Thus Spoke Zarathustra

spirit the six past years (1876—82) were, this Nietzsche himself has described to us in the prefaces to the new editions of Human, All Too Human (I and II), Daybreak, and The Gay Science, as well as in the self-criticism of The Birth of Tragedy. I refer here expressly to these five memorable documents (from the year 1886), since I know them to be mostly unknown, even by good Nietzsche experts.

The characteristic feature of the third epoch is the achieved self-assurance. Nietzsche lives and weaves here in his own realm; he has a culture of his own, — that culture to which one of the most significant passages of the Untimely Meditations (2nd piece p. 78; — 2nd ed. p. 174) prophetically pointed, and of which culture only the rarest, boldest specimens of humanity thus far have had an inkling. To not a single one, even if they were already unafraid enough for atheism, had the all-changing consequences appeared to which the collapse of the belief in God must lead in the course of the centuries. Nietzsche is the first who sees moral problems here at all; Nietzsche is the first who, out of a great soul and out of an unprecedented psychological acumen, teaches the morality of atheism, — a Dionysian referring to the god Dionysus, representing chaotic, creative, life-affirming energy morality, which towers just as high above the Christian morality of the time as atheism towers above the belief in God. Even Schopenhauer — the last truly great and serious atheist to be taken into account — had no glimmer of this task. With him, rather, we see precisely Christian morality, severed from the belief in God, tied to atheism! The atheistic saint with the will to wither away and pass away forever — biologically a creature of decay — is his highest human type! As a moral philosopher, Schopenhauer stands entirely under the spell of the Romantic period, which was frightened by the French Revolution and was returning to devoutness, into which his youth fell. An atheist in his head, a Christian in his heart! Moreover, as a result of his inability for historical derivations, he believes in morality as something metaphysical, fixed for all time. It is this belief in metaphysics that hinders him from being productive as an atheist in the field of morality. When he says "preaching morality is easy, grounding morality is difficult," he confesses that the two forces of his philosophy (modern atheism and the old, untouched morality) were not able to give birth to a new third thing from themselves. He not only did not preach the morality of atheism...