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First Part · XV. The Thousand and One Goals

Peoples first, the individual latest

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Creating ones were first of all peoples, and only in late times individuals; verily, the individual himself is still the latest creation.

Peoples once hung over them tables of the good. Love which would rule and love which would obey, created for themselves such tables.

Older is the pleasure in the herd than the pleasure in the ego: and as long as the good conscience is for the herd, the bad conscience only saith: ego.

Verily, the crafty ego, the loveless one, that seeketh its advantage in the advantage of many—it is not the origin of the herd, but its ruin.

Loving ones, was it always, and creating ones, that created good and bad. Fire of love gloweth in the names of all the virtues, and fire of wrath.

Peoples were the first creators, and the individual is the latest creation. Tables of good arose from love that rules and love that obeys, and the loveless ego that seeks only its own advantage ruins the herd.

Commentary on this chapter

What the critics said

All morality is expediencyH. L. Mencken · The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1908interpretation

Mencken argues, citing Zarathustra's account of the tables of many peoples, that every moral code is a changing expression of a people's expediency and will to power, that a people's god merely reflects its current ideas, and that the Ten Commandments are no more immutable than acts of Parliament.

All morality is expediencyH. L. Mencken · The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1908interpretation

Mencken argues, citing Zarathustra's account of the tables of many peoples, that every moral code is a changing expression of a people's expediency and will to power, that a people's god merely reflects its current ideas, and that the Ten Commandments are no more immutable than acts of Parliament.

Morality as means to power; modern goallessnessAnthony M. Ludovici · Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1909interpretation

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.