Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

First published:Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883-1885 (English translation, 1896)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work

Friedrich Nietzsche was ignored and misunderstood during his lifetime, but his ideas went on to influence a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and literature, and eventually he came to be considered one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Trained as a classical Greek scholar, Nietzsche was a prodigy in his field, appointed associate professor at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four. Because he suffered from poor health, particularly problems with his vision and his digestion, Nietzsche resigned his post in 1879 and turned his full attention to writing. He used his training in ancient Greek culture to critique traditional philosophy, and his insights into the hidden motives behind the formation of Western morality and ethics formed the basis for much twentieth century thought. Although he never completed an organized summary of his ideas, his revolutionary approach ensured him an important place in intellectual history.

In his early work, Nietzsche probed psychological phenomena and began to describe the function of the unconscious (some of this work foreshadowed his nervous breakdown in 1889, from which he never fully recovered). He analyzed humanity’s hidden drives, the human desire to dominate and to be dominated—drives that he would later describe as “the will to power” and that led to the famous skeptical doctrine in which he proclaimed the death of God—as forming the core of Christian virtue.

Nietzsche’s thought is best represented by his major work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. A long parable, full of sentimentality and satire, the work exhorts readers to abandon their conditioning and embrace a new mode of living: that of the Übermensch, or Overman, a being free from the constraints of society in general and of Christianity in particular. For Nietzsche, the Overman possessed a reason or a will that enabled him to master his passions and thus freed him to discover “truth,” or what Nietzsche called “the eternal recurrence of the same.”

Nietzsche declared that he chose the name Zarathustra because he was inspired by the Persian prophet, who had created the first moral vision of the world and transposed morality into the metaphysical realm so that, far from being a simple code of conduct, morality became an end in itself as both a force and a cause shaping the human universe. Consequently, Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra begins with the acknowledgment of its relevance to human life. As Zarathustra abandons his mountain solitude, he proclaims that he is going to travel in the world “once again to be a man.” Using metaphor, Nietzsche presents the mountain as the solitude of the soul, while the lowlands symbolize the plain inhabited by ordinary human beings. A similar symbolic contrast occurs with the appearance of Zarathustra’s pagan attendants, or animal familiars, the serpent and the eagle. The serpent is bound to the earth, while the eagle rules the sky, and Zarathustra, the bridge between the two, is the future healer of humanity’s split personality, tending on one hand toward the body and on the other toward the spirit.

Zarathustra contemplates the mystery of the sun, which sets and is reborn the next morning as a new and burning god. Nietzsche thus opens his book with metaphors for rebirth and resurrection, the theme underlying the entire work. After the stultifying effect of centuries of Christianity and of the kind of dogmatic moral beliefs that had led to the Crusades and the Inquisition, Nietzsche wonders how humanity can be reborn.

Nietzsche’s answer is to send his prophet Zarathustra, murderer of God, on a journey where he will preach the enlightened doctrine of daylight as a metaphor for consciousness and the limitations of human perception: “the drunken happiness of dying at midnight, that sings: the world is deep, deeper than day had been aware.” When humanity becomes “aware,” it is faced with a contradiction: How can those who have denied God find the strength to become creators themselves?

Nietzsche discusses humanity’s dilemma in being forced to learn to live without God’s comfort and in coming to terms with the numbing indifference of the cosmos without being paralyzed by it. To avoid destruction, members of humanity must become the Übermensch, capable of embracing misery with enthusiasm, even delight.

Nietzsche explores ways to reach this inner peace, which requires both perfect self-knowledge and self-transcendence. For Nietzsche, the Overman is the symbol of the robust health he himself lacked. The Overman is the individual who has learned to live without belief and without truth, yet who superhumanly accepts life as it comes to him—this individual accepts the “eternal recurrence of the same.” Indeed, to embrace the prospect of repeating one’s life, exactly as it occurs, day by day, complete with all of its pain and disappointment, is for Nietzsche the highest achievement and the greatest display of courage. The individual’s personal goal, according to Nietzsche, ought to be the cultivation of “perfect moments.”

Having attained this existence—which is to be enjoyed if repeated endlessly—the Overman despises his former self, that weak creature who had desired that not only law and order but also his own personal morality be imposed from outside himself. Through this concept of the Overman, Nietzsche becomes the great philosophical liberator who anticipates the decline of morality in civilization by sending forth the Overman as a secular savior. Nietzsche saw that Christianity was losing its hold on the world, for with the death of God (a phenomenon Nietzsche described without necessarily welcoming it), humanity found itself exposed to itself, its own most dangerous predator. God the protector was gone, killed by science. Therefore, lest humanity destroy itself in its infancy, Nietzsche created the Overman as the model of what humanity could become if people showed courage and lived every moment as if that moment were to be repeated for all eternity.

With God dead, assassinated by skepticism and rationality, Nietzsche acknowledges that humanity, deprived of this potent ally, will, metaphysically speaking, shrink. Deprived of God and therefore of significance, human beings fall from grace and becomes no more than animals. Yet Nietzsche does not accept humanity’s decline in status simply because people lack the superstition to regard themselves as divine creations. Instead, Nietzsche counters the “shrinkage” that humanity experiences when deprived of a god by substituting the Overman, an ideal created by human beings for human beings, a thoroughly human creation that acknowledges itself as human and not divine in its origin.

The Overman, the apotheosis of the human and the apex of becoming, thus represents a kind of salvation. The eternal recurrence of salvation in turn guarantees his reappearance, and thus a kind of secular afterlife. Nietzsche sees God, then, as the ultimate form of human self-aggrandizement, as a comforting delusion, and yet he acknowledges humanity’s need for something beyond itself, humanity’s fundamental yearning, which, if it is not to be exploited by organized religion or unchecked nationalism, must be given an outlet. Nietzsche considers the ideal Overman humanity’s only true savior.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Overman has conquered his cloying need for God’s approval. Like a child, he has had to learn to take care of himself, an important skill when the school bully appears. Even more important, the Overman has traveled beyond his lust for meaning outside himself, finding sufficient glory in what remains behind. Nietzsche writes, “Those who cannot bear the sentence, 'There is no salvation,' ought to perish!” Nietzsche argues that the old, simple, God-fearing people ought to fade into extinction like some ill-adapted hominid ancestor, making way for the Übermensch, bearer of the torchlight of knowledge and freedom.

Nietzsche addresses and explores the problems and pain at the heart of nineteenth and twentieth century consciousness. Raised on illusion, on exorbitant expectations and wild dreams, the mind loves life but can find no meaning in it. It despairs of ever finding fundamental purpose or of discovering the emotional riches promised in childhood. Nietzsche dares his readers to approach the abyss with him. Indeed, he subtitles Thus Spake Zarathustra “a book for all and none,” which is a warning that only the stout of heart should approach the edge with him, for to confront the implications of the absence of God is to be utterly alone. Nietzsche writes of the end of the journey toward truth, of “the Don Juan of the Mind”—the lover of all things, cursed with the inability to enjoy them—and of the final bleak candor with which the honest or “authentic” individual views existence: “And in the very end he craves for Hell . . . perhaps it too will disappoint. . . . And if so, he will have to stand transfixed through all eternity, nailed to disillusion, having himself become the Guest of Stone, longing for a last supper of knowledge that he will never receive.”

Nietzsche’s importance lies precisely in the fact that he was finally not pessimistic. Squinting through the mist of an intellectual dark age, he sparked a light and had the courage to focus on what he saw as the truth, without turning away or softening his description. Nietzsche’s tool for philosophizing, as he said himself, was a hammer. Accordingly, it was his driving ambition to crack open the truth, even at great personal sacrifice: “Oh grant madness, you heavenly powers! . . . I am consumed by doubts, for I have killed the Law. . . . If I am not more than the Law, then I am the most abject of all men.” That he survived as long as he did, and even managed to relate the tale of his extraordinary journey off the mountaintop, is Zarathustra’s, and Nietzsche’s, final triumph.

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