Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Educator*. This book actually promises Zarathustrism the philosophy of Zarathustra; it is Thus Spoke Zarathustra in another, more undeveloped idiom: even the term "Uebermensch" Overman/Superman already appears in it (p. 54, lines 5 and 6; — 2nd ed. p. 52, lines 1 and 2). — Another "Untimely", the first one, already contains in nuce in a nutshell the master-morality, in the sentence: "Here was an opportunity —" (p. 44; — 2nd ed. p. 42). But what reader of that time could have guessed what was being alluded to here? Such passages were accepted as idle remarks. But Nietzsche always negated starting from a positive position, from the spirit of a doctrine that is his original property and for which he could only create sense and understanding for us through years of clarification.

Some ignoramuses, who had heard that every philosopher must have his "system," believed they were saying something clever when they accused Nietzsche of lacking such a system. How he thought about system-mongering is well known: he considered it something dishonest; in his later time, he could, for example, laugh when he held Schopenhauer's "system" and Schopenhauer's life side by side: Schopenhauer's system, which culminates in the saint, and Schopenhauer's life, which was dominated by the principles that √ stand in his Maxims for a Way of Life and contain roughly the opposite of the saint's morality. (Understand me: he did not laugh at Schopenhauer's system, even less at Schopenhauer's life, ˇ — he laughed at the incongruence between the two.) — With Nietzsche, life and teaching were one. The cohesion, the "system," the unity of his world of thought is rooted in his character and his titanic tendency. ✓ Is that not system enough? — I would think it is more than what the conventional system-smiths, especially of philosophizing Germany, have done. — Just as Nietzsche's personality, according to its soul, is the first and fundamental element in every one of his sentences, and his no matter how eminent thought-work served only to communicate the movements of this great soul, so he also looked at every human being first and foremost regarding their inherent strength of character original: Gemüthskraft. He searched for people, and not just for heads. His tendency is much less aimed at understanding the world in this or that way, than at shaping it in this or that way. For him, philosophy is infinitely more than a mere ‘ science: — it is ‘ for him above all a mental matter, a thing of the most audacious...