Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883–85) is Friedrich Nietzsche‘s most famous, most poetic and most misread book. Written in four parts in bursts of ten days each — Part One in January 1883 at Rapallo, on walks along the Ligurian coast, Part Two that summer in Sils-Maria, Part Three in the winter of 1883–84 at Nice, and Part Four, privately printed in forty copies, in 1885 — it is a hybrid of philosophical treatise, parable, prophecy, hymn, satire and mock-scripture, written in a deliberately biblical, Luther-Bible cadence. Its hero is Zarathustra, the Persian prophet (Zoroaster) who first taught the cosmic struggle of good and evil, returning to earth to teach the opposite: that “God is dead”, that humanity is something to be overcome, and that the highest affirmation is to will the eternal recurrence of one’s life. In it Nietzsche first announces the Übermensch (The Übermensch), the will to power (Will to Power) and the eternal return (Eternal Recurrence). He called it “the greatest gift that has ever been made to mankind”, “the Fifth Gospel” — and, in the same letter, a book that “no one has understood”. See Zarathustra.

Why Zarathustra?

Nietzsche chose the historical Zoroaster, founder of the Persian religion, because “he was the first to see in the struggle of good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things. The translation of morality into the metaphysical, as force, cause, end in itself, is his work. But this question could in itself be asked as the question: what is the difference between the work of Zarathustra and the work of Zoroaster? Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognize it” (Ecce Homo). Zarathustra is thus the first moralist who becomes the first to overcome morality: the prophet who retracts his own doctrine.

Structure and style

The book has a prologue and four parts, each made up of numbered “speeches” (Reden) and songs. Its style, imitating Luther’s Bible, is aphoristic, rhythmic, full of images (the tightrope, the camel, the spider, the abyss), and often parodic — a “Gospel” that mocks the gospel. The “madman” parable in The Gay Science (The Madman with the Lantern) had already announced the death of God; Zarathustra is the man who has to live in its aftermath.

Zarathustra’s Prologue

At thirty, Zarathustra leaves his home and the lake of his birth and goes into the mountains, where for ten years he enjoys his spirit and solitude. One morning he addresses the sun: “You great star, what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine?” He decides he must go down, “to go under” (untergehen), to give away his wisdom “like the bee that has gathered too much honey”. On the way he meets an old saint in the forest, who has not heard “that God is dead”. Zarathustra says to himself: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!”

The tightrope walker

In the nearest town, in the market-place, a crowd is waiting for a tightrope walker. Zarathustra preaches: “I teach you the overman (Übermensch). Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the animals rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.” The crowd laughs, not understanding, and calls for the tightrope walker. Zarathustra then shows them “the last man”.

The last man

The last man (der letzte Mensch) is the opposite ideal: the creature of comfortable, safe, mediocre contentment. “Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” They avoid the cold, work a little, for work is a form of entertainment; no one wants to rule or obey; they are all equal, and “whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into a madhouse”. “A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.” The crowd, instead of recoiling, shouts: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra… Turn us into these last men!”

The tightrope walker falls and dies; Zarathustra carries the corpse out of town on his back, saying: “You have made danger your calling; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your calling… I shall bury you with my own hands.” The prologue ends with Zarathustra’s companions, an eagle and a serpent.

Part One

The three metamorphoses

The first speech describes how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion a child. The camel kneels to be loaded with the heaviest burdens — “what is difficult?” — and carries them into the desert: the spirit that reveres, takes on the weight of tradition and duty (“Thou shalt”). In the loneliest desert, it becomes a lion, who wants to be master in his own desert, and fights the great dragon whose name is “Thou shalt”, with a scale on every scale, glittering with gold: the lion says “I will” and wins freedom — but cannot yet create new values. Only the child can: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’.” “For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed.”

On the afterworldly

Zarathustra speaks “to the despisers of the body”, the Hinterweltler (“those who believe in a world behind”): the creation of God was the “work and madness of a human being”, a suffering and incapable person’s dream. “The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call ‘spirit’ — a little instrument and toy of your great reason.” There is “more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.” Be faithful to the earth.

On the new idol

“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” Where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous; there the rainbow and the bridges to the overman.

On the flies of the market-place; on chastity; on the friend; on the thousand and one goals

Zarathustra warns that great things stand far from the market-place and fame; that the friend should be “the festival of the earth” and the enemy honoured; that every people has a “table of values”, a tablet of its overcomings, that each people “speaks its own tongue in good and evil”, and that humanity has had no goal — “mankind has no goal yet”. On the way of the creator: “Do you want to go into isolation, my brother? Do you want to seek the way to yourself? Pause a moment and listen to me.” “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new unless you first became ashes?”

On the bestowing virtue

The first part ends with Zarathustra’s farewell to his disciples: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains only a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers: but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.” (This is the epigraph of Ecce Homo.)

Part Two

Zarathustra returns to the mountains, where he is troubled by a dream — a child holding a mirror in which he sees a devil’s grinning face, signalling that his teaching is in danger — and descends again to the Blessed Isles.

Notable speeches: On the Blessed Isles: “God is a conjecture… could you create a god? Then be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the overman.” On the pitying: pity is the greatest danger for a free spirit; “Even gods die of their pity.” On the tarantulas: the “preachers of equality”, who are full of vengeance, “poisonous spiders” whose poison makes the soul “whirl with revenge”. On the famous wise men: the philosophers who serve the people. On self-overcoming: where he says: “Where I found the living, there I found will to power” — life itself, “that which must always overcome itself”. On the sublime men, On the land of culture, On immaculate perception (against the “pure” contemplatives of the moon), On scholars, On poets. On great events: the fire hound and the news that Zarathustra has gone to hell. The soothsayer: “All is empty, all is the same, all has been!” On redemption: the will cannot will backwards — “‘It was’ — that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past.” Redemption is to transform every “it was” into “thus I willed it”.

The part ends with The stillest hour: the “voice without voice” that tells Zarathustra: “You must still become a child and without shame… the pride of youth is still upon you; you have become young late; but whoever wants to become a child must overcome his youth too.” He must go back to his solitude, “for your fruit is ripe but you are not ripe for your fruit.”

Part Three

Zarathustra, alone, crosses the sea to the mainland. The great teaching of the third part is the eternal recurrence.

On the vision and the riddle

On the ship he tells a vision to the sailors: climbing a mountain path with a dwarf (the spirit of gravity) on his shoulders, dripping lead into his ear, he comes to a gateway named “Moment”. Two paths meet there, “contradicting each other”: one stretching back into eternity, the other forward. Zarathustra says: “From this gateway Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? … And this slow spider that creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things — must not all of us have been here before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane — must we not eternally return?” The dwarf says “Time itself is a circle”, and Zarathustra snaps at him for making it too easy. Then he sees a young shepherd, writhing, choking, with a black snake hanging from his mouth; Zarathustra cries out, “Bite! Bite its head off!” — and the shepherd bites, spits the head out, and leaps up “no longer shepherd, no longer human — one transformed, surrounded with light, laughing! Never yet on earth had any man laughed as he laughed!” The vision, Nietzsche suggests, tells of the overcoming of the deepest nausea — the thought that the small man, the last man, recurs eternally.

The Convalescent

In The Convalescent, Zarathustra faces the abysmal thought directly. In a scene of nightmare comedy he calls it up — “Up, abysmal thought, out of my depths! I am your cock and dawn, sleepy worm: up! up! my voice shall yet crow you awake” — and falls “like a dead man” for seven days, until his animals, the eagle and the serpent, nurse him with fruits and herbs. They tell him: “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls for ever. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; the year of being runs on for ever… In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.” Zarathustra tells them, “O you buffoons and barrel organs”: they have turned it into a hurdy-gurdy song. The thought that terrified him was that the small man recurs: “Man’s great nausea — that man’s smallness recurs eternally!” He accepts it as his destiny: “I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent — not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, identical life, in the greatest as in the smallest, to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things.” See Eternal Recurrence.

The other songs

On the spirit of gravity; On old and new tablets (a long speech of thirty sections, about overcoming); The Second Dance Song and The Other Dance Song, in which Zarathustra dances with Life, who calls him “faithless” and says she might be mistaken for “a virtue” — and the Seven Seals (The Yes and Amen Song), a seven-fold hymn of love for Eternity: “Oh, how should I not be ardent for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings, the ring of recurrence? Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity!” Each stanza ends: “For I love you, O Eternity!”

Part Four

Added in 1885 and originally circulated only to friends, Part Four is a tragicomic coda. Zarathustra, now old, sits at the mouth of his cave, when he hears a cry of distress — “the cry of the higher man”. During the day, he meets a series of “higher men”, who have come to find him: the two kings, who have fled the degenerate world; the conscientious man of the spirit, who has studied the leech’s brain to the last detail and become its slave; the sorcerer (a Wagner parody), whose melancholy performance Zarathustra beats with his stick; the last pope (“retired”), who has lost his job because “God is dead”, saying he served the old God “until his last hour”; the ugliest man, the murderer of God, who killed him because he could not bear his pity; the voluntary beggar (the Buddha-like preacher of the cow’s contentment); and the shadow, the wanderer. Zarathustra, hospitable, takes them to his cave, where they eat, drink and hold The Last Supper — a parody of the Christian meal — with the ass-worship litany: they worship an ass that says “I-A” (Yes). Zarathustra is appalled — then amused. At the Drunken Song, midnight strikes, and the ugliest man declares that for the sake of this one day he has loved earth: “Was that life? Well then! Once more!” — the thought of recurrence, affirmed. Zarathustra sings the Roundelay: “Oh man, take care! What does the deep midnight declare? ‘I was asleep, I was asleep — From a deep dream I woke and swear: The world is deep, Deeper than day had been aware. Deep is its woe; Joy — deeper yet than agony: Woe says: Fade! Go! But all joy wants eternity — Wants deep, deep, deep eternity!’”

The next morning Zarathustra leaves the cave “glowing and strong, like a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains”. A lion roars; a flock of doves surrounds him. He realises that the lion has come — the sign — and the higher men have fled. His last words: “My children are near, my children… Well then, this is my morning, my day begins: rise now, rise, great noon!” Pity for the higher men was his last temptation; he has overcome it.

Key ideas

God is dead

“God is dead!” is announced in the Prologue and elaborated in the “madman” parable in The Gay Science (The Death of God). It is not an atheist’s boast but a diagnosis: belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, and with it the foundation of Western morality, meaning and metaphysics has collapsed. Humanity faces nihilism: the sense that “the highest values devaluate themselves”. Zarathustra’s task is to teach what comes after.

The Übermensch

The overman is not a superman or a biological species, but a human type who has overcome himself — his resentment, his need for comfort, his need for transcendent consolation — and who creates values in fidelity to the earth. “The overman is the meaning of the earth.” The term has been grossly misread (by the Nazis, among others, who appropriated it, helped by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who edited and falsified his papers). See The Übermensch.

The last man

The last man is the overman’s counter-image: the man who has “invented happiness”, seeks comfort and security above all, and has lost the capacity to despise himself or to create. Nietzsche’s warning — written in the 1880s — has been read as a prophecy of consumer society and the welfare state.

Will to power

Zarathustra teaches that “wherever I found the living, there I found will to power”, the drive of life to expand, overcome and create. It is not a lust for domination but the creative self-overcoming of all life. See Will to Power.

Eternal recurrence

The thought that everything recurs eternally is Zarathustra’s “most abysmal thought”. It works as a test: if you could will that your life should be repeated infinitely, you have affirmed it. See Eternal Recurrence.

Fidelity to the earth

Against the “afterworldly” who despise the body and invent heaven, Zarathustra urges: “Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue.” Nietzsche insists on the body, the senses and this world as the whole of reality.

Against pity and resentment

Zarathustra criticises the “preachers of equality” and the “tarantulas” who poison the soul with revenge (ressentiment), and warns against pity as the temptation that nearly destroys him (Master and Slave Morality).

Reception and interpretation

The book sold poorly; Part Four was initially printed in only forty copies; Nietzsche sent seven. It found its public after his collapse in 1889, becoming the Bible of the German youth movement — soldiers in the First World War carried 150,000 copies in knapsacks — and then, disastrously, a source of Nazi appropriation, although Nietzsche despised nationalism and anti-Semitism. Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), whose opening fanfare appears in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony (with its “O Mensch! Gib Acht!” setting) are its musical offspring. In philosophy, Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche (1936–46), Karl Jaspers, Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, Walter Kaufmann’s translation and interpretation, Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature, and Paul de Man shaped the modern reading. Writers from Thomas Mann (Doctor Faustus), Hermann Hesse, Rilke, Yeats, Gide, Camus and Sartre, to Kazantzakis and Ayn Rand responded to it. Critics (Russell, Santayana) found it rhetorical, aristocratic and cruel; admirers see it as the greatest philosophical-literary work of the nineteenth century.

Zarathustra in conversation

Four lines will serve. On self-overcoming: “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.” On comfort: the last man who “has invented happiness — and blinks”. On change: the camel, the lion and the child. On life: “Was that life? Well then! Once more!”