Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Introduction

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German Also sprach Zarathustra) is Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical poem-novel in four parts, composed between 1883 and 1885. Nietzsche himself regarded it as his most important work; reception has been more divided, with many scholarly readers finding the more discursive Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) more philosophically tractable. But Zarathustra contains the most extended presentation of the central Nietzschean doctrines — the death of God, the übermensch, the will to power, the eternal recurrence — and remains the work through which most readers first encounter Nietzsche.

The form is distinctive. Zarathustra is structured as a philosophical poem-novel in four books, written in a style modeled on biblical prophetic literature (especially the King James version of the Hebrew Bible, which Nietzsche read in Luther's German translation). The protagonist Zarathustra is loosely based on the historical Persian prophet Zoroaster, but the figure is entirely Nietzsche's construction; Zarathustra's teachings are Nietzsche's. The choice of the form is integral to the philosophy: the doctrines presented are not arguments to be evaluated detachedly but proclamations addressed to a reader who is meant to be transformed by encountering them.

Form, length, date, language

The work is in four parts totaling approximately 100,000 words in German. Parts I and II appeared in 1883; Part III in 1884; Part IV was printed privately in 1885 (Nietzsche had only forty copies printed because of the work's poor reception) and was not publicly available until after his death (1892). The original language is German in Nietzsche's distinctive style: rhythmic, aphoristic, archaic in vocabulary, modeled on biblical and prophetic literature.

Why it was written

Zarathustra is Nietzsche's attempt to present the positive doctrines of his mature philosophy in a form adequate to their content. The critical works of the early 1880s (The Gay Science, the later sections of Human, All Too Human) had developed the diagnosis of modern European nihilism; Zarathustra presents what would come after — the figure capable of affirming life including its eternal recurrence, the übermensch as the goal of human striving, the recovery of meaning in a world after the death of God.

The formal choice (a poem-novel rather than a discursive treatise) follows from the philosophical content. Nietzsche regards the inherited European philosophical tradition as substantially complicit in the framework whose collapse he is diagnosing; the doctrines that would point beyond that framework cannot be conveyed in the form of that framework. The biblical-prophetic style is a deliberate appropriation: Nietzsche's Zarathustra speaks in the form of the religious tradition he is most attacking, both as polemic and as positive recovery of what religion had been capable of saying.

Structure and argument

Part I. Zarathustra, after ten years of solitude in the mountains, descends to teach humans the doctrine of the übermensch. He is mocked at a town's marketplace, retreats, finds disciples. The major early speeches: Of the Three Metamorphoses (the soul's development from camel through lion to child); Of the Despisers of the Body (against the inherited dualism); Of the Bestowing Virtue (the highest virtue is the overflowing generosity of one whose own life is rich).

Part II. Zarathustra continues teaching his disciples. The major speeches expand on the critique of inherited morality and religion: Of Self-Overcoming introduces the doctrine of the will to power as the fundamental drive of life; Of Redemption introduces the problem of redemption from the past; Of Great Events addresses political and historical themes.

Part III. Zarathustra travels alone, struggling with the most difficult doctrine — the eternal recurrence. The book contains the most concentrated presentation of the doctrine (Of the Vision and the Riddle; The Convalescent) and Zarathustra's eventual capacity to affirm it.

Part IV. Zarathustra is older. He encounters various higher humans — figures who have partially escaped the conventional framework but have not arrived at the übermensch condition. The closing scenes show Zarathustra refusing pity for the higher humans and going forth into his work.

Key passages

• Prologue §3 — I teach you the übermensch. Man is something that should be overcome.
• Prologue §5 — the warning against the last man, the small, contented, post-historical human who has lost the capacity for striving.
• I, *Of the Three Metamorphoses* — camel, lion, child; the three stages of the soul's development.
• I, *Of the Despisers of the Body* — the rejection of body-soul dualism.
• II, *Of Self-Overcoming* — the will to power as the fundamental drive.
• II, *Of Redemption — the problem of redeeming the past; thus I willed it* as the response.
• III, *Of the Vision and the Riddle — the vision of the gateway Moment*, eternal recurrence.
• III, *The Convalescent* — Zarathustra's struggle with and eventual affirmation of eternal recurrence.
• III, *The Other Dancing Song* — the great lyric on life and eternity.
• IV, *The Drunken Song — the closing affirmation: all joy wants eternity*.

Reception history

Zarathustra's contemporary reception was poor. Parts I, II, and III sold very few copies; Part IV (1885) was printed in only forty copies because Nietzsche could find no readership for it. The breakthrough came after Nietzsche's mental collapse and through the active promotion of his sister Elisabeth; by the early twentieth century, Zarathustra was one of the most-read German books of the period, with millions of copies printed.

The Nazi appropriation of selected Zarathustra themes in the 1930s and 1940s shaped the work's reception for decades. The post-war recovery, especially through Walter Kaufmann's 1954 translation and his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), substantially separated Zarathustra from this appropriation. The subsequent scholarly reception (Robert Pippin, Lawrence Lampert, Stanley Rosen, Laurence Lampert, Paul Loeb) has produced extensive engagement with the work as a serious philosophical text.

Contemporary engagement

The standard German text is in volume 4 of the Colli-Montinari critical edition. The standard English translations are Walter Kaufmann's (1954, widely used), Adrian Del Caro's (Cambridge, 2006), and Graham Parkes's (Oxford World's Classics, 2005). Major recent scholarly work includes Lawrence Lampert's Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1986), Robert Pippin's Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1991; substantial engagement with Zarathustra), Paul Loeb's The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (2010), and Stanley Rosen's The Mask of Enlightenment (1995). Active scholarly debates concern the interpretation of the eternal recurrence (cosmological doctrine or existential test?), the status of the übermensch (literal goal or rhetorical figure?), the relation between Zarathustra and Nietzsche's more discursive works, and the interpretation of Part IV.

Further reading

• Nietzsche — the author
• Existentialism — the tradition substantially shaped by the work
• Amor Fati — the doctrine of life-affirmation
• Heraclitus — the Pre-Socratic whose flux doctrine Nietzsche affirmed
• Belief Systems — the structure his critique of morality exposes
• Virtue — the ethical category his work transforms

Nietzsche's philosophical poem-novel. The most extended presentation of the mature Nietzschean doctrines.