Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
Chapter 1 · 1/158
Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
Chapter 1
1THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA A BOOK FOR ALL AND NONE By Friedrich Nietzsche Translated By Thomas Common CONTENTS. 2INTRODUCTION BY MRS FORSTER-NIETZSCHE. 3THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA. 4FIRST PART. 5Zarathustra’s Prologue. 6Zarathustra’s Discourses. 7The Three Metamorphoses. 8II. 9The Academic Chairs of Virtue. 10III. 11Backworldsmen. 12IV. 13The Despisers of the Body. 14Joys and Passions. 15VI. 16The Pale Criminal. 17VII. 18Reading and Writing. 19VIII. 20The Tree on the Hill. 21IX. 22The Preachers of Death. 23War and Warriors. 24XI. 25The New Idol. 26XII. 27The Flies in the Market-place. 28XIII. 29Chastity. 30XIV. 31The Friend. 32XV. 33The Thousand and One Goals. 34XVI. 35Neighbour-Love. 36XVII. 37The Way of the Creating One. 38XVIII. 39Old and Young Women. 40XIX. 41The Bite of the Adder. 42XX. 43Child and Marriage. 44XXI. 45Voluntary Death. 46XXII. 47The Bestowing Virtue. 48SECOND PART. 49XXIII. 50The Child with the Mirror. 51XXIV. 52In the Happy Isles. 53XXV. 54The Pitiful. 55XXVI. 56The Priests. 57XXVII. 58The Virtuous. 59XXVIII. 60The Rabble. 61XXIX. 62The Tarantulas. 63XXX. 64The Famous Wise Ones. 65XXXI. 66The Night-Song. 67XXXII. 68The Dance-Song. 69XXXIII. 70The Grave-Song. 71XXXIV. 72Self-Surpassing. 73XXXV. 74The Sublime Ones. 75XXXVI. 76The Land of Culture. 77XXXVII. 78Immaculate Perception. 79XXXVIII. 80Scholars. 81XXXIX. 82Poets. 83XL. 84Great Events. 85XLI. 86The Soothsayer. 87XLII. 88Redemption. 89XLIII. 90Manly Prudence. 91XLIV. 92The Stillest Hour. 93THIRD PART. 94XLV. 95The Wanderer. 96XLVI. 97The Vision and the Enigma. 98XLVII. 99Involuntary Bliss. 100XLVIII. 101Before Sunrise. 102XLIX. 103The Bedwarfing Virtue. 104On the Olive-Mount. 105LI. 106On Passing-by. 107LII. 108The Apostates. 109LIII. 110The Return Home. 111LIV. 112The Three Evil Things. 113LV. 114The Spirit of Gravity. 115LVI. 116Old and New Tables. 117LVII. 118The Convalescent. 119LVIII. 120The Great Longing. 121LIX. 122The Second Dance-Song. 123LX. 124The Seven Seals. 125FOURTH AND LAST PART. 126LXI. 127The Honey Sacrifice. 128LXII. 129The Cry of Distress. 130LXIII. 131Talk with the Kings. 132LXIV. 133The Leech. 134LXV. 135The Magician. 136LXVI. 137Out of Service. 138LXVII. 139The Ugliest Man. 140LXVIII. 141The Voluntary Beggar. 142LXIX. 143The Shadow. 144LXX. 145Noon-Tide. 146LXXI. 147The Greeting. 148LXXII. 149The Supper. 150LXXIII. 151The Higher Man. 152LXXIV. 153The Song of Melancholy. 154LXXV. 155Science. 156LXXVI. 157Among Daughters of the Desert. 158LXXVII. 159The Awakening. 160LXXVIII. 161The Ass-Festival. 162LXXIX. 163The Drunken Song. 164LXXX. 165The Sign. 166APPENDIX. 167Notes on “Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Anthony M. 168Ludovici. 169INTRODUCTION BY MRS FORSTER-NIETZSCHE. 170HOW ZARATHUSTRA CAME INTO BEING. 171“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. 172Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims. 173My 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. 174At 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. 175Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. 176Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.” 177All Zarathustra’s views, as also his personality, were early conceptions of my brother’s mind. 178Whoever reads his posthumously published writings for the years 1869–82 with care, will constantly meet with passages suggestive of Zarathustra’s thoughts and doctrines. 179For 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.” 180“The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals. 181How was this possible? 182The question is one which ought to be studied. 183“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. 184“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. 185Here we may still be hopeful: in the rearing of exceptional men.” 186The 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.”) 187But the ideals he most revered in those days are no longer held to be the highest types of men. 188No, around this future ideal of a coming humanity—the Superman—the poet spread the veil of becoming. 189Who can tell to what glorious heights man can still ascend? 190That 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. 191Naked have I seen both of them, the greatest and the smallest man:— All-too-similar are they still to each other. 192Verily even the greatest found I—all-too-human!”— The phrase “the rearing of the Superman,” has very often been misunderstood. 193By 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. 194In 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. 195He 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. 196Now, 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. 197And 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. 198Stated 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.” 199This 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. 200But 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. 201The 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. 202Could 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? 203In 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. 204In “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. 205I 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’.” 206“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. 207He 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! 208that 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? 209Sad 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. 210Another 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...” 211Although 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. 212In 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. 213I made a note of the thought on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: 6,000 feet beyond men and time! 214That 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. 215It was then that the thought struck me. 216Looking 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. 217It would even be possible to consider all ‘Zarathustra’ as a musical composition. 218At all events, a very necessary condition in its production was a renaissance in myself of the art of hearing. 219In 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.” 220During 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. 221Among the notes of this period, we found a page on which is written the first definite plan of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”:— “MIDDAY AND ETERNITY.” 222“GUIDE-POSTS TO A NEW WAY OF LIVING.” 223Beneath 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.” 224“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.” 225In 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. 226Just as he was beginning to recuperate his health, however, an unkind destiny brought him a number of most painful personal experiences. 227His 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. 228But to be forsaken is something very different from deliberately choosing blessed loneliness. 229How 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. 230Now, 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. 231Whether 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.” 232My 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. 233My 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. 234These 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. 235In 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. 236In the afternoon, as often as my health permitted, I walked round the whole bay from Santa Margherita to beyond Porto Fino. 237This spot was all the more interesting to me, inasmuch as it was so dearly loved by the Emperor Frederick III. 238In the autumn of 1886 I chanced to be there again when he was revisiting this small, forgotten world of happiness for the last time. 239It 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.” 240The first part of “Zarathustra” was written in about ten days—that is to say, from the beginning to about the middle of February 1883. 241“The last lines were written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the ghost in Venice.” 242With 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. 243He 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. 244As 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”. 245Even 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. 246“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.” 247My 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. 248He 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. 249This 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. 250I tried to leave it. 251I 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. 252But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. 253In 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. 254I 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. 255In 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’. 256About this time I was obsessed by an unspeakably sad melody, the refrain of which I recognised in the words, ‘dead through immortality.’” 257We 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. 258When, 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. 259Now and again I am troubled by the thought: WHAT NEXT? 260My ‘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.” 261The second part of “Zarathustra” was written between the 26th of June and the 6th July. 262“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. 263Ten days sufficed. 264Neither for the second, the first, nor the third part, have I required a day longer.” 265He 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. 266He 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? 267If not, I will describe it. 268If 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. 269The 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. 270One 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. 271There 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. 272There 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. 273There 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). 274Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. 275The 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. 276It 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. 277On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. 278Here 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.’ 279This is MY experience of inspiration. 280I 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. 281In 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”. 282“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. 283Many hidden corners and heights in the landscapes round about Nice are hallowed to me by unforgettable moments. 284That 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. 285My most creative moments were always accompanied by unusual muscular activity. 286The body is inspired: let us waive the question of the ‘soul.’ 287I might often have been seen dancing in those days. 288Without a suggestion of fatigue I could then walk for seven or eight hours on end among the hills. 289I slept well and laughed well—I was perfectly robust and patient.” 290As 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. 291The composition of the fourth part alone was broken by occasional interruptions. 292The first notes relating to this part were written while he and I were staying together in Zurich in September 1884. 293In 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. 294My 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 intended writing a fifth and sixth part, and notes relating to these parts are now in my possession. 295This fourth part (the original MS. of which contains this note: “Only for my friends, not for the public”) is written in a particularly personal spirit, and those few to whom he presented a copy of it, he pledged to the strictest secrecy concerning its contents. 296He often thought of making this fourth part public also, but doubted whether he would ever be able to do so without considerably altering certain portions of it. 297At all events he resolved to distribute this manuscript production, of which only forty copies were printed, only among those who had proved themselves worthy of it, and it speaks eloquently of his utter loneliness and need of sympathy in those days, that he had occasion to present only seven copies of his book according to this resolution. 298Already at the beginning of this history I hinted at the reasons which led my brother to select a Persian as the incarnation of his ideal of the majestic philosopher. 299His reasons, however, for choosing Zarathustra of all others to be his mouthpiece, he gives us in the following words:—“People have never asked me, as they should have done, what the name Zarathustra precisely means in my mouth, in the mouth of the first Immoralist; for what distinguishes that philosopher from all others in the past is the very fact that he was exactly the reverse of an immoralist. 300Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things. 301The translation of morality into the metaphysical, as force, cause, end in itself, was HIS work. 302But the very question suggests its own answer. 303Zarathustra CREATED the most portentous error, MORALITY, consequently he should also be the first to PERCEIVE that error, not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinker—all history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things:—the more important point is that Zarathustra was more truthful than any other thinker. 304In his teaching alone do we meet with truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue—i.e.: the reverse of the COWARDICE of the ‘idealist’ who flees from reality. 305Zarathustra had more courage in his body than any other thinker before or after him. 306To tell the truth and TO AIM STRAIGHT: that is the first Persian virtue. 307Am I understood?... 308The overcoming of morality through itself—through truthfulness, the overcoming of the moralist through his opposite—THROUGH ME—: that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.” 309ELIZABETH FORSTER-NIETZSCHE. 310Nietzsche Archives, Weimar, December 1905. 311THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA. 312FIRST PART. 313ZARATHUSTRA’S DISCOURSES. 314ZARATHUSTRA’S PROLOGUE.
1 / 158