Thus Spoke Zarathustra

impulses. The philosopher is not a mere spectator, observer, and generalizer; but — the philosopher as a legislator and commander in all areas of human and national life — that is Nietzsche's thought.

How he communicates this thought lies in the distinguishing characteristic of the three epochs of his literary activity.

In the first five writings, he brings this thought into direct contact with contemporary conditions for the most part. He "places himself on the marketplace," he attaches his tremendous thought to what is closest, he believes in a public that could not yet exist. From the counter-effects, he recognizes how much he had deceived himself regarding his listeners. He turns away, he says to himself, like Zarathustra:

"Do not speak to the people, — but to companions! To companions who follow you because they want to follow themselves!"

In the second epoch, he writes as if only for himself, without regard for the rhetorical and other literary demands of the daily readership. He invents an exclusive number of rare people as his audience. Whatever suddenly captivates him from the immense circle of his knowledge and experience, what insights, what perspectives light up for him there, by what hopes his heart is inflamed, — that he holds fast, immediately in the hour of enthusiasm, with the stylus, mostly while walking, in the open air. He no longer constructs actual books: he forgoes artistic transitions, all ad hoc for this specific purpose thinking; he credits the reader with enough architectural art to construct the giant edifice, into which these thoughts wish to coalesce, out of their own resources. He writes sentences and aphorisms, — pure, self-contained cabinet and master-pieces that seek their equal, even in linguistic and formal respects. He hands these pieces, ordered, to the printing house, — less so that they may seek their public than to be rid of them, to forget them, to gain new room for new thoughts, to not be disturbed by what has been done while working on what is still to be done. He almost never read his published writings again; he was, as in everything, so in this too, preferring to look forward rather than backward.

The third epoch begins with the conception of the Zarathustra work (winter 1882/3) and ends with the finished first part of the "Revaluation of all Values." What odyssey of his...