This episode of discotheque Zarathustra continues with Chapter 5 of the Second Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘On the Virtuous’.

To explore this chapter, we come bang up to date with a recent release from The Smashing Pumpkins, the dark disco of “Cyr” from the double album of the same name (2020).

In this chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche explores virtue. He does not ask you which acts are virtuous. Rather, questions such as this require a more essential question to be answered first. What grounds your virtues?

You are virtuous! But – Are your virtues ‘a spasm under the whip’? Are your virtues aroused when ‘vices grow lazy’? Are your virtues just you putting the ‘breaks’ on your vices? Are your virtues merely habits, ‘regular clocks that have been wound up’? You are virtuous! But, whispers Zarathustra in your ear, ‘like the snout of a boar shall my words tear open the ground of your soul…’ and ‘the secrets of your ground shall come to light’. You now ‘lie churned and broken up in the sun’. If Zarathustra’s words unground these grounds, bring to light the illusions of these presuppositions, how is virtue possible? Authority becomes shadowy. Idols are toppled, facture, become fragments. Your master slowly dies, is dead: you have killed your master. We can see such a Nietzschean teaching in ‘Cyr’ (2020).

Check out discotheque Zarathustra: Zarathustra vs The Smashing Pumpkins