6 passages
Calm is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it hideth droll monsters! Unmoved is my depth: but it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters. A sublime one saw I to-day, a solemn one, a penitent of the spirit:…
Zarathustra describes a solemn, tense hunter of knowledge who returns from the forest hung with thorns and ugly truths. A wild beast still looks out of his seriousness, and Zarathustra dislikes such strained souls.
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But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Against friends who say taste admits no dispute, Zarathustra says that taste is itself weight, scales and weigher, and that living means disputing over it.
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Should he become weary of his sublimeness, this sublime one, then only will his beauty begin—and then only will I taste him and find him savoury. And only when he turneth away from himself will he o’erleap his own…
Only when he tires of sublimity and turns from himself will the sublime one become beautiful. He has sat too long in shade with contempt in his eye, and should be a white ox that lows in praise of all things earthly.
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To be sure, I love in him the shoulders of the ox: but now do I want to see also the eye of the angel. Also his hero-will hath he still to unlearn: an exalted one shall he be, and not only a sublime one:—the ether…
Zarathustra loves the ox's shoulders but wants the eye of an angel. The hero must unlearn his hero-will, redeem his monsters, and let longing end in beauty rather than satiety.
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When power becometh gracious and descendeth into the visible—I call such condescension, beauty.
Beauty is hardest for the hero, and Zarathustra defines it as power descending into the visible. He asks the powerful one to make goodness his last self-conquest.
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Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws! The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful—but…
Zarathustra laughs at weaklings who call themselves good because their paws are crippled. He sets the pillar as the model, more graceful and harder within as it rises, and promises the sublime one that he will one day be beautiful and mirror his own beauty.
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What the critics said
Ludovici says the sublime ones are a type Nietzsche did not wholly dislike but who take life too seriously and never surmount the camel stage; real greatness is to speak of lofty things without being oppressed by them, and Nietzsche breaks old things not with the anarchist's irreverence but with the fingers of an artist at ease with beauty, guided by his own taste.