Contents
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Introduction
Based on the translation by Thomas Common, Boni and Liveright Publishers, New York. 1921. Original published 1885.
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
overman 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 overman 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 overman--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 overman. 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 overman," 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 overman 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 overman, 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
"overman" (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 overman.
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 intended writing a
fifth and sixth part, and notes relating to these parts are now in my
possession. This 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. He 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. At 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.
Already 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. His 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.
Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the
essential wheel in the working of things. The translation of morality into
the metaphysical, as force, cause, end in itself, was HIS work. But the
very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra 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. In 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. Zarathustra had more courage in his
body than any other thinker before or after him. To tell the truth and TO
AIM STRAIGHT: that is the first Persian virtue. Am I understood?...The
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."
ELIZABETH FORSTER-NIETZSCHE.
Nietzsche Archives,
Weimar, December 1905.
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