Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

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

Chapter LXVII. The Ugliest Man.

This discourse contains perhaps the boldest of Nietzsche's suggestions concerning Atheism, as well as some extremely penetrating remarks upon the sentiment of pity. Zarathustra comes across the repulsive creature sitting on the wayside, and what does he do? He manifests the only correct feelings that can be manifested in the presence of any great misery--that is to say, shame, reverence, embarrassment. Nietzsche detested the obtrusive and gushing pity that goes up to misery without a blush either on its cheek or in its heart--the pity which is only another form of self-glorification. "Thank God that I am not like thee!"--only this self-glorifying sentiment can lend a well-constituted man the impudence to SHOW his pity for the cripple and the ill-constituted. In the presence of the ugliest man Nietzsche blushes,--he blushes for his race; his own particular kind of altruism--the altruism that might have prevented the existence of this man--strikes him with all its force. He will have the world otherwise. He will have a world where one need not blush for one's fellows--hence his appeal to us to love only our children's land, the land undiscovered in the remotest sea.

Zarathustra calls the ugliest man the murderer of God! Certainly, this is one aspect of a certain kind of Atheism--the Atheism of the man who reveres beauty to such an extent that his own ugliness, which outrages him, must be concealed from every eye lest it should not be respected as Zarathustra respected it. If there be a God, He too must be evaded. His pity must be foiled. But God is ubiquitous and omniscient. Therefore, for the really GREAT ugly man, He must not exist. "Their pity IS it from which I flee away," he says--that is to say: "It is from their want of reverence and lack of shame in presence of my great misery!" The ugliest man despises himself; but Zarathustra said in his Prologue: "I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore." He therefore honours the ugliest man: sees height in his self-contempt, and invites him to join the other higher men in the cave.

Chapter LXVIII. The Voluntary Beggar.