FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

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."