The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Nietzsche's Course of Development

[ 1 ] I have presented Nietzsche's views on the superman as they confront us in his last writings: "Zarathustra" (1883-1884), "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886), "Genealogy of Morals" (1887), "The Wagner Case" (1888), "Twilight of the Idols" (1889). In the unfinished work "Der Wille zur Macht, Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte", the first part of which, "Antichrist", appeared in the eighth volume of the complete edition, they would have found their most philosophically concise expression. This can be clearly seen from the disposition printed in the appendix to the aforementioned volume. It is entitled: 1. The Antichrist. An attempt at a critique of Christianity. 2. The free spirit. Critique of philosophy as a nihilistic movement. 3. The Immoralist. Critique of the most disastrous kind of ignorance, morality. 4. Dionysus. Philosophy of the eternal return.

[ 2 ] Nietzsche did not immediately express his thoughts in their most original form at the beginning of his literary career. He was initially influenced by German idealism, especially in the form in which Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner represented it. In his first writings, he expressed himself in Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian formulas. But anyone who is able to see through this formulaic nature to the core of Nietzsche's thoughts will find the same intentions and goals in these writings that are expressed in his later works.

[ 3 ] It is impossible to speak of Nietzsche's development without being reminded of the freest thinker that modern mankind has produced, Max Stirner. It is a sad truth that this thinker, who corresponds in the fullest sense to what Nietzsche demands of the superman, has only been recognized and appreciated by a few. He had already expressed Nietzsche's world view in the forties of this century. However, not in such saturated heartfelt tones as Nietzsche, but in crystal-clear thoughts, next to which Nietzsche's aphorisms often seem like mere stammering.

[ 4 ] What path Nietzsche would have taken if not Schopenhauer but Max Stirner had become his educator! There is no sign of Stirner's influence in Nietzsche's writings. Nietzsche had to work his way out of German idealism to a world view similar to Stirner's on his own.

[ 5 ] Like Nietzsche, Stirner is of the opinion that the driving forces of human life can only be sought in the individual, real personality. He rejects all powers that seek to shape and determine the individual personality from the outside. He follows the course of world history and finds the fundamental error of humanity to date in the fact that it has not set itself the cultivation and culture of the individual personality, but other, impersonal goals and purposes. He sees the true liberation of man in the fact that he does not concede a higher reality to all such goals, but uses these goals as a means for his self-care. The free man determines his own ends; he possesses his ideals; he does not allow himself to be possessed by them. The man who does not rule over his ideals as a free personality is under their influence, like the insane man who suffers from fixed ideas. For Stirner it makes no difference whether a man imagines himself to be the "King of China" or whether "a comfortable citizen imagines that he is destined to be a good Christian, a devout Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man, etc. - they are both one and the same 'fixed idea'. Anyone who has never tried and dared not to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a virtuous person, etc., is trapped in faithfulness, virtuousness, etc. caught and biased."

[ 6 ] You only need to read a few sentences from Stirner's book "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" to see how related his view is to Nietzsche's. I will quote a few passages from this book that are particularly indicative of Stirner's way of thinking.

[ 7 ] "Pre-Christian and Christian times pursue an opposite goal; the former wants to idealize the real, the latter to realize the ideal, the latter seeks the 'holy spirit', the latter the 'transfigured body'. Therefore, the former ends with insensitivity to the real, with 'contempt for the world'; the latter will end with the rejection of the ideal, with 'contempt for the spirit'...

[ 8 ] As the procession of sanctification or purification goes through the old world (the ablutions and so on), so that of corporealization goes through the Christian one: the God throws himself into this world, becomes flesh and wants to redeem it, that is, to fill it with himself; but since he is 'the idea' or 'the spirit', one (for example Hegel) introduces the idea into everything, into the world, at the end and proves 'that the idea, that reason is in everything'. What the pagan Stoics set up as 'the wise man' corresponds in today's education to 'man', who like this is a - fleshless being. The unreal 'sage', this bodiless 'saint', the Stoic, became a real person, a bodily 'saint', in the incarnate God; the unreal 'man', the bodiless I, will become real in the incarnate I, in Me.

[ 9 ] The fact that the individual is a world history for himself and has ownership of the rest of world history goes beyond the Christian. For the Christian, world history is superior because it is the history of Christ or 'man'; for the egoist, only his history has value because he only wants to develop himself, not the idea of mankind, not the plan of God, not the intentions of Providence, not freedom and the like. He does not see himself as an instrument of the idea or a vessel of God, he does not recognize a vocation, he does not think he is there for the further development of humanity and must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, unconcerned about how well or badly humanity is doing. Were it not for the misunderstanding that a state of nature is being praised, one could be reminded of Lenau's 'Three Gypsies'. - What, am I in the world to realize ideas? For example, to do my part in realizing the idea of the 'state' through my citizenship, or to bring the idea of the family into existence through marriage, as a husband and father? What does such a profession matter to me! I live as little after a profession as the flower grows and smells after a profession

[ 10 ] The ideal 'man' is realized when the Christian view turns into the sentence: 'I, this one and only, am man'. The conceptual question: "What is man?" - has then been transformed into the personal question: "Who is man?" With "what", one sought the concept in order to realize it; with "who", it is no longer a question at all, but the answer is personally present in the questioner: the question answers itself.

[ 11 ] It is said of God: 'Names do not call you'. This is true of Me: no concept expresses Me, nothing that is given as My essence exhausts Me; they are only names. Likewise, it is said of God that He is perfect and has no vocation to strive for perfection. This also applies to Me alone.

[ 12 ] I am the Owner of My power, and I am so when I know Myself as the Only One. In the Only One even the owner returns to his creative nothingness from which he is born. Every higher being above me, be it God or man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness and only pales before the sun of this consciousness: If I place my cause on myself, the only one, then it stands on the perishable, the mortal creator of his, who consumes himself, and I may say:

[ 13 ] ‘I have set my cause on nothing.’”

[ 14 ] This self-absorbed owner, who only creates out of himself, is Nietzsche's superhuman.

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[ 15 ] These Stirnerian thoughts would have been the appropriate vessel into which Nietzsche could have poured his rich emotional life. Instead, he sought in Schopenhauer's conceptual world the ladder on which he climbed up to his world of thought.

[ 16 ] In Schopenhauer's opinion, our entire knowledge of the world comes from two roots. From the life of imagination and from the perception of the will, which appears in us as an agent. The "thing in itself" lies beyond the world of our imagination. For the imagination is only the effect that the "thing in itself" exerts on my organ of cognition. I only know the impressions that things make on me, not the things themselves. And these impressions are my perceptions. I do not know a sun or an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun and a hand that feels an earth. Man only knows: "that the world which surrounds him is there only as an imagination, that is, only in relation to another, the imagining, which he himself is". (Schopenhauer, "World as Will and Representation", § I.) But man does not merely represent the world, but he also acts in it; he becomes aware of his will, and he experiences that that which he feels within himself as will can be perceived from without as the movement of his body, that is, man perceives his own activity twice, from within as representation, from without as will. Schopenhauer concludes from this that it is the will itself that appears as a representation in the perceived bodily action. And he then goes on to claim that it is not only the perception of one's own body and its movements that is based on a will, but that this is also the case with all other perceptions. In Schopenhauer's view, the whole world is therefore essentially will and appears to our intellect as a representation. This will, Schopenhauer further asserts, is uniform in all things. Only our intellect causes us to perceive a majority of particular things.

[ 17 ] Through his will, according to this view, man is connected with the unified world being. Insofar as man acts, the unified primordial will acts in him. As an individual, special personality, man exists only in his own imagination; in essence, he is identical with the unified world essence.

[ 18 ] If we assume that the idea of the superman was already unconsciously, instinctively present in Nietzsche when he became acquainted with Schopenhauer's philosophy, then this doctrine of will could only touch him sympathetically. In the human will he was given an element that allowed man to participate directly in the creation of the content of the world. As a willer, man is not merely a spectator standing outside the content of the world, making images of the real, but he himself is a creator. The divine power rules in him, beyond which there is no other.

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[ 19 ] These views gave rise to Nietzsche's two ideas of the Apollinian and the Dionysian view of the world. He applied them to Greek artistic life, which he accordingly saw as arising from two roots: from an art of imagination and an art of will. When the imaginer idealizes his imaginary world and embodies his idealized ideas in works of art, Apollinian art is created. By imprinting the sbeauty on the individual objects of imagination, he gives them the appearance of the eternal. But it remains within the world of imagination. The Dionysian artist not only seeks to express beauty in his works of art, but he himself imitates the creative work of the will of the world. He seeks to depict the spirit of the world in his own movements. He makes himself the visible embodiment of the will. He becomes a work of art himself. "Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on his way to ascend dancing into the air. Enchantment speaks from his gestures." ("Birth of Tragedy", § 1.) In this state, man forgets himself, he no longer feels himself as an individual, he lets the general will of the world rule in him. In this way Nietzsche interprets the festivals organized by the Dionysus servants in honour of the god Dionysus. Nietzsche sees the Dionysus servant as the archetype of the Dionysian artist. He now imagines that the oldest dramatic art of the Greeks arose from the fact that a higher union of the Dionysian with the Apollonian took place. In this way he explains the origin of the first Greek tragedy. He assumes that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus. The Dionysian man becomes a spectator, a viewer of an image that represents himself. The chorus is the self-reflection of a Dionysian excited person, i.e. the Dionysian person sees his Dionysian excitement depicted by an Apollonian work of art. The representation of the Dionysian in the Apollonian image is the primitive tragedy. The prerequisite for such a tragedy is that its creator has a living awareness of the connection between man and the elemental forces of the world. Such an awareness expresses itself as myth. The mythical must be the subject of the oldest tragedy. If the time comes in the development of a people when the corrosive intellect destroys the living feeling for the myth, then the death of the tragic is the necessary consequence.

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[ 20 ] In Nietzsche's opinion, this point in the development of Greekism occurred with Socrates. Socrates was an enemy of all instinctive life in league with the forces of nature. He only accepted that which the mind was able to prove by reasoning, that which was teachable. Thus war was declared on myth. And Euripides, whom Nietzsche described as a disciple of Socrates, destroyed tragedy because his work no longer sprang from Dionysian instincts, like that of Aeschylus, but from the critical mind. Instead of reproducing the movements of the will of the spirit of the world, in Euripides we find the comprehensible linking of individual events within the tragic plot. I am not asking about the historical justification of these Nietzschean ideas. He has been sharply attacked for them by a classical philologist. Nietzsche's description of Greek culture can be compared to the description that a person gives of a landscape viewed from the top of a mountain; a philological account with a description given by the hiker who visits each individual spot. From the mountain, many things shift according to the laws of optics.

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[ 21 ] What comes into consideration here is the question: what kind of task did Nietzsche set himself in his "Birth of Tragedy"? Nietzsche is of the opinion that the older Greeks knew the suffering of existence very well. "There is an old legend that King Midas hunted for the wise Silen, the companion of Dionysus, in the forest for a long time without catching him. When he has finally fallen into his hands, the king asks what is the very best and most excellent thing for man. The demon remains rigidly and immovably silent until, compelled by the king, he finally bursts out laughing: 'Wretched one-day creature, child of chance and toil, why do you force me to tell you what is most profitable for you not to hear? The very best is utterly unattainable for you: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon." ("Birth of Tragedy", § 3.) Nietzsche finds a basic feeling of the Greeks expressed in this legend. He considers it superficial to portray the Greeks as a constantly cheerful, childishly dallying people. The Greeks' basic tragic feeling had to give rise to the urge to create something that would make their existence bearable. They searched for a justification of existence - and found it in their world of gods and in art. It was only through the counter-image of the Olympian gods and art that the harsh reality became bearable for the Greeks. The fundamental question for Nietzsche in the "Birth of Tragedy" is therefore: To what extent did Greek art promote life, sustain life? Nietzsche's basic instinct with regard to art as a life-promoting power is thus already evident in this first work.

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[ 22 ] Another of Nietzsche's basic instincts can already be observed in this work. It is the aversion to merely logical minds, whose personality is completely under the dominion of their intellect. Nietzsche's opinion that the Socratic spirit is the destroyer of Greek culture stems from this aversion. Nietzsche sees the logical as only one form in which personality expresses itself. If this form is not joined by other modes of expression, the personality appears as a cripple, as an organism in which the necessary organs are mutilated. Because Nietzsche could only discover the brooding mind in Kant's writings, he calls Kant a "crippled conceptual cripple". Only when logic is the expression of the deeper basic instincts of a personality does Nietzsche accept it. It must be an outflow of the super-logical in the personality. Nietzsche always adhered to the rejection of the Socratic spirit. We read in "Götzen-Dämmerung": "With Socrates, the Greek taste turns in favor of dialectics: what is actually happening there? Above all, a noble taste is defeated; the rabble comes up with the dialectic. Before Socrates, dialectical manners were rejected in good society: they were considered bad manners, they embarrassed." ("Problem of Socrates", § 5.) Where strong basic instincts do not speak for a cause, the proving mind steps in and seeks to support it through the art of advocacy.

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[ 23 ] Nietzsche believed he recognized an innovator of the Dionysian spirit in Richard Wagner. It was out of this belief that he wrote the fourth of his "Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtungen": "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth", 1876. At this time, he still held on to the interpretation of the Dionysian spirit that he had formed in accordance with Schopenhauer's philosophy. He still believed that reality was only human imagination and that beyond this imaginary world lay the essence of things in the form of the primordial will. And the creating Dionysian spirit was not yet for him the person who creates out of himself, but the person who forgets himself and merges into the primal will. Wagner's music dramas were for him images of the ruling primal will, created by a Dionysian spirit devoted to this primal will.

[ 24 ] And since Schopenhauer saw in music a direct image of the will, Nietzsche also believed that music was the best means of expression for a Dionysian creative spirit. The language of civilized peoples seemed to him sick. It could no longer be the simple expression of feelings, because words gradually had to be used more and more to become the expression of people's increasing intellectualization. As a result, however, the meaning of words has become abstract, poor. They can no longer express what the Dionysian spirit, which creates out of the primal will, feels. It can therefore no longer express itself in the drama of words. It must call upon other means of expression, above all music, but also the other arts. The Dionysian spirit becomes the dithyrambic dramatist, "this term taken so fully that it simultaneously encompasses the actor, poet and musician". "However one may imagine the development of the original dramatist, in his maturity and perfection he is an entity without any inhibition or gap: the truly free artist, who cannot help but think in all the arts at the same time, the mediator and reconciler between seemingly separate spheres, the restorer of a unity and totality of artistic ability, which cannot be guessed at and developed at all, but can only be shown through action." ("Richard Wagner in Bayreuth", § 7.) Nietzsche revered Richard Wagner as a Dionysian spirit. And Wagner can only be described as a Dionysian spirit in the sense indicated by Nietzsche in the aforementioned essay. His instincts are directed towards the beyond; he wants to let the voice of the beyond resound through his music. I have already pointed out (pp. 84f.) that Nietzsche later found himself and was able to recognize the nature of his instincts directed towards the hereafter. He had originally misunderstood Wagner's art because he had misunderstood himself, because he had allowed his instincts to be tyrannized by Schopenhauer's philosophy. This subordination of his instincts to a foreign spiritual power later seemed to him like a disease process. He found that he had not listened to his instincts and had allowed himself to be seduced by an opinion that was inappropriate for him into allowing an art to work on these instincts that could only be detrimental to them, that had to make them ill.

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[ 25 ] Nietzsche himself described the influence that Schopenhauer's philosophy, which contradicted his basic instincts, had on him in his third "Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtung", "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" (1874), at a time when he still believed in this philosophy. Nietzsche was looking for an educator. The right educator can only be the one who works on the person to be educated in such a way that their innermost core of being develops out of their personality. Every person is influenced by their time and its cultural resources. He absorbs the educational material offered by the times. But the question is how he can find himself in the midst of this external intrusion; how he can spin out of himself what he and only he and no one else can be. "The man who does not want to belong to the masses only needs to stop being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience, which calls out to him: 'Be yourself! This is not what you are doing, what you think, what you desire": thus speaks the man to himself who one day finds that he has only ever been content to absorb educational material from outside. ("Schopenhauer as Educator", § 1.) Nietzsche found himself, even if not yet in his very own form, through the study of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Nietzsche unconsciously strove to express himself simply and honestly in accordance with his basic instincts. He only found people around him who expressed themselves in the educational formulas of the time, who disguised their own essence through these formulas. In Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche found a man who had the courage to make his personal feelings towards the world the content of his philosophy: "The powerful sense of well-being of the speaker" enveloped Nietzsche the first time he read Schopenhauer's sentences. "Here is an always similar invigorating air, we feel; here is a certain inimitable impartiality and naturalness, such as people have who are at home in themselves and indeed in a very rich home masters: in contrast to the writers, who are most astonished themselves when they have once been witty, and whose speech thereby acquires something restless and contrary to nature." "Schopenhauer talks to himself: or if you want to imagine a listener, think of the son whom the father instructs. It is an honest, coarse, good-natured utterance to a listener who hears with love." ("Schopenhauer", § 2.) That he heard a man speaking according to his innermost instincts was what drew Nietzsche to Schopenhauer.

[ 26 ] Nietzsche saw in Schopenhauer a strong personality who is not transformed by philosophy into a mere intellectual, but who makes the logical merely the expression of the superlogical, the instinctive in himself. "The longing for strong nature, for healthy and simple humanity was in him a longing for himself, and as soon as he had conquered time ~ himself, he also had to see the genius in himself with an astonished eye." ("Schopenhauer", § 3.) In Nietzsche's mind, the striving for the idea of the superman, who seeks himself as the meaning of his existence, was already at work at that time, and he found such a seeker in Schopenhauer. In such a man he saw the purpose, and indeed the only purpose, of world existence achieved; nature seems to him to have arrived at a goal when it has produced such a man. "Nature, which never leaps, makes [here] its only leap, and a leap of joy, for it feels itself for the first time at its goal, namely where it realizes that it must unlearn to have goals." ("Schopenhauer", § 5.) In this sentence lies the germ of the concept of the superman. When Nietzsche wrote this sentence, he already wanted exactly the same thing that he later wanted with his Zarathustra; but he still lacked the strength to express this will in his own language. When he wrote his Schopenhauer book, he already saw the basic idea of culture in the creation of the superman.

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[ 27 ] In the development of the personal instincts of individuals, Nietzsche thus sees the goal of all human development. What works against this development appears to him as the most actual sin against humanity. But there is something in man that quite naturally resists his free development. The human being cannot be developed by the forces of the weak human being alone, but they are extinguished by the historical sense. In order to determine the degree, and through it the limit, "at which the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is; I mean that power to determine out of itself similar to individual moments in him active instincts, but also through everything that has accumulated in his memory. Man remembers his own experiences, he seeks to acquire an awareness of the experiences of his people, tribe, indeed of all mankind through the operation of history. Man is a historical being. Animals live unhistorically; they follow the instincts that are at work in them at any given moment. Man allows himself to be determined by his past. If he wants to undertake something, he asks himself: what experiences have I or someone else already had with a similar undertaking? The impulse to act can be completely killed by the memory of an experience. For Nietzsche, the observation of this fact gives rise to the question: to what extent does a person's memory have a beneficial effect on his life, and to what extent does it have a detrimental effect? Memory, which also seeks to encompass things that man has not experienced himself, lives in man as a historical sense, as a study of the past. Nietzsche asks: to what extent does the historical sense promote life? He attempts to answer this question in his second "Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtung": "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" (1874). The impetus for this writing was Nietzsche's perception that the historical sense had become a prominent character trait among his contemporaries, especially among the scholars among them. Nietzsche found the immersion in the past praised everywhere. Only through knowledge of the past should man be able to distinguish between what is possible and what is impossible for him: this creed penetrated his ears. Only those who know how a people has developed can judge what is beneficial for its future: Nietzsche heard this call. Even the philosophers no longer wanted to think up something new, but preferred to study the thoughts of their ancestors. This historical sense has a paralyzing effect on present creativity. Those who, with every impulse that stirs within them, first try to determine what a similar impulse has led to in the past, will find their powers flagging before they have taken effect. "Think of the most extreme example, a man who would not have the power to forget, who would be condemned to see a becoming everywhere: such a one no longer believes in his own being, no longer believes in himself, sees everything flowing apart into moving points and loses himself in this stream of becoming ... All action involves forgetting: just as the life of all organic things involves not only light but also darkness. A man who wanted to feel only historically through and through would be like a man who was forced to abstain from sleeping, or like an animal that should live only from chewing the cud and ruminating again and again." ("History", § i.) Nietzsche is of the opinion that man can only tolerate so much history as corresponds to the extent of his creative powers. The strong personality carries out its intentions, despite remembering the experiences of the past; indeed, it will perhaps experience a strengthening of its power precisely through the memory of these experiences. The grow to transform and incorporate the past and the foreign". ("History", § I.)

[ 28 ] Nietzsche is of the opinion that the historical should only be cultivated insofar as it is necessary for the health of an individual, a people or a culture. What matters to him is: "learning better to do history for the purpose of life!" ("Historie", § 1.) He grants man the right to pursue history in such a way that it works as far as possible to promote the impulses of a particular present. From this point of view, he is an opponent of that view of history which seeks its salvation only in "historical objectivity", which only wants to see and tell how things "actually" happened in the past, which only seeks "the 'pure inconsequential: Knowledge or, more clearly, the truth, in which nothing comes out" ("Historie", § 6.) Such a view can only spring from a weak personality, whose feelings do not rise and fall like floods and ebbs when it sees the stream of events passing by. Such a personality "has become a resounding passive, which by its resounding again affects other such passives: until at last the whole air of a time is filled with such jumbled, delicate and related resonances". ("Historie", § 6.) But Nietzsche does not believe that such a weak personality can really empathize with the forces that prevailed in the people of the past: "But it seems to me that one hears, as it were, only the overtones of each original historical main tone: the coarse and powerful of the original can no longer be guessed from the spherically thin and sharp string sound. On the other hand, the original tone usually awakens deeds, hardships, horrors, it lulls us and turns us into soft connoisseurs; it is as if the heroic symphony had been arranged for two flutes and intended for use by dreaming opium smokers." ("Historie", § 6.) Only those can really understand the past who also live powerfully in the present, who have strong instincts through which they can guess and develop the instincts of their ancestors. This person is less concerned with the facts than with what can be guessed from the facts. "It would be possible to imagine a historiography that has not a drop of common empirical truth in it and yet could lay claim to the highest degree to the predicate of objectivity." ("Historie", §6.) The master of such a historiography would be the one who searched everywhere in the historical persons and events for what lies behind the merely factual. To do this, however, he must lead a powerful life of his own, because instincts and drives can only be observed directly in his own person. "Only from the highest power of the present may you interpret the past: only in the strongest tension of your noblest qualities will you guess what is worth knowing and preserving and great in the past. Like by like! Otherwise you will draw the past down to you." "So: History is written by the experienced and superior. He who has not experienced something greater and higher than all will not know how to interpret anything great and high from the past." ("History", § 6.)

[ 29 ] In contrast to the prevalence of the historical sense in the present, Nietzsche asserts "that man learns above all to live, and only uses history in the service of the learned life". ("History", § 10.) Above all, he wants a "health teaching of life", and history should only be pursued to the extent that it is conducive to such a health teaching.

[ 30 ] What is it about the view of history that promotes life? Nietzsche poses this question in his "History", and he is already standing on the ground that he describes in the sentence from "Beyond Good and Evil" quoted on p. 20 f.

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[ 31 ] The attitude that manifests itself in the bourgeois philistine counteracts the healthy development of the individual personality to a particularly strong degree. A philistine is the opposite of a person who finds satisfaction in the free expression of his dispositions. The Philistine only wants to allow this living out to the extent that it corresponds to a certain average measure of human talent. As long as the Philistine remains within his limits, there is nothing wrong with him. Anyone who wants to remain an average person has to come to terms with that. Among his contemporaries, Nietzsche found those who wanted to make their philistine attitude the normal attitude for all people, who regarded their philistinism as the only true humanity. Among them he counted Dav. Friedr. Strauß, the aesthete Friedr. Theodor Vischer and others. Vischer, he believes, made an unapologetic confession of philistinism in a speech he gave in memory of Hölderlin. He sees it in the words: "He (Hölderlin) was one of the unarmed souls, he was the Werther of Greece, a hopeless lover; it was a life full of softness and longing, but there was also strength and content in his will, and greatness, fullness and life in his style, which here and there even reminds us of Aeschylus. Only his spirit had too little of the hard; he lacked humor as a weapon; he could not bear that one is not yet a barbarian if one is a philistine." ("David Strauss", § z.) The Philistine does not want to deny outstanding people their right to exist; but he does mean that they will perish from reality if they do not know how to come to terms with the institutions that the average person has created according to his needs. These institutions are the only thing that is real, the only thing that is reasonable, and even the great man must submit to them. David Strauss wrote his book "The Old and the New Faith" based on this philistine attitude. The first of Nietzsche's "Untimely Observations", "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" (1873), is directed against this book, or rather against the attitude expressed in it. The impression of the more recent scientific achievements on the philistine is such that he says: "The Christian prospect of an immortal, heavenly life, together with the other consolations [of the Christian religion], has irredeemably fallen away." ("David Strauss", § 4.) He wants to make life on earth comfortable for himself in accordance with the ideas of natural science, i.e. as comfortable as the Philistine would like it to be. Now the Philistine shows how one can be happy and content despite knowing that no higher spirit rules over the stars, but that the rigid, unfeeling forces of nature rule over all world events. "During the last few years we have taken a lively interest in the great national war and the establishment of the German state, and we find ourselves uplifted to the core by this unexpected and glorious turn in the fortunes of our much-tested nation. We help to understand these things through historical studies, which are now made easy even for the non-scholar by means of a series of attractive and popularly written historical works; at the same time we seek to expand our knowledge of nature, for which there is also no lack of commonly understandable aids; and finally we find in the writings of our great poets, in the performances of the works of our great musicians, a stimulation for mind and spirit, for imagination and humor, which leaves nothing to be desired. This is how we live, this is how we walk happily." (Strauss, "The Old and New Faith", § 88.)

[ 32 ] It is the gospel of the most trivial enjoyment of life that speaks from these words. The Philistine calls anything that goes beyond the trivial unhealthy. Strauss says of Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" that it is only popular with those who "regard the baroque as genius, the formless as the sublime" ("Der alte und neue Glaube", § 109); of Schopenhauer, the Messiah of philistinism knows how to proclaim that one should not waste reasons on a philosophy as "unhealthy and uninspiring" as Schopenhauer's, but at most only words and jokes. ("David Strauss", § 6.) Healthy is what the philistine calls only that which corresponds to average education.

[ 33 ] As a moral precept, Strauss posits the sentence: "All moral action is a self-determination of the individual according to the idea of the species." ("The Old and New Faith", § 74.) Nietzsche replies: "Translated into clear and tangible terms, this only means: Live as a human being, and not as an ape or a seal! This imperative is unfortunately quite useless and powerless, because under the concept of man the most diverse things go together in the yoke, for example the Patagonian and the Master Ostrich, and because no one will dare to say with equal right: live as a Patagonian! and: live as a Master Ostrich!" ("David Strauss", § 7.)

[ 34 ] It is an ideal, and indeed an ideal of the most miserable kind, that Strauss wants to present to people. And Nietzsche protests against it; he protests because a lively instinct calls out in him: don't live like Master Strauss, but live as is appropriate for you!

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[ 35 ] Nietzsche first appears free from the influence of Schopenhauer's way of thinking in his essay "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" (1878). He has given up seeking supernatural causes for natural events; he strives for natural explanations. He now sees all human life as a kind of natural event; in man he sees the highest product of nature. One lives "ultimately among men and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproach, jealousy, feasting on many things as on a spectacle of which one had hitherto only to fear. One would be rid of the emphasis and would no longer feel the incitement of the thought that one is not only nature or more than nature ... Rather, a man from whom the usual fetters of life have fallen away to such an extent that he lives on only in order to recognize better and better, must be able to renounce much, indeed almost everything that has value among other people, without envy and annoyance; for him, the most desirable state must be that free, fearless floating above people, customs, laws and the conventional estimates of things suffice." ("Human" 1. § 34.) Nietzsche has already given up all belief in ideals; he sees in human actions only the consequences of natural causes, and in the recognition of these causes he finds his satisfaction. He finds that one gets an incorrect idea of things if one sees in them only that which is illuminated by the light of idealistic knowledge. One then misses what lies in the shadows of things. Nietzsche now wants to get to know not only the sunny side, but also the dark side of things. This endeavor resulted in the writing of "The Wanderer and his Shadow" (1879). In this book, he wants to grasp the phenomena of life from all sides. He became a "philosopher of reality" in the best sense of the word.

[ 36 ] In "Dawn" (1881), he describes the moral process in the development of humanity as a natural process. In this work, he already shows that there is no supernatural moral world order, no eternal laws of good and evil, and that all morality arises from the natural drives and instincts in people. The way was now clear for Nietzsche's original journey. If no extra-human power can impose a binding obligation on man, then he is entitled to let his own creativity run free. This realization is the leitmotif of "Joyful Science" (1882). Nietzsche's "free" cognition is now no longer shackled. He feels called to create new values after he has recognized the origin of the old ones and found that they are only human, not divine values. He now dares to reject that which contradicts his instincts and to put other things in their place that are in accordance with his instincts: "We new, nameless, incomprehensible people, we premature births of a still unproven future - we also need a new means to a new end, namely a new health, a stronger, more cunning, tougher, more daring, more fun than all health has been up to now. Whoever's soul thirsts to experience the whole range of previous values and desirabilities and to have sailed around all the coasts of this ideal 'Mediterranean', whoever wants to know from the adventures of his own experiences what it is like to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal ... first of all needs one thing, great health ... And now, after we have been on the road for so long, we Argonauts of the ideal, more courageous perhaps than is wise ... it seems to us as if, as a reward, we have an as yet undiscovered country before us ... How could we, after such vistas and with such a ravenous hunger for conscience and knowledge, still be satisfied with present man?" ("Joyful Science", § 382.)

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[ 37 ] It was out of the mood characterized in the preceding sentences that Nietzsche developed the image of his superhuman. It is the counter-image of contemporary man; it is above all the counter-image of the Christian. In Christianity, the contradiction against the cultivation of the strong life has become religion. ("Antichrist", § 5.) The founder of this religion taught: that what has value before men is contemptible before God. In the "Kingdom of God" the Christian wants to find realized everything that appears to him to be deficient on earth. Christianity is the religion that wants to relieve people of all concern for earthly life: it is the religion of the weak, who like to be presented with the commandment: "Do not resist evil and tolerate all adversity" because they are not strong enough to resist. The Christian has no sense of the noble personality that wants to draw its strength from its own reality. He believes that seeing the kingdom of man spoils his vision for the kingdom of God. Even the more advanced Christians, who no longer believe that they will be resurrected in their bodily form at the end of days, either to be admitted to paradise or cast into hell, dream of "divine providence", of a "supersensible" order of things. They also believe that man must rise above his merely earthly goals and fit into an ideal realm. They believe that life has a purely spiritual background and that this is what gives it value. Christianity does not want to cultivate the instincts for health, beauty, growth, well-being, longevity and the accumulation of strength, but rather hatred of the spirit, of pride, courage, nobility, self-confidence and freedom of the spirit, hatred of the pleasures of the sensual world, of the joy and serenity of the reality in which man lives. ("Antichrist", § 21.) Christianity describes the natural as downright "reprehensible". In the Christian God an otherworldly being, that is, a nothing is deified, it is the will to nothing canonized. ("Antichrist", § 8.) This is why Nietzsche combats Christianity in the first book of his "Umwertung aller Werte". And in the second and third books he also wanted to fight the philosophy and morality of the weak, who are only comfortable in the role of dependents. Because the type of person that Nietzsche wants to see cultivated does not hold this worldly life in low esteem, but embraces it with love and places it too high to believe that it should only be lived once, he is "eager for eternity" ("Zarathustra", Part 3, "The Seven Seals") and wants this life to be lived infinitely often. Nietzsche lets his "Zarathustra" be the "teacher of the eternal return". "Behold, we know ... that all things return eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already been here eternally and all things with us." ("Zarathustra", part 3, "The Convalescent")

[ 38 ] I do not think it is possible at present to form a definite opinion as to what idea Nietzsche associated with the word "eternal return". It will only be possible to say more precisely when Nietzsche's notes on the unfinished parts of his "Will to Power" are available in the second section of the complete edition of his works.