"When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went up into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it..."
Have you read it? Many of us have only heard of the theory of the Superman. The misunderstanding is simple: by superman Nietzsche meant an over-man.
Have you read it? Many of us have only heard of the theory of the Superman. The misunderstanding is simple: by superman Nietzsche meant an over-man. Not a superman of the kind a shallow, lowbrow culture has got us used to, nor a man with superpowers, capable of telekinesis or levitation. Nietzsche probably simply meant to express the idea that it was possible to overcome man's original cultural poverty by abandoning common morality and putting the ascetic ideal into practice.
"When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went up into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it. But at last his heart changed, and one morning he rose with the dawn, stood before the sun and spoke to it thus: - You great star! What would your happiness be, had you not those for whom you shine! For ten years you have climbed up here to my cave: you would have grown weary of your light and of this path, without me, my eagle and my serpent. But we waited for you every morning, took from you your overflow and blessed you for it. Behold!..."
Against the backdrop of the Mountain, as a symbol of superhuman ascesis, moves Zarathustra. Throughout the whole text Zarathustra has chosen as his dwelling a cave in the high mountains. A dwelling he will keep returning to for all his life...
"... After this Zarathustra went back to the mountains and to the solitude of his cave, withdrawing from men ..."
Most of the time he withdraws from men because he is insulted and disowned and even disrespectfully mocked. The mountain not only as spiritual and mystical ascesis. The mountain as a refuge that dispenses regenerating solitude. A place so close to the sky that it seems to belong to it. A place that can be one of peace and also a place of the hardest physical trials...
"Winter, a sullen guest, sits in my house; my hands are blue from his cordial handshakes. I respect this sullen guest, but gladly leave him alone. Gladly I run away from him, and if you run well you can escape him! With warm feet and warm thoughts I run to where the wind is still, towards the sunny corner of my mount of olives."
... and of spiritual trials ...
"It is not the height but the slope that is terrible! The slope down which the gaze plunges, while the hand gropes upwards. Then the heart is seized by giddiness, caught between two wills..."
In the mountains man has room to look into his own heart; even the most fearless turns pale as he searches for a safe hold. So in Zarathustra the mountain ends up being "elevation of the spirit", "refuge for reflection" and at the same time a unit of measure and comparison for man's boundless ego. It is above all by measuring ourselves against "the mountain", against "altitude", that we manage to measure and overcome the smallness of our human miseries, finally managing to project ourselves beyond, outside and far from our self-centred and perverse ego...
"Solitude! O solitude, my homeland! Too long have I lived wild in wild lands to come back to you without tears! Go on, threaten me with your finger as mothers do, smile at me as mothers smile ... - Oh, Zarathustra, I know everything: even that among people you felt more forsaken, more alone, than you ever did here with me!"
Frankly, from the lowly depths of my thoroughly patchy culture, Zarathustra made me think of a Buddhist holy man, of a man in the manner of Osho, with that iconoclastic and nihilistic way of his. On the one hand he is venerated by his disciples, on the other he is misunderstood and denigrated. It could hardly be otherwise: he himself cannot explain well enough what he means by abandoning one's own ego and abandoning the common moral sense...
Would it perhaps have been enough to suggest that men think for themselves?
"When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went up into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it..."