Leo Strauss on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Leo Strauss

Author:Leo Strauss [Strauss, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-226-48677-2
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

“In moderation, according to nature” you wish to live? Oh noble Stoics! How your words deceive! Think of a being like Nature, immoderately wasteful, immoderately indifferent, devoid of intentions and consideratenesses, devoid of compassion and a sense of justice, fruitful and desolate and uncertain at the same time: think of Indifference on the throne—how could you live in moderation according to this indifference? Living—isn’t it precisely a wishing-to-be-different from this Nature? Doesn’t living mean evaluating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? But supposing your imperative “to live in moderation, according to nature” only means “to live in moderation, according to life”—how then could you live otherwise? Why make a principle of something that you are and have to be? The truth is quite another matter: while rapturously pretending to read the canon of your law out of nature, you actually want the opposite—you strange play-actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to dictate your morality, your ideal, to nature (even to nature!). It wants to incorporate itself in nature; you demand that nature be nature “in moderation, according to the Stoa”; you want to remake all existence to mirror your own existence; you want an enormous everlasting glorification of stoicism! With all your love for truth, you force yourselves to see nature falsely, i.e. stoically—so long, so insistently, so hypnotically petrified, until you can no longer see it any other way. And in the end some abysmal arrogance gives you the insane hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves (stoicism is self-tyranny), you can also tyrannize over nature—for isn’t the Stoic a part of nature? . . . But all this is an old, everlasting story. What happened to the Stoics still happens today, as soon as a philosophy begins to have faith in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise, for philosophy is this tyrannical desire; it is the most spiritual will to power, to “creation of the world,” to the causa prima.10

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