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I get that Zarathustra is able to do great work, by the end of the book.
But what I don't get is how those not predestined to greatness could take from Nietzsche body of work, except perhaps a mild dissatisfaction with any attempt to work.
Could Nietzsche set the goal of going over (as Zarathustra is meant to have), not to the higher men he wants liberated from morality, but to the lower type - creating values which free those who can do great things from their own (detestable) smallness.
Seung, Thomas K. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lanham, Md. [u.a.: Lexington Books, 2005.
I suggest you read Seung's commentary on Thus Spake Zarathustra if you want to understand what it is all about.
Yes, this is, I fear, a difficult question. Really Nietzsche was not interested in any but men of the highest achievements and cultivation. And yet, in some way, he may say that he is philanthropic, or altruist, in that in allowing for the great to be great, we are all lifted up. And then, from such works, all can in their own way judge of the situation with human beings.
"Could Nietzsche set the goal of going over (as Zarathustra is meant to have), not to the higher men he wants liberated from morality, but to the lower type - creating values which free those who can do great things from their own (detestable) smallness."
When it is said that the "Chinese dream" (under the PRC's Communism) is of "moderately prosperous society", I think this reminds of Nietzsche's point. The idea of the transcendent value of a mediocre universality. Or, of the social value of normality, proper psychological health, in the United States. What Nietzsche objects to is that someone, of superior capability and accomplishment, should becomes like each other one, as a impressment into service of a supposed community or dreary duty to egalitarianism. I think, in a certain sense, this is not the question of Raskolnikov. It is not about being anti-moral (of the "everything is permitted"), but about being against the leveling down of the human being as the ultimate seed of human life. That the talented should forsake their talent, and the beautiful be made to look average, so as not to harm the others and bring about their envy and misery (I mean, one must consider that Nietzsche was thinking in remote and vast terms, as Kant put it, the human is so constituted so as to be concerned even with the most remote possibilities of the development of the human race). It's not obvious to me that even right-wing Capitalism, in its claim of providing equal opportunity, rather than equal outcome, is not a form of this petty (i.e., the "detestable smallness") opportunity for the average to escape the feeling of being tied to the forced project of leveling down. Supposing that Capitalism never swung over to the full pursuit of the equal outcome of life, rather than the supposed chance to compete. Yet, if history is moving to the equal outcome, than it is very hard to see any but the most exceptional persons wresting themselves. The book Degeneration by Nordau was about this issue, as was, of course, the Max Stirner book. But, the two Max s thought here of men like Paul Gauguin or Neitzsche himself. Not of the ordinary man, told in his cradle, to be "creative". Which, after all, is something commanded (and even thought possible!) of kindergartners.
