Thus Spoke Zarathustra

positions of honor in this world, on the other hand — these are earthly nobility." — Nietzsche’s life and entire teaching is a life and teaching of that "heavenly" nobility. One should read (as has already been urged) the Third Unzeitgemässe Untimely Meditation, this incomparable psychology of genius and its pioneers, and one will be astonished at the self-denial, indeed cruelty, with which Nietzsche here speaks past himself and his status at that time: — Nietzsche was, after all, a professor at an ancient and venerable university! Moreover, honored and loved by colleagues, students, and everyone who had ever felt the magic of his imposing personality. But all the flattering things he experienced did not seduce him for a moment into making concessions to his earthly nobility at the expense of his "heavenly" one. He had become a professor — as he called it — "by chance"; he had neither applied for this post, nor was his study plan designed for it; he had received his call to Basel (1868) as a student on the basis of a few philological works (among them the one characteristic for him about Theognis and the ancient Greek castes) — a call by which Basel has honored itself for all time. He did not even apply for his doctoral degree: he received it honoris causa as a mark of honor from the University of Leipzig after his extraordinary appointment as professor had become known to them. His increasing illness, which may have sprung partly from the feeling that he could not dedicate himself enough to his life's task, finally compelled him (1878) to resign the professorship. And now he lived hard and strictly against himself, obeying and commanding himself as only tyrants have ever commanded, unrecognized and often in voluntary poverty, on mountains, by the sea, among southern people, as a true "saint of knowledge."

"Do I strive for happiness? — I strive for my work!"

— this word of Zarathustra’s expresses his fundamental instinct entirely. "Happiness" did not count to him as something primary, but as the effect of an overcoming, a victory over himself or others, as something secondary, as a "reward": he labeled happiness without dynamic premises, the happiness of the lazy, the dream of the faint-hearted who do not want "happiness" as the result of an unleashing of power, with other names.

Nietzsche lived the life of his Zarathustra, in all reality. And only in this way could he also teach Zarathustrismus Zarathustrianism (which, incidentally, has nothing in common with the Persian one). For whom did he teach