Walking the Tightrope

Lest we think that Nietzsche was so caught up with Becoming in the Now that he left himself ungrounded, Rudiger Safranski , as usual, offers an insightful but less considered influence during this period.   Nietzsche teaches "be truthful to the earth".   By this he means that metaphysics has its basis in tangible biology. “The metaphorical style of presentation in Zarathustra only hints at its biological contents.   In his notebooks from the period of Zarathustra , Nietzsche was more forthright.   He wrote that the 'goal' was the ‘evolution of the entire body and not just the brain’.   Overt references 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 Ü