Editor’s note: The following words from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra epitomise what I meant the day before yesterday when I mentioned that Hitler believed that overmanhood could only arise on Earth, and that his love for painting was much deeper than the average racialist can imagine (e.g., ancient painters like Claude Lorrain or modern ones like Parrish motivated me to take my vows in the priesthood of the sacred words).
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Behold, I teach you the overman!
The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, dying off and self-poisoned, of whom the earth is weary: so let them fade away!
Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible thing, and to esteem the bowels of the unfathomable higher than the meaning of the earth!
Once the soul gazed contemptuously at the body, and then such contempt was the highest thing: it wanted the body gaunt, ghastly, starved. Thus it intended to escape the body and the earth.
Oh this soul was gaunt, ghastly and starved, and cruelty was the lust of this soul!
But you, too, my brothers, tell me: what does your body proclaim about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment?
Truly, mankind is a polluted stream. One has to be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming unclean.
Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under.
10 replies on “Thus spake…”
Reading this, I thought back to some lines for Alain de Benoist’s On Being A Pagan, which I paraphrased into my diary, on the ideal of Paganism and Pagan man:
To me, this reflected the idea of our homeworld, earth, and how we have not yet conquered it, and why we must – by the instinctive drive in us for all that is pre-Christian, and thus noble – conquer it fully, and achieve our prudent dominance over it, and over all others, and not consider the unimaginable void as a realistic target, as if it were a bounteous field to be cultivated, remaining instead as obscene to us as any heaven, closer to time and Judaism than to tangible, rooted reality, ungraspable, and thus vacuous (Benoist gives the Old Testament example of Abel’s landless nomadism and Cain’s Neolithic revolution, and why that god favours Abel).
I hope this isn’t an unusual textual comparison to make.
I think that Friedrich Nietzsche put forth a vision of the Overman (Superman) that is more complex than just a return to Paganism and a rejection of socalled “Christian” values. Nietzsche was not able to finish the literary work where he expressed his vision of the future Ubermensch due to his mental collapse in 1889. In Book 4 of The Will to Power (983) we read: Education in those rulers’ virtues that master even one’s benevolence and pity: the great cultivator’s virtues (“forgiving one’s enemies” is child’s play by comparison), the affect of the creator must be elevated – no longer to work on marble! – The exceptional situation and powerful position of those beings (compared with any prince hitherto): the Roman Ceasar with Christ’s soul.
The Will to Power was a collection of unpublished manuscripts published by his sister. Nietzsche considered his work complete after completing The Antichrist, before he suffered his psychological breakdown.
Thank you, Hyperborean555, I wasn’t aware of those lines. I admit, that book isn’t one I’ve focussed on when reading Nietzsche. Could you explain to me a little more what you mean by it? I was a little confused by his sentiment.
Of course, as best as I can interpret it – which may certainly be wrong – yes, one must have benevolence and pity where it is appropriate… say, in accordance with the 4-words towards children and towards animals, so they do not suffer, and indeed a firm racial bond with others of a similar purity, but I did not understand his reference to Christ, especially given that Christ ‘was’ a subversive mythological Jew. I wish he had said ‘body’ rather than ‘soul’, as by his lines in Zarathustra, but then of course that would also be racially impure and subhuman.
I agree with him in so far as the Overman thrust, as he describes it here, seems to be the spiritual one – the adoption of godly/Natural archetypes as a personal development for man to represent through himself, in harmony with the world he inhabits (my best understanding so far of non-Theistic religion in an Aryan sense), but I am puzzled still. I think it is my own lack of comprehension, although I read what Cesar has written below also, and accept that he was in breakdown at the time of writing it so may have been clouded (as I know from my own writings when mad).
I think that the Overman is an individual who incorporates both the Master morality and the Slave morality. He would be a person who embodies the virtues that make one suitable for War and Peace, a man who spans the entire spectrum and has the capacity to function in a healthy way in both.
Just to clarify, he needs elements of both (Master/Slave). Anyway, that is what I think Nietzsche meant by those words.
Oh ok, I see what you mean. Thank you very much for answering my question!
There is one book written about Nietzsche that I think is worth a read. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND THE POLITICS OF THE SOUL (A Study of Heroic Individualism) by Leslie Paul Thiele.
Thank you for the recommendation. I shall try to pick that up when I have funds to. By the way, I remember you asking a while back about my The Less Than Jolly Heretic, with some interest. Would you like a free copy? I know you were curious, but I’d understand if you didn’t want my (admittedly very time consuming) ‘Spare Videos Blog’ PayPal purchasing idea. I’d have to ask you to email me though, just so I know an address/PO Box to send it to. If you asked Cesar, I’d be happy to allow him to pass on my email address to you.
Cheers!
Sounds good Benjamin. Thanks.