Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

APPENDIX 81. NOTES ON "THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA" BY ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI. (continued)

Chapter XLIV. The Stillest Hour.

This seems to me to give an account of the great struggle which must have taken place in Nietzsche's soul before he finally resolved to make known the more esoteric portions of his teaching. Our deepest feelings crave silence. There is a certain self-respect in the serious man which makes him hold his profoundest feelings sacred. Before they are uttered they are full of the modesty of a virgin, and often the oldest sage will blush like a girl when this virginity is violated by an indiscretion which forces him to reveal his deepest thoughts.

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PART III.

This is perhaps the most important of all the four parts. If it contained only "The Vision and the Enigma" and "The Old and New Tables" I should still be of this opinion; for in the former of these discourses we meet with what Nietzsche regarded as the crowning doctrine of his philosophy and in "The Old and New Tables" we have a valuable epitome of practically all his leading principles.

Chapter XLVI. The Vision and the Enigma.

"The Vision and the Enigma" is perhaps an example of Nietzsche in his most obscure vein. We must know how persistently he inveighed against the oppressing and depressing influence of man's sense of guilt and consciousness of sin in order fully to grasp the significance of this discourse. Slowly but surely, he thought the values of Christianity and Judaic traditions had done their work in the minds of men. What were once but expedients devised for the discipline of a certain portion of humanity, had now passed into man's blood and had become instincts. This oppressive and paralysing sense of guilt and of sin is what Nietzsche refers to when he speaks of "the spirit of gravity." This creature half-dwarf, half-mole, whom he bears with him a certain distance on his climb and finally defies, and whom he calls his devil and arch-enemy, is nothing more than the heavy millstone "guilty conscience," together with the concept of sin which at present hangs round the neck of men. To rise above it--to soar--is the most difficult of all things to-day. Nietzsche is able to think cheerfully and optimistically of the possibility of life in this world recurring again and again, when he has once cast the dwarf from his shoulders, and he announces his doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things great and small to his arch-enemy and in defiance of him.