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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Friedrich Nietzsche presents a profound philosophical narrative that intertwines poetry, prose, and prophetic discourse. The book follows the journey of Zarathustra, a sage who descends from the mountains to impart his wisdom on humanity. Through a series of parables and aphorisms, Nietzsche explores themes of the √úbermensch (Overman), the eternal recurrence, and the reevaluation of morality. The work is stylistically innovative, characterized by its lyrical language and rhetorical flourishes, challenging traditional philosophical conventions and reflecting the tumultuous intellectual landscape of the late 19th century. Nietzsche'Äôs text not only serves as a philosophical treatise but also as a critique of contemporary cultural and religious values, thereby establishing itself as a cornerstone of existential and modernist thought. Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher known for his radical ideas and critique of religion, was deeply influenced by existential concerns and the perceived moral decay of society. His personal struggles with health and his fascination with ancient philosophical texts shaped his ideological framework. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" emerged from Nietzsche'Äôs belief in the necessity of a new framework for understanding human existence, one that transcended conventional Christian morality and ventured into self-creation and individualism. This seminal work is highly recommended for readers interested in philosophy, literature, and the human condition. Nietzsche'Äôs eloquent prose and unsettling ideas provoke critical reflection and engage readers in a dialogue about the nature of existence and the potential for personal transformation. Its impact on 20th-century thought makes it an essential read for anyone seeking to understand contemporary existential philosophy.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Table of Contents
Introduction
A solitary sage descends from his mountain to test his audacious call for self-overcoming against the frailties of a restless world. That dramatic gesture, at once mythical and intimate, frames Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a living experiment in thought. The book stages an encounter between visionary speech and the stubborn inertia of habit, probing how new values might be born within and against the crowd. Rather than offering a system, it enacts a journey whose trials are intellectual, moral, and stylistic. The reader is invited to witness a mind daring to remake evaluation itself, and to measure that daring in the arena of human response.
This work is a classic because it reshaped the boundary between philosophy and literature, fusing parable, hymn, satire, and dialogue into a singular voice. Its influence radiated across modernism, feeding a century of writers and thinkers drawn to its urgency and lyric force. Enduring themes of freedom, creativity, and responsibility continue to provoke debate, while its images of ascent, descent, and dance retain visceral power. The book’s capacity to unsettle and energize, to resist simplification, and to demand rereading situates it among the seminal creations of the nineteenth century. It altered not only what could be said, but the very forms through which saying might transform.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the early 1880s, amid accelerating scientific progress and growing skepticism toward inherited certainties in Europe. Composed as a poetic-philosophical narrative rather than an academic treatise, it presents the wanderings and teachings of Zarathustra, a figure who reflects on human transformation and the creation of values. Nietzsche’s purpose was not to codify doctrine but to craft a form equal to his themes: a rhetoric capable of awakening, not just convincing. By choosing a prophetic narrator and a series of emblematic encounters, he pursued a style that could carry thought beyond argument, into image, rhythm, and dramatized experience.
The book appeared in four parts between 1883 and 1885, with the final part initially issued in a limited printing. This distinctive publication history mirrors the text’s refusal of conventional closure and its invitation to return, circle, and begin again. Organized as speeches, scenes, and parables, its architecture encourages readers to move both forward and inward, gathering motifs that echo across chapters. While self-contained episodes provide entry points, the parts cohere as a meditation on becoming. The work’s self-description as a message meant both for everyone and for no one underscores Nietzsche’s paradoxical ambition: to address the common human condition while demanding uncommon attentiveness.
The premise is simple yet inexhaustible: Zarathustra leaves solitude to share what he has learned, meets disciples and skeptics, and wrestles with the difficulty of communicating radical insight. The narrative follows his travels, teachings, and reversals, using emblematic figures and animals, festivals and laments, to stage philosophical problems as lived scenes. The book’s movement alternates between proclamation and retreat, public encounter and renewed solitude, asking what it means to embody a teaching rather than merely pronounce it. Without relying on plot twists, it sustains momentum through recurring images and intensifying challenges, turning the act of reading into companionship with a changing, often embattled, voice.
At its core, the book explores self-overcoming, the forging of values without recourse to inherited guarantees, and the courage to affirm life in its complexity. It introduces and elaborates ideas that have become central to Nietzsche’s legacy, including the call to create beyond conformity, the discipline of joyful rigor, and the test of recurrence as a measure of assent. The figure of the overhuman serves less as a fixed ideal than as a provocation to growth. The work insists that transformation demands risk, play, and patience, and that moral renewal is inseparable from stylistic renewal, the remaking of the very voices through which we judge and aspire.
Stylistically, Thus Spoke Zarathustra draws on the cadences of scripture, the wit of satire, and the crystalline concentration of lyric poetry. Its language is vivid and ceremonious, then suddenly ironic or tender, embodying the many masks that thinking must learn to wear. Aphoristic flashes alternate with extended chants; images return with altered meaning, like refrains in a symphony. This musical structure shapes argument as experience, enlisting readers in rhythms of ascent, fall, and dance. The result is a text that works as performance as much as proposition, demanding that interpretation be active, responsive, and willing to inhabit the tensions it dramatizes.
The book’s impact extends beyond philosophy into literature and the arts. Novelists such as Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann engaged deeply with its themes of inner transformation and cultural critique. Poets including Rainer Maria Rilke and W. B. Yeats drew on its mythic charge and visionary voice. Its influence also reached music: Richard Strauss’s tone poem bearing the same title testifies to the work’s resonance across forms. In each case, artists found not a set of conclusions but a generative pressure on form and feeling, a permission to experiment with hybrid genres and prophetic tones capable of addressing modernity’s fractures and possibilities.
The text has likewise shaped twentieth-century thought, provoking responses from figures aligned with existentialism and phenomenology, and prompting sustained philosophical commentary. Its challenge to moral complacency, critique of herd conformity, and insistence on responsibility before oneself reverberated in debates about freedom and authenticity. The book’s daring, however, brought risks of misreading. Its masks, ironies, and hyperboles reward careful, context-sensitive interpretation, reminding readers that a dramatic persona is not a transparent authorial voice. This complexity partly explains its longevity: it resists reduction, continually reopening questions that subsequent epochs, with their own anxieties, find newly pressing.
As a reading experience, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is both demanding and hospitable. It welcomes readers through unforgettable images and clear narrative motifs, yet it asks for active collaboration, patience with ambiguity, and sensitivity to tone. The central figure models a pedagogy that refuses to coerce, preferring example, invitation, and withdrawal. Approached as a mythopoetic experiment rather than a manual, the book yields layers: a critique of inherited values, a drama of teaching, and a poetics of creation. It rewards rereading, as motifs sharpen and reconfigure, and as the reader’s own questions meet the text’s restless, luminous provocations.
For contemporary audiences, its relevance lies in a world still negotiating crises of meaning, polarized discourse, and the enticements of conformity. Nietzsche’s work presses for the cultivation of inner strength, generosity, and style as ethical acts, urging readers to craft lives that can bear affirmation. It asks how communities might be formed without stifling difference, and how individuals might change without collapsing into isolation. Its call is not to abandon tradition wholesale, but to engage traditions as materials for creative responsibility. In an era of accelerated change, the book offers a demanding hope: that renewal can be learned, staged, and sustained.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra endures as a work of startling invention: a philosophical drama, a poetic sermon, and a manifesto for self-transformation. Its images and rhythms carry ideas into felt experience, its protagonist frames the risks and rewards of teaching and learning, and its questions reach beyond their century. By uniting critique with affirmation, solitude with engagement, and severity with laughter, it models a form of thinking equal to the complexity of life. That balance, achieved through daring language and structural audacity, secures its classic status and continuing appeal, inviting each new reader to test, refine, and renew the truths they can live.
Synopsis
Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents a philosophical narrative in which Zarathustra, a solitary sage, descends from a decade of contemplation to share teachings with humanity. The work unfolds in a prologue and four parts, combining parables, speeches, poems, and encounters. Its central ideas include the overcoming of conventional morals, the call to create new values, and the figure of the Übermensch as a future ideal. The book’s tone is prophetic and aphoristic, framing philosophical claims as dramatic episodes. Throughout, Zarathustra’s movement between solitude and engagement structures the development of themes about self-transformation, affirmation of life, and the revaluation of inherited beliefs.
In the prologue, Zarathustra leaves his mountain retreat, meets a pious hermit, and proceeds to a marketplace to address a crowd. He introduces the Übermensch as a goal for humanity and contrasts it with the “last man,” symbolizing complacency and comfort. The audience rejects his challenge, preferring safety over transformation. A tightrope walker’s fall during a performance becomes an emblematic event, prompting Zarathustra to act with solemn care and to reconsider his audience. Concluding that the masses are unreceptive, he resolves to seek companions who might share and carry forward the task of value-creation rather than persuade the crowd.
Part I presents foundational discourses outlining Zarathustra’s path. He describes the spirit’s three metamorphoses—from burden-bearing to negation to childlike creativity—establishing a pattern of inner transformation. He warns against resentment, idle moralizing, and escapism into otherworldly hopes. Emphasizing earthly life and bodily existence, he critiques the lure of the marketplace, the noise of public opinion, and the conformity of the state, called the “new idol.” Zarathustra urges courage, laughter, and self-discipline, presenting ideal traits of a creator who fashions values from strength. He gathers a small circle of listeners, then cautions them to follow themselves rather than a leader.
Zarathustra’s teachings continue with reflections on friendship, love, and solitude. He distinguishes love of neighbor from devotion to distant goals, encouraging bonds that strengthen rather than dilute the self. He speaks about chastity, marriage, and the challenge of forming relationships that serve growth. Poetry, song, and dance punctuate these teachings, expressing joy alongside severity. Zarathustra repeatedly returns to seclusion, accompanied by symbolic animals, to renew his insight. This alternation between proclamation and retreat reveals a rhythm central to the book: clarity arises in solitude and is tested in encounters with others. The stage is set for deeper doctrines about time, recurrence, and self-overcoming.
Part II expands the critique of prevailing virtues and exposes the dynamics of revenge and envy in moral systems. Zarathustra addresses zealots of equality and punishment, whom he calls tarantulas, linking their fervor to resentment rather than justice. He contrasts reactive morality with creative strength, arguing for a virtue that gives rather than avenges. He examines sages, scholars, and poets, questioning their attachments to reputation, rationalization, or comforting illusions. He praises lightness, play, and dancing as signs of a free spirit that affirms life. The emphasis remains on overcoming herd opinions and preparing the ground for a teaching that demands personal resolve and endurance.
The narrative introduces pivotal visions that mark a turning point. Zarathustra confronts a riddle about time at a symbolic gateway, where the notion of the “moment” suggests circularity rather than linear progress. He falls into a grave introspection, described as an illness, and emerges with a decisive doctrine summarized as the affirmation of recurrence. This teaching, presented through parable and animal voices, challenges readers to consider whether they could will the repetition of all moments. The episode functions as a test of strength and joy. After convalescence, Zarathustra’s mission gains urgency, and his focus shifts to communicating a more exacting, affirmative wisdom.
Part III consolidates Zarathustra’s stance through new “tablets,” or concise declarations, that renounce outdated commandments and celebrate becoming. He articulates a path of self-overcoming, replacing reactive guilt with active creation. The virtues he praises are those that risk, laugh, and waste themselves in generosity. The section concludes with hymns to affirmation, presenting a seal of consent to life’s flux and contingency. These pronouncements do not form a system but a set of provocations aimed at freeing the reader from inherited norms. With his vision clarified, Zarathustra prepares for a final engagement with humanity, expecting a sign that it is time to descend again.
Part IV gathers figures whom the text calls “higher men,” representatives of advanced yet incomplete striving: rulers, religious officials, scholars, artists, and ascetics. They converge at Zarathustra’s cave, seeking guidance and rest. Their dialogues expose limits—lingering piety, vanity, fatigue, or fear of creation—revealing proximity to, but distinction from, the ideal Zarathustra proclaims. A satirical ritual among them dramatizes the persistence of old reverences in new forms. Zarathustra offers hospitality without endorsement, directing them toward further self-overcoming. He maintains that reverence for life requires rejecting herd consolations, even in refined guises, and insists that the future demands creators rather than merely elevated followers.
The book concludes with signs and scenes that indicate renewal and readiness. A storm passes; dawn approaches; Zarathustra perceives that his hour to descend has come. He leaves the gathering, reaffirming his goal to call forth creators of new values who can bear the heaviest thought with joy. The narrative’s central message is an earthly affirmation: after the decline of old certainties, life must be embraced as worthy of repeated willing, and strength must express itself as creative generosity. Thus Spoke Zarathustra closes by sending its protagonist back among humans, entrusting the task of self-overcoming and value-creation to those prepared to undertake it.
Historical Context
Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents a deliberately indeterminate setting that fuses mythic landscapes with recognizable features of late nineteenth-century Europe. Its prophet descends from a mountain cave to the marketplace, wanders among coastal towns, and preaches in communal gatherings that resemble modern civic spaces. The book’s imagined time is contemporaneous with industrial modernity: crowds, fairgrounds, public squares, and the rhetoric of progress mirror the social atmospheres of the 1870s and 1880s. While the narrative voice borrows archaic cadences, its concerns—mass politics, the authority of science, the decline of religious certainty—belong to the rapidly changing societies of the German Empire and its neighboring states after 1871.
The work’s scenic textures draw from the Alps and the Mediterranean. Nietzsche composed major portions in Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, Switzerland (notably summer 1881 and 1883), and in Italian locales such as Rapallo, near Genoa, in winter 1882–1883. These environments—high, rarefied mountain air and bright southern coasts—informed the book’s recurring images of altitude, sunlight, sea, and solitude. Publication unfolded in parts: Part I appeared in 1883, Part II later that year, Part III in 1884, and Part IV was printed privately in 1885 in a very small run. The narrative’s timeless preacher thus stands unmistakably amidst Europe’s modernizing geography and the author’s transalpine itineraries.
The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles on 18 January 1871 transformed Central Europe. Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck, along with German allies, defeated the Second French Empire; pivotal engagements included Wörth (6 August 1870), Gravelotte–St. Privat (18 August), and Sedan (1 September), where Napoleon III was captured. The subsequent siege of Paris ended in January 1871, and the Treaty of Frankfurt (10 May 1871) ceded Alsace and parts of Lorraine to the new Reich, fueling French revanchism and German triumphalism. Universal conscription, rail mobilization, and Krupp artillery symbolized an era of bureaucratized power and technological warfare. Nietzsche served briefly as a medical orderly in 1870 with the Prussian forces, contracted dysentery and diphtheria near the front, and saw firsthand the physical and moral costs of organized conflict. The empire’s birth consolidated a militarized, administrative society under Emperor Wilhelm I and Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, while exposing the spiritual vacuum of a nation defining itself through victory, discipline, and material success. Thus Spoke Zarathustra mirrors this watershed by turning from external conquest to inner overcoming: its stages, parables, and severe training answer an age mesmerized by army, nation, and machine. The book’s contempt for herd enthusiasms and its caricature of the marketplace echo the mass rallies and patriotic festivals of the early Reich. By transfiguring contemporary power into metaphors of self-mastery, it critiques the very foundations of post-1871 German public life and offers a counter-model to the ecstatic national consolidation that followed Sedan and Versailles.
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (circa 1871–1878) pitted the new Reich against the Roman Catholic Church. The Jesuits were expelled in 1872; Prussia’s May Laws of 1873, crafted by Minister Adalbert Falk, placed clergy education and appointments under state oversight; bishops were fined or imprisoned when they resisted. By the late 1870s, Bismarck eased the conflict to secure Catholic support against socialism. The campaign’s clash of state rationalization with religious authority dramatized secular modernity’s advance. Zarathustra’s proclamation of the death of God and his critique of priestly morality resonate with this confrontation, transposing institutional battles into an existential struggle over the sources of value in a secular age.
Rapid industrialization and urbanization reshaped Germany and Europe between 1850 and 1900. The Ruhr and Saxon industrial districts expanded with coal, steel, and chemicals (BASF founded 1865; Siemens grew rapidly after mid-century). Railways knit territories; Berlin’s population surged, and factory labor regimes disciplined time and body. New working-class quarters, department stores, and electrified boulevards redefined collective life. With clocks, schedules, and machines, individuals were synchronized to impersonal systems. Zarathustra’s market scenes and depictions of the last men capture the exhaustion and complacency bred by standardized comforts. The book refracts the industrial city’s crowd psychology and consumer routines into its critique of conformity and stunted aspiration.
The rise of socialist politics culminated in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), formed at Gotha in 1875 by merging Lassalle’s ADAV (1863) and the SDAP (1869). After assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878, Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) banned organizations and publications, while he co-opted demands with pioneering social insurance: health (1883), accident (1884), and old-age (1889). Internationally, socialist congresses linked labor movements from London to Zurich. Zarathustra targets egalitarian moralities that sanctify resentment and security, warning that a politics promising universal comfort may produce spiritual diminishment. Its fable of self-overcoming offers a counter to programmatic levelling without endorsing entrenched privilege.
The Paris Commune (18 March–28 May 1871) followed France’s defeat and the siege of Paris. National Guardsmen seized the city; the Commune instituted measures including separation of Church and State, workers’ rights experiments, and radical municipal governance. The Versailles army crushed it during the Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week) in May, with perhaps 20,000 killed and tens of thousands arrested or deported. Across Europe, elites feared the crowd’s sovereignty and barricade politics, while radicals cherished the episode as a model. Zarathustra’s ambivalence toward mass redemption reflects this horizon: it rejects both nostalgia and revolutionary intoxication, probing how collective passions eclipse individual creation of values.
Anti-Semitic agitation surged in Central Europe from the late 1870s. In Berlin, the Antisemitismusstreit and a petition campaign (1879–1881) demanded restrictions on Jews; Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker founded the Christian Social Workers’ Party (1878) with anti-Jewish planks; in Austria, Georg von Schönerer and later Vienna’s mayor Karl Lueger (from 1897) normalized such politics. Nietzsche repudiated anti-Semitism and broke with figures, including his own sister’s milieu; Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her husband Bernhard Förster pursued a racist colony in Paraguay (Nueva Germania, 1886). Zarathustra’s scorn for national and moral crusaders rebukes the demagogic style that accompanied racialist politics, envisioning a Europe beyond exclusionary identities.
Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival opened on 13 August 1876, consecrating a cultural-national shrine funded partly by King Ludwig II. Wagner’s writings, including the notorious Judaism in Music (1869 expanded edition), aligned parts of his circle with völkisch currents. Nietzsche, once devoted, recoiled from Bayreuth’s pomp and from Parsifal (1882), with its revived Christian motifs. He came to see Wagnerism as seductive mass religion masquerading as art. Zarathustra parodies charismatic cults and prophetic grandstanding, warning that aesthetic ecstasy can conceal submission to herd values. By dramatizing the danger of idol-making, the book reorients longing from communal rapture toward solitary, disciplined creation.
Scientific naturalism and Darwinism transformed public discourse. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), popularized in Germany by Ernst Haeckel, joined the materialism debates of the 1850s (Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, 1855). Physics codified energy conservation (Hermann von Helmholtz, 1847) and thermodynamics (Rudolf Clausius, 1850s). These currents eroded teleological worldviews. Zarathustra does not preach Darwinian adaptation; instead, it challenges both mechanistic reduction and metaphysical consolation by proposing the overhuman as a task. Its thought of eternal recurrence radicalizes a non-teleological cosmos, forcing a revaluation of meaning without recourse to providence or progressive necessity.
Higher biblical criticism destabilized traditional faith decades before the 1880s. David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835) and The Old and the New Faith (1872), along with Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) and Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863), recast scripture as human product. Nietzsche attacked Strauss in 1873 in an Untimely Meditation, accusing him of complacent unbelief. Zarathustra’s announcement that God is dead—first dramatized by the madman in The Gay Science (1882)—reverberates in this critical climate. The book journeys beyond both dogma and shallow positivism, staging the cultural aftermath of a Europe where theological authority had lost intellectual legitimacy.
Italian unification unfolded between 1859 and 1870 under figures such as Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel II, culminating in the capture of Rome on 20 September 1870 and the end of the Papal States. The new kingdom pursued anticlerical reforms and modernization, while coastal Ligurian towns like Genoa and Rapallo anchored a Mediterranean political and commercial sphere. Nietzsche wintered in Rapallo (1882–1883) and returned repeatedly to Italy, contrasting southern brightness with northern heaviness. Zarathustra’s sun-suffused metaphors and seaward vistas echo this post-Risorgimento geography, adopting Italy as a stage for renewal outside the nationalist solemnity and Protestant moralism of the German north.
European imperialism intensified with the Berlin Conference (November 1884–February 1885), convened by Bismarck to regulate African colonization and commerce. Germany proclaimed protectorates in Togoland and Kamerun (1884), German South West Africa (1884), and German East Africa (1885), joining Britain, France, and Belgium in partitioning the continent. Empire promised markets and prestige, while entrenching violence and racial hierarchies. Zarathustra offers no program of colonial dominion; it turns away from external expansion to inner rank-ordering of the self. Its language of strength and elevation critiques mediocrity but refuses nationalist or imperial teleology, unsettling the period’s self-justifying narratives of civilizing mission.
The expansion of the mass press and literacy remade politics and opinion. Compulsory schooling in Prussia had long raised literacy, and by the 1870s–1880s German literacy exceeded 80 percent; daily newspapers multiplied, with parties financing organs and Bismarck manipulating outlets through secret funds. Sensational feuilletons, illustrated weeklies, and telegraphed news synchronized publics across regions. Crowd moods became governable yet volatile. Zarathustra’s market sermons, his encounter with the tightrope walker, and his irony toward public acclamation dramatize the age of headlines and applause. The book deflates the authority of public opinion, urging readers to cultivate judgments that resist the excitations of the news cycle.
Conscription and barracks culture defined male citizenship in the Reich. Building on reforms by Albrecht von Roon and the General Staff, universal service created cohorts drilled into punctuality, obedience, and esprit de corps. War anniversaries, monuments, and veterans’ leagues sustained martial identity in peacetime, while officers occupied a privileged social stratum. This regime of discipline extended into schools and factories, linking militarism with administrative modernity. Zarathustra’s pedagogy of self-command rejects cadaver obedience; it demands rigorous training but subordinates drill to self-legislation. The book thus inverts the army’s ideal: not coordinated movement under orders, but solitary ascent toward standards one gives oneself.
As social and political critique, Thus Spoke Zarathustra exposes the period’s intertwined idolatries: nation, progress, comfort, and crowd. It reads the post-1871 order as spiritually exhausted, masking fear with noise, patriotism, and consumption. By dramatizing the last men—risk-averse, equalized, sated—it indicts a society that confuses social insurance and material security with flourishing. Its parables unmask demagogues and culture-gurus who translate anxiety into resentment or ecstatic belonging. Against clerical authority, it refuses moral heteronomy; against scientistic triumph, it refuses reduction. The book forces a confrontation with the vacuum opened by secularization, insisting that new values must be created rather than inherited.
The work also arraigns class and political arrangements that stabilize mediocrity. It challenges a bourgeois ethos that sanctifies comfort while delegating violence to army and colony, and it warns labor movements against exchanging domination for domestication. Zarathustra’s standard is rank achieved through self-overcoming, not birth, wealth, or party credential. In satirizing the marketplace of opinions and the pageantry of the state, it calls for integrity against bribed presses and plebiscitary flattery. Though often misused by later ideologies, the book’s central demand is ethical: to revalue values so that individuals and communities can resist herd cowardice, nationalist intoxication, and the quiet injustices of a managed age.
Author Biography
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and classical philologist whose radically probing reflections on morality, religion, knowledge, and culture helped reshape modern thought. Beginning as a scholar of antiquity and ending as one of philosophy’s most stylistically distinctive voices, he challenged inherited certainties with aphoristic intensity and experimental forms. His critiques of Christian morality, his analyses of nihilism and ressentiment, and his calls for revaluation of values made him a pivotal figure for later movements across the humanities. Though read polemically in many directions, Nietzsche’s work is now approached as a rigorous, historically informed inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human flourishing.
Nietzsche grew up in the Prussian provinces and received a rigorous humanistic education at the renowned boarding school Schulpforta, where he excelled in Greek and Latin. He studied classical philology at the University of Bonn and then at Leipzig, working closely with the eminent philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. During his Leipzig years he encountered Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, whose skepticism about metaphysics and emphasis on artistic insight left a lasting imprint, even as Nietzsche later departed from it. Music and the figures of ancient Greece—especially the pre-Socratics and Greek tragedy—fed his early intellectual imagination, as did an intense, initially admiring engagement with Richard Wagner.
In his mid-twenties Nietzsche accepted a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel, becoming one of the youngest scholars to hold such a post. He relinquished Prussian citizenship and lived in Switzerland, occasionally serving as a volunteer medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War. Persistent health problems plagued him thereafter. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, proposed a bold interpretation of Greek art and culture in terms of the Apollonian and Dionysian, attracting public interest but sharp academic criticism. By the mid-1870s he had grown estranged from Wagner’s cultural program, turning from nationalist-romantic ambitions toward a more independent, experimental philosophical path.
Continuing illness led Nietzsche to resign his Basel chair in the late 1870s and live as an independent writer, moving seasonally among Swiss, Italian, and French locales that suited his fragile health. During this period he wrote Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, works that adopt a fragmentary, aphoristic form and develop his critique of metaphysics, morality, and truthfulness. The famous declaration that “God is dead” appears in The Gay Science, framed as a cultural diagnosis rather than a simple assertion. Nietzsche’s notion of the “free spirit” emerges here: a figure of disciplined skepticism, experimental living, and intellectual probity.
Nietzsche’s mature phase produced Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a poetic-philosophical work exploring themes of self-overcoming, the Übermensch, and eternal recurrence. He followed it with Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, which refine his method of historical-genealogical critique and analyze the formation of values, conscience, and ressentiment. Late writings such as Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and the intensely self-reflective Ecce Homo display a compressed, polemical clarity. While his readership remained small, these books forged the vocabulary and problems—perspectivism, revaluation, critique of herd morality—that would preoccupy much twentieth-century philosophy and cultural analysis.
In early 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse that ended his public life. He produced little thereafter and spent his remaining years incapacitated, cared for first within his family and then overseen by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who managed his literary estate. Through the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, she promoted and edited his writings, shaping their early reception, at times controversially. Political misappropriations followed, including nationalist readings at odds with his frequent criticisms of anti-Semitism and state idolatry. Later scholarship, aided by philologically rigorous editions—notably the Colli–Montinari edition—restored reliable texts and chronology, revising this legacy and clarifying the scope and limits of his thought.
Nietzsche’s legacy spans philosophy, literature, and cultural theory. He is read as a seminal interlocutor for existentialism, phenomenology, genealogy, and post-structuralism, and as a searching critic of moral psychology and modern culture. Scholars continue to debate his views on truth, art, and value creation, as well as the coherence of concepts like the will to power and eternal recurrence. Beyond the academy, his aphoristic style and prophetic rhetoric attract broad audiences, but careful context—drawing on reliable editions and historical framing—remains essential. Today he is approached less as a system builder than as a radical diagnostician of the modern condition and its possibilities.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Introduction by Mrs Forster-Nietzsche
How Zarathustra Came Into Being.
“Zarathustra[1]” is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims. My brother had the figure of Zarathustra in his mind from his very earliest youth: he once told me that even as a child he had dreamt of him. At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his dreams by different names; “but in the end,” he declares in a note on the subject, “I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.”
All Zarathustra’s views, as also his personality, were early conceptions of my brother’s mind. Whoever reads his posthumously published writings for the years 1869-82 with care, will constantly meet with passages suggestive of Zarathustra’s thoughts and doctrines. For instance, the ideal of the Superman[2] is put forth quite clearly in all his writings during the years 1873-75; and in “We Philologists”, the following remarkable observations occur:—
“How can one praise and glorify a nation as a whole?—Even among the Greeks, it was the INDIVIDUALS that counted.”
“The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? The question is one which ought to be studied.
“I am interested only in the relations of a people to the rearing of the individual man, and among the Greeks the conditions were unusually favourable for the development of the individual; not by any means owing to the goodness of the people, but because of the struggles of their evil instincts.
“WITH THE HELP OF FAVOURABLE MEASURES GREAT INDIVIDUALS MIGHT BE REARED WHO WOULD BE BOTH DIFFERENT FROM AND HIGHER THAN THOSE WHO HERETOFORE HAVE OWED THEIR EXISTENCE TO MERE CHANCE. Here we may still be hopeful: in the rearing of exceptional men.”
The notion of rearing the Superman is only a new form of an ideal Nietzsche already had in his youth, that “THE OBJECT OF MANKIND SHOULD LIE IN ITS HIGHEST INDIVIDUALS” (or, as he writes in “Schopenhauer as Educator”: “Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce great men—this and nothing else is its duty.”) But the ideals he most revered in those days are no longer held to be the highest types of men. No, around this future ideal of a coming humanity—the Superman—the poet spread the veil of becoming. Who can tell to what glorious heights man can still ascend? That is why, after having tested the worth of our noblest ideal—that of the Saviour, in the light of the new valuations, the poet cries with passionate emphasis in “Zarathustra”:
“Never yet hath there been a Superman. Naked have I seen both of them, the greatest and the smallest man:—
All-too-similar are they still to each other. Verily even the greatest found I—all-too-human!”—
The phrase “the rearing of the Superman,” has very often been misunderstood. By the word “rearing,” in this case, is meant the act of modifying by means of new and higher values—values which, as laws and guides of conduct and opinion, are now to rule over mankind. In general the doctrine of the Superman can only be understood correctly in conjunction with other ideas of the author’s, such as:—the Order of Rank, the Will to Power, and the Transvaluation of all Values[3]. He assumes that Christianity, as a product of the resentment of the botched and the weak, has put in ban all that is beautiful, strong, proud, and powerful, in fact all the qualities resulting from strength, and that, in consequence, all forces which tend to promote or elevate life have been seriously undermined. Now, however, a new table of valuations must be placed over mankind—namely, that of the strong, mighty, and magnificent man, overflowing with life and elevated to his zenith—the Superman, who is now put before us with overpowering passion as the aim of our life, hope, and will. And just as the old system of valuing, which only extolled the qualities favourable to the weak, the suffering, and the oppressed, has succeeded in producing a weak, suffering, and “modern” race, so this new and reversed system of valuing ought to rear a healthy, strong, lively, and courageous type, which would be a glory to life itself. Stated briefly, the leading principle of this new system of valuing would be: “All that proceeds from power is good, all that springs from weakness is bad.[1q]”
This type must not be regarded as a fanciful figure: it is not a nebulous hope which is to be realised at some indefinitely remote period, thousands of years hence; nor is it a new species (in the Darwinian sense) of which we can know nothing, and which it would therefore be somewhat absurd to strive after. But it is meant to be a possibility which men of the present could realise with all their spiritual and physical energies, provided they adopted the new values.
The author of “Zarathustra” never lost sight of that egregious example of a transvaluation of all values through Christianity, whereby the whole of the deified mode of life and thought of the Greeks, as well as strong Romedom, was almost annihilated or transvalued in a comparatively short time. Could not a rejuvenated Graeco-Roman system of valuing (once it had been refined and made more profound by the schooling which two thousand years of Christianity had provided) effect another such revolution within a calculable period of time, until that glorious type of manhood shall finally appear which is to be our new faith and hope, and in the creation of which Zarathustra exhorts us to participate?
In his private notes on the subject the author uses the expression “Superman” (always in the singular, by-the-bye), as signifying “the most thoroughly well-constituted type,” as opposed to “modern man”; above all, however, he designates Zarathustra himself as an example of the Superman. In “Ecco Homo” he is careful to enlighten us concerning the precursors and prerequisites to the advent of this highest type, in referring to a certain passage in the “Gay Science”:—
“In order to understand this type, we must first be quite clear in regard to the leading physiological condition on which it depends: this condition is what I call GREAT HEALTHINESS. I know not how to express my meaning more plainly or more personally than I have done already in one of the last chapters (Aphorism 382) of the fifth book of the ‘Gaya Scienza’.”
“We, the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand,”—it says there,—“we firstlings of a yet untried future—we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, stronger, sharper, tougher, bolder and merrier than all healthiness hitherto. He whose soul longeth to experience the whole range of hitherto recognised values and desirabilities, and to circumnavigate all the coasts of this ideal ‘Mediterranean Sea’, who, from the adventures of his most personal experience, wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror, and discoverer of the ideal—as likewise how it is with the artist, the saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the devotee, the prophet, and the godly non-conformist of the old style:—requires one thing above all for that purpose, GREAT HEALTHINESS—such healthiness as one not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire, because one unceasingly sacrifices it again, and must sacrifice it!—And now, after having been long on the way in this fashion, we Argonauts of the ideal, more courageous perhaps than prudent, and often enough shipwrecked and brought to grief, nevertheless dangerously healthy, always healthy again,—it would seem as if, in recompense for it all, that we have a still undiscovered country before us, the boundaries of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to all countries and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, the strange, the questionable, the frightful, and the divine, that our curiosity as well as our thirst for possession thereof, have got out of hand—alas! that nothing will now any longer satisfy us!—
“How could we still be content with THE MAN OF THE PRESENT DAY after such outlooks, and with such a craving in our conscience and consciousness? Sad enough; but it is unavoidable that we should look on the worthiest aims and hopes of the man of the present day with ill-concealed amusement, and perhaps should no longer look at them. Another ideal runs on before us, a strange, tempting ideal full of danger, to which we should not like to persuade any one, because we do not so readily acknowledge any one’s RIGHT THERETO: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively (that is to say involuntarily and from overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto been called holy, good, intangible, or divine; to whom the loftiest conception which the people have reasonably made their measure of value, would already practically imply danger, ruin, abasement, or at least relaxation, blindness, or temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of a humanly superhuman welfare and benevolence, which will often enough appear INHUMAN, for example, when put alongside of all past seriousness on earth, and alongside of all past solemnities in bearing, word, tone, look, morality, and pursuit, as their truest involuntary parody—and WITH which, nevertheless, perhaps THE GREAT SERIOUSNESS only commences, when the proper interrogative mark is set up, the fate of the soul changes, the hour-hand moves, and tragedy begins...”
Although the figure of Zarathustra and a large number of the leading thoughts in this work had appeared much earlier in the dreams and writings of the author, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” did not actually come into being until the month of August 1881 in Sils Maria; and it was the idea of the Eternal Recurrence of all things which finally induced my brother to set forth his new views in poetic language. In regard to his first conception of this idea, his autobiographical sketch, “Ecce Homo”, written in the autumn of 1888, contains the following passage:—
“The fundamental idea of my work—namely, the Eternal Recurrence of all things—this highest of all possible formulae of a Yea-saying philosophy, first occurred to me in August 1881. I made a note of the thought on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: 6,000 feet beyond men and time! That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the lake of Silvaplana, and I halted beside a huge, pyramidal and towering rock not far from Surlei. It was then that the thought struck me. Looking back now, I find that exactly two months previous to this inspiration, I had had an omen of its coming in the form of a sudden and decisive alteration in my tastes—more particularly in music. It would even be possible to consider all ‘Zarathustra’ as a musical composition. At all events, a very necessary condition in its production was a renaissance in myself of the art of hearing. In a small mountain resort (Recoaro) near Vicenza, where I spent the spring of 1881, I and my friend and Maestro, Peter Gast—also one who had been born again—discovered that the phoenix music that hovered over us, wore lighter and brighter plumes than it had done theretofore.”
During the month of August 1881 my brother resolved to reveal the teaching of the Eternal Recurrence, in dithyrambic and psalmodic form, through the mouth of Zarathustra. Among the notes of this period, we found a page on which is written the first definite plan of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”:—
“MIDDAY AND ETERNITY.” “GUIDE-POSTS TO A NEW WAY OF LIVING.”
Beneath this is written:—
“Zarathustra born on lake Urmi; left his home in his thirtieth year, went into the province of Aria, and, during ten years of solitude in the mountains, composed the Zend-Avesta.”
“The sun of knowledge stands once more at midday; and the serpent of eternity lies coiled in its light—: It is YOUR time, ye midday brethren.”
In that summer of 1881, my brother, after many years of steadily declining health, began at last to rally, and it is to this first gush of the recovery of his once splendid bodily condition that we owe not only “The Gay Science”, which in its mood may be regarded as a prelude to “Zarathustra”, but also “Zarathustra” itself. Just as he was beginning to recuperate his health, however, an unkind destiny brought him a number of most painful personal experiences. His friends caused him many disappointments, which were the more bitter to him, inasmuch as he regarded friendship as such a sacred institution; and for the first time in his life he realised the whole horror of that loneliness to which, perhaps, all greatness is condemned. But to be forsaken is something very different from deliberately choosing blessed loneliness. How he longed, in those days, for the ideal friend who would thoroughly understand him, to whom he would be able to say all, and whom he imagined he had found at various periods in his life from his earliest youth onwards. Now, however, that the way he had chosen grew ever more perilous and steep, he found nobody who could follow him: he therefore created a perfect friend for himself in the ideal form of a majestic philosopher, and made this creation the preacher of his gospel to the world.
Whether my brother would ever have written “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” according to the first plan sketched in the summer of 1881, if he had not had the disappointments already referred to, is now an idle question; but perhaps where “Zarathustra” is concerned, we may also say with Master Eckhardt: “The fleetest beast to bear you to perfection is suffering.”
My brother writes as follows about the origin of the first part of “Zarathustra”:—“In the winter of 1882-83, I was living on the charming little Gulf of Rapallo, not far from Genoa, and between Chiavari and Cape Porto Fino. My health was not very good; the winter was cold and exceptionally rainy; and the small inn in which I lived was so close to the water that at night my sleep would be disturbed if the sea were high. These circumstances were surely the very reverse of favourable; and yet in spite of it all, and as if in demonstration of my belief that everything decisive comes to life in spite of every obstacle, it was precisely during this winter and in the midst of these unfavourable circumstances that my ‘Zarathustra’ originated. In the morning I used to start out in a southerly direction up the glorious road to Zoagli, which rises aloft through a forest of pines and gives one a view far out into the sea. In the afternoon, as often as my health permitted, I walked round the whole bay from Santa Margherita to beyond Porto Fino. This spot was all the more interesting to me, inasmuch as it was so dearly loved by the Emperor Frederick III. In the autumn of 1886 I chanced to be there again when he was revisiting this small, forgotten world of happiness for the last time. It was on these two roads that all ‘Zarathustra’ came to me, above all Zarathustra himself as a type;—I ought rather to say that it was on these walks that these ideas waylaid me.”
The first part of “Zarathustra” was written in about ten days—that is to say, from the beginning to about the middle of February 1883. “The last lines were written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the ghost in Venice.”
With the exception of the ten days occupied in composing the first part of this book, my brother often referred to this winter as the hardest and sickliest he had ever experienced. He did not, however, mean thereby that his former disorders were troubling him, but that he was suffering from a severe attack of influenza which he had caught in Santa Margherita, and which tormented him for several weeks after his arrival in Genoa. As a matter of fact, however, what he complained of most was his spiritual condition—that indescribable forsakenness—to which he gives such heartrending expression in “Zarathustra”. Even the reception which the first part met with at the hands of friends and acquaintances was extremely disheartening: for almost all those to whom he presented copies of the work misunderstood it. “I found no one ripe for many of my thoughts; the case of ‘Zarathustra’ proves that one can speak with the utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by any one.” My brother was very much discouraged by the feebleness of the response he was given, and as he was striving just then to give up the practice of taking hydrate of chloral—a drug he had begun to take while ill with influenza,—the following spring, spent in Rome, was a somewhat gloomy one for him. He writes about it as follows:—“I spent a melancholy spring in Rome, where I only just managed to live,—and this was no easy matter. This city, which is absolutely unsuited to the poet-author of ‘Zarathustra’, and for the choice of which I was not responsible, made me inordinately miserable. I tried to leave it. I wanted to go to Aquila—the opposite of Rome in every respect, and actually founded in a spirit of enmity towards that city (just as I also shall found a city some day), as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church—a person very closely related to me,—the great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. In the end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza Barberini, after I had exerted myself in vain to find an anti-Christian quarter. I fear that on one occasion, to avoid bad smells as much as possible, I actually inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale whether they could not provide a quiet room for a philosopher. In a chamber high above the Piazza just mentioned, from which one obtained a general view of Rome and could hear the fountains plashing far below, the loneliest of all songs was composed—‘The Night-Song’. About this time I was obsessed by an unspeakably sad melody, the refrain of which I recognised in the words, ‘dead through immortality.’”
We remained somewhat too long in Rome that spring, and what with the effect of the increasing heat and the discouraging circumstances already described, my brother resolved not to write any more, or in any case, not to proceed with “Zarathustra”, although I offered to relieve him of all trouble in connection with the proofs and the publisher. When, however, we returned to Switzerland towards the end of June, and he found himself once more in the familiar and exhilarating air of the mountains, all his joyous creative powers revived, and in a note to me announcing the dispatch of some manuscript, he wrote as follows: “I have engaged a place here for three months: forsooth, I am the greatest fool to allow my courage to be sapped from me by the climate of Italy. Now and again I am troubled by the thought: WHAT NEXT? My ‘future’ is the darkest thing in the world to me, but as there still remains a great deal for me to do, I suppose I ought rather to think of doing this than of my future, and leave the rest to THEE and the gods.”
The second part of “Zarathustra” was written between the 26th of June and the 6th July. “This summer, finding myself once more in the sacred place where the first thought of ‘Zarathustra’ flashed across my mind, I conceived the second part. Ten days sufficed. Neither for the second, the first, nor the third part, have I required a day longer.”
He often used to speak of the ecstatic mood in which he wrote “Zarathustra”; how in his walks over hill and dale the ideas would crowd into his mind, and how he would note them down hastily in a note-book from which he would transcribe them on his return, sometimes working till midnight. He says in a letter to me: “You can have no idea of the vehemence of such composition,” and in “Ecce Homo” (autumn 1888) he describes as follows with passionate enthusiasm the incomparable mood in which he created Zarathustra:—
“—Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one—describes simply the matter of fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly—I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one’s steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;—there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression. It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra’s own phrases, as if all things came unto one, and would fain be similes: ‘Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here fly open unto thee all being’s words and word-cabinets; here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how to talk.’ This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one who could say to me: It is mine also!—”
In the autumn of 1883 my brother left the Engadine for Germany and stayed there a few weeks. In the following winter, after wandering somewhat erratically through Stresa, Genoa, and Spezia, he landed in Nice, where the climate so happily promoted his creative powers that he wrote the third part of “Zarathustra”. “In the winter, beneath the halcyon sky of Nice, which then looked down upon me for the first time in my life, I found the third ‘Zarathustra’—and came to the end of my task; the whole having occupied me scarcely a year. Many hidden corners and heights in the landscapes round about Nice are hallowed to me by unforgettable moments. That decisive chapter entitled ‘Old and New Tables’ was composed in the very difficult ascent from the station to Eza—that wonderful Moorish village in the rocks. My most creative moments were always accompanied by unusual muscular activity. The body is inspired: let us waive the question of the ‘soul.’ I might often have been seen dancing in those days. Without a suggestion of fatigue I could then walk for seven or eight hours on end among the hills. I slept well and laughed well—I was perfectly robust and patient.”
As we have seen, each of the three parts of “Zarathustra” was written, after a more or less short period of preparation, in about ten days. The composition of the fourth part alone was broken by occasional interruptions. The first notes relating to this part were written while he and I were staying together in Zurich in September 1884. In the following November, while staying at Mentone, he began to elaborate these notes, and after a long pause, finished the manuscript at Nice between the end of January and the middle of February 1885. My brother then called this part the fourth and last; but even before, and shortly after it had been privately printed, he wrote to me saying that he still intended writing a fifth and sixth part, and notes relating to these parts are now in my possession. This fourth part (the original MS. of which contains this note: “Only for my friends, not for the public”) is written in a particularly personal spirit, and those few to whom he presented a copy of it, he pledged to the strictest secrecy concerning its contents. He often thought of making this fourth part public also, but doubted whether he would ever be able to do so without considerably altering certain portions of it. At all events he resolved to distribute this manuscript production, of which only forty copies were printed, only among those who had proved themselves worthy of it, and it speaks eloquently of his utter loneliness and need of sympathy in those days, that he had occasion to present only seven copies of his book according to this resolution.
Already at the beginning of this history I hinted at the reasons which led my brother to select a Persian as the incarnation of his ideal of the majestic philosopher. His reasons, however, for choosing Zarathustra of all others to be his mouthpiece, he gives us in the following words:—“People have never asked me, as they should have done, what the name Zarathustra precisely means in my mouth, in the mouth of the first Immoralist; for what distinguishes that philosopher from all others in the past is the very fact that he was exactly the reverse of an immoralist. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things. The translation of morality into the metaphysical, as force, cause, end in itself, was HIS work. But the very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra CREATED the most portentous error, MORALITY, consequently he should also be the first to PERCEIVE that error, not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinker—all history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things:—the more important point is that Zarathustra was more truthful than any other thinker. In his teaching alone do we meet with truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue—i.e.: the reverse of the COWARDICE of the ‘idealist’ who flees from reality. Zarathustra had more courage in his body than any other thinker before or after him. To tell the truth and TO AIM STRAIGHT: that is the first Persian virtue. Am I understood?... The overcoming of morality through itself—through truthfulness, the overcoming of the moralist through his opposite—THROUGH ME—: that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.”
ELIZABETH FORSTER-NIETZSCHE. Nietzsche Archives, Weimar, December 1905.
First Part. Zarathustra’s Discourses
Zarathustra’s Prologue
1.
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,—and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spake thus unto it:
Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!
For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent.
But we awaited thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow and blessed thee for it.
