Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

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

"I am a railing alongside the torrent; whoever is able to grasp me, may grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not." These two paragraphs are an exhortation to higher men to become independent.

Par. 15.

Here Nietzsche perhaps exaggerates the importance of heredity. As, however, the question is by no means one on which we are all agreed, what he says is not without value.

A very important principle in Nietzsche's philosophy is enunciated in the first verse of this paragraph. "The higher its type, always the seldomer doth a thing succeed" (see page 82 of "Beyond Good and Evil"). Those who, like some political economists, talk in a business-like way about the terrific waste of human life and energy, deliberately overlook the fact that the waste most to be deplored usually occurs among higher individuals. Economy was never precisely one of nature's leading principles. All this sentimental wailing over the larger proportion of failures than successes in human life, does not seem to take into account the fact that it is the rarest thing on earth for a highly organised being to attain to the fullest development and activity of all its functions, simply because it is so highly organised. The blind Will to Power in nature therefore stands in urgent need of direction by man.

Pars. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

These paragraphs deal with Nietzsche's protest against the democratic seriousness (Pobelernst) of modern times. "All good things laugh," he says, and his final command to the higher men is, "LEARN, I pray you--to laugh." All that is GOOD, in Nietzsche's sense, is cheerful. To be able to crack a joke about one's deepest feelings is the greatest test of their value. The man who does not laugh, like the man who does not make faces, is already a buffoon at heart.

"What hath hitherto been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the word of him who said: 'Woe unto them that laugh now!' Did he himself find no cause for laughter on the earth? Then he sought badly. A child even findeth cause for it."

Chapter LXXIV. The Song of Melancholy.