Star-Morality (1881) — Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche Albanian version and notes by Eda Zari

Star-Morality Written in 1881

Foreordained for the path of stars, what is the darkness to you, star? Roll blessed through this age; let its misery remain foreign and far from you.

Your radiance belongs to the most distant world: let pity be a sin for you. Only one commandment holds for you — be pure.

Dedicated to the divine and to myself — in devotion and gratitude.

Notes by Eda Zari

Nietzsche’s “Sternen-Moral”, like passages in Ecce Homo, may be read as a call to free oneself from what he called “slave morality”: a morality shaped among the violated, oppressed, embittered, imprisoned, insecure and exhausted, whose condition becomes bearable through a system of pity and self-denial.

By contrast, his notion of “master morality” places emphasis on confidence and pride in oneself, and on a fundamental resistance to self-erasure.

Nietzsche develops these questions more fully in Beyond Good and Evil and in On the Genealogy of Morality.

© Eda Zari, Düsseldorf, 15 May 2020. All rights reserved.