Lou Salomé and I he Quest for Intimacy 261man should be for the Übermensch, a laughing stock or a painful embar-
rassment" (4,14; ZFirst Part, Prologue § 3).
The metaphoric style of presentation in Zarathustra only hints at its
biologistic contents. In his notebooks from the period of Zarathustra,
Nietzsche was more forthright He wrote that the "goal" was the "evo-
lution of the entire body and not just of the brain" (10,506). Overt ref-
erences to the specifics of the physical evolution of man would have
been ill-suited to the pathos of Zarathustra's speeches. Ought
Zarathustra to have said something about, for instance, the quantity of
hair, musculature, arm length, or head size of the Übermensch? This
would have been unintentionally comical. In matters concerning the
physical appearance of the Übermensch, Zarathustra confines himself to
this advice for those contemplating marriage: "Do not reproduce your-
self, but rather produce upward\ May the garden of marriage help you do
this" (4,90; ZFirst Part, "On Child and Marriage").
Nietzsche was thoroughly familiar with his contemporaries' ideas on
biological breeding and evolution. While in Sils-Maria in the summer of
1881, he had sent for literature on this subject He would have had to be
completely ignorant of the widespread trend of biological evolutionary
thought spurred by Darwinism to have escaped its influence. Despite all
of his criticism of the specifics of Darwinism, Nietzsche was unable to
extricate himself entirely from the powerful implications of this theory.
Two basic ideas were considered common knowledge in the intellectual
culture of those years, and they had become unquestioned assumptions
on his part as well.
The notion of development was one of them. It is not a new idea, at
least not in reference to the cultural sphere. All of Hegelianism and the
subsequent historical school introduced it as a law of development of
intellectual metamorphoses. Darwin's new contribution, the second of
these basic ideas, was the application of the thesis of development to
biological substance.
The implications of a biological history of man's evolution from the
animal kingdom could be viewed as a drastic debasement of man. It