You crowd around your neighbor and have fine words for it. But I say unto you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbor from yourselves and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your “selflessness.”
The you is older than the I; the you has been pronounced holy, but not yet the I: so man crowds toward his neighbor.
Do I recommend love of the neighbor to you? Sooner I should even recommend flight from the neighbor and love of the farthest. Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future; higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid and run to your neighbor.
You cannot endure yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to seduce your neighbor to love, and then glide yourselves with his error. Would that you could not endure all sorts of neighbors and their neighbors; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.
You invite a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have seduced him to think well of you, then you think well of yourselves.
Thus speaks the fool: “Association with other people corrupts one’s character––especially if one has none.”
One man goes to his neighbor because he seeks himself; another because he would lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves turns your solitude into a prison. It is those farther away who must pay for your love of your neighbor; and even if five of you are together, there is always a sixth who must die.
Friedrich, Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Penguin, 1954. 172-3. Print.
Below (added 6/25/2023) are some paragraphs from Carl Jung in response to the above paragraphs from Nietzsche:
Self-forgetting virtue is an unnatural alienation from one’s own essence, which is thus deprived of development. It is a sin to deliberately alienate the other from his self by means of one’s own virtuousness, for example, through saddling oneself with his burden. This sin rebounds on us.
It is submission enough, amply enough, if we subjugate ourselves to our self. The work of redemption is always first to be done on ourselves, if one dare utter such a great word. This work cannot be done without love for ourselves. Must it be done at all? Certainly not, if one can endure a given condition and does not feel in need of redemption. The tiresome feeling of needing redemption can finally become too much for one. Then one seeks to rid oneself of it and thus enters into the work of redemption . . .
I think it would be most correct and most decent to say that one blunders into the work of redemption unintentionally, so to speak, if one wants to avoid what appears to be the unbearable evil of an insurmountable feeling of needing redemption. This step into the work of redemption is neither beautiful nor pleasant nor does it divulge an inviting appearance. And the thing itself is so difficult and full of torment that one should count oneself as one of the sick and not as one of the overhealthy who seek to impart their abundance to others.Consequently we should also not use the other for our own supposed redemption. The other is no stepping stone for our feet. It is far better that we remain with ourselves. The need for redemption rather expresses itself through an increased need for love with which we think we can make the other happy. But meanwhile we are brimming with longing and desire to alter our own condition. And we love others to this end. If we had already achieved our purpose, the other would leave us cold. But it is true that we also need the other for our own redemption. Perhaps he will lend us his help voluntarily, since we are in a state of sickness and helplessness. Our love for him is, and should not be, selfless. That would be a lie. For its goal is our own redemption. Selfless love is true only as long as the demand of the self can be pushed to one side. But someday comes the turn of the self. Who would want to lend himself to such a self for love? Certainly only one who does not yet know what excess of bitterness, injustice, and poison the self of a man harbors who has forgotten his self and made a virtue of it.
Jung, C.G. Scrutinies. Edit. Sonu Shamdasani. Trans. Mark Kyburz et al. The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. 478-80. Print.
In terms of the self, selfless love is a veritable sin.
We must presumably often go to ourselves to re-establish the connection with the self, since it is torn apart all too often, not only by our vices but also by our virtues. For vices as well as virtues always want to live outside. But through constant outerward living we lose the self and through this we also become secretly selfish in our best endeavors. What we neglect in ourselves blends itself secretly into our actions toward others.
Through uniting with the self we reach the God.
