doctrine Metaphysical 'other worlds' as the invention of suffering and weariness; heaven as a dream of the sick body.
When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth the forest, he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra spake…
Those who speak of superearthly hopes are called poisoners and despisers of life.
Read in the book →Once on a time, Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen. The work of a suffering and tortured God, did the world then seem to me. The dream—and diction—of a God, did the world then seem to me;…
Zarathustra admits he once imagined the world as the dream of a suffering God, a projection of his own suffering.
Read in the book →Suffering was it, and impotence—that created all backworlds; and the short madness of happiness, which only the greatest sufferer experienceth. Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a…
Backworlds and Gods come from suffering, impotence and a weariness that wants to reach the ultimate in one leap.
Read in the book →The sick and perishing—it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming blood-drops; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and the earth!…
The sick and perishing despised body and earth and invented heaven and redeeming blood-drops, yet owed even their rapture to the body.
Read in the book →Many sickly ones have there always been among those who muse, and languish for God; violently they hate the discerning ones, and the latest of virtues, which is uprightness. Backward they always gaze toward dark ages:…
The God-longing hate discerning ones and uprightness, and they heed the preachers of death.
Read in the book →Even in your folly and despising ye each serve your Self, ye despisers of the body. I tell you, your very Self wanteth to die, and turneth away from life. No longer can your Self do that which it desireth most:—create…
Contempt for body and earth is shown as the anger and envy of those who cannot create.
Read in the book →There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom desistance from life must be preached. Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life…
The 'life eternal' is offered as a lure to coax the superfluous out of this life.
Read in the book →Let this be the significance and the truth of thy marriage. But that which the many-too-many call marriage, those superfluous ones—ah, what shall I call it? Ah, the poverty of soul in the twain! Ah, the filth of soul in…
The claim that marriages are made in heaven is rejected as the heaven of the superfluous.
Read in the book →God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the bitterness of this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith be taken from the creating one, and from the eagle his flights into eagle-heights? God is a thought—it maketh…
The teaching of the one, the unmoved and the imperishable is condemned as evil, misanthropic and a vertigo to human limbs.
Read in the book →Oh, just look at those tabernacles which those priests have built themselves! Churches, they call their sweet-smelling caves! Oh, that falsified light, that mustified air! Where the soul—may not fly aloft to its height!…
The priests' God is made from what afflicted them, and their churches shut out the clear sky and the soul's flight.
Read in the book →Better songs would they have to sing, for me to believe in their Saviour: more like saved ones would his disciples have to appear unto me! Naked, would I like to see them: for beauty alone should preach penitence. But…
God is the stop-gap the Saviours put into every defect of their spirit.
Read in the book →And especially ABOVE the heavens: for all Gods are poet-symbolisations, poet-sophistications!
The gods above the heavens are called poets' inventions set on clouds.
Read in the book →Ah, I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God. Thus did the sea give a stone to the hungry one. And they themselves may well originate from…
His net brings up only the head of some ancient God.
Read in the book →Voluptuousness: unto all hair-shirted despisers of the body, a sting and stake; and, cursed as “the world,” by all backworldsmen: for it mocketh and befooleth all erring, misinferring teachers. Voluptuousness: to the…
Backworldsmen curse it as 'the world'.
Read in the book →“To the clean are all things clean”—thus say the people. I, however, say unto you: To the swine all things become swinish! Therefore preach the visionaries and bowed-heads (whose hearts are also bowed down): “The world…
The backworldsmen see the world from behind and call it filthy, and they counsel passivity and renunciation.
Read in the book →Then, however, did it come to pass that Zarathustra, astonished at such merely roguish answers, jumped back to the door of his cave, and turning towards all his guests, cried out with a strong voice: “O ye wags, all of…
He turns the saying about becoming as little children against the kingdom of heaven.
Read in the book →Brandes sets out Nietzsche's hypothesis that the bad conscience arose when warlike instincts, imprisoned by a state founded through conquest, turned inward; guilt then became debt to ancestors and gods, culminating in the Christian God, original sin and the God who pays the debt with his own blood, so that man's Nay to his nature becomes a Yea to God and the Beyond.
Self-negation is projected as affirmation of the Beyond and eternal punishment.
Brandes reports Nietzsche's account of the ascetic ideal as a sick life's device for self-preservation: the sick ascetic priest herds the despairing, redirects their resentment inward by reinterpreting suffering as sin, and drugs them with apathy, labour, small joys and congregation; as yet the ideal has no real assailant, though a new ideal is forming that sees suffering as a condition of happiness.
The ascetic ideal expresses disgust with life and longing to be elsewhere.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche made the improvement of the body the first step of progress, that the superman's freed will to live will be refined by natural selection into an accurate instinct, summed up in Zarathustra's 'Be hard!', and that unlike Schopenhauer, Comte and the humanitarians Nietzsche held man to be of the earth, rising only after casting off transcendental morality.
Holds that heavens and hells are man's own vaporings that must be thrown off.
Mencken explains Nietzsche's view that Christian humility, the Golden Rule and sympathy make a man throw away his strength and his 'feeling of increasing power'; sympathy is a depressant that preserves what is ripe for extinction and, disguised as 'the other world', is hostile to life.
The 'other world' and 'better life' are named as rhetoric concealing nothingness and hostility to life.
This is an experiment in interactive reading, and in using AI to help you grow. Thus Spake Zarathustra is notoriously difficult for a modern reader; yet taken as a set of mental exercises, it is guaranteed to transform your thinking by the time you reach the end. Along the way you will have help from the companion, who is always beside the book.
Do you accept the challenge?
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that science presupposes an unconditional will to truth that cannot be justified by utility and so means 'I will not deceive, not even myself', a moral stance that affirms another world than life; hence even godless knowers still take their fire from the Christian-Platonic belief that God is truth, and he asks what follows if God proves our most persistent lie.
The unconditional truth-seeker affirms a world other than life, nature and history, and so denies this one.
Nietzsche says that he has said nothing not already said through Zarathustra; unmasking morality breaks history in two, revealing that 'God', the 'beyond' and 'true world', 'soul', 'sin' and 'free will' were invented to depreciate the only world, despise the body and make the yea-sayer 'evil': Dionysus versus Christ.
'Beyond' and 'true world' were invented to rob earthly reality of all aim and task.