Nietzsche must not be taken too seriously. He was engaged with the deepest problems of life, and published his opinions as to their solution before he had actually attempted to investigate them. He criticised and attacked like the Irishman who hits a head wherever he sees it. Here are the first three rules of his philosophical warfare:
"First: I attack only those causes which are victorious, sometimes I wait till they are victorious. Secondly: I attack them only when I would find no allies, when I stand isolated, when I compromise myself alone. Thirdly: I have never taken a step in public which did not compromise me. That is my criterion of right action."
A man who adopts this strange criterion of right conduct must produce a strange philosophy. His soul is in an uproar against itself. Says Nietzsche in his Götzendämmerung, Aphorism 45:
"Almost every genius knows as one phase of his development the 'Catilinary existence,' so-called, which is a feeling of hatred, of vengeance, of revolution against everything that is, which no longer needs to become ... Catiline—the form of Cæsar's pre-existence."
Nietzsche changed his views during his life-time, and the unmoralist Nietzsche originated in contradiction to his habitual moralism. He was a man of extremes. As soon as a new thought dawned on him, it took possession of his soul to the exclusion of his prior views, and his later self contradicts his former self.
Nietzsche says:
"The serpent that cannot slough must die. In the same way, the spirits which are prevented from changing their opinions cease to be spirits."
So we must expect that if Nietzsche had been permitted to continue longer in health, he would have cast off the slough of his immoralism and the negative conceptions of his positivism. His Zarathustra was the last work of his pen, but it is only the most classical expression of the fermentation of his soul, not the final purified result of his philosophy; it is not the solution of the problem that stirred his heart.
While writing his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Nietzsche characterizes his method of work thus:
"That I proceed with my outpourings considerably like a dilettante and in an immature manner, I know very well, but I am anxious first of all to get rid of the whole polemico-negative material. I wish undisturbedly to sing off, up and down and truly dastardly, the whole gamut of my hostile feelings, 'that the vaults shall echo back.'[9] Later on, i. e., within five years, I shall discard all polemics and bethink myself of a really 'good work,' But at present my breast is oppressed with disgust and tribulation. I must expectorate, decorously and indecorously, but radically and for good" [endgültig].