From the very outset Nietzsche is condemned, in his thinking out of what life-affirmation means, to arrive at the higher form of it by a more or less meaningless living out of life to the full. He wants to listen to the highest efforts of the will-to-live without putting it in any relation to the universe. But the higher life-affirmation can be a living thing only when life-affirmation tries to conceive itself in world-affirmation. Life-affirmation in itself, in whichever direction it turns, can only become enhanced life-affirmation, never a higher form of it. It careers about in circles unable to take any fixed course, like a ship with its steering apparatus tied firmly up. Nietzsche, however, instinctively shrinks from fitting life-affirmation into world-affirmation, and bringing it by that method to development into a higher and ethical life-affirmation. Life-affirmation within world-affirmation means devotion to the world, but with that there follows somehow or other life-denial within the life-affirmation. But it is just this interplay of the two that Nietzsche wants to get rid of, because it is there that ordinary ethics come to grief. . . . Nietzsche was not the first to put forward in Western thought the theory of living one’s own life to the full. Greek sophists and others after them anticipated him by this. There is a great difference, however, between him and his predecessors. They are for living a full life because it brings them enjoyment. He, on the other hand brings to the theory the much deeper thought that by living [pg 179] one’s own life victoriously to the full life itself is honoured, and that by raising life to a higher power the meaning of existence is brought out. Men of genius and strong individuality, therefore, should be intent only on allowing the greatness that is in them to become an actuality._(_75_)_ Nietzsche’s true predecessors are unknown to him. They have their home, like those of Spinoza, in China. In that country life-affirmation made the attempt to come to clear ideas about itself. In Lao-tse and his pupils it is still naïvely ethical. In Chwang-tse it becomes cheerful resignation; in Lie-tse the will to secret power over things; in Yang-tse it ends in an all-round living of life to the full. Nietzsche is a synthesis, showing itself in a European mentality, of Lie-tse and Yang-tse. It is only we Europeans who are capable of producing the philosophy of brutality. Zarathustra is for Nietzsche the symbol of the thoughts which are forming within him: Zarathustra as the hero of veracity who ventures to value natural life as a good, and as the genius who is far removed from the Judaeo-Christian mode of thought.