Part 20

“Man is something that must be surpassed”:—it is a matter of tempo: the Greeks were wonderful, there was no haste about them.—My predecessors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe.

1. Dissatisfaction with ourselves. An antidote to repentance. The transformation of temperament (e.g., by means of inorganic substances). Good will to this dissatisfaction. We should wait for our thirst and let it become great in order to discover its source.

2. Death must be transformed into a means of victory and triumph.

3. The attitude towards disease. Freedom where death is concerned.

4. The love of the sexes is a means to an ideal (it is the striving of a being to perish through his opposite). The love for a suffering deity.

5. Procreation is the holiest of all things. Pregnancy, the creation of a woman and a man, who wish to enjoy their unity, and erect a monument to it by means of a child.

6. Pity as a danger. Circumstances must be created which enable everyone to be able to help himself, and which leave him to choose whether he would be helped.

7. Education must be directed at making men evil, at developing their inner devil.

8. Inner war as “development”

9. “The maintenance of the species,” and the thought of eternal recurrence.

Principal doctrine. We must strive to make every stage one of perfection, and rejoice therein,—we must make no leaps!

In the first place, the promulgation of laws. After the Superman the doctrine of eternal recurrence will strike us with horror: Now it is endurable.

Life itself created this thought which is the most oppressive for life. Life wishes to get beyond its greatest obstacle I

We must desire to perish in order to arise afresh,—from one day to the other. Wander through a hundred souls,—let that be thy life and thy fate! And then finally: desire to go through the whole process once more!

The highest thing of all would be for us to be able to endure our immortality.

The moment in which I begot recurrence is immortal, for the sake of that moment alone I will endure recurrence.

The teaching of eternal recurrence—it is at first oppressive to the more noble souls and apparently a means of weeding them out,—then the inferior and less sensitive natures would remain over! “This doctrine must be suppressed and Zarathustra killed.”

The hesitation of the disciples. “We are already able to bear with this doctrine, but we should destroy the many by means of it!”

Zarathustra laughs: “Ye shall be the hammer: I laid this hammer in your hands.”

I do not speak to you as I speak to the people. The highest thing for them would be to despise and to annihilate themselves: the next highest thing would be for them to despise and annihilate each other.

“My will to do good compels me to remain silent. But my will to the Superman bids me speak and sacrifice even my friends.”

“I would fain form and transform you, how could I endure things otherwise!”

The history of higher man. The rearing of the better man is incalculably more painful. The ideal of the necessary sacrifice which it involves, as in the case of Zarathustra, should be demonstrated: A man should leave his home, his family and his native land. Live under the scorn of the prevailing morality. The anguish of experiments and errors. The solution of all the joys offered by the older ideals (they are now felt to be partly hostile and partly strange).

What is it which gives a meaning, a value, an importance to things? It is the creative heart which yearns and which created out of this yearning. It created joy and woe. It wanted to sate itself also with woe. Every kind of pain that man or beast has suffered, we must take upon ourselves and bless, and have a goal whereby such suffering would acquire some meaning.

Principal doctrine: the transfiguration of pain into a blessing, and of poison into food, lies in our power. The will to suffering.

Concerning heroic greatness as the only state of pioneers. (A yearning for utter ruin as a means of enduring one’s existence.)

We must not desire one state only; we must rather desire to be periodical creatures—like existence.

Absolute indifference to other people’s opinions (because we know their weights and measures), but their opinions of themselves should be the subject of pity.