Chapter 1 of this study opened with three Nietzsche quotations on the subject of truth. Two of these equated truth and honesty with morality, while the third declared Zarathustra’s teaching to be the only one to posit truthfulness as the highest good. I shall conclude with three more citations on truth. The first closes out Gay Science 110: ‘To what extent can truth endure (vertragen) incorporation? – that is the question; that is the experiment’ (KSA 3:471). A similar question is asked by Nietzsche in his preface to Ecce Homo: ‘How much truth can one endure (ertragen), how much truth does a spirit dare? More and more that became for me the true measure of value’ (EH F 3, KSA 6:259). And in another Gay Science passage, Nietzsche speaks of ‘a completely new task’ for mankind, that of ‘incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive’ because ‘so far we have incorporated only our errors’ (GS 11, KSA 3:383). That question, that experiment and that task, I submit, are all synonymous with Zarathustra’s doctrine of self-overcoming, the severity of which is red-flagged above by the reiterated verb endure. Appearing high up in Nietzsche’s table of values, endurance or fortitude serves to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is to say, those who will perish from the experiment of truth-incorporation and those who will prevail, albeit pyrrhically.

Zarathustra’s Violent Rhetoric of Truth Incorporation

We learn from Zarathustra’s pivotal Part 2 discourse ‘On Self-Overcoming’ that the three primary truths known to the knower are the Heraclitean truth of becoming, the Nietzschean concept of will to power and that life ‘must always overcome itself ’ (Z2 ‘On Self-Overcoming’, KSA 4:148). Upon acquiring this knowledge, the knower is required not only to incorporate these truths into his daily life, but to endure the pain of perpetual self-overcoming. In Zarathustra, this pain is expressed through a prodigious array of emblems and epithets, the first of which is the sickle-blade. Towards the end of the prologue, Zarathustra speaks of his need for fellow ‘harvesters’ and ‘celebrators’ who will join him in cutting down the blighted but tenacious crop of Christianised good and evil deep-rooted in the human psyche.