ON LOVE OF THE NEIGHBOR

ON LOVE OF THE NEIGHBOR

YOU CROWD AROUND YOUR neighbor and have beautiful words for it. But I tell you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves. 10

You flee from yourselves to your neighbor and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your “selflessness.”

The You is older than the I; the You has been consecrated, but not yet the I: so man crowds toward his neighbor.

Do I recommend love of the neighbor to you? Sooner should I recommend even flight from the neighbor and love of the farthest!

Higher than love of the neighbor stands love of the farthest and the future; higher still than the love of man I account the love of things and ghosts.

The ghost that runs on before you, my brother, is fairer than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid and you run to your neighbor.

You cannot endure to be alone with yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: so you want to mislead your neighbor into love and gild yourselves with his error.

I wish rather that you could not endure to be with any kind of neighbor or your neighbor’s neighbor; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.

You call in a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have misled him into thinking well of you, you then think well of yourselves.

It is not only he who speaks contrary to what he knows who lies, but even more he who speaks contrary to his ignorance. And thus you speak of yourselves in your dealings with others and deceive your neighbor with yourselves.

Thus speaks the fool: “Association with other people spoils the character, especially when one has none.”

One man goes to his neighbor because he seeks himself, and another because he wants to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

It is those farther away who must pay for your love of your neighbor; and when there are five of you together, a sixth must always die.

I do not love your festivals either: I found too many actors there, and even the spectators often behaved like actors.

I do not teach you the neighbor but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Übermensch.

I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But you must know how to be a sponge if you want to be loved by overflowing hearts.

I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a vessel of the good,-the creating friend who has always a completed world to give away.

And as the world unrolled itself for him, so it rolls together again for him in rings, as the becoming of the good through evil, as the becoming of purpose out of chance.

Let the future and the farthest be the motive of your today: in your friend you shall love the Übermensch as your motive.

My brothers, I do not recommend to you love of the neighbor: I recommend to you love of the farthest.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.