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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Friedrich Nietzsche artfully intertwines philosophy and prose within a lyrical narrative structure. This work embraces the character of Zarathustra, who descends from the mountains to share his profound insights on morality, religion, and the human condition. Nietzsche employs a poetic style that oscillates between parable and aphorism, presenting his ideas on concepts such as the √úbermensch and the eternal recurrence. The book stands as a transformative text that critiques traditional norms, encouraging readers to reclaim individuality and creativity amidst the rigid frameworks of contemporary society. Friedrich Nietzsche, a pivotal figure in the realm of existential and postmodern thought, penned this seminal work during a pivotal period of intellectual upheaval in the late 19th century. His own struggles with health, belief systems, and societal expectations shaped his philosophies, leading him to advocate for the reevaluation of all values. Nietzsche's experiences as a classical philologist and his engagement with various philosophical traditions provided a rich backdrop for the spiritual and existential explorations found in Zarathustra. This book is highly recommended for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Nietzsche's radical philosophy and its enduring impact on modern thought. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" challenges us to confront our limitations and reimagine our potential, making it an essential read for those intrigued by the intersections of philosophy, literature, and the quest for meaning. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA (Modern Classics Series)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A solitary wanderer descends from the mountain to test a vision of human transformation against the noise of the marketplace. With this image, Friedrich Nietzsche opens a work that fuses parable, poetry, and philosophical provocation into a singular voice. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not a system but a drama of thought, a sequence of encounters in which a teacher tries to embody the lessons he proclaims. The book invites readers into a terrain where ideas are lived, not merely argued, where images and rhythms carry arguments as forcefully as abstractions. It begins with a gesture of descent and a challenge to every complacent ascent.
This book is a classic because it altered what philosophy and literature could be. Refusing the sober treatise, Nietzsche forged a prophetic style that expanded the possibilities of modern prose, influencing novelists, poets, and thinkers across the twentieth century. Its phrases and figures became part of the cultural vocabulary, while its experiments in voice and form helped shape modernism and existential reflection. It remains central not only for ideas it introduced or intensified, but for the way it weds thinking to performance. In its wake, the philosopher could be a dramatist, and the page a stage for inner metamorphosis.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the nineteenth century, wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra between 1883 and 1885, publishing it in four parts. The book presents Zarathustra, a visionary wanderer who leaves solitude to address humanity with teachings about self-overcoming and creative renewal. Rather than a linear plot, the text offers a sequence of speeches, parables, and encounters arranged as a pilgrimage of mind and spirit. Nietzsche’s aim is not to furnish dogma but to unsettle inherited certainties and kindle a more affirmative art of living. He crafts a voice that provokes readers to measure themselves by the demands it raises.
Nietzsche’s method here is deliberately poetic and ceremonious. He borrows cadences from scripture and turns them toward a new horizon, blending hymn, satire, and fable. Refrains and symbols recur to create a musical architecture, where ideas are introduced, reversed, and returned to with deepened resonance. Laughter, dance, and masks serve as emblems of freedom and discipline at once. The language seeks to move the body as much as the mind, insisting that conviction must be breathed, walked, and risked. This stylistic daring is not decorative; it is the very medium through which the book’s ethical and existential stakes are felt.
Among the themes that animate the work, self-overcoming stands foremost. Zarathustra calls readers to outgrow habits of resentment and dependence, urging the creation of values grounded in strength and generosity. Nietzsche’s vision of the overhuman names a horizon rather than a finished type, a task set for individuals and cultures facing the exhaustion of old ideals. He entwines this call with a demanding thought of affirmation that asks what it would mean to say yes to life in its entirety. These notions appear not as theses to be filed, but as trials designed to test one’s temperament and courage.
The book’s impact is broad and lasting. Its fusion of mythic tone and philosophical urgency helped shape modernist experimentation and energized discussions about authenticity, freedom, and meaning in an age of disenchanted certainties. Writers across Europe drew on its rhetorical daring and stark images, while philosophers grappled with its challenges to morality and metaphysics. It has been contested, celebrated, misread, and reclaimed, which is the fate of works that remap the terrain. Its influence persists less as a single doctrine than as a provocation that keeps asking what a human being might become when tradition no longer suffices.
Within Nietzsche’s oeuvre, Zarathustra is a turning point. It follows the gaiety and lightning strikes of aphorism in The Gay Science and anticipates the incisive analyses of Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality. Here, however, Nietzsche moves from diagnosis to enactment, staging a persona who speaks and stumbles, learns and forgets. This shift matters: the book does not merely describe transformation; it tries to perform it. The prophetic mask lets Nietzsche explore extremes of affirmation and critique without reducing them to slogans. The result is a work that is at once intimate confession and public festival of thought.
The ethical drama at the center of this book confronts the pull of the herd and the weariness of spirit that follows the collapse of inherited authorities. Nietzsche does not offer a refuge in new commandments. Instead, he presses the burden of creativity upon each reader, challenging us to craft standards robust enough to sustain action and generous enough to avoid cruelty. The tone alternates between severity and play, reminding us that lightness can demand as much discipline as gravity. By dramatizing temptation and resistance, he teaches that the path of strength is inseparable from tenderness, patience, and renewed attention.
Form matters as much as content. Episodes are arranged like stations on a pilgrimage, each teaching refracted through symbols and encounters that resist simple classification. Animals, seasons, and landscapes become interlocutors. The staging invites rereading, since images that appear playful in one context return later with a different weight. Nietzsche’s use of refrain and variation keeps the argument open, preventing closure that would betray the spirit of becoming. This openness helps explain why the book continues to generate debate. It refuses to hand over answers while refusing, equally, the fashionable despair that mistakes irony for wisdom.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is also a challenge to translation and reading habits. Its rhetorical swings from thunderous proclamation to intimate aside make demands on voice and tempo. Many readers find that its cadences reward being spoken aloud, where the rhythm of repetition and reversal can be felt. The book’s hybrid genre asks us to suspend expectations of tidy argument and instead listen for patterns across scenes. It is hospitable to readers from literature, philosophy, and religious studies precisely because it sits at their crossroads. To approach it well is to allow style to educate as much as statement.
For contemporary audiences, the book’s relevance lies in its confrontation with mass culture, fatigued skepticism, and the search for meaning without guaranteed foundations. In a world saturated with information and performance, Zarathustra’s insistence on crafted character and earned joy cuts through noise. The call to create value is not a license for arbitrariness but a demand for responsibility and courage. Nietzsche asks whether we can affirm life without illusion while resisting cynicism. He does so without nostalgia, proposing renewal through cultivation rather than retreat. The questions he poses remain urgent for readers navigating change and fragmentation.
To read Thus Spoke Zarathustra is to encounter themes of self-overcoming, creative valuation, disciplined joy, and the affirmation of life in its complexity. Its enduring power comes from a union of philosophical daring and artistic form, a book that thinks by singing and tests by staging. Written by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s and shaped as a series of parables and addresses, it stands as a classic because it alters our sense of what a book can do. It continues to invite readers to risk transformation, to live ideas rather than collect them, and to meet the future with courage.
Synopsis
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical narrative in which Nietzsche introduces Zarathustra, a solitary sage who speaks in parables and sermons. The book unfolds across a prologue and four parts, blending story, hymns, and aphoristic speeches. It follows Zarathustra as he descends from mountain solitude to address humankind, articulating central themes such as the Overman, self-overcoming, creative value making, and affirmation of life. Rather than a conventional plot, the work presents a sequence of encounters and discourses that build its vision. The tone is prophetic and symbolic, and the progression moves from initial proclamation to deeper doctrine and a culminating readiness for action.
The prologue sets the stage. After ten years in solitude, Zarathustra greets the rising sun and resolves to share his wisdom. In a town marketplace he announces the Overman as a goal beyond current humanity, contrasting it with the last man who seeks comfort and safety. The crowd’s reaction ranges from mockery to misunderstanding. A dramatic incident involving a rope-dancer underscores human risk and aspiration. Zarathustra gains a few listeners but soon recognizes the difficulty of public teaching. These opening scenes establish the voice, introduce key terms, and present the central challenge of communication between a visionary and the crowd.
Part One offers foundational discourses. Zarathustra describes the three metamorphoses of the spirit as camel, lion, and child, outlining a path of burden-bearing, liberation, and creative innocence. He critiques moral teachers and otherworldliness, urging attention to the body and this-worldly meaning. He addresses fear, guilt, and punishment in chapters like the pale criminal, and speaks on friendship, love of the farthest, and the danger of pity. He denounces the state as a new idol and distinguishes individual paths from herd values. Through these speeches, the book sketches a map of obstacles facing those who would create new values.
Continuing in Part One, Zarathustra counsels creators to seek solitude, warns against the noise of the marketplace, and reflects on chastity, marriage, and war and warriors as disciplines of self-mastery. He surveys the thousand and one goals of peoples, arguing that values arise from life’s needs rather than fixed absolutes. He speaks of bestowing virtue, emphasizing giving over demanding. Sensing premature discipleship, he dismisses his followers and returns to his mountain, marking a pattern of alternation between solitude and descent. This close signals the end of introductory teachings and prepares a shift toward more intricate psychological and ethical themes.
Part Two deepens the doctrine. Zarathustra returns with new songs and argues that life is will to power, a striving to expand and reinterpret. He confronts egalitarian revenge in the tarantulas, addresses resentment and punishment in on redemption, and criticizes revered sages and poets for veiling life with abstractions. He distinguishes noble and common forms of valuation and urges self-overcoming rather than leveling. The stillest hour chapter presents an internal summons that speech cannot answer with noise, indicating an impending transformation. These sections move from critique toward a more demanding test of affirmation, preparing the ground for a decisive thought.
Part Three presents that decisive thought through visions and parables. In the vision and the riddle, Zarathustra encounters a gateway called Moment and wrestles with the idea that all things recur, introducing the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In the convalescent, he struggles with the heaviest weight and passes into recovery, signaling acceptance rather than despair. In old and new tablets, he inscribes provisional commandments that reject fear and celebrate creative becoming. The seven seals ends the part with a refrain that affirms the dance of existence. The narrative voice consolidates teaching into a sustained yes to life, despite its burdens.
Part Four turns to encounters with figures called the higher men. Urged by his animal companions, Zarathustra descends again and meets types representing religious, philosophical, artistic, and political traditions: kings, a former pope, a conscientious thinker, a sorcerer, the ugliest man, a voluntary beggar, and his shadow. They gather in his cave, seeking counsel and shelter. Zarathustra offers hospitality while challenging their lingering asceticism, shame, and dependence. These episodes dramatize the difficulties faced by those who have risen beyond the crowd yet have not achieved creative self-legislation. The mountain setting becomes a testing ground for incomplete transformations.
Festivities and parodies follow, notably a donkey celebration that exposes residual worship of burden and obedience. Zarathustra rebukes servile devotion and calls for laughter, dance, and courage. Songs of melancholy and joy alternate as the guests wrestle with self-judgment. A storm passes; dawn returns. Zarathustra awaits a sign indicating that his hour has come. He receives it in the form of an auspicious omen involving animals and light, which he interprets as a summons to depart. The part closes with his readiness to leave the cave and reenter the world, bringing his teaching to its practical, future-directed threshold.
Across its arc, the book conveys a message of revaluation. It urges readers to move beyond inherited moralities, resist resentment, and affirm existence through self-overcoming. The Overman serves as a goal for humanity’s transformation, not a present condition. Eternal recurrence functions as a test of affirmation, asking whether one can will life’s return in all its details. Critiques of pity, herd morality, and the state stress independence and creative responsibility. Through prophetic language, parables, and refrains of laughter and dance, the work presents a vision of life as a task of shaping values, culminating in a readiness to act.
Historical Context
Though cast in a mythic register, the book’s imagined spaces draw on the alpine solitude and southern light Friedrich Nietzsche experienced in the 1870s and 1880s. Zarathustra’s mountains recall the Upper Engadine around Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps, where Nietzsche summered from 1881. The bustling marketplace evokes modern European towns that he frequented in Italy and France, such as Genoa, Rapallo, and Nice. The time that underlies the narrative is the late nineteenth century, when rapid industrialization, mass politics, and scientific secularization were reshaping European life. The setting oscillates between ascetic heights and crowded plazas, staging a confrontation between solitary self-overcoming and the new urban masses.
The background Europe is the recently unified German Empire (1871) and a continent unsettled by war, nationalist pride, and social agitation. Nietzsche had taught in Basel (1869–1879), just across the German border, and renounced Prussian citizenship in 1869, becoming stateless. That supra-national stance informs the book’s hostility to patriotic idols and its appeal to good Europeans. The period’s railways, factories, mass newspapers, and popular assemblies created a new social tempo and a culture of publicity. Meanwhile, historical criticism of religion and Darwinian debates eroded traditional certainties. The book’s time and place are thus the staging ground of modernity’s promise and its spiritual disorientation.
The unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) set the political frame for Nietzsche’s mature work. Prussia’s victories at Wörth (6 August 1870), Sedan (1–2 September 1870), and the Siege of Paris (September 1870–January 1871) culminated in the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871. Nietzsche served as a medical orderly in 1870, contracted dysentery and diphtheria, and witnessed the ravages of modern warfare. The Bismarckian Reich then pursued national consolidation through the Kulturkampf (notably the May Laws of 1873 against Catholic influence) and a militarized politics of power. In May and June 1878, after assassination attempts against Kaiser Wilhelm I, Bismarck drove through Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890), restricting socialist organization while simultaneously introducing pioneering social insurance: Health Insurance (1883), Accident Insurance (1884), and Old-Age and Disability Insurance (1889). Across the border, the Paris Commune (18 March–28 May 1871) dramatized revolutionary urban class conflict and state repression. These events created a landscape of triumphant nationalism, mass mobilization, and ideological polarization. The book responds by exposing the new idol of the state, rejecting herd enthusiasms of nation and party, and proposing self-overcoming as an alternative to victories achieved through cannon, bureaucracy, and plebiscite. Zarathustra’s teachings about the last man and the contempt for complacent equality mirror anxieties born from the empire’s bureaucratic order and the Commune’s radical leveling. The work’s call for a revaluation of values is forged in the wake of unification’s triumphs and the social dislocations that immediately followed.
The Bayreuth Festival (inaugurated 1876) became a nationalist cultural project intertwined with the politics of the new Reich. Supported by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Richard Wagner’s festival staged mythic Germanic operas as a spiritual counterpart to political unification. Wagnerian circles often overlapped with völkisch and anti-Semitic agitation. Nietzsche’s break with Wagner in the late 1870s and his polemics against German cultural chauvinism inform the book’s counter-prophetic voice. Zarathustra’s rhetoric seeks to outbid grand opera and public pageantry by turning away from communal intoxication toward solitary creation, critiquing the cultural nationalism that Bayreuth symbolized.
Industrialization and urbanization accelerated in the 1860–1890 period. German railway mileage expanded rapidly, while coal and steel output soared; Berlin’s population grew from roughly 825,000 in 1871 to over 1.6 million by 1900. Factory labor, time-discipline, and the mass press transformed everyday life. Crowded cities created new public spheres of agitation and spectacle, but also anonymity and fatigue. The book mirrors this world in its images of the marketplace, crowds, and public entertainers. Zarathustra’s disdain for acclaim and his departure from the town dramatize a refusal of mass approval and a diagnosis of the spiritual exhaustion that can accompany prosperity and mechanized routine.
The workers’ movement emerged as a central force. In 1875 the Social Democratic Workers’ Party adopted the Gotha Program in a unification congress at Gotha; despite the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890), the party’s vote share increased, and labor unrest and strikes periodically spread. Bismarck’s social insurance measures of 1883–1889 aimed to integrate workers while containing socialist influence. The book engages this context not by policy argument but by diagnosing resentment and leveling drives it saw in egalitarian rhetoric. Zarathustra’s parable of the tarantulas portrays justice animated by revenge, signaling suspicion toward politics that feed on envy rather than strength and generosity.
Secularization intensified through historical criticism of scripture and the diminishing public authority of churches. David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835), Ernest Renan’s studies (1863), and the Tübingen School questioned traditional narratives; in Germany the Kulturkampf (1871–1878) sought to curtail Catholic power through measures like the 1873 May Laws. Such upheavals fostered moral uncertainty. The book addresses a society after the collapse of shared metaphysical certainties, dramatizing the death of God as a historical experience. In that vacuum, Zarathustra calls for new tables of value and for individuals to fashion meaning without recourse to ecclesiastical or state guardianship.
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) galvanized European debates on evolution. In Germany, Ernst Haeckel popularized evolutionary monism and provoked disputes about religion, ethics, and human nature. Social Darwinism attempted to translate biological struggle into politics. The book operates in this climate, adopting a naturalistic tone about life’s drives while resisting crude adaptationism. It offers the Übermensch as an ethical and cultural ideal rather than a biological program, and reframes struggle as self-overcoming. By turning evolution’s language toward creative transvaluation, it critiques both metaphysical consolations and simplistic applications of natural selection to society.
Organized anti-Semitism crystallized in the late 1870s. Wilhelm Marr’s 1879 pamphlet popularized the term antisemitism; court preacher Adolf Stoecker mobilized Berlin petitions in 1880–1881; völkisch clubs linked ethnic nationalism to exclusionary politics; in Vienna, Karl Lueger later rode such currents to the mayoralty (1897). Nietzsche opposed anti-Semitism and criticized its presence in German nationalism and Wagnerian circles. The book’s appeal to good Europeans and its satire of parochial pride confront the ethnonational mood of the time. By attacking herd instincts and ressentiment, it implicitly rejects movements that sought unity through scapegoating and racialized myths.
A wave of revolutionary and anarchist violence unsettled European states. In Germany, the 1878 attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I by Hödel and Nobiling prompted repressive legislation. In Russia, Narodnaya Volya assassinated Tsar Alexander II on 13 March 1881, symbolizing the volatility of urban conspiracies and the crisis of authority. Such events fed a climate of fear, policing, and ideological rigidity. The book treats the thirst for revenge and the intoxication of destruction as symptoms of a deeper nihilism. Zarathustra counsels creating beyond both submission and revolt, seeing in violent politics a mirror of the resentment it claims to oppose.
Nietzsche’s life in Switzerland and his statelessness shaped a supra-national vantage. Appointed professor at the University of Basel in 1869, he renounced Prussian citizenship that year and remained stateless thereafter. Basel’s proximity to France and Germany placed him near the Franco-Prussian front in 1870, where he volunteered as a medical orderly. Swiss neutrality offered a perch outside imperial propaganda and party organization. The book reflects this exile’s orientation: it addresses Europeans rather than Germans, and it portrays the state as a cold idol demanding worship. Zarathustra’s wandering across borders allegorizes an ethic that refuses national and confessional enclosures.
The Mediterranean and alpine itineraries of the 1880s furnished concrete stages for composition. Nietzsche conceived the idea of eternal recurrence at Sils-Maria in 1881; he wrote Part I of the book in Rapallo in January–February 1883, Part II at Sils-Maria in summer 1883, Part III also at Sils-Maria in 1884, and Part IV in Nice during 1884–1885, privately printing forty copies in 1885. Genoa, Portofino, and Nice provided sea light, promenades, and winter warmth. The book’s imagery of dawns, seas, and southern exuberance reflects these locales, setting its critique of Europe’s north-German heaviness against a sunlit, wind-swept discipline.
Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship on ancient Iran made Zoroaster newly available to European thinkers. Anquetil-Duperron published a Latin translation of the Avesta in 1771, while Martin Haug’s lectures in 1862 argued that Zarathustra reformed Iranian religion toward ethical dualism of truth and falsehood. Max Müller’s philology disseminated Vedic and Iranian texts widely. Against this learned backdrop, the book selects Zarathustra as its mask because he was historically credited with inventing moral worldmaking. By having him return to unmake and remake values, the work stages a historical reversal: the reputed originator of morality calls for its revaluation in a disenchanted modern world.
The period saw advances in neurology, psychiatry, and therapeutics that reframed suffering. Figures like Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris explored hysteria in the 1870s, while new drugs such as chloral hydrate circulated in European clinics. Nietzsche’s own chronic migraines, eye troubles, and collapses forced a regimen of solitude, walking, and careful diet. This medicalized landscape enters the book as a physiology of morals, where virtues and vices are read as symptoms of health or decadence. Zarathustra prescribes a training of body and spirit, criticizing narcotic comforts favored by modern society and urging an affirming endurance beyond the therapeutic pursuit of mere relief.
High imperialism provided another horizon. The Berlin Conference (1884–1885), convened by Bismarck, formalized European claims in Africa and accelerated the partition of the continent, with Germany acquiring colonies in Southwest Africa, Cameroon, Togoland, and East Africa. Imperial prestige fed national pride and a belief in civilizing missions. While the book does not treat colonial policy, it addresses the hubris of a Europe intoxicated with expansion and power. Zarathustra’s appeals to self-overcoming and his critique of herd morality question the complacency of a civilization measuring itself by conquest, calling for values that do not depend on domination of other peoples.
As social and political critique, the book targets the new idolatries of the age: the nation-state, public opinion, and comfort as supreme value. It portrays the modern state as an impersonal power demanding devotion without delivering meaning. The last man caricature embodies a society that prefers safety, equality, and entertainment to risk, hierarchy of excellence, and creation. Against parliamentary clamor and bureaucratic discipline, the text advocates an ethic of self-legislation and responsibility. Its critique of leveling does not defend old aristocracies; it indicts both inherited status and mass mediocrity, seeking a post-traditional standard rooted in strength, generosity, and style.
The work exposes how Christian moral universalism, nationalist fervor, and socialist ressentiment can converge in denying rank, nuance, and the tragic conditions of life. It diagnoses secular Europe’s malaise as nihilism: the collapse of binding values amid industrial prosperity and scientific triumph. By staging new festivals, dances, and solitary disciplines, it offers an alternative politics of culture rather than a party platform. It censures anti-Semitism, chauvinism, and herd vengeance as symptoms of weakness. In place of moralizing against power or worshiping it in the state, the book urges a revaluation that creates standards capable of judging both altar and throne.
Author Biography
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and classical philologist whose late nineteenth‑century writings reshaped modern thought. Trained in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, he turned to a radical critique of morality, religion, and truth, articulating themes of nihilism, perspectivism, and self‑overcoming in a striking, aphoristic style. His books, at first controversial and unevenly received, later became central to debates in philosophy, literary studies, and cultural theory. Rather than constructing a system, Nietzsche probed the psychological and historical conditions of values, seeking a revaluation of prevailing ideals and an affirmative, life‑enhancing ethos in the wake of European modernity.
Nietzsche grew up in Prussia and excelled at Schulpforta, a renowned humanist boarding school, where rigorous training in languages and antiquity shaped his intellectual orientation. He studied classical philology at the University of Bonn and then Leipzig, working under the influential scholar Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. Encountering the works of the pre‑Socratics and Greek tragedy deepened his interest in the cultural significance of myth and art. Around the same time, he read Arthur Schopenhauer, whose pessimism and account of will strongly marked Nietzsche’s early outlook, and he befriended the composer Richard Wagner, whose aesthetic ambitions initially seemed to exemplify a possible cultural renewal.
In the early 1870s Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship at the University of Basel, one of the youngest in that role. He published The Birth of Tragedy, interpreting Greek tragedy through art, myth, and music; the book drew harsh criticism from philologists for its speculative method. He then wrote the Untimely Meditations, essays that challenged cultural complacency and defended independent thinking. During these years he was close to Wagner’s circle and supported the Bayreuth project. Yet mounting philosophical and personal differences led to estrangement, a decisive break that freed Nietzsche to pursue an increasingly independent critique of art, morality, and German cultural nationalism.
Chronic illness forced Nietzsche to resign his chair in the late 1870s. Living modestly as an independent writer in Switzerland, Italy, and the south of France, he developed a new, experimental voice. Human, All Too Human inaugurated his “free spirit” period, followed by Daybreak and The Gay Science, works composed largely in aphorisms and short analyses. He examined the genealogy of moral feelings, criticized metaphysics and religious belief, and addressed science and culture with psychological acumen. The Gay Science introduced ideas associated with his mature philosophy, including reflections on nihilism and the thought of eternal recurrence, framed as tests of affirmation rather than doctrines.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in the mid‑1880s, presented a poetic philosopher who proclaims the overcoming of prevailing values and the figure he called the Übermensch. Nietzsche’s subsequent books, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, offered sustained critiques of truth, morality, and ressentiment, developing the genealogical method for tracing the historical emergence of values. Across these writings he emphasized rank orderings of drives, interpretations, and the cultivation of stronger forms of life, sometimes invoking “will to power” as a principle of interpretation. His style combined polemic, provocation, and lyric intensity to unsettle readers and recast philosophical inquiry.
Nietzsche’s final productive year, 1888, yielded a burst of books and polemics—The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner—that intensified his critiques and offered retrospective self‑assessment. Early in 1889 he suffered a mental collapse in Turin and thereafter was incapacitated, no longer able to continue his work. His literary estate was managed by his sister, who organized the archive and edited manuscripts, assembling The Will to Power from notebooks; later scholarship has treated that compilation with caution. Nietzsche died in 1900, leaving a body of published works that would grow steadily in influence during the twentieth century.
Posthumously, Nietzsche’s ideas radiated across philosophy, literature, and the human sciences. Early appropriations were often selective or ideological, including nationalist distortions that conflicted with his criticisms of anti‑Semitism and herd politics. Through critical editions and careful scholarship, readers increasingly distinguished his published texts from tendentious uses of his notes. His thought influenced existentialist and phenomenological debates, informed psychoanalytic and genealogical methods, and inspired modernist and post‑structuralist writing. Today he is read as a penetrating diagnostician of modernity’s crises and possibilities, a theorist of value‑creation and critique whose unsettling questions about truth, morality, and life‑affirmation continue to animate philosophical and cultural reflection.
THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA (Modern Classics Series)
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[1q]” (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. 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.”
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[3] 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.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.
I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.
Therefore must I descend into the deep: as thou doest in the evening, when thou goest behind the sea, and givest light also to the nether-world, thou exuberant star!
Like thee must I GO DOWN, as men say, to whom I shall descend.
Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!
