doctrine Honesty as the last and strictest virtue: the will to truth, bred by Christianity itself, that can no longer believe in God; the conscientious in spirit, the pope who calls Zarathustra's unbelief a piety.
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:…
Names uprightness as 'the latest of virtues', hated by the pious, and sets the honest voice of the healthy body against faith that forbids doubt.
Read in the book →God is a conjecture: but I do not wish your conjecturing to reach beyond your creating will. Could ye CREATE a God?—Then, I pray you, be silent about all Gods! But ye could well create the Superman. Not perhaps ye…
Turns the will to truth against God: follow your discernment to the end and allow only what is humanly conceivable, which rules out God.
Read in the book →Verily, ye fill your mouth with noble words: and we are to believe that your heart overfloweth, ye cozeners? But MY words are poor, contemptible, stammering words: gladly do I pick up what falleth from the table at your…
Exposes the 'pure discerners' as dissemblers behind a God's mask: whoever does not believe in himself always lies.
Read in the book →—Here, however, Zarathustra could no longer restrain himself; he took his staff and struck the wailer with all his might. “Stop this,” cried he to him with wrathful laughter, “stop this, thou stage-player! Thou false…
Zarathustra unmasks the stage-player who staged the 'penitent in spirit', the one who freezes to death through his own science and conscience.
Read in the book →“Thou mayest have deceived subtler ones than I,” said Zarathustra sternly. “I am not on my guard against deceivers; I HAVE TO BE without precaution: so willeth my lot. Thou, however,—MUST deceive: so far do I know thee!…
Zarathustra honours the magician's single genuine moment, his honest admission 'I am not great', as the one truth in a life of deception.
Read in the book →“Thou old pope,” said here Zarathustra interposing, “hast thou seen THAT with thine eyes? It could well have happened in that way: in that way, AND also otherwise. When Gods die they always die many kinds of death.…
Zarathustra's case against God rests on honesty: he loves what 'speaketh honestly', and good taste in piety itself rejects such a God.
Read in the book →—“What do I hear!” said then the old pope, with intent ears; “O Zarathustra, thou art more pious than thou believest, with such an unbelief! Some God in thee hath converted thee to thine ungodliness. Is it not thy piety…
The pope calls Zarathustra's unbelief a piety and says his 'over-great honesty' will lead him beyond good and evil.
Read in the book →“Forgive me,” answered the shadow, “that it is I; and if I please thee not—well, O Zarathustra! therein do I admire thee and thy good taste. A wanderer am I, who have walked long at thy heels; always on the way, but…
The shadow follows the will to truth to its end: all reverence broken, 'Nothing is true, all is permitted', kicked in the face by truth.
Read in the book →Do not will anything beyond your power: there is a bad falseness in those who will beyond their power. Especially when they will great things! For they awaken distrust in great things, these subtle false-coiners and…
Calls honesty the most precious and rarest thing, warns against falseness and against scholars whose inability to lie is not yet love of truth.
Read in the book →Thus sang the magician; and all who were present went like birds unawares into the net of his artful and melancholy voluptuousness. Only the spiritually conscientious one had not been caught: he at once snatched the…
The spiritually conscientious one alone resists the magician's spell and protests at a deceiver's talk of truth.
Read in the book →—“And thou,” said Zarathustra, “thou bad old magician, what didst thou do! Who ought to believe any longer in thee in this free age, when THOU believest in such divine donkeyism? It was a stupid thing that thou didst;…
Zarathustra appeals to the conscientious one's intellectual conscience against the praying, and he answers with an equivocal 'perhaps I dare not believe in God'.
Read in the book →Förster-Nietzsche quotes Nietzsche explaining that he chose Zarathustra because the Persian prophet created the error of morality, making good and evil the wheel of things, and so must be the first to perceive it; being the most truthful thinker, his name stands for the self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness.
Truthfulness as the highest virtue is what turns morality against itself.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche called himself an immoralist because progress depends on truth, and pictures the ideal immoralist, the 'blond beast', as guided by instinct and intelligence rather than god and commandments, free of sin and hell, and thus a powerful force for truth against superstition.
Makes the pursuit of truth against moral and religious delusion the immoralist's noblest task.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche distinguished present from eternal truth and believed the will to power in higher men is an instinct for truth that grows more accurate over time, so that errors diminish until, with truth supreme, the superman would walk the earth.
The drive to truth is placed in the instincts of the higher type rather than in moral codes.
Mencken explains Nietzsche's later teaching that each man should pit his own feelings against majority law and that chronic skepticism is the proper attitude, quoting 'Zarathustra is a skeptic.... Convictions are prisons', and that the need for belief is a sign of weakness.
Intellectual conscience appears as freedom from permanent conviction, belonging to strength.
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.
The specialist's severe, restricted honesty is the mark of the conscientious in spirit.
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.
The specialist's honesty elevates him above the other higher men.
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 will to truth at any price is itself a moral and ultimately Christian conviction, possibly a concealed will to death.
Nietzsche says that the will to truth might be a concealed will to death, a principle hostile to life.
Raises the suspicion that unconditional honesty may be hostile to life.
Nietzsche says that the decay of belief in the Christian God is a European event, that what defeated God was Christian morality itself, its veracity sublimated into the scientific conscience, and that rejecting the Christian interpretation confronts us with Schopenhauer's question whether existence has any significance at all, to which Schopenhauer gave only a premature, Christian-ascetic answer.
Two thousand years' discipline in truth ends by refusing the lie of belief in God.
Nietzsche says that the Christian God was overcome by Christian morality itself, its ever stricter conception of veracity sublimated into the scientific conscience.
Crisp formula for the self-overcoming of Christianity through its own will to truth.
Nietzsche says that his name will recall an unprecedented crisis of conscience and a sentence passed on all that was hallowed; he is no founder of religion and wants no believers, would rather be a clown than a saint, and names the transvaluation of all values as mankind's greatest step toward coming to its senses, a contradiction that is nonetheless the reverse of a negative spirit.
He is the first to smell falsehood as falsehood, hitherto lies have been called truth.
Nietzsche says that he chose the Persian Zarathustra because he was the first to see the struggle of good and evil as the wheel of things and so created the error of morality; being the most truthful of thinkers, who upheld truthfulness as the highest virtue, he must also be the first to expose it, so that the name means morality's self-overcoming through truthfulness.
Truthfulness as the highest virtue turns against morality itself.
Nietzsche says that the name Zarathustra means the self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the moralist overcoming himself in his opposite.
Truthfulness is the engine of morality's self-overcoming.