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Thus Spake ZarathustraIdeasLibrary
First Part · X. War and Warriors

Ugliness, sublimity and proud enemies

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They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love the bashfulness of your good-will. Ye are ashamed of your flow, and others are ashamed of their ebb.

Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!

And when your soul becometh great, then doth it become haughty, and in your sublimity there is wickedness. I know you.

In wickedness the haughty man and the weakling meet. But they misunderstand one another. I know you.

Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.

Zarathustra reads his hearers as bashful in good-will and wicked in their sublimity. They are to have only enemies worth hating and to be proud of them.

Commentary on this chapter

What the critics said

War, inequality and German militarismGeorg Brandes · Aristocratic Radicalism, 1889judgement

Brandes argues that Nietzsche, like Hartmann, denies the possibility of equality and peace because life is inequality and war, praising the good war that hallows every cause, and that both reflect the militarism of the new German Empire, Nietzsche differing only in wanting war so that manliness may not die out.

Contest, victory and the transvaluationH. L. Mencken · The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1908interpretation

Mencken argues that for Nietzsche instinct and experiment reveal one's power, that happiness lies in unrestrained yielding to the will to power through constant contest, citing Zarathustra's 'not to peace, but to victory' and casting dice with death, and that this means a crusade against ethics of self-sacrifice for inferiors and a transvaluation that frees the will to power from infamy.