Second Part · XXIV. In the Happy Isles

Against the imperishable; praise of becoming

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 all the straight crooked, and all that standeth reel. What? Time would be gone, and all the perishable would be but a lie?

To think this is giddiness and vertigo to human limbs, and even vomiting to the stomach: verily, the reeling sickness do I call it, to conjecture such a thing.

Evil do I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one, and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the imperishable!

All the imperishable—that’s but a simile, and the poets lie too much.—

But of time and of becoming shall the best similes speak: a praise shall they be, and a justification of all perishableness!

Zarathustra asks who could drink the bitterness of the God-conjecture without dying. He calls the thought of God a reeling sickness that makes time a lie, and wants similes that justify perishing.

Backworlds and afterworldsmenThe teaching of the one, the unmoved and the imperishable is condemned as evil, misanthropic and a vertigo to human limbs.
Scholars, poets and the knowersHe says the poets lie too much when they speak of the imperishable.
Affirmation (Yea-saying, amor fati)The best similes should praise time and becoming and justify all perishableness.

Commentary on this chapter

Nietzsche elsewhere

The hammer and the image in the stoneFriedrich Nietzsche · Ecce Homo, 1888Nietzsche

Nietzsche says that for Zarathustra man is neither an object of love nor of pity but raw material, an ugly stone for the sculptor's chisel, quoting the passage where the creative will drives the hammer against the stone to free the Superman's image; a Dionysian task needs the hardness of the hammer and the joy even of destruction, 'all creators are hard'.

What the critics said

Anthony M. Ludovici, Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra (1909)

Zarathustra is not the place to beginAnthony M. Ludovici · Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1909interpretation

Ludovici argues that Zarathustra, though Nietzsche's opus magnum, should not be read first: many chapters are nearly meaningless without knowledge of Nietzsche's life and friendships, and its philosophical views are best clarified by his other works, which he himself regarded as preparation for it.

Creating as salvation from godless pessimismAnthony M. Ludovici · Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1909interpretation

Ludovici says that in 'In the Happy Isles' Nietzsche overcomes the pessimism that godlessness brings by pointing to creating as salvation from suffering, the Superman supplying the cheerfulness to face a world without God.