Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra

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.

Ludovici explains that Nietzsche is a moral relativist for whom good and evil are expedients by which each species or type gains power, that Christian values protect a low type of man, and that history is a war between the master-morality of the strong and the slave-morality of the weak.

Ludovici states that for Nietzsche good and evil are, in their origin, merely expedients for acquiring power.

Ludovici explains that for Nietzsche master-morality is active and creative, calling good whatever springs from strength and bad whatever springs from weakness, while slave-morality is passive and defensive, prizing pity, patience and humility and fearing the strong; Nietzsche advocated the former because it leads to the ascent of life and the latter to degeneration.

Ludovici says that Nietzsche accepted the theory of evolution but denied that man is its final product: since man's spiritual development has no evident limit, his ideal should be to surpass himself and reach the Superman, as the Prologue teaches.

Ludovici says that as a sociologist Nietzsche aimed at an aristocratic order of society and the rearing of an ideal race, holding that men are not equal and that every elevation of the type man has been the work of an aristocratic society with a long scale of ranks.

Ludovici explains that Zarathustra's nicknames stand for whole classes: the 'herdsmen' of the Prologue are today's advocates of gregariousness, who call Zarathustra a robber because he would rear a higher aristocracy, and 'the good and just' are the self-righteous moderns sure that their inherited values must rule forever.

Ludovici reads the three metamorphoses as the development of every creator of new values, ending in a second childhood, and argues that it disowns anarchy: only by first bearing the existing law like the camel does the free spirit gain the strength to master the dragon 'Thou shalt' and promulgate new law.

Ludovici says that in 'The Despisers of the Body' Zarathustra calls the intellect the little sagacity and the instincts the big sagacity, endorsing Schopenhauer's view of the intellect as the body's instrument and warning against exalting reason over the instincts.

Ludovici says that 'The Thousand and One Goals' opens Zarathustra's doctrine of moral relativity, declaring all morality a means to power, with verses on the Greeks, Persians, Jews and Germans, and that its close diagnoses the root of modern nihilism: man has no goal.

Ludovici argues that hostility to Nietzsche's views on women is a misunderstanding: his doctrine is that the sexes are fundamentally antagonistic and should be kept so, against the democratic levelling that would masculinise women and feminise men, a view Ludovici judges right and just; he adds that the discourse's notorious last line was suggested by a woman.

Ludovici says that Nietzsche disliked the word 'suicide' for its suggestion of evil and renamed the act Voluntary Death to raise it to the dignity it held in classical antiquity.

Ludovici says that the Nietzschean ideal is the man of overflowing strength who must discharge it or perish, so that giving from overflow is the only charity Nietzsche recognises, and that the discourse urges disciples to become independent thinkers and find themselves before learning more from Zarathustra.

Ludovici reads 'The Child with the Mirror' as Nietzsche's grief at the misinterpretation of his writings, and says it hints that a creator of new values is most obstructed by language itself, whose words are stamped with the race's long-ruling values, hence the obscurity of original thinkers.

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.

Ludovici identifies the tarantulas with Socialists and Democrats whose criticism of society from below is suppressed envy, and says Nietzsche refuses to be confused with them, including the 'Nietzschean Socialists' who preach his doctrine together with equality.

Ludovici calls 'Self-Surpassing' the best exposition of the will to power in the book, and argues that Nietzsche was no iconoclast by choice: the saying that the creator in good and evil must first be a destroyer shows his esteem for law and self-discipline.

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.

Ludovici says 'The Land of Culture' epitomises Nietzsche's attack on the scholars of his day as sterile because they believe in nothing, and that its last verses explain his altruism: he rejects Christian pity and neighbour-love both as degenerative slave-values and because he can love only his children's land, redeeming his fathers' errors in his children.

Ludovici argues that Zarathustra's interview with the fire-dog, easily dismissed as fantasy, is important because it confronts the spirit of revolution that Nietzsche most loathed, and shows that for him the world turns inaudibly around inventors of new values, not of new noise.

Ludovici identifies the soothsayer with Schopenhauer, whom Nietzsche once followed, and says Nietzsche overcame pessimism by finding an object in existence, the raising of society to a higher level.

Ludovici explains that the great men in 'Redemption' are inverse cripples with one faculty overdeveloped, and that Nietzsche's redemption is the ability to say of all that is past 'Thus would I have it'; the inability to say it is the source of revenge and of punishment, its euphemism, while the man grateful even for his enemies and calamities knows neither revenge nor despair.

Ludovici says 'Manly Prudence' explains the injunction that the superior man must wear a mask: the truly profound individual feels his difference so keenly that he conforms outwardly and avoids display, unlike those who show individuality through eccentricity.

Ludovici reads 'The Stillest Hour' as an account of Nietzsche's inner struggle before resolving to reveal the more esoteric parts of his teaching, since the deepest feelings crave silence and are held sacred.

Ludovici argues that the spirit of gravity, the dwarf Zarathustra carries and defies, stands for the sense of guilt and sin that Christian and Judaic values have bred into men's instincts, and that Nietzsche can affirm the recurrence of life only once he has cast this dwarf off, announcing the doctrine in defiance of him.

Ludovici defines Nietzsche's 'spirit of gravity' as the oppressive, paralysing sense of guilt and sin.

Ludovici grants that much can be said for the hypothesis of eternal recurrence but judges it a very daring conjecture, and doubts whether Nietzsche ever properly estimated its effect as a dogma on men's minds.

Ludovici reads the shepherd as the man of today, the choking snake as the paralysing social values that threaten humanity, and 'Bite!' as Nietzsche's cry to mankind to change its values before it is too late.

Ludovici explains that by 'the great noontide' Nietzsche meant the present period as the noon of man's history: the childhood of mankind is over, we now know, and there is no longer any excuse for mistakes that botch the type man.

Ludovici argues that the fool of 'On Passing-by' is Nietzsche's extreme opposite and his imitator, the iconoclast who destroys out of resentment and revenge, with whom the public confuses Nietzsche, who destroys out of love; Zarathustra's rebuke of him should warn readers against associating Nietzsche with noisy revolutionists.

Ludovici reads 'The Return Home' as autobiography: Nietzsche confesses that pity was his greatest danger, pitting the lawgiver's far-sighted love of posterity against a meaner sympathy for the neighbour from which he suffered, and returning to solitude to recover from his attempt to be all things to all men.

Ludovici argues that in weighing voluptuousness, lust of power and selfishness Nietzsche sought to give healthy men back innocence and a clean conscience in their desires, not to license the vulgar or the weak, and that his teaching is esoteric, meant to save higher men from compromising their genius with traditional values.

Ludovici explains the doctrine of self-love in 'The Spirit of Gravity' as a response to modern man's terror of being alone with himself, which betrays self-contempt, so that learning to love oneself requires a slow inner transformation; and he notes that Nietzsche does not coerce but says 'This is my way, where is yours?'

Ludovici argues that in 'Old and New Tables' freedom receives its death-blow as a general desideratum: Nietzsche held freedom dangerous in unworthy hands, asking 'free for what?' and requiring that one first be such as can will.

Ludovici restates Nietzsche's teaching that nothing is stable, not even good and evil: values stand like foot-bridges over the stream of life, seemingly firm in winter, until the thaw-wind sweeps them away, a state Nietzsche thinks has now been reached.

Ludovici presents paragraph 10 of 'Old and New Tables' as a protest against reading a moral order into life, citing Nietzsche that life is essentially immoral and is will to power, appropriation and conquest, while Spencer's adaptation is only a secondary re-activity.

Ludovici holds that paragraphs 11–12 of 'Old and New Tables' express Nietzsche's principle of rearing a select race, and endorses it by appeal to Gobineau on the evils of promiscuous marriages and Darwin on the degeneration of cultivated types through promiscuous breeding.

Ludovici argues that Zarathustra's cry of 'Disgust!' at his abysmal thought shows how far Nietzsche fell short of his own ideal of the man who cries da capo to all existence: his life of illness, disappointment and snubs made it impossible for him to think of eternal recurrence without loathing.

Ludovici sets out Nietzsche's relation to Darwin and Spencer: Nietzsche accepts evolution but makes the organism's formative will primary over environment, treats adaptation as mere reactivity, and replaces the passive struggle for existence with an active struggle for power, of which self-preservation is only an indirect result.

Ludovici argues that depriving a higher man of his so-called wickedness may do violence to the greatest in him, and that the noblest wickedness, that of courage and determination, is vanishing under slave-moralities, which is why Nietzsche cried that man's baddest is so small and that to be brave is good.

Ludovici describes 'The Seven Seals' as Zarathustra's final paean to Eternity and to the marriage-ring of rings, the ring of the Eternal Recurrence.

Ludovici argues that Part IV avows that all of Nietzsche's philosophy was laid at the feet of higher men: he did not seek to save the world but to determine who should be its master, freeing higher men to reach their zenith, and his strongest temptation to pity is their cry for help in a dangerous modern environment.

Ludovici defends the maxim 'Become what thou art' by insisting that Nietzsche's teaching is esoteric, a law only for his own: applied to all it would be vicious, but humanity needs its highest individuals to attain full development, since only through its heroes is the race led upward.

Ludovici defends the prophetic seriousness of Zarathustra's thousand-year kingdom against English readers inclined to laugh, arguing that without such earnest belief in their Hazar higher men would have become pessimists, suicides or merchants.

Ludovici identifies the soothsayer of 'The Cry of Distress' with Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic ethics place pity highest, and reads the scene as Schopenhauer tempting Nietzsche to his last sin through his deepest sentiment, sympathy for higher men.

Ludovici reads the conscientious in spirit as the honest scientific specialist, like Darwin, who masters a hand's breadth of knowledge and is rigorous and blind beyond it, a higher man whom Zarathustra respects.

Ludovici argues that the magician is Wagner, recounting Nietzsche's youthful idealisation of him and the bitter break, and reads the dialogue as exposing what Nietzsche came to loathe in Wagner: his histrionics, vanity, equivocation and falseness, though Zarathustra still treats him as a higher man broken by modern values.

Ludovici explains the last pope's story as Nietzsche's history of Judaism and Christianity: the jealous, revengeful God of a strong warlike race degenerates with his people into a soft, pitiful God of love who sacrifices his Son for us, and this process ends in his being suffocated by his own pity.

Ludovici argues that in meeting the ugliest man Zarathustra shows the only right response to great misery, shame and reverence, against obtrusive pity, which is self-glorification; Nietzsche blushes for his race and wills a world where one need not blush for one's fellows.

Ludovici reads the ugliest man as the murderer of God by an atheism of the great ugly man who reveres beauty: an omniscient God's pity, lacking shame and reverence, could not be evaded and so must not exist; Zarathustra honours his self-contempt as the mark of a great despiser.

Ludovici identifies the voluntary beggar with the ideal Buddhist, a decadent religion whose values come from the higher rather than the lower classes, and sees in him Nietzsche's purified portrait of Christ, stripped of the spiteful traits added by apologists.

Ludovici reads the shadow as the bold, wayward free spirit who follows every daring movement of his age until he loses all goal and home, cries 'Nothing is true; all is permitted', and becomes wreckage, prone to being captured by a narrow faith.

Ludovici explains that with Nietzsche man came of age at the noon of life: the gods and superstitions of our childhood withdraw, we are responsible for our actions, and having lived our morning under chance we must make our afternoon our own.

Ludovici holds that Zarathustra's greeting confirms his thesis that the philosophy aims to give higher men the great hope, but harshly: Nietzsche would be a hard bed to higher men, making them harder, not easing their way.

Ludovici calls Nietzsche's principle that the higher the type the seldomer it succeeds very important: the most deplorable waste is among higher individuals, because highly organised beings rarely reach full development, so the blind will to power in nature needs direction by man.

Ludovici explains that the closing paragraphs of 'The Higher Man' protest against democratic seriousness: all that is good is cheerful, being able to joke about one's deepest feelings tests their value, and the greatest sin was the word 'Woe unto them that laugh now!'

Ludovici argues that by making the conscientious specialist the only one to resist the magician's melancholy music, Nietzsche pays high tribute to the honesty of the scientist, and uses the debate on fear to restate that courage is the entire primitive history of man.

Ludovici reads the higher men's worship of the ass as a warning that thinkers who regain confidence in believing as such fall victim to the narrowest superstitions, alluding to pagan charges that Christians were ass-worshippers and to medieval asinaria festa.

Ludovici explains that Zarathustra, after rebuking the higher men, sees the ass-festival as foolish but necessary, a recreation for wise men devised by convalescents, and bids them celebrate it again out of love for themselves and him.

Ludovici declines to fix an interpretation of the drunken song but notes that recurrence appears here for the last time: all delight longs for repetition, and the man who sees a joyful meaning in existence must cry 'Again!' to all his life, as a child does.

Ludovici reads 'The Sign' as Nietzsche's final dissociation from the higher men: the lion and doves show that he unites great power and tenderness and has mastered the terrible in nature, for which the higher men are unready, and he turns from fellow-suffering to his work and the great noonday.