Thus Spoke Zarathustra Read Online Free PDF

He who had attained that joy would affirm life and love it however much pain it contained, because he would know that ‘all things are chained and entwined together’ and that everything is therefore part of a whole which he must accept as a whole . To express this feeling of life-affirmation Nietzsche formulated a theorem of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same events’ to which he gave rhapsodic expression in Zarathustra . To be sure, only the Superman could be so well-disposed towards his life as to want it again and again for ever: but that precisely is the reason for willing his creation. The joy of the Superman in being as he is, now and ever, is the ultimate sublimation of the will to power and the final overcoming of an otherwise inexorable and inevitable nihilism.
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    These conceptions constitute the heart of Thus Spoke Zarathustra ; these, and the extended hymn to solitude and individuality to which the book owes its peculiar tone and pathos. I have described the process of their formation as an eruption; what I mean is an eruption from the subconscious of ideas belonging to Nietzsche’s earliest years, an eruption brought about by the very fact that at this time he had arrived at the end of the path which led away from them. He could go nofurther forward, so he had to go back. But since he likewise could not retract what he had been asserting for the previous five years, these earliest ideas which now came up again came up transformed and distorted almost beyond recognition. What is involved is the operation of something like the psychic censor of psychoanalysis: so that I doubt whether Nietzsche himself was altogether aware of the provenance of the grand and grandiose positive conceptions to the elaboration of which he began to apply his exceptional rhetorical gifts.
    These ‘earliest ideas’ are of course Christian, and specifically Lutheran. The teaching of Lutheran Pietism is before all that the events of life are divinely willed and that it is thus impiety to desire that things should be different from what they are: * but the other tenets of Christian belief are naturally also firmly adhered to by Lutherans. Here, without more ado, are what I take to be the Christian parallels to the conceptions which dominated Nietzsche’s mind during the period from the summer of 1881 to the year January 1883–January 1884, when they found full expression in Zarathustra ,
    Amor fati : Lutheran acceptance of the events of life as divinely willed, with the consequent affirmation of life as such as divine , as a product of the divine will, and the implication that to hate life is blasphemous.
    Eternal recurrence : as a consequence of amor fati the extremest formula of life-affirmation, strongly influenced by the Christian concepts of eternal life and the unalterable nature of God: what is, ‘is now and ever shall be, world without end.’
    Will to power : divine grace. The clue to the connexion is the concept of ‘self-overcoming’, which is one of Nietzsche’s terms for sublimation and the hinge upon which the theory of the will to power turns from being a nihilist to a positiveand joyful conception. The corresponding Christian conception is that of unregenerate nature redeemed by the force of God’s grace. In both conceptions the central idea is that a certain inner quality (grace/sublimated will to power) elevates man (or some men) above the rest of nature. The pathos with which ‘will to power’ is invested derives to some extent from ‘Thy will be done’ and the juxtaposition of ‘power’ and ‘glory’, together with the Christian doctrine that to God’s will all things are possible.
    Live dangerously! : ‘Take up thy Cross, and follow me’ -Christian deprecation of the easy life.
    Great noontide : the Second Coming, the Last Judgement, the division of the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff.
    Superman : God as creator and ‘highest being’, the ‘Son of Man’ as God, man as the