This is Nietzsche at his enigmatic best. “He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.” Nietzsche creates an alter-ego, Zarathustra, half-hermit and half-superman, who wanders the mountains and spits out life advice in the form of riddles to his small band of followers. He also occasionally takes time out of his day to talk with animals and fly through the air over passing ships. This is no stale philosophical treatise.
Nietzsche begins, “It is not your sin, but your moderation that cries to heaven…. Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss.” Nietzsche is not concerned with the common man, but the remnant living above the mob. “To lure many away from the herd—that is why I have come…. Behold the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? Him who smashes their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker—but he is the creator. Behold the faithful of all faiths! Whom do they hate the most? Him who smashes their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker—but he is the creator…. I shall leap over the hesitating and the indolent. Thus may my going-forward be their going-down!”
Nietzsche explains religious faith and higher virtue thus, “It was suffering and impotence—that created all afterworlds; and that brief madness of happiness that only the greatest sufferer experiences…. If you have a virtue and it is your own virtue, you have it in common with no one…. Let your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names; and if you speak of it, do not be ashamed to stammer…. only thus do I wish the good…. To have many virtues is to be distinguished, but it is a hard fate; and many a man has gone into the desert and killed himself because he was tired of being a battle and battleground of virtues…. Every virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing…. Man is something that must be overcome: and for that reason you must love your virtues—for you will parish by them.”
Nietzsche continues by describing relations between humans. He waxes on about the nature of the State, of wealth, power and freedom. “Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law…. But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies—and whatever it has, it has stolen…. I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state where universal slow suicide is called—life…. Just look at these superfluous people! They acquire wealth and make themselves poorer with it…. They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have—as if happiness sat upon the throne! Often filth sits upon the throne—and often the throne upon filth, too…. A free life remains for great souls. Truly, he who possesses little is so much the less possessed: praised be a moderate poverty! Only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin.”
Nietzsche is obsessed with the creators, especially the creators of subjective value. “Truly, men have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven. Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself—he created the meaning of things, a human meaning!… A change in values—that means a change in the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.” Nietzsche knows that the creator of values will be disdained by the mob. “It is more noble to declare yourself wrong than to maintain you are right, especially when you are right. Only you must be rich enough for it.”
Cultural inertia and contingency block the creative path. “Not only the reason of millennia—the madness of millennia too breaks out in us. It is dangerous to be an heir. We are still fighting step by step with the giant Chance, and hitherto the senseless, the meaningless, has still ruled over mankind.” The way forward is solitary learning. “Guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you. The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil…. The enlightened man goes among men as among animals…. As long as men have existed, man has enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin!”
Nietzsche pitches war against the good and the just. “With whom does the greatest danger for the whole human future lie? Is it not with the good and just?—with those who say and feel in their hearts: ‘We already know what is good and just, we possess it too; woe to those who are still searching for it!’ And whatever harm the wicked may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm! And whatever harm the world-calumniators may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm. Oh my brothers, someone who once looked into the heart of the good and just said: ‘They are the Pharisees.’ But he was not understood. The good and just themselves could not understand him: their spirit is imprisoned in their good conscience. The stupidity of the good is unfathomably clever…. The good have to crucify him who devises his own virtue…. For the good—cannot create: they are the beginning of the end.”
Nietzsche espouses almost Buddhist-like ideas on the nature of the Self and the cycle of life. “You are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!… 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…. “Now I die and decay,” you would say, “and in an instant I shall be nothingness. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! I myself am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence.””
Nietzsche speaks of the temptations of the secure and easy life of the everyman. “Even a prison at last seems bliss to such restless people as you. Have you ever seen how captured criminals sleep? They sleep peacefully, they enjoy their new security. Take care that you are not at last captured by a narrow belief, a hard, stern illusion! For henceforth everything that is narrow and firm will entice and tempt you.” Nietzsche, again, reiterates that even his followers must chart their own paths. “I am a law only for my own, I am not a law for all…. And let us not be equal before the mob. You Higher Men, depart from the market-place!” Man must create to overcome himself, but also know his limits, if he has them. “And you should not pretend to be saints in those matters in which your fathers were vicious!” Famously, Nietzsche advised, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
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