Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra 02: The Hour of Great Contempt

By Sadhika on

Part I: Zarathustra’s Prologue, Thus Spake Zarathustra

“Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?...
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.
Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom.”

In his first discourse to men, Zarathustra lays out the existential burden that lies heavy upon Man’s shoulders. Man does not exist as a stationary point living out a small span of time in actions that will be forgotten with the passing of a few generations. Of course, some men do live that way. But the ‘overman’ acts out the mythological fragment of the hero transformed and reborn through his frequent journeys into the Chaos. Simply put, man exists to transcend himself. The evolution of man from apes has not only been a biological journey, but also a spiritual one. 

It is a moral responsibility to take on the task of this furtherance, knowingly and willingly. This begins by starting to THINK rather than represent the ideas one has been fed in the best way; to reassume the position of the master of the house, at least insofar as it is possible. To do otherwise is sinful, for it means that one has avoided the responsibility of thinking for oneself. One then remains, no more than a shell of voices and impulses, all running at cross-purposes with each other, to gain the control of their host and carry out their ends. Zarathustra’s words about man being a “disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom” echoes the beliefs of psychoanalysts such as Freud and Jung, who claimed that Man is a collection of multiple spirits (each having their own personalities and rationales) striving for different ends, but loosely held together. 

“Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing:—the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.
Oh, that soul was itself meagre, ghastly, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of that soul!
But ye, also, my brethren, tell me: What doth your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency?
Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that sea; in him can your great contempt be submerged.
What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.”

These lines hint at the nihilism that, in Nietzsche’s view, characterised his time. Zarathustra implies that the idea of the transcendent came into existence when the soul despised the constraints of the body and the finitude of man’s life. It sought to escape from the ill, weak and suffering body into a world of heavenly stature, where it no longer needed to rely on a host for its existence and furtherance. However, the soul was no less stainless than it believed the body to be. Full of sin, corruption, poverty and complacency, the soul had no noble ends that it strove towards. In a world where God had met a cruel death at the hands of men, the need for an ultimate value looms ever more urgently. The Overman can take the responsibility of devising new hierarchies of values, and the nobility of his goal redeems the soul that has taken recourse to nihilism; the nihilistic soul that has contempt for all values, for everything of meaning -  for knowledge, reason and virtue, so much so that the greatest sin in this “hour of great contempt” would be to have a shred of faith left. 

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