Yesterday I posted the first section on my paper about Nietzsche, the meaning of life, and the process of overcoming. I’ll recap with the quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion. To assume the right to new values — that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey. As its holiest, it once loved ‘Thou-shalt’: now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture. But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child? (Zarathustra, 84).
The lion has already achieved the act of independence, and says “no” to all outside influences. The final creation out of this achievement is the will to power – to become the overman. Nietzsche believes that to have a creative will is to have freedom. The child represents the most creative of wills because of its brand new potential. There has been no tainting from the outside world, but be assured that it will quickly work its way in to the child’s heart. “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea. Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: its own will willeth now the spirit; his own world winneth the world’s outcast” (Zarathustra, 84).
Nietzsche addresses the process of overcoming with these apparently technical aspects, but he does so in a way that relates to history. We master the technical aspects of an art form only by learning the rules and the ways that people have done things in the past. We must participate in the game of creating in order to create. It requires immense plasticity of the mind to push this idea forward, and to break free from the influence of one’s teachers. Progress toward the overman demands a constant struggle, whereupon completion a new self will overcome an old one.
In Upon the Blessed Isles, Zarathustra addresses the men and he tells them that they are not capable of creating the superman. He explains that they may not create life out of nothing, but that they can indeed transform themselves into the superman. This, Zarathustra says, will be their best creation in their life.
In one’s life, there is little that is achievable. The jaded achievements of society mean nothing, and throughout our life, only produce suffering. This is not to say that life is horrible, or even unlivable, but rather that it is a state which is to be overcome. Suffering is life, but life itself is to create. The only true creator of this world is a child-bearer; who once has created, becomes a mother, and I use that word loosely. Zarathustra says, “Creating – that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to be, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation”(Zarathustra, 139).
Nietzsche continues to say that these creators are impermanents. “Thus are ye advocates and justifiers of all things that pass away,” he says. Nietzsche, it seems attributes these great and necessary act of creating to the woman, but continues to use the word “he” in the following passage in an effort to display the child-bearing father, who also has the ability to create and overcome. “For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the prangs of the birth-giver” (Zarathustra, 139). But Nietzsche knows, as all others do, that no man can endure the physicalities of child-bearing. While he insists that life is suffering, he recognizes the pains of childbirth to be brutal in all comparisons. He points beyond the physical, and tends to the mental burdens of creation that only few can understand.