Key Arguments

• They declare ‘that is now fate!’—to be the first to teach this teaching.
• They explicitly connect the greatness of the fate with its danger and with Zarathustra’s sickness.
• They present the content of the teaching as their shared knowledge with him, consolidating attribution.

Source Quotes

With new songs you must heal your soul: that you might bear your enormous fate, which has been no human’s fate up to now! ‘For your animals know well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, — that is now fate! ‘That you must be the first to teach this teaching– how should this great fate not be your greatest danger and sickness too!

‘For your animals know well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, — that is now fate! ‘That you must be the first to teach this teaching– how should this great fate not be your greatest danger and sickness too! ‘Behold, we two know what you teach: that all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already been here an eternity of times, and all things with us.

‘That you must be the first to teach this teaching– how should this great fate not be your greatest danger and sickness too! ‘Behold, we two know what you teach: that all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them, and that we have already been here an eternity of times, and all things with us. ‘You teach that there is a Great Year of Becoming, a monster of a Great Year, which must like an hour-glass turn itself over anew, again and again, that it may run down and run out ever anew:– ‘– such that all these years are the same, in the greatest and smallest respects– such that we ourselves are in each Great Year the same as ourselves, in the greatest and smallest respects.

Key Concepts

• behold, — that is now fate!
• That you must be the first to teach this teaching– how should this great fate not be your greatest danger and sickness too!
• we two know what you teach: that all things recur eternally and we ourselves with them

Context

The animals define Zarathustra’s mission in the wake of his convalescence, tying teaching to destiny and pathology.

Perspectives

Nietzsche

Sees the pedagogy of recurrence as a selective ordeal: the doctrine tests and transforms the teacher himself.

Zarathustra

Recognizes his calling as burdensome and hazardous; he resolves to bear it through song and renewed strength.