Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None - 01

THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA
A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE

By Friedrich Nietzsche

Translated By Thomas Common


CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION BY MRS FORSTER-NIETZSCHE.

THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.
FIRST PART.
Zarathustra’s Prologue.
Zarathustra’s Discourses.
I. The Three Metamorphoses.
II. The Academic Chairs of Virtue.
III. Backworldsmen.
IV. The Despisers of the Body.
V. Joys and Passions.
VI. The Pale Criminal.
VII. Reading and Writing.
VIII. The Tree on the Hill.
IX. The Preachers of Death.
X. War and Warriors.
XI. The New Idol.
XII. The Flies in the Market-place.
XIII. Chastity.
XIV. The Friend.
XV. The Thousand and One Goals.
XVI. Neighbour-Love.
XVII. The Way of the Creating One.
XVIII. Old and Young Women.
XIX. The Bite of the Adder.
XX. Child and Marriage.
XXI. Voluntary Death.
XXII. The Bestowing Virtue.

SECOND PART.
XXIII. The Child with the Mirror.
XXIV. In the Happy Isles.
XXV. The Pitiful.
XXVI. The Priests.
XXVII. The Virtuous.
XXVIII. The Rabble.
XXIX. The Tarantulas.
XXX. The Famous Wise Ones.
XXXI. The Night-Song.
XXXII. The Dance-Song.
XXXIII. The Grave-Song.
XXXIV. Self-Surpassing.
XXXV. The Sublime Ones.
XXXVI. The Land of Culture.
XXXVII. Immaculate Perception.
XXXVIII. Scholars.
XXXIX. Poets.
XL. Great Events.
XLI. The Soothsayer.
XLII. Redemption.
XLIII. Manly Prudence.
XLIV. The Stillest Hour.

THIRD PART.
XLV. The Wanderer.
XLVI. The Vision and the Enigma.
XLVII. Involuntary Bliss.
XLVIII. Before Sunrise.
XLIX. The Bedwarfing Virtue.
L. On the Olive-Mount.
LI. On Passing-by.
LII. The Apostates.
LIII. The Return Home.
LIV. The Three Evil Things.
LV. The Spirit of Gravity.
LVI. Old and New Tables.
LVII. The Convalescent.
LVIII. The Great Longing.
LIX. The Second Dance-Song.
LX. The Seven Seals.

FOURTH AND LAST PART.
LXI. The Honey Sacrifice.
LXII. The Cry of Distress.
LXIII. Talk with the Kings.
LXIV. The Leech.
LXV. The Magician.
LXVI. Out of Service.
LXVII. The Ugliest Man.
LXVIII. The Voluntary Beggar.
LXIX. The Shadow.
LXX. Noon-Tide.
LXXI. The Greeting.
LXXII. The Supper.
LXXIII. The Higher Man.
LXXIV. The Song of Melancholy.
LXXV. Science.
LXXVI. Among Daughters of the Desert.
LXXVII. The Awakening.
LXXVIII. The Ass-Festival.
LXXIX. The Drunken Song.
LXXX. The Sign.

APPENDIX.
Notes on “Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Anthony M. Ludovici.


INTRODUCTION BY MRS FORSTER-NIETZSCHE.
HOW ZARATHUSTRA CAME INTO BEING.

“Zarathustra” is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of
his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures,
bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there
soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest
aims. My brother had the figure of Zarathustra in his mind from his very
earliest youth: he once told me that even as a child he had dreamt of
him. At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his
dreams by different names; “but in the end,” he declares in a note on
the subject, “I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with
this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and
comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according
to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his
‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.”
All Zarathustra’s views, as also his personality, were early conceptions
of my brother’s mind. Whoever reads his posthumously published writings
for the years 1869–82 with care, will constantly meet with passages
suggestive of Zarathustra’s thoughts and doctrines. For instance, the
ideal of the Superman is put forth quite clearly in all his writings
during the years 1873–75; and in “We Philologists”, the following
remarkable observations occur:—
“How can one praise and glorify a nation as a whole?—Even among the
Greeks, it was the INDIVIDUALS that counted.”
“The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared
such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? The
question is one which ought to be studied.
“I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of
the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually
favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing
to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their
evil instincts.
“WITH THE HELP OF FAVOURABLE MEASURES GREAT INDIVIDUALS MIGHT BE REARED
WHO WOULD BE BOTH DIFFERENT FROM AND HIGHER THAN THOSE WHO HERETOFORE
HAVE OWED THEIR EXISTENCE TO MERE CHANCE. Here we may still be hopeful:
in the rearing of exceptional men.”
The notion of rearing the Superman is only a new form of an ideal
Nietzsche already had in his youth, that “THE OBJECT OF MANKIND SHOULD
LIE IN ITS HIGHEST INDIVIDUALS” (or, as he writes in “Schopenhauer as
Educator”: “Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce great
men—this and nothing else is its duty.”) But the ideals he most revered
in those days are no longer held to be the highest types of men. No,
around this future ideal of a coming humanity—the Superman—the poet
spread the veil of becoming. Who can tell to what glorious heights man
can still ascend? That is why, after having tested the worth of our
noblest ideal—that of the Saviour, in the light of the new valuations,
the poet cries with passionate emphasis in “Zarathustra”:
“Never yet hath there been a Superman. Naked have I seen both of them,
the greatest and the smallest man:—
All-too-similar are they still to each other. Verily even the greatest
found I—all-too-human!”—
The phrase “the rearing of the Superman,” has very often been
misunderstood. By the word “rearing,” in this case, is meant the act of
modifying by means of new and higher values—values which, as laws and
guides of conduct and opinion, are now to rule over mankind. In general
the doctrine of the Superman can only be understood correctly in
conjunction with other ideas of the author’s, such as:—the Order
of Rank, the Will to Power, and the Transvaluation of all Values. He
assumes that Christianity, as a product of the resentment of the botched
and the weak, has put in ban all that is beautiful, strong, proud, and
powerful, in fact all the qualities resulting from strength, and that,
in consequence, all forces which tend to promote or elevate life have
been seriously undermined. Now, however, a new table of valuations
must be placed over mankind—namely, that of the strong, mighty, and
magnificent man, overflowing with life and elevated to his zenith—the
Superman, who is now put before us with overpowering passion as the
aim of our life, hope, and will. And just as the old system of valuing,
which only extolled the qualities favourable to the weak, the suffering,
and the oppressed, has succeeded in producing a weak, suffering, and
“modern” race, so this new and reversed system of valuing ought to rear
a healthy, strong, lively, and courageous type, which would be a glory
to life itself. Stated briefly, the leading principle of this new system
of valuing would be: “All that proceeds from power is good, all that
springs from weakness is bad.”
This type must not be regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a
nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote
period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the
Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would
therefore be somewhat absurd to strive after. But it is meant to be
a possibility which men of the present could realise with all their
spiritual and physical energies, provided they adopted the new values.
The author of “Zarathustra” never lost sight of that egregious example
of a transvaluation of all values through Christianity, whereby the
whole of the deified mode of life and thought of the Greeks, as well as
strong Romedom, was almost annihilated or transvalued in a comparatively
short time. Could not a rejuvenated Graeco-Roman system of valuing (once
it had been refined and made more profound by the schooling which
two thousand years of Christianity had provided) effect another such
revolution within a calculable period of time, until that glorious type
of manhood shall finally appear which is to be our new faith and hope,
and in the creation of which Zarathustra exhorts us to participate?
In his private notes on the subject the author uses the expression
“Superman” (always in the singular, by-the-bye), as signifying “the most
thoroughly well-constituted type,” as opposed to “modern man”; above
all, however, he designates Zarathustra himself as an example of the
Superman. In “Ecco Homo” he is careful to enlighten us concerning the
precursors and prerequisites to the advent of this highest type, in
referring to a certain passage in the “Gay Science”:—
“In order to understand this type, we must first be quite clear in
regard to the leading physiological condition on which it depends: this
condition is what I call GREAT HEALTHINESS. I know not how to express my
meaning more plainly or more personally than I have done already in
one of the last chapters (Aphorism 382) of the fifth book of the ‘Gaya
Scienza’.”
“We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand,”—it says
there,—“we firstlings of a yet untried future—we require for a new end
also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher,
bolder and merrier than all healthiness hitherto. He whose soul
longeth to experience the whole range of hitherto recognised values
and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal
‘Mediterranean Sea’, who, from the adventures of his most personal
experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror, and discoverer
of the ideal—as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the
legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the
godly non-conformist of the old style:—requires one thing above all
for that purpose, GREAT HEALTHINESS—such healthiness as one not only
possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one
unceasingly sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it!—And now, after
having been long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the ideal,
more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked
and brought to grief, nevertheless dangerously healthy, always healthy
again,—it would seem as if, in recompense for it all, that we have a
still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one
has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known
hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the
questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well
as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand—alas! that
nothing will now any longer satisfy us!—
“How could we still be content with THE MAN OF THE PRESENT DAY
after such outlooks, and with such a craving in our conscience and
consciousness? Sad enough; but it is unavoidable that we should look
on the worthiest aims and hopes of the man of the present-day with
ill-concealed amusement, and perhaps should no longer look at them.
Another ideal runs on before us, a strange, tempting ideal full of
danger, to which we should not like to persuade any one, because we
do not so readily acknowledge any one’s RIGHT THERETO: the ideal of
a spirit who plays naively (that is to say involuntarily and from
overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto
been called holy, good, intangible, or divine; to whom the loftiest
conception which the people have reasonably made their measure of value,
would already practically imply danger, ruin, abasement, or at least
relaxation, blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of
a humanly superhuman welfare and benevolence, which will often enough
appear INHUMAN, for example, when put alongside of all past seriousness
on earth, and alongside of all past solemnities in bearing, word, tone,
look, morality, and pursuit, as their truest involuntary parody—and
WITH which, nevertheless, perhaps THE GREAT SERIOUSNESS only commences,
when the proper interrogative mark is set up, the fate of the soul
changes, the hour-hand moves, and tragedy begins...”
Although the figure of Zarathustra and a large number of the leading
thoughts in this work had appeared much earlier in the dreams and
writings of the author, “Thus Spake Zarathustra” did not actually come
into being until the month of August 1881 in Sils Maria; and it was the
idea of the Eternal Recurrence of all things which finally induced my
brother to set forth his new views in poetic language. In regard to his
first conception of this idea, his autobiographical sketch, “Ecce Homo”,
written in the autumn of 1888, contains the following passage:—
“The fundamental idea of my work—namely, the Eternal Recurrence of
all things—this highest of all possible formulae of a Yea-saying
philosophy, first occurred to me in August 1881. I made a note of the
thought on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: 6,000 feet beyond
men and time! That day I happened to be wandering through the woods
alongside of the lake of Silvaplana, and I halted beside a huge,
pyramidal and towering rock not far from Surlei. It was then that the
thought struck me. Looking back now, I find that exactly two months
previous to this inspiration, I had had an omen of its coming in the
form of a sudden and decisive alteration in my tastes—more particularly
in music. It would even be possible to consider all ‘Zarathustra’ as a
musical composition. At all events, a very necessary condition in its
production was a renaissance in myself of the art of hearing. In a small
mountain resort (Recoaro) near Vicenza, where I spent the spring of
1881, I and my friend and Maestro, Peter Gast—also one who had been
born again—discovered that the phoenix music that hovered over us, wore
lighter and brighter plumes than it had done theretofore.”
During the month of August 1881 my brother resolved to reveal the
teaching of the Eternal Recurrence, in dithyrambic and psalmodic form,
through the mouth of Zarathustra. Among the notes of this period, we
found a page on which is written the first definite plan of “Thus Spake
Zarathustra”:—
“MIDDAY AND ETERNITY.”
“GUIDE-POSTS TO A NEW WAY OF LIVING.”
Beneath this is written:—
“Zarathustra born on lake Urmi; left his home in his thirtieth year,
went into the province of Aria, and, during ten years of solitude in the
mountains, composed the Zend-Avesta.”
“The sun of knowledge stands once more at midday; and the serpent
of eternity lies coiled in its light—: It is YOUR time, ye midday
brethren.”
In that summer of 1881, my brother, after many years of steadily
declining health, began at last to rally, and it is to this first gush
of the recovery of his once splendid bodily condition that we owe not
only “The Gay Science”, which in its mood may be regarded as a prelude
to “Zarathustra”, but also “Zarathustra” itself. Just as he was
beginning to recuperate his health, however, an unkind destiny brought
him a number of most painful personal experiences. His friends caused
him many disappointments, which were the more bitter to him, inasmuch as
he regarded friendship as such a sacred institution; and for the first
time in his life he realised the whole horror of that loneliness to
which, perhaps, all greatness is condemned. But to be forsaken is
something very different from deliberately choosing blessed loneliness.
How he longed, in those days, for the ideal friend who would thoroughly
understand him, to whom he would be able to say all, and whom he
imagined he had found at various periods in his life from his earliest
youth onwards. Now, however, that the way he had chosen grew ever more
perilous and steep, he found nobody who could follow him: he therefore
created a perfect friend for himself in the ideal form of a majestic
philosopher, and made this creation the preacher of his gospel to the
world.
Whether my brother would ever have written “Thus Spake Zarathustra”
according to the first plan sketched in the summer of 1881, if he
had not had the disappointments already referred to, is now an idle
question; but perhaps where “Zarathustra” is concerned, we may also say
with Master Eckhardt: “The fleetest beast to bear you to perfection is
suffering.”
My brother writes as follows about the origin of the first part of
“Zarathustra”:—“In the winter of 1882–83, I was living on the charming
little Gulf of Rapallo, not far from Genoa, and between Chiavari and
Cape Porto Fino. My health was not very good; the winter was cold and
exceptionally rainy; and the small inn in which I lived was so close
to the water that at night my sleep would be disturbed if the sea were
high. These circumstances were surely the very reverse of favourable;
and yet in spite of it all, and as if in demonstration of my belief that
everything decisive comes to life in spite of every obstacle, it was
precisely during this winter and in the midst of these unfavourable
circumstances that my ‘Zarathustra’ originated. In the morning I used to
start out in a southerly direction up the glorious road to Zoagli, which
rises aloft through a forest of pines and gives one a view far out into
the sea. In the afternoon, as often as my health permitted, I walked
round the whole bay from Santa Margherita to beyond Porto Fino. This
spot was all the more interesting to me, inasmuch as it was so dearly
loved by the Emperor Frederick III. In the autumn of 1886 I chanced to
be there again when he was revisiting this small, forgotten world
of happiness for the last time. It was on these two roads that all
‘Zarathustra’ came to me, above all Zarathustra himself as a type;—I
ought rather to say that it was on these walks that these ideas waylaid
me.”
The first part of “Zarathustra” was written in about ten days—that is
to say, from the beginning to about the middle of February 1883. “The
last lines were written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard
Wagner gave up the ghost in Venice.”
With the exception of the ten days occupied in composing the first part
of this book, my brother often referred to this winter as the hardest
and sickliest he had ever experienced. He did not, however, mean thereby
that his former disorders were troubling him, but that he was suffering
from a severe attack of influenza which he had caught in Santa
Margherita, and which tormented him for several weeks after his arrival
in Genoa. As a matter of fact, however, what he complained of most was
his spiritual condition—that indescribable forsakenness—to which he
gives such heartrending expression in “Zarathustra”. Even the reception
which the first part met with at the hands of friends and acquaintances
was extremely disheartening: for almost all those to whom he presented
copies of the work misunderstood it. “I found no one ripe for many of my
thoughts; the case of ‘Zarathustra’ proves that one can speak with the
utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by any one.” My brother was very
much discouraged by the feebleness of the response he was given, and as
he was striving just then to give up the practice of taking hydrate
of chloral—a drug he had begun to take while ill with influenza,—the
following spring, spent in Rome, was a somewhat gloomy one for him.
He writes about it as follows:—“I spent a melancholy spring in Rome,
where I only just managed to live,—and this was no easy matter. This
city, which is absolutely unsuited to the poet-author of ‘Zarathustra’,
and for the choice of which I was not responsible, made me inordinately
miserable. I tried to leave it. I wanted to go to Aquila—the opposite
of Rome in every respect, and actually founded in a spirit of enmity
towards that city (just as I also shall found a city some day), as a
memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church—a person very
closely related to me,—the great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick
II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. In the
end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza Barberini, after I had
exerted myself in vain to find an anti-Christian quarter. I fear that
on one occasion, to avoid bad smells as much as possible, I actually
inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale whether they could not provide a
quiet room for a philosopher. In a chamber high above the Piazza just
mentioned, from which one obtained a general view of Rome and could
hear the fountains plashing far below, the loneliest of all songs
was composed—‘The Night-Song’. About this time I was obsessed by an
unspeakably sad melody, the refrain of which I recognised in the words,
‘dead through immortality.’”
We remained somewhat too long in Rome that spring, and what with the
effect of the increasing heat and the discouraging circumstances already
described, my brother resolved not to write any more, or in any case,
not to proceed with “Zarathustra”, although I offered to relieve him
of all trouble in connection with the proofs and the publisher. When,
however, we returned to Switzerland towards the end of June, and he
found himself once more in the familiar and exhilarating air of the
mountains, all his joyous creative powers revived, and in a note to me
announcing the dispatch of some manuscript, he wrote as follows: “I have
engaged a place here for three months: forsooth, I am the greatest fool
to allow my courage to be sapped from me by the climate of Italy. Now
and again I am troubled by the thought: WHAT NEXT? My ‘future’ is the
darkest thing in the world to me, but as there still remains a great
deal for me to do, I suppose I ought rather to think of doing this than
of my future, and leave the rest to THEE and the gods.”
The second part of “Zarathustra” was written between the 26th of June
and the 6th July. “This summer, finding myself once more in the sacred
place where the first thought of ‘Zarathustra’ flashed across my mind,
I conceived the second part. Ten days sufficed. Neither for the second,
the first, nor the third part, have I required a day longer.”
He often used to speak of the ecstatic mood in which he wrote
“Zarathustra”; how in his walks over hill and dale the ideas would crowd
into his mind, and how he would note them down hastily in a note-book
from which he would transcribe them on his return, sometimes working
till midnight. He says in a letter to me: “You can have no idea of the
vehemence of such composition,” and in “Ecce Homo” (autumn 1888) he
describes as follows with passionate enthusiasm the incomparable mood in
which he created Zarathustra:—
“—Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion
of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If
not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition
in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea
that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty
power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes
suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy,
which profoundly convulses and upsets one—describes simply the matter
of fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask
who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with
necessity, unhesitatingly—I have never had any choice in the matter.
There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes
relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one’s steps either rush
or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is
completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an
endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;—there
is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not
operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of
necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an
instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms
(length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of
the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and
tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous
outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The
involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable
thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and
what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as
the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression.
It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra’s own phrases, as if all
things came unto one, and would fain be similes: ‘Here do all things
come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride
upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here
fly open unto thee all being’s words and word-cabinets; here all being
wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how
to talk.’ This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that
one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one
who could say to me: It is mine also!—”
In the autumn of 1883 my brother left the Engadine for Germany and
stayed there a few weeks. In the following winter, after wandering
somewhat erratically through Stresa, Genoa, and Spezia, he landed in
Nice, where the climate so happily promoted his creative powers that
he wrote the third part of “Zarathustra”. “In the winter, beneath the
halcyon sky of Nice, which then looked down upon me for the first time
in my life, I found the third ‘Zarathustra’—and came to the end of my
task; the whole having occupied me scarcely a year. Many hidden corners
and heights in the landscapes round about Nice are hallowed to me by
unforgettable moments. That decisive chapter entitled ‘Old and New
Tables’ was composed in the very difficult ascent from the station
to Eza—that wonderful Moorish village in the rocks. My most creative
moments were always accompanied by unusual muscular activity. The body
is inspired: let us waive the question of the ‘soul.’ I might often have
been seen dancing in those days. Without a suggestion of fatigue I could
then walk for seven or eight hours on end among the hills. I slept well
and laughed well—I was perfectly robust and patient.”
As we have seen, each of the three parts of “Zarathustra” was written,
after a more or less short period of preparation, in about ten days.
The composition of the fourth part alone was broken by occasional
interruptions. The first notes relating to this part were written while
he and I were staying together in Zurich in September 1884. In the
following November, while staying at Mentone, he began to elaborate
these notes, and after a long pause, finished the manuscript at Nice
between the end of January and the middle of February 1885. My brother
then called this part the fourth and last; but even before, and shortly
after it had been privately printed, he wrote to me saying that he still