The great disgust at man—IT strangled me and had crept into my throat: and what the soothsayer had presaged: “All is alike, nothing is worth while, knowledge strangleth.”
A long twilight limped on before me, a fatally weary, fatally intoxicated sadness, which spake with yawning mouth.
“Eternally he returneth, the man of whom thou art weary, the small man”—so yawned my sadness, and dragged its foot and could not go to sleep.
A cavern, became the human earth to me; its breast caved in; everything living became to me human dust and bones and mouldering past.
My sighing sat on all human graves, and could no longer arise: my sighing and questioning croaked and choked, and gnawed and nagged day and night:
—“Ah, man returneth eternally! The small man returneth eternally!”
Naked had I once seen both of them, the greatest man and the smallest man: all too like one another—all too human, even the greatest man!
All too small, even the greatest man!—that was my disgust at man! And the eternal return also of the smallest man!—that was my disgust at all existence!
Ah, Disgust! Disgust! Disgust!—Thus spake Zarathustra, and sighed and shuddered; for he remembered his sickness. Then did his animals prevent him from speaking further.
What the critics said
Brandes calls Zarathustra's eternal recurrence a somewhat shallow mysticism derived from the Pythagorean cycle and Ecclesiastes, the direct antithesis of Hartmann's world process ending in destruction, and notes that Blanqui and Le Bon advanced the same idea about the same time.
Mencken says that in Zarathustra Nietzsche treats recurrence as a philosophical speculation that well-nigh drives the prophet mad, quoting the passage in which Zarathustra will return with this sun, earth, eagle and serpent to the same life, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things.
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.