It is as though we cherished the view that by such imputation we were refuting the thought of this thinker.
The officious will to refute never even approaches a thinker's path. Refutation belongs among those petty intellectual entertainments which the public needs for its amusement. Moreover, Nietzsche himself long ago anticipated the answer to our question. The text that immediately precedes Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Nietzsche's corpus appeared in 1882 under the title The Gay Science. In its penultimate section (number 341 ), under the heading "The Greatest Burden," Nietzsche first delineated his "most abysmal thought." Following it is the final section (342), which was adopted verbatim as the opening of the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the posthumously published materials (XIV, 404 ff.) we find sketches for a foreword to The Gay Science. There we read the following:
A spirit fortified by wars and victories, which has developed a need for conquest, adventure, hazard, pain; become accustomed to the crispness of the upper air, to long wintry walks, to ice and mountain crags in every sense; a kind of sublime malice and extreme exuberance of revenge—for there is revenge in it, revenge on life itself, when one who suffers greatly takes life under his protection.
What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra's doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. Yet we say it by no means as a misconceived refutation of Nietzsche's philosophy. We do not even utter it as an objection against Nietzsche's thinking. But we say it in order to turn our attention to the fact that—and the extent to which—Nietzsche's thought too is animated by the spirit of prior reflection. Whether the spirit of prior thinking is at all captured in its definitive essence when it is interpreted as the spirit of revenge-this question we leave open. At all events, prior thinking is metaphysics, and Nietzsche's thinking presumably brings it to fulfillment.
Thus something in Nietzsche's thinking comes to the fore which this thinking itself was no longer able to think. Such remaining behind what it has thought designates the creativity of a thinking. And where a thinking brings metaphysics to completion it points in an exceptional way to things unthought, cogently and confusedly at once.