264 Nietzsche
mouth of a Zarathustra, the demolisheroi morality, turns into a very con-
templative word) has almost universally, in complete innocence, been
taken to mean the very values that are the exact opposite of what
Zarathustra was intended to represent, namely the 'idealistic' type of a
higher kind of man, half 'saint,' half 'genius.'... Other academic block-
heads have suspected me of Darwinism on that account. Even the "hero
worship' of that major unwitting and unwilling counterfeiter Carlyle I
have so roundly rejected has been read into it. When I whispered into
the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare
Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears" (6,300; EH"Why
I Write Such Good Books" § 1).
Nietzsche had clearly forgotten his own beginnings when he com-
plained that his Übermensch had been mistakenly interpreted as an " 'ide-
alistic' type of a higher kind of man." In The Birth of Tragedy, and
particularly in "Schopenhauer as Educator," he had developed the con-
cept of a genius that strongly resembled the type of "half 'saint,' half
'genius' " he was now criticizing. In a draft of a preface to The Birth of
Tragedy, he had written: "Who would dare to claim that the saint in the
desert has failed to achieve the highest purpose of the cosmic will?"
(7,354). For Nietzsche, the genius and the saint were the "peak of rap-
ture" of the world. There were ascetics, ecstatics, and intelligent and
creative people, but they were not Cesare Borgia types. They were not
heroes of vitality or bastions of strength, nor were they athletes of
amorality. In the period of Zarathustra and beyond, Nietzsche deleted
several idealistic and quasi-religious traits from his image of the Über-
mensch. It was not until the fifth book of The Gay Science (written after
Zarathustra) that the Übermensch appeared as a dastardly grand player, a
bogeyman of the middle class and amoral bastion of strength. There
Nietzsche depicted the "ideal of a spirit who plays naively—that is, unin-
tentionally and from a position of overabundance and power—with
everything that has always been called holy, good, untouchable, divine... ;
the ideal of a human-superhuman well-being and well-wishing that will
quite often appear inhuman" (3,637; GS§ 382).