our humanly ordered picture of the world satisfy us, make sense? . . .
If King Lear is an image of the promised end, so is Buchenwald; and both stand under the
accusation of being horrible, rootless fantasies, the one no more true or more false than
the other, so that the best you can say is that King Lear does less harm” (1966, 38). In
conversation with Kermode, we would functionally attach his notion of concord to truth,
and refer to the earlier discussion of Impressionism and the accusations levied against it
by Realists.
3. In the special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric on post-truth, James Crosswhite
­elegantly captures Nietzsche’s ambivalent treatment of truth and life, specifically as the

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latter connects to the will to power. He explains Nietzsche’s displacement, rejection, and
elevation of truth, writing, “In one operation, [truth] plays a necessary role in the pres-
ervation of life. It arrests and fixates what otherwise surges and flows. It plays the role of
nomos for cities. It issues law, commands, to counter chaos, the unpredictable, the uncon-
trollable, what might undermine politics, stability, commonality. In these respects, it is
only an illusion of truth. In another operation, it is a self-transcending poetic creation
of new truth, a tapping into chaos to overthrow old truths and to shape new truth and
so fulfill the rule of the will to power. To become aware of these operations of truth
is to move into a post-truth condition” (2018, 377). In our essay, the two sections titled
“Missed Opportunities” and “Contradiction: Revision and What Might Be True” play
what Crosswhite calls “operations of truth” against one another, drawing attention to truth
as a clumsy attempt to overcome and, alternatively, truth as combative language game, or
indeed “fact-checking.”
4. See also the Gospel of Matthew 11:15.

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