Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

Chapter 95: Chapter IV. The Despisers of the Body.

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About This Book

A prophetic teacher named Zarathustra delivers a series of poetic discourses and parables in four parts that explore the death of God, the will to power, the ideal of the overman, eternal recurrence, and the transvaluation of moral values. Mixing lyrical sermon, aphorism, and allegory, the text stages encounters, speeches, and symbolic episodes that critique Christian morality, celebrate self-overcoming, and insist on creative reevaluation of life’s aims. Recurring motifs such as solitude, the three metamorphoses, teaching and rejection, and paradoxical humor bind the fragments into a visionary call to invent new, life-affirming values.

Chapter IV. The Despisers of the Body.

Here Zarathustra gives names to the intellect and the instincts; he calls the one “the little sagacity” and the latter “the big sagacity.” Schopenhauer’s teaching concerning the intellect is fully endorsed here. “An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest ‘spirit,’” says Zarathustra. From beginning to end it is a warning to those who would think too lightly of the instincts and unduly exalt the intellect and its derivatives: Reason and Understanding.