Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 15:17:02 -0800
Subject: [fyi] really bad reporting




<color><param>278A,1C2A,FFFF</param>but interesting, under that light:


Polemics:  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 

Superman 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 Superman 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 Superman--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 Superman.  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 Superman," 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 Superman 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 Superman, 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 

"Superman" (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
Superman. 

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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