A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>	S	>>	T	>>	U
V	>>	W	>>			X	>>	Z

John M. Coulter - "The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Der Tragödie zweiter Teil"

Charles Johnston - "The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali"

Andrew Lang - "Ban and Arriere Ban"

Thus Spake Zarathustra

F >> Friedrich Nietzsche >> Thus Spake Zarathustra




Chapter LXX. Noontide.

At the noon of life Nietzsche said he entered the world; with him man came
of age. We are now held responsible for our actions; our old guardians,
the gods and demi-gods of our youth, the superstitions and fears of our
childhood, withdraw; the field lies open before us; we lived through our
morning with but one master--chance--; let us see to it that we MAKE our
afternoon our own (see Note XLIX., Part III.).

Chapter LXXI. The Greeting.

Here I think I may claim that my contention in regard to the purpose and
aim of the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy (as stated at the beginning of
my Notes on Part IV.) is completely upheld. He fought for "all who do not
want to live, unless they learn again to HOPE--unless THEY learn (from him)
the GREAT hope!" Zarathustra's address to his guests shows clearly enough
how he wished to help them: "I DO NOT TREAT MY WARRIORS INDULGENTLY," he
says: "how then could ye be fit for MY warfare?" He rebukes and spurns
them, no word of love comes from his lips. Elsewhere he says a man should
be a hard bed to his friend, thus alone can he be of use to him. Nietzsche
would be a hard bed to higher men. He would make them harder; for, in
order to be a law unto himself, man must possess the requisite hardness.
"I wait for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant ones, merrier ones,
for such as are built squarely in body and soul." He says in par. 6 of
"Higher Man":--

"Ye higher men, think ye that I am here to put right what ye have put
wrong? Or that I wished henceforth to make snugger couches for you
sufferers? Or show you restless, miswandering, misclimbing ones new and
easier footpaths?"

"Nay! Nay! Three times nay! Always more, always better ones of your type
shall succumb--for ye shall always have it worse and harder."

Chapter LXXII. The Supper.

In the first seven verses of this discourse, I cannot help seeing a gentle
allusion to Schopenhauer's habits as a bon-vivant. For a pessimist, be it
remembered, Schopenhauer led quite an extraordinary life. He ate well,
loved well, played the flute well, and I believe he smoked the best cigars.
What follows is clear enough.

Chapter LXXIII. The Higher Man. Par. 1.

Nietzsche admits, here, that at one time he had thought of appealing to the
people, to the crowd in the market-place, but that he had ultimately to
abandon the task. He bids higher men depart from the market-place.

Par. 3.

Here we are told quite plainly what class of men actually owe all their
impulses and desires to the instinct of self-preservation. The struggle
for existence is indeed the only spur in the case of such people. To them
it matters not in what shape or condition man be preserved, provided only
he survive. The transcendental maxim that "Life per se is precious" is the
ruling maxim here.

Par. 4.

In the Note on Chapter LVII. (end) I speak of Nietzsche's elevation of the
virtue, Courage, to the highest place among the virtues. Here he tells
higher men the class of courage he expects from them.

Pars. 5, 6.

These have already been referred to in the Notes on Chapters LVII. (end)
and LXXI.

Par. 7.

I suggest that the last verse in this paragraph strongly confirms the view
that Nietzsche's teaching was always meant by him to be esoteric and for
higher man alone.

Par. 9.

In the last verse, here, another shaft of light is thrown upon the
Immaculate Perception or so-called "pure objectivity" of the scientific
mind. "Freedom from fever is still far from being knowledge." Where a
man's emotions cease to accompany him in his investigations, he is not
necessarily nearer the truth. Says Spencer, in the Preface to his
Autobiography:--"In the genesis of a system of thought, the emotional
nature is a large factor: perhaps as large a factor as the intellectual
nature" (see pages 134, 141 of Vol. I., "Thoughts out of Season").

Pars. 10, 11.

When we approach Nietzsche's philosophy we must be prepared to be
independent thinkers; in fact, the greatest virtue of his works is perhaps
the subtlety with which they impose the obligation upon one of thinking
alone, of scoring off one's own bat, and of shifting intellectually for
oneself.

Par. 13.

"I am a railing alongside the torrent; whoever is able to grasp me, may
grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not." These two paragraphs are an
exhortation to higher men to become independent.

Par. 15.

Here Nietzsche perhaps exaggerates the importance of heredity. As,
however, the question is by no means one on which we are all agreed, what
he says is not without value.

A very important principle in Nietzsche's philosophy is enunciated in the
first verse of this paragraph. "The higher its type, always the seldomer
doth a thing succeed" (see page 82 of "Beyond Good and Evil"). Those who,
like some political economists, talk in a business-like way about the
terrific waste of human life and energy, deliberately overlook the fact
that the waste most to be deplored usually occurs among higher individuals.
Economy was never precisely one of nature's leading principles. All this
sentimental wailing over the larger proportion of failures than successes
in human life, does not seem to take into account the fact that it is the
rarest thing on earth for a highly organised being to attain to the fullest
development and activity of all its functions, simply because it is so
highly organised. The blind Will to Power in nature therefore stands in
urgent need of direction by man.

Pars. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

These paragraphs deal with Nietzsche's protest against the democratic
seriousness (Pobelernst) of modern times. "All good things laugh," he
says, and his final command to the higher men is, "LEARN, I pray you--to
laugh." All that is GOOD, in Nietzsche's sense, is cheerful. To be able
to crack a joke about one's deepest feelings is the greatest test of their
value. The man who does not laugh, like the man who does not make faces,
is already a buffoon at heart.

"What hath hitherto been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the
word of him who said: 'Woe unto them that laugh now!' Did he himself find
no cause for laughter on the earth? Then he sought badly. A child even
findeth cause for it."

Chapter LXXIV. The Song of Melancholy.

After his address to the higher men, Zarathustra goes out into the open to
recover himself. Meanwhile the magician (Wagner), seizing the opportunity
in order to draw them all into his net once more, sings the Song of
Melancholy.

Chapter LXXV. Science.

The only one to resist the "melancholy voluptuousness" of his art, is the
spiritually conscientious one--the scientific specialist of whom we read in
the discourse entitled "The Leech". He takes the harp from the magician
and cries for air, while reproving the musician in the style of "The Case
of Wagner". When the magician retaliates by saying that the spiritually
conscientious one could have understood little of his song, the latter
replies: "Thou praisest me in that thou separatest me from thyself." The
speech of the scientific man to his fellow higher men is well worth
studying. By means of it, Nietzsche pays a high tribute to the honesty of
the true specialist, while, in representing him as the only one who can
resist the demoniacal influence of the magician's music, he elevates him at
a stroke, above all those present. Zarathustra and the spiritually
conscientious one join issue at the end on the question of the proper place
of "fear" in man's history, and Nietzsche avails himself of the opportunity
in order to restate his views concerning the relation of courage to
humanity. It is precisely because courage has played the most important
part in our development that he would not see it vanish from among our
virtues to-day. "...courage seemeth to me the entire primitive history of
man."

Chapter LXXVI. Among the Daughters of the Desert.

This tells its own tale.

Chapter LXXVII. The Awakening.

In this discourse, Nietzsche wishes to give his followers a warning. He
thinks he has so far helped them that they have become convalescent, that
new desires are awakened in them and that new hopes are in their arms and
legs. But he mistakes the nature of the change. True, he has helped them,
he has given them back what they most need, i.e., belief in believing--the
confidence in having confidence in something, but how do they use it? This
belief in faith, if one can so express it without seeming tautological, has
certainly been restored to them, and in the first flood of their enthusiasm
they use it by bowing down and worshipping an ass! When writing this
passage, Nietzsche was obviously thinking of the accusations which were
levelled at the early Christians by their pagan contemporaries. It is well
known that they were supposed not only to be eaters of human flesh but also
ass-worshippers, and among the Roman graffiti, the most famous is the one
found on the Palatino, showing a man worshipping a cross on which is
suspended a figure with the head of an ass (see Minucius Felix, "Octavius"
IX.; Tacitus, "Historiae" v. 3; Tertullian, "Apologia", etc.). Nietzsche's
obvious moral, however, is that great scientists and thinkers, once they
have reached the wall encircling scepticism and have thereby learned to
recover their confidence in the act of believing, as such, usually manifest
the change in their outlook by falling victims to the narrowest and most
superstitious of creeds. So much for the introduction of the ass as an
object of worship.

Now, with regard to the actual service and Ass-Festival, no reader who
happens to be acquainted with the religious history of the Middle Ages will
fail to see the allusion here to the asinaria festa which were by no means
uncommon in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe during the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

Chapter LXXVIII. The Ass-Festival.

At length, in the middle of their feast, Zarathustra bursts in upon them
and rebukes them soundly. But he does not do so long; in the Ass-Festival,
it suddenly occurs to him, that he is concerned with a ceremony that may
not be without its purpose, as something foolish but necessary--a
recreation for wise men. He is therefore highly pleased that the higher
men have all blossomed forth; they therefore require new festivals,--"A
little valiant nonsense, some divine service and ass-festival, some old
joyful Zarathustra fool, some blusterer to blow their souls bright."

He tells them not to forget that night and the ass-festival, for "such
things only the convalescent devise! And should ye celebrate it again," he
concludes, "do it from love to yourselves, do it also from love to me! And
in remembrance of ME!"

Chapter LXXIX. The Drunken Song.

It were the height of presumption to attempt to fix any particular
interpretation of my own to the words of this song. With what has gone
before, the reader, while reading it as poetry, should be able to seek and
find his own meaning in it. The doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence appears
for the last time here, in an art-form. Nietzsche lays stress upon the
fact that all happiness, all delight, longs for repetitions, and just as a
child cries "Again! Again!" to the adult who happens to be amusing him; so
the man who sees a meaning, and a joyful meaning, in existence must also
cry "Again!" and yet "Again!" to all his life.

Chapter LXXX. The Sign.

In this discourse, Nietzsche disassociates himself finally from the higher
men, and by the symbol of the lion, wishes to convey to us that he has won
over and mastered the best and the most terrible in nature. That great
power and tenderness are kin, was already his belief in 1875--eight years
before he wrote this speech, and when the birds and the lion come to him,
it is because he is the embodiment of the two qualities. All that is
terrible and great in nature, the higher men are not yet prepared for; for
they retreat horror-stricken into the cave when the lion springs at them;
but Zarathustra makes not a move towards them. He was tempted to them on
the previous day, he says, but "That hath had its time! My suffering and
my fellow suffering,--what matter about them! Do I then strive after
HAPPINESS? I strive after my work! Well! the lion hath come, my children
are nigh. Zarathustra hath grown ripe. MY day beginneth: ARISE NOW,
ARISE, THOU GREAT NOONDAY!"

...

The above I know to be open to much criticism. I shall be grateful to all
those who will be kind enough to show me where and how I have gone wrong;
but I should like to point out that, as they stand, I have not given to
these Notes by any means their final form.

ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI.

London, February 1909.

Copyright (c) 2007. fullstories.net. All rights reserved.