Page - 145 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

146 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom The lion-spirit has created for itself the conditions to transform the world, and to transform itself in relation to the world. It corresponds with man as “measure of the value of things, as judge of the world,” quoted above, a view on humanity and the world fiercely criticized by Nietzsche. But here, In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche does not conceal a certain admiration for the camel and the lion as stages of the human spirit: they are necessary in the history of metamorphoses. The third stage forms a rupture with the camel-lion relation to the world. It is the last metamorphosis, that of the “child.” Instead of a “sacred No” to the world, the child is a “sacred Yes” to it. (Nietzsche 1969, 55). “But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion can- not? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game [Spiel], a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.” (55; Translation modified) Here the relation to the world is not one of surmounting and conquering, but one of creating: “a new beginning” in which one is simultaneously ab- sorbed by that creation with “innocence and forgetfulness,” like a child that can be immersed in its game. At this point in Nietzsche’s line of thought as set out in this hymn, we are touching upon the paradox of the spaces social imaginaries are, as we have demonstrated in the previous section. The creative relation to the world obliterates the division of “man and the world”: it is rather an opening toward the world and into the world. Creat- ing a world, that remarkable capacity of children, simultaneously means that one lives in that world. Bubbles In his trilogy Spheres, Peter Sloterdijk opens the first volume with a beauti- ful miniature, painting with words a little boy who is blowing bubbles with a small pipe and a bowl of soap and water. John Everett Millais, “Bubbles” (1886) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bubbles_by_John_Everett_Millais.jpg