Thus Spoke Zarathustra Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘truth’ is a concept belonging to the human mind and will and that apart from the human mind and will there is no such thing as ‘truth’? finally, that the resolute determination that your own truth shall be the truth is the sole origin of ‘the truth’ on earth? To give life a meaning: that has been the grand endeavour of all who have preached ‘truth’; for unless life is given a meaning it has none. At this level, truth is not something that can be proved or disproved: it is something which you determine upon , which, in the language of the old psychology, you will . It is not something waiting to be discovered, something to which you submit or at which you halt: it is something you create , it is the expression of a particular kind of life and being which has, in you, ventured to assert itself. Thus Zarathustra declares: ‘The Superman is the meaningof the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth.’ He is a prophet, not of the truth that is , but of the truth that shall be . What determines the nature of ‘truth’? The nature of the I which asserts ‘ I am the truth’. Why truth, and not rather untruth or indifference to truth? Because each particular life and being needs a fortress within which to preserve and protect itself and from which to reach out in search of aggrandizement and more power, and truth is this fortress. Or, as life says to thinking mankind: ‘my will to power walks with the feet of your will to truth.’ What then ultimately is the answer to Pilate’s question? It is: truth is will to power. Thus – by my reading at any rate – spoke Zarathustra.
    The great need, the ‘one thing needful’, was to overcome the nihilistic devaluation of life and man which had followed the destruction of the metaphysical world (the ‘death of God’). This devaluation had been effected chiefly by a psychological theory, namely the theory that primitive drives can be sublimated , so that distinctively human qualities, ‘humane’ qualities, can be understood as sublimated forms of drives which mankind has in common with the animals. The motive for formulating such a theory was the need to account for what is distinctively human without recourse to the metaphysical or supernatural. From a very large number of experiments, two primitive drives emerged as dominant: the desire for power and the emotion of fear. And when Nietzsche came to understand fear as the feeling of the absence of power , he was left with a single motivating principle for all human actions: the will to power.
    Sublimated will to power was now the Ariadne’s thread tracing the way out of the labyrinth of nihilism. ‘A table of values’ – i.e. a morality – ‘hangs over every people’: it is the table of the self-imposed commands which have turned a herd and rabble into a nation: primitive aggression has been directed back upon itself, sublimated into self -control. When the same thing happens in an individual, when he imposes commands upon himself, and obeys them, so that he too as it were changes from a rabble into a nation, the result is ‘the Superman’, theman who is master of himself . But to master oneself is the hardest of all tasks, that which requires the greatest amount of power: he who can do it has experienced the greatest increase in power, and if (as Nietzsche later says explicitly but here implies) happiness (in Zarathustra ‘joy’) is the feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome, then the Superman will be the happiest man and, as such, the meaning and justification of existence. Through continual increase of power to transmute the chaos of life into a continual self-overcoming of life and thus to experience in an ever greater degree the joy which is synonymous with this self-overcoming: that would now be the meaning of life – for joy is to Nietzsche, as it is to commonsense, the one thing that requires no justification, that is its own justification.