Thus Spoke Zarathustra

instruction, in order to protect the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra from a too pedantic, too literal, and unsymbolic understanding!

All of Nietzsche's preceding and subsequent writings relate to this "Bible for exceptional people" (as one might call Thus Spoke Zarathustra) like commentaries on a text. From the very beginning, Nietzsche carried the image of Zarathustra within himself: — Nietzsche is, in fact, Zarathustra himself. For many years, he struggled to place this image outside of himself. Especially the form in which this was to be done had to cause him difficulties, in an age that is averse to everything self-glorifying, — until he finally found the current form, which allowed him to say in the third person everything (and even more) that he had to say about himself.

The fundamental teachings of Zarathustrism the philosophy of Zarathustra are already inherently present in The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations: — yet upon their first appearance, they could not possibly have been gleaned or even understood. No one had them except Nietzsche; to the contemporary world, they were utterly alien. Only now, looking back from the later Nietzsche, do those earlier writings give and receive their true light; only now do we recognize into what expanses and depths his spirit had already penetrated back then — and we also recognize how erroneous his belief was, that he could awaken the tremendous trains of thought that had dawned upon his mind in the reader with mere hints alone! One should read, for example, Schopenhauer as Educator. This work is almost exclusively about Nietzsche, as he will one day become, — and only in a few places about Schopenhauer, as he truly was. Schopenhauer lacks precisely the traits that Nietzsche, using his own resources, poetically projects into him. Schopenhauer's great merit is indeed that he brought the dynamic side of the world to the foreground and helped devalue everything intellectual, all mere head-philosophy: but he is still too caught up in moral and scholarly-dogmatic prejudices to be able to think this thought through to something great and just. Nietzsche looks into existence from a completely different height: free from the Schopenhauerian narrowness, free from the delusion that the simple is the true in the empirical, free above all from that Schopenhauerian hopelessness and lack of love, for which there is no future and from which nothing new and original wants to grow. Nietzsche's fertility is not proven more beautifully than by the manner in which he considers this great sterilizer in Schopenhauer as...