Читать книгу Thus Spoke Zarathustra - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Friedrich Nietzsche - Страница 13

Nietzsche started writing these works in the late 1870s. By that point, Charles Darwin's findings were already disseminated – The Origin of Species was published in 1859 – and had achieved widespread scientific acceptance in Germany.

It is clear from reading his texts of this period that naturalistic investigations into human history and development had influenced his thinking. Darwin's Descent of Man (1870), where Darwin applied his theory of evolution to man's moral development, gave Nietzsche additional context. He could now draw from a wider range of studies promoting Darwinian theories in relation to humankind.

But Nietzsche was beginning to introduce original perspectives that deviated from the theories of Darwin and others. Above all, he speculated on the specific question of morality and offered alternative hypotheses concerning its origins and dissemination. Instead of treating morality as a historical given, he had become interested in how belief in morality had arisen and how it had displaced other non‐moral perspectives. He speculated about what belief in morality could reveal about the individual who espoused it. This eventually led him to establish a dual history for morality: a master morality versus a slave morality.

Whereas the master morality adhered to values promoting health, vitality, and affirmation of life, slave morality looked with suspicion at examples of human thriving and excellence. It was an important distinction, which he explored further in his most influential post‐Zarathustra work, the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Nietzsche's fundamental insight was that morality did not derive from a transcendent source, but was simply the product of a worldly power struggle.

Nietzsche's critical view of morality led him to suspect a literary tradition that had unquestioningly accepted the moral point of view as the only one. He also started to distrust the scientific rhetoric that was being applied to man and his place in nature. He believed it to be a rhetoric colored by an implicit moralism.

At this point, Nietzsche had reached a critical juncture: either to continue to write within a tradition he had intellectually undermined and which he felt to be spiritually bankrupt, or nihilistic – or to break free from the spiritual and linguistic stranglehold of the moral tradition.

It is here where the idea for Zarathustra came to him – or rather, as he later stated, it overtook him.⁵