Those who do not spoil themselves by reading Watchmen will have Watchmen spoiled for them by this post.
Some of these Bestiary entries deal with fairly contained topics — say, a movie, or an opera, or a rock and roll song. Then there are topics like this one. As we step into Chapter 6 of the web annotations, we’re immediately greeted with the source of this chapter’s title quotation and epigraph, which the annotations summarize as: “Nietzsche.”
Nietzsche is a huge topic! Entire books, indeed entire shelves of books, entire careers, have been devoted to exploring the life, philosophies, and works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and although I do my research for each of these entries, I cannot possibly claim to be any kind of authority on such a vast domain of knowledge. So from the very start, I want to be upfront about what I know and what I don’t know. I read three books to prepare for this post:
I also watched my fair share of YouTube videos, read some encyclopedia entries, short essays, and online resources, brushed up on Philosophy 101, and spent a little time lurking on the Nietzsche subreddit. In the process, I’ve become fairly well acquainted with the broad outlines of Nietzsche’s life and the major themes of his work, but I’m certainly no expert. I generally give these posts the tone of a lecture (albeit a fun one, I hope), and this post will be no different, but the nature of this Watchmen project leads me to be a dilettante on its subjects, and I’m really a dilettante on this one. I just felt like I should make that very clear at the outset.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s start with the broad outlines of Nietzsche’s life, and look at how his works and ideas have taken on a life of their own since his death. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor. His father’s profession matters, because Nietzsche spent most of his life railing against Christianity, in case that wasn’t clear from Kaufmann labeling him an “Antichrist”. He was a bit of a prodigy, admitted to the prestigious Pforta grammar school as a child, and becoming at age 24 the youngest ever professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. After encountering the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche began incorporating more and more philosophy into his philological lectures.
Unfortunately, he also suffered from ill health starting in early adulthood as well. Just 3 years into his professorship, he took his first leave of absence for health concerns, and in 1879, at 35 years old, he retired on a pension from the university due to sickness. However, the next ten years would find him extraordinarily productive as a writer. He had published various books, lectures, and maxims during his years in academia, but from 1879 to 1889 he produced his greatest works: The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On The Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols. In 1889, he suffered a mental collapse, and spent the rest of his life hopelessly insane, dying in 1900. Deborah Hayden and others have argued convincingly that both Nietzsche’s ongoing ill-health and his eventual madness were the result of an early and untreated infection with syphilis.
We call Nietzsche a philosopher, but his work can take forms that don’t exactly feel like philosophical tracts. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is in fact a sort of story, about a prophet who comes down from the mountains (then goes back up, then down again, several times), has various encounters with people (often allegorically framed), and declaims his thoughts through the entire thing. As J. Keeping points out in Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test:
Zarathustra resembles an epic poem as much as it does a philosophical treatise. Nietzsche’s contemporaries were used to the dry disseminations of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel and had no idea what to think of it… The language is florid and evocative; to many readers, it sounds like the Bible. (pg. 59)
Nietzsche also writes actual poetry, and is drawn to what scholars tend to call “aphorisms” — brief-to-middling discourses that can be angry, funny, rambling, pointed, or any number of other moods and approaches.
These styles, elliptical and sometimes obscure, exaggerated, or self-contradictory, lend themselves to varied interpretations. Add to this the fact that his poetic German offers a wide range of translation options, and that these translations can often differ from each other dramatically, as we’ll see later in this post. These traits would work much to the detriment of understanding Nietzsche after his insanity and death, when his sister took possession of his works and estate.
Oh, and he sported an absolutely epic moustache.
According to Kaufmann, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took on the German nationalist and antisemitic views of her husband (who committed suicide after the failure of their eugenicist Nueva Germania colony in Paraguay), and edited Nietzsche’s works in accordance with her prejudices. Consequently, Nietzsche came to be identified with what became the Nazi Party, and the Nazis for their part cherry-picked his philosophies to underpin their racist, autocratic, and imperialistic Reich.
Nietzsche, meanwhile, had frequently proclaimed himself an implacable enemy of State power, and a devoted “anti-anti-Semite.” (Kaufmann pg. 44. I’m using the modern styling of antisemite and antisemitism except when quoting sources that use the old styling.) It wasn’t until the 1950s that Kaufmann and other scholars rehabilitated Nietzsche’s image, placing him “in the grand tradition of Western thought” (pg. xxi) and leading the Nietzsche renaissance that allowed him by 1986 to be quoted uncontroversially in a literary comic book.
The Abyss Also Gazes
Which brings us back to Chapter 6 of Watchmen. This issue focuses entirely on Rorschach, framing his biography through interviews with a prison psychologist, along with present-day scenes of the psychologist at home and Rorschach interacting with the other prisoners. The chapter is called “The Abyss Gazes Also”, and ends with this epigraph:
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,
and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
That quote comes from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil, specifically a section called “Maxims and Interludes”. BG+E as a whole consists of 296 aphorisms (and a little poem at the end), most of which range from a half-page to several pages. However, the aphorisms in the “Maxims” section are much shorter, generally just a sentence or two. In this way, they’re reminiscent of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” — a set of pithy thoughts encased in a more discursive work. Similarly, Nietzsche’s desire to transcend binaries with a title like Beyond Good and Evil brings to mind Blake’s joy in the tension of opposites, his desire to marry heaven to hell.
Unlike Blake’s work, though, Nietzsche only comes to us in English through translation, and as I mentioned, those translations can change the meaning of a passage pretty dramatically. This aphorism is a case in point. The translation I read, by R.J. Hollingdale, rendered it as follows:
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. (pg. 102)
There’s no doubt that the Watchmen translation is more poetic, with its Biblical “ye” and its Yoda-esque “Battle not”. “The Abyss Gazes Also” is surely a more evocative chapter title than “The Abyss Also Gazes”. And yet, there are significant differences in meaning here that make the more poetic version feel also like more of a disservice to Nietzsche.
Watchmen‘s version exhorts us to “battle not with monsters”, warning of the consequences that the battle could bring. But Nietzsche’s core philosophies involve exercising power and overcoming one’s own limitations — he wants us to battle our monsters! Sure, he has some advice about what to watch out for when doing so, but he would not be on board with the forbidding “battle not”.
Similarly, in the abyss sentence, the “if” of Watchmen‘s translation stands in contrast to the “when” of Hollingdale’s, as well as Hollingdale’s addition of “long”. For the Nietzschean, it is not a matter of whether we gaze into the abyss — it cannot be avoided forever. Eventually, we all find ourselves gazing into it, and when that gaze lingers, the darkness we see there touches the darkness in ourselves.
What is that abyss? Like many things in Nietzsche, it’s open to interpretation. For Malcolm Long, the abyss seems to be Rorschach himself. Long’s story provides the most straightforward context for this chapter’s epigraph, as he seems both to battle Rorschach as a monster, and to gaze into him as an abyss. That abyss gazes back, as the chapter explicitly calls out. On the very first page, Long writes about Rorschach, “I could stare at him for hours… except that he stares back, which I find uncomfortable.” And again, at the top of page two: “I just wish he wouldn’t stare at me like that,” just above the chapter title, bold black capital letters on a white background.
“No problem is beyond the grasp of a good psychoanalyst,” Long writes to himself in his notes, and thus he sets himself in opposition to Rorschach. He sees Rorschach as the monster that has taken over the innocent Walter, and he hopes to banish the former, thereby saving the latter. Naturally, he opposes Rorschach’s self-identification, insisting on calling him Walter, a name that Rorschach might call his deadname, were such modern parlance available to him.
That dichotomy plays out throughout the chapter. Gloria says “Rorschach,” and Malcolm corrects her: “Not Rorschach. Walter Kovacs. Rorschach’s an unhealthy fantasy personality.” Rorschach himself battles back against the deadnaming: “You keep calling me Walter. I don’t like you.” And indeed, as Long learns more about Rorschach’s life, and about Rorschach’s behavior in the prison, the distinction between Walter and Rorschach becomes no longer quite so, well, black and white. In writing about the cooking fat attack, he catches himself: “He’s getting worse. So am I. Just read back what I’ve written above. The sixth line down should read, ‘Kovacs spoke to the other inmates.’ Kovacs. Not Rorschach.” We also see his diction start to slip just a little — “Just read back” rather than “I just read back” — edging slightly into Rorschach’s own terse, clipped mode of speech.
Long’s slippage continues the next day: “Alright, Ror… Alright, Walter…”, and moments later Rorschach himself acknowledges that at one point in his history, the distinction wasn’t so clear for him either, that he was “Kovacs pretending to be Rorschach.” He speaks of Kovacs in the past tense: “All Kovacs ever was: man in a costume.” And Malcolm comes to see it the same way, writing of “what turned him into Rorschach.” The next day, Long’s resistance has faded. “Hello, Rorschach,” he says. During their session that day, Rorschach makes explicit the moment of his own metamorphosis: “It was Kovacs who said ‘Mother’ then, muffled under latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again.”
Rorschach’s story devastates Long, and in Long’s notes from that night, he sounds more Rorschach-like than ever: “Ignored him. Bought paper.” He looks at the blots and, like Rorschach, sees gore. Then that gore slips into emptiness. Malcolm Long has been transformed.
Has he, though, become a monster? He’s certainly become more like Rorschach, and not just in his mode of writing. In Chapter 11, he heads towards Joey and Aline’s fight. His words to Gloria — “It’s the world… I can’t run from it” — echo what Rorschach tells him in Chapter 6: “We do not do this thing because it is permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we are compelled.”
The question, then, turns on whether Rorschach himself is a monster, and this chapter gives us plenty of material to consider on that point. I would argue that while the Malcolm Long reading of the epigraph is the most easily available, Nietzsche’s words apply as much or more to Rorschach himself, because this chapter is as much about Rorschach’s transformation as Long’s.
In his childhood flashbacks, we see the experiences that guided Walter Kovacs’s decision to battle with what he saw as monsters: his teenaged bullies, “scum” like the murderer of Kitty Genovese, organized crime bosses. He battled those monsters, but he did not become them. From the perspective of later Rorschach, that version of the battle was “naive” and “soft”. However, even in these early days there is an exception: when he stabs the bully’s eye with a lit cigarette, he has escalated well beyond anything that was being done to him, though there were certainly threats in the air at that moment that could have turned into more.
That moment of fiery wrath foreshadows the inferno that will consume Gerald Grice. Here is the ultimate monster with whom Kovacs does battle in this chapter, and here is where he becomes Rorschach. Kovacs has promised Blaire Roche’s parents that he will return her unharmed, but when he sees (what he believes to be) her bones chewed by dogs, that promise cannot be kept, and that impossibility is so intolerable that Kovacs himself must be banished, replaced by Rorschach. Rorschach, who believes that there is good, and there is evil, and evil must be punished, sets about to punish the evil that he has witnessed here, first by murdering the dogs, and then by giving Grice the grisly choice of dying in a fire or sawing his own arm off.
His story ends with a long gaze into flames and the darkness he feels all about him — the “dark planet” beneath him, the “cold suffocating dark” of the sky. The abyss. In doing so, he describes the feeling of that abyss staring back: “The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them.” From that moment, he saw the world as morally blank, and himself as the agent who could mark it. Walter Kovacs had been transformed.
Thus Malcolm Long in this issue really gazes into two abysses: the abyss that is Rorschach, and the abyss that made Rorschach. Similarly, while he may see Rorschach as his monster to battle, he is finally made to see the monsters Rorschach himself has battled — mother, bullies, crime, indifference, horrific murder.
But none of this answers the earlier question: have they become monsters themselves? It’s not an easy question to answer. Long is changed, but he does not create a costume, adopt a new identity, and fight crime. He does not invent another personality to repair his fundamental failure. Kovacs is changed, and he is now capable of horrific murder himself, as well as brutal bullying, such as breaking men’s fingers in sleazy bars. Yet in other places, we see him adjusting his crusade so as not to hurt a child (when confronting his landlady), or fervently grasping Dan’s hand despite his assertion that it was Kovacs who had friends.
The question of whether we can apply the label of “monster” brings us to concepts of moral valuation, concepts that were very important to Nietzsche. It is also an enormous domain, one whose exploration could spawn a huge project of its own. I’m not going to attempt to put Long or Rorschach on trial against Nietzsche’s — or anyone’s — tables of moral values, if those tables could even be clearly defined. There is, however, a central concept by which Nietzsche tries to unite the values of varying cultures, and I’ll return to it later as a part of outlining Nietzsche’s most important precepts and how they relate to Watchmen overall.
Before that, though, there is one specific value I’d like to interrogate a little further: the value of truth. In Philosophy 101, Peter Gibson asserts: “Truth is at the center of human life, and at the center of philosophy… Truth may even be the supreme value of philosophy.” (pg. 24) From there, however, he goes on to detail some of the objections to this centrality, and mentions that Nietzsche “challenged the reverential aura around truth.” (pg. 27) And so he did, as in this excerpt from the very first aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil:
Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? — The problem of the value of truth stepped before us — or was it we who stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which of us sphinx?
Long seeks the truth about how Rorschach formed his identity, and the process of discovering that truth changes him so profoundly that his marriage falls apart. The man who once proclaimed, “I’m too fat and contented for anything to ruin my disposition,” finds himself sitting alone in a darkened bedroom, deep in an existential crisis. He’s far less contented, knowing Rorschach’s truth. Might he be better off in uncertainty, or ignorance, still believing himself very good with people?
Similarly, Rorschach himself militantly asserts truth as an unqualified good, even in the face of armageddon. Knowing of Ozymandias’s vast trick, “evil must be punished” means to him that “people must be told.” This purist stance is completely consistent with his character, but as we see in the other characters, its value assertion is subject to question. Why not rather untruth in this situation? For Rorschach, truth is good and good is truth, and that tautology is all he needs. As readers steeped in the Western tradition against which Nietzsche rails, we might be inclined to agree. But Ozymandias has everyone else convinced of a different morality, in which ignorance (at the mass scale) is in fact a greater good than truth.
Veidt’s untruth creates the possibility of peace in a world that seemed on the edge of self-destruction. But that untruth also called for millions of sacrifices — is there any justice in their deaths serving a lie? In Ozymandias’s eyes, if the lie were unraveled, those deaths would be in vain, and billions more would likely die. Does that belief really justify falsehood? It’s a rich set of questions. In Watchmen and Philosophy, Alex Nuttall uses it to explore utilitarianism and Kant’s categorical imperative. For our purposes, we can call it the first resonance of Nietzsche and Watchmen beyond the words of the Chapter 6 epigraph. There are many more.
The Table of Overcomings
There’s a world of Nietzsche beyond the monsters and abysses aphorism, and his views have so permeated modern consciousness that any given 20th century work of literature is likely to have echoes of them. Let’s take a look at some of his most important concepts, and how Watchmen reflects and refracts them.
“God is dead”
If there is one phrase associated in the popular imagination with Nietzsche, this would have to be it. The idea appears first in 1882’s The Gay Science, framed in an aphorism about a madman who cries “I seek God! I seek God!”, and then turns on his bemused onlookers, saying, “We have killed him — you and I.” (Kaufmann pg. 96-97) The notion reappears quite early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when Zarathustra encounters an old, saintly hermit in the forest, who continuously praises God. Zarathustra later muses to himself, “Could it be possible? This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!” (pg. 41)
Rorschach shares the same revelation in his climactic story: “Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.” The transformed Malcolm, staring at an ink blot in the dark, agrees: “We are alone. There is nothing else.” In this way, perhaps Rorschach functions as a kind of Zarathustra to Malcolm, a mysterious and powerful teacher whose lesson bends the mind into seeing the darkness and emptiness around it.
And yet! In the Watchmen universe, the God may be absent but a god is very much present in the form of Dr. Manhattan. With his seeming omnipotence, and near omniscience, Dr. Manhattan represents a version of divinity alive and incarnate on earth, but missing both the benevolence and the vengefulness of the traditional Jehovah, and therefore perhaps more terrifying than the notion of a dead God ever was. What would Zarathustra make of this ultra-powerful being? He probably wouldn’t recognize him as God, or even a god, but might see in him the apotheosis he seeks: the Superman.
Übermensch
Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet comes down from his mountains for the first time, and speaks to the people of the nearest town:
I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? (pg. 41)
TSZ is a book that loves its recurring refrains, and “I teach you the Superman” becomes one of them, in this section and future sections. Nietzsche is, of course, using a German word — Übermensch — which Hollingdale translates as “Superman“, Kaufmann prefers as “Overman“, and Keeping just leaves untranslated. For my part, I’m sticking with “Superman” because it feels closest in tone to the subjects of this post. (I’m also noting, but not engaging with, the oppressive gender assumptions that underpin this and a whole lot more of Nietzsche’s work.) For Zarathustra, who is more or less a stand-in for Nietzsche, the Superman concept is inextricably tied up with the death of God.
It’s hard to overstate how profound an impact Darwin’s theory of evolution had upon Western thought. For centuries upon centuries, the veracity of Christian scripture was largely unchallenged, and the bulk of social and political structures were formed around that set of beliefs. That authority started eroding midway through the 1600s, and scientific inquiry and scientific thinking reached a peak with Darwin’s theory that fundamentally threatened the notion that humans were created by God, and in turn, threatened religious belief overall. Thus it was that On The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and a mere 23 years later we find Nietzsche proclaiming the death of God.
But in the absence of a divine overseer, what guides us? For Nietzsche (via Zarathustra), the very idea of evolution points towards the answer, as in the passage immediately following the previous quote:
All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.
[…]
Behold, I teach you the Superman.
The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!
If evolution has taken us this far, far enough to recognize the falsehood of our long-preferred explanation for ourselves, we are free to become the very creator whom we always believed was external to us. In overcoming our weaknesses, becoming the ultimate version of ourselves (or in Nietzsche’s framing, “becoming who we are” [Kaufmann pg. 159]), we may take evolution into our own hands, and learn to be as superior to humans as humans are to apes. On an earth rendered meaningless by the death of God, human beings can become the architects of their own meaning.
We can read the superhero genre as an extended meditation on this concept, starting with Siegel and Schuster’s Superman himself. Here is a being that is indeed far superior to humans, but in the end, Superman/Kent is an alien — he is among humans, but not of them. He does not represent an overcoming. The next major hero to come along, Batman, is much closer. Bruce Wayne, driven by childhood trauma, perfects himself physically and uses the enormous economic and intellectual power he already possesses to craft technologies that elevate him above the rest of humanity.
These archetypes repeat over and over through the genre — Thor and Iron Man are a couple of Marvel examples — and they cover most of Watchmen as well. Most of the costumed characters in the book are in the Batman mold, Nite Owl II most of all. Through various combinations of technology and training, they have elevated themselves above what Nietzsche would call “the herd”, attempting to create something beyond themselves, to become who they are. (Or, in Laurie’s case, who her mother wants her to be.) Doctor Manhattan, on the other hand, has become fundamentally something other than human — a Superman, an Overman, an Übermensch, and a creator of sorts, but one who is not the architect of his own destiny, trapped instead in a single jewel of time.
The Eternal Recurrence
Zarathustra has an abyss of his own. In a chapter called “The Convalescent”, he springs out of bed, crying:
I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle — I call you, my most abysmal thought!
Ah! you are coming — I hear you! My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into the light! (pg. 233)
What is this abyss? It is his disgust with the triviality of humanity — “Alas, that his wickedest is so very small! Alas, that his best is so very small!” (pg. 235) — combined with this knowledge, spoken by his abysmal thought: “The man of whom you are weary, the little man, recurs eternally… Alas, man recurs eternally! The little man recurs eternally!” (pg. 236)
One of Zarathustra’s animals is the snake, seen here in ouroboros form symbolizing eternal recurrence.
Upon hearing his outpouring, the animals he lives with reply to him. (Yeah, he lives with talking animals.) They say:
Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal your soul with new songs, so that you may bear your great destiny, that was never yet the destiny of any man!
For your animals well know, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!…
Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us.
If you’ve been reading this Bestiary series for a while, that refrain ought to sound awfully familiar. For one thing, this stance outside of time, treating it as an object, evokes both Doctor Manhattan’s point of view and the reader’s. For another, this specific idea of eternalism has become, well, a recurring fascination for Alan Moore, reaching its quintessential expression in his novel Jerusalem. There, and elsewhere, he talks of time as a “glass football” — big bang at one end, big crunch at another. In between exists all time in one great “hypermoment”, only ordered into linearity by our conscious minds.
Alma Warren, Moore’s self-insertion character in Jerusalem, does not experience this concept as an abysmal thought. Instead, she is greatly relieved by the notion that “…every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city.” (pg. 1262) Nietzsche’s self-insertion character Zarathustra, too, eventually finds ecstasy in eternalism. In the section titled “The Seven Seals”, each aphorism ends with, “Oh how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings — the Ring of Recurrence! […] For I love you, O Eternity!” (pg. 244-247)
For Nietzsche, the idea of eternal recurrence seems to be a sort of thought experiment — how would you live your life if you knew that you’d re-experience your every action, over and over again for eternity? If your actions are small and worth little, this might be a horrifying thought. If your actions are grand, if you are constantly in the process of becoming more and more a Superman, such repetition might be amazing. For Moore, the glass football seems to be pretty much what he views as the actual truth of the universe. Both of them, though, come to embrace a block universe absent of free will, ruled over by fate.
Amor fati
Nietzsche frequently reiterated that amor fati — the love of fate — was his “inmost nature”, and central to his philosophy. He idealizes this stance in his final book, Ecce Homo:
My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. (quoted in Kaufmann, pg. 243)
Kaufmann, in explaining how this greatness implies an affirmation of the present moment that extends beyond the present, frames our current moment as a point in an infinitely complex web:
That I am here, now, doing this — that depends on an awe-inspiring series of antecedent events, on millions of seemingly accidental moves and decisions, both by myself and many others whose moves and decisions in turn depended on yet other people. And our very existence, our being as we are, required that our parents had to choose each other, not anyone else, and beget us at the precise moment when we were actually begotten; and the same consideration applies to their parents, and to all our ancestors, going back indefinitely. (pg. 282)
He was very likely not on the surface of Mars when he wrote that, but he sounds an awful lot like someone who is:
This speech was Jon’s explanation to Laurie of why her life isn’t meaningless, and in fact, Laurie finds her own amor fati by the end of the book. Whereas on Mars she despairs that her life is a big, stupid, meaningless joke, by the time she visits Sally in Florida, she no longer wants anything to be different:
People’s lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and… well, sometimes they can’t talk about them. I know how that is. I love you, Mom. You never did anything wrong by me.
She also embraces the legacy of both her parents. Adventuring in costume is now something she wants to do, not something forced upon her. And she wants to do it in leather armor and a mask, with a gun, just like The Comedian. She is becoming herself at last, overcoming her nihilistic and frightened thoughts, choosing power.
Self-Overcoming and the Will To Power
As I mentioned above, concepts of moral valuation were very important to Nietzsche. Through his philological studies, he found that different cultures asserted different moral codes, and that in fact unique moral codes are part of what defines a separate culture and prevents it from being subsumed by others. And yet, as a philosopher, he sought a unifying theory that successfully places all these codes under a single rubric. As he so often did, he put the results into Zarathustra’s mouth:
No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbor evaluates.
Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another: thus I found. I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours.
One neighbour never understood another: his soul was always amazed at his neighbour’s madness and wickedness.
A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power.
What it accounts hard it calls praiseworthy; what it accounts indispensable and hard it calls good; and that which relieves the greatest need, the rare, the hardest of all — it glorifies as holy. (pg. 84)
Kaufmann calls this “nothing less than a generic definition of morality, an attempt to crystallize the common essence of all moral codes.” (pg. 211) For Nietzsche, the concept of will to power — the constant strengthening of humans by overcoming each other, their environment, and most importantly themselves — was a crucial counterpart to the other aspects of his philosophy. If God is dead, we can only become our own creators by exercising the will to power necessary to attain the level of the Superman. If we recur eternally, it is imperative that what repeats is our constant improvement through self-overcoming, embracing our circumstances in order to transcend them.
Because of its very encompassing nature, will to power is inevitably at work in almost any story, and Watchmen is no different. Chapter 6 plays out as a long power struggle between Long and Rorschach, each trying to overcome the other. In the end, it is Rorschach who prevails, and how does he do so? By telling the story of how Rorschach overcame Walter, triumphing over his squalid origins by exerting the power of his own moral code. By scrawling his own design on the world.
Laurie and Dan will themselves to power as well, stepping back into their costumed identities to change the world, both before and after New York’s apocalypse. Even Doctor Manhattan, who frequently seems to be all power and no will, has moments of self-overcoming — his epiphany about thermodynamic miracles, or his decision to create life rather than just observing it or being tangled in it.
But the ultimate expression of will to power in Watchmen is surely Ozymandias, and it goes back to his origin. I don’t just mean the character’s life story, though that plainly is an example of self-overcoming as well, at least in Veidt’s own telling. I mean the character’s origin as an adaptation of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt. Peter Cannon’s stories, indeed his superpower, revolved around his willpower — it’s through his strength of will that he unlocks the potential of his brain and body. Ozymandias, too, has continually overcome his own limitations, honing himself physically and mentally while reaping the economic benefits of selling that selfsame concept to the masses.
Under this moral umbrella, the question of who is and isn’t a monster appears in a different light. Just as one neighbor is always amazed at the other’s madness and wickedness, so too do the different characters in Watchmen alienate each other with their own versions of self-overcoming. Long sees Rorschach as a monster until he sees what Rorschach has overcome, and begins the journey of overcoming himself in the same way, a journey we see expressed in his last moments on Earth. Has he become a monster? It depends on where you stand. What has happened, though, is that he has found his will to power.
The plot of Watchmen revolves around a grand exercise of Adrian Veidt’s will to power, and it asks the question: is that exercise monstrous? Each character has a different answer, but the world cannot answer, because at least as of the end of the book, the truth behind that power is cloaked. Disguised. Masked.
Masks
Aphorism 69 of Beyond Good and Evil begins, “Everything profound loves the mask”. Nietzsche’s point in this aphorism seems to be that the most “fragile and valuable” parts of ourselves require the protection of a thorough disguise, and that in fact our most delicate truths and extravagant loves cannot help but constantly grow masks, due to the world’s ongoing misinterpretation of our greatest thoughts, words, and actions.
Unlike the death of God, the Superman, the eternal recurrence, or the will to power, the mask motif is not central to Nietzsche’s thought, but it comes up several times in BG+E, and certainly seems quite relevant to the themes of Watchmen. Aphorism 223 expands the metaphor to include costumes, framing European culture as a series of affectations — “romantic or classical or Christian or Florentine or baroque or ‘national'” (pg. 152) — all of which fail to fit and must be discarded. He suggests for a moment that this may be a sort of evolution, but lands finally on the notion that nineteenth century European culture has become at last a comedy:
Perhaps it is precisely here that we are discovering the realm of our invention, that realm where we too can still be original, perhaps as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons — perhaps, even if nothing else of today has a future, precisely our laughter may still have a future!
This is the realm of invention belonging to The Comedian, isn’t it? As the character with the clearest sight in Watchmen, he has discarded the ill-fitting personas of crimefighter, savior, and legendary being. Instead, in Rorschach’s words, “He saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection, a parody of it,” and he did so precisely because of his belief that nothing of his day had a future. But is there anything profound hidden behind that mask, or is it just another abyss?
Aphorism 270 argues that suffering is what necessitates the mask, and that the more one knows, the more one suffers, and thus the more one requires a disguise to shield that suffering from an ignorant world: “sometimes folly itself is the mask for an unhappy, all too certain knowledge.” Rorschach certainly believes that this portrait describes The Comedian: “No one else saw the joke. That’s why he was lonely.” As readers, though, we don’t see The Comedian suffering due to his superior understanding of modernity. Instead, his anguish comes from having gazed long into the abyss of Adrian Veidt’s world-saving plan. It is an unhappy, all too certain knowledge, but it is what breaks Blake’s mask of folly rather than creating it.
Perhaps Rorschach may have been projecting onto Blake, because we certainly see in Chapter 6 that he has endured great suffering himself. Nietzsche claims in this aphorism that “profound suffering ennobles; it separates”, and that “there are free insolent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts”. Rorschach has suffered profoundly, but it’s hard to make the case that it has ennobled him — he hovers instead between monster and abyss. But looking at his tear-streaked face at the end of Chapter 12, echoing that same face in childhood having been brought to tears by his mother’s blows, it’s not hard to see him as a broken, proud, incurable heart.
The Poets Lie Too Much
That poignant image, of a helpless Rorschach superimposed upon a helpless Kovacs, may lead us to question what “will to power” even means for this character. Free as he may have felt to scrawl his own design upon the world, Rorschach eventually reaches the limits of his capability when confronted by a true Superman. Yet it’s worth remembering that for Nietzsche, will to power didn’t simply mean always getting one’s own way. Instead, what he emphasized about it was its evolutionary character, combined with the unique human ability to reflect and decide upon one’s actions. Kaufmann puts it thus:
Nature is not perfectly rational and does not efficiently fulfill her own longing for perfection. Recognizing this, Nietzsche speaks of the will to power; but he leaves no doubt that this drive is an Eros and can be fulfilled only through self-perfection. (pg. 256)
This Eros, for Nietzsche, derives all its power from human creativity, and the self-overcoming for which he strives is a profoundly creative, generative, artistic expression. It doesn’t matter that Rorschach can’t rule the universe. What matters is that he has taken the wretched raw materials of his past and applied his imagination to them, creating for himself a new version, one which looks on the last one as a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.
And yet, I don’t think Nietzsche or Zarathustra would gaze upon Rorschach and proclaim him a Superman. Yes, he has overcome himself, but he has done so by embracing an absolutely Manichean worldview, insisting that there is good and there is evil, with no shades of grey. But Nietzsche, as his title keeps reminding us, wants to move beyond good and evil. In aphorism 56 of that book, he refers to the “spell and illusion of morality” and pronounces it “world-denying”.
Against this, he sets “the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most world-affirming man”, whose joyous amor fati embraces everything that is and was, and wants it to recur eternally. In my view, this stance is not relativism. It’s not nihilist, it’s not passive, and it’s not even amoral.
Look, there is obviously a tension between the idea of amor fati and eternal recurrence on the one side, and will to power reaching towards the Superman on the other side. We might want to ask Nietzsche to make up his mind here — should we embrace everything (including ourselves) just as it is, recurring over and over, or should we strive to overcome ourselves and reach towards Superhumanity? I think the key to this seeming paradox is in the idea of being world-affirming and life-affirming.
For Nietzsche, the truest and best manifestations of will to power are not about prevention, but about production. They create rather than destroy, begin rather than halt. This is what’s so ironic about his philosophies being adopted by the Nazis, who sought to wipe out entire categories of humanity and to impose by totalitarian force a single will upon the world. The world-affirming, life-affirming man idealized by Nietzsche does not try to make the world over in his own image — he tries to make himself over in the image of what he loves the most, purging his weaknesses in the process. To again invoke a modern phrase, he tries to become his “best self”. In doing so, he asserts values that may indeed transform the world, but that transformation is simply a side-effect of the essential act of self-perfection.
Thus it is that Kaufmann calls Nietzsche’s philosophy “a sustained celebration of creativity — and all genuine creation is, as we have tried to show, a creation of new values and norms.” (pg. 414) By these lights, the reinvention and/or extension of one’s own identity into a super-heroic alter ego may be seen as fundamentally an act of extravagant creativity, allied with an event of self-overcoming, a combination which brings one close to Nietzsche’s idealized Superman. However, as we see with Rorschach and the other Watchmen characters, that self-creation may ultimately be limited by all-too-human desires: revenge, money, sex, and above all an attachment to simplistic, straightforward solutions and moral codes. The spirit of Nietzsche would not necessarily celebrate these creations as the type of overcomings he seeks.
I wonder, though, if he might celebrate the creativity of Watchmen in its entirety? The “Of Poets” section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra deals with creation and creativity itself, and Zarathustra implicates himself within it, speaking to a disciple:
“Yet what did Zarathustra once say to you? That the poets lie too much? — But Zarathustra too is a poet.
Do you now believe that he spoke the truth? Why do you believe it?”
The disciple answered: “I believe in Zarathustra.” But Zarathustra shook his head and smiled.
Belief does not make me blessed (he said), least of all belief in myself.
But granted that someone has said in all seriousness that the poets lie too much: he is right — we do lie too much.
We know too little and are bad learners: so we have to lie. (pg. 149)
As J. Keeping noted, TSZ reads like an epic poem, with Nietzsche as the poet and Zarathustra himself speaking through most of it in poetic cadences. From within that work, Zarathustra asserts that the poets lie too much, and includes himself in that judgment. Of course, Zarathustra is simply the voice of the actual poet, Nietzsche — in fact the “Z” of Zarathustra is just a rotated “N”. Thus Nietzsche, from within his own story, confronts the limits of storytelling.
Watchmen, too, can be read as a meditation on fiction, what it can and cannot do to change reality. We’ve looked at how each character’s superheroic alter ego is a kind of creative fiction, meant to change themselves and make them more capable of changing the world. Each character discovers the limits of those changes as the story progresses, often finding that they know too little and are bad learners.
There are also actual writers within the book, such as Doug Roth from Nova Express and Hector Godfrey of the New Frontiersman. Each of these men works to advance a point of view through their own versions of journalism, and neither is aware of the larger forces directing and circumscribing their efforts. Closer to a poet is Max Shea, the comic book writer whose Black Freighter work echoes the themes of Watchmen‘s plot, and who in working for Veidt finds himself authoring a much more real tale than he understands. Hira Manish is in the same boat, as it were, her paintings and designs stretching from the canvas to actual, biological creation.
None of these creators understand that they are being treated as characters and story beats by the grandest author within Watchmen: Ozymandias. Veidt’s apocalypse, as I’ve written before, operates as an act of authorship within the story, an attempt to rewrite reality into a form he could tolerate. And yet, as we see on the final page, a competing narrative looms on the horizon, and if it rushes into the space vacated by Hector Godfrey’s column, it may twist the world’s plot once more.
All of those possibilities swirl within the world created by Watchmen, which of course is an act of authorship itself, with Moore as its Shea and Gibbons/Higgins as its Manish. I can see Watchmen‘s creation as an expression of will to power within comics, looking on its predecessors as laughing-stocks or painful embarrassments. And yet, just like the creations within it, Watchmen itself has had its share of unintended consequences, from helping to usher in the Dark Age of Comics to the fact that its ongoing popularity exploded the contractual assumption that Moore expected would return his characters to him.
There’s also the fact that Moore claimed that he was hoping Watchmen would “scare a little bit so that people would just stop and think about their country and their politics”, but much like Elvis Costello’s attempts to unseat Thatcher, Watchmen didn’t exactly halt the Cold War. Was Watchmen itself, like Veidt’s hoax, a grand yet likely futile attempt to get humanity to recognize itself? Perhaps.
What seems beyond dispute is that Watchmen created new values and norms for the comics medium, and that they continue to resonate today. Just as DC continuity can be split into “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis“, so can superhero comics themselves divide into pre-Watchmen and post-Watchmen. That impact was the result of a will to power among its authors, and made it into an elevated version of the Superhero comic, a sort of Überbuch. We have gazed long into it (certainly I have!), and in turn, it has shown us things in the genre and ourselves that we would not have known without it.
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