Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

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

Chapter LII. The Apostates.

It is clear that this applies to all those breathless and hasty "tasters of everything," who plunge too rashly into the sea of independent thought and "heresy," and who, having miscalculated their strength, find it impossible to keep their head above water. "A little older, a little colder," says Nietzsche. They soon clamber back to the conventions of the age they intended reforming. The French then say "le diable se fait hermite," but these men, as a rule, have never been devils, neither do they become angels; for, in order to be really good or evil, some strength and deep breathing is required. Those who are more interested in supporting orthodoxy than in being over nice concerning the kind of support they give it, often refer to these people as evidence in favour of the true faith.

Chapter LIII. The Return Home.

This is an example of a class of writing which may be passed over too lightly by those whom poetasters have made distrustful of poetry. From first to last it is extremely valuable as an autobiographical note. The inevitable superficiality of the rabble is contrasted with the peaceful and profound depths of the anchorite. Here we first get a direct hint concerning Nietzsche's fundamental passion--the main force behind all his new values and scathing criticism of existing values. In verse 30 we are told that pity was his greatest danger. The broad altruism of the law-giver, thinking over vast eras of time, was continually being pitted by Nietzsche, in himself, against that transient and meaner sympathy for the neighbour which he more perhaps than any of his contemporaries had suffered from, but which he was certain involved enormous dangers not only for himself but also to the next and subsequent generations (see Note B., where "pity" is mentioned among the degenerate virtues). Later in the book we shall see how his profound compassion leads him into temptation, and how frantically he struggles against it. In verses 31 and 32, he tells us to what extent he had to modify himself in order to be endured by his fellows whom he loved (see also verse 12 in "Manly Prudence"). Nietzsche's great love for his fellows, which he confesses in the Prologue, and which is at the root of all his teaching, seems rather to elude the discerning powers of the average philanthropist and modern man. He cannot see the wood for the trees. A philanthropy that sacrifices the minority of the present-day for the majority constituting posterity, completely evades his mental grasp, and Nietzsche's philosophy, because it declares Christian values to be a danger to the future of our kind, is therefore shelved as brutal, cold, and hard (see Note on Chapter XXXVI.). Nietzsche tried to be all things to all men; he was sufficiently fond of his fellows for that: in the Return Home he describes how he ultimately returns to loneliness in order to recover from the effects of his experiment.