Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Why is it at once the most famous and the most misread book?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the best-selling and most quoted of Nietzsche's books. Yet it is neither a treatise nor a collection of aphorisms but an epic-like prose work recounting one figure's speeches and travels, and it does not define its concepts one by one. As its subtitle, "A Book for All and None", suggests, Nietzsche set out to write a book that everyone could read and no one would properly understand. The German Wikipedia sums up its basic movement as Zarathustra's repeated failure to teach his thought: he is always misunderstood, and that failure is itself a theme of the book.

The misunderstanding repeated itself outside the book. Phrases such as the overman (Übermensch), the will to power and "man is something that shall be overcome" were torn from their context and enlisted in the war propaganda of the First World War and the racism of the Nazis. At the same time the same book was read as a book of liberation by anarchists, expressionist artists and existentialists. Reading it therefore means reading not only Nietzsche's thought but also what the twentieth century did with Nietzsche.

How was it written and published?

The name Zarathustra comes from Zarathustra (Zoroaster), the Iranian religious reformer of antiquity. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche later explained that since the historical Zarathustra was the first to make the struggle of good and evil the wheel that drives the world, he must also be the first to recognise that error. The figure first appeared in "Incipit tragoedia", the last section of The Gay Science (1882), which became almost unchanged the opening of this book.

According to the German Wikipedia the four parts were written between November 1882 and February 1885. Nietzsche recalled conceiving the first part while walking along the coast at Rapallo in Italy early in 1883. The first and second parts appeared in 1883 and the third in 1884, from Schmeitzner in Chemnitz. The book hardly sold, however, and the fourth part, written in the winter of 1884–1885, found no publisher; in 1885 Nietzsche had forty copies printed at his own expense and gave them to close friends. In these years Nietzsche, who had resigned his Basel chair for reasons of health in 1879, lived as a wanderer between Sils Maria in Switzerland and Italy and the south of France.

The book deliberately imitates the style of the Bible, especially Luther's translation. Each speech ends with the refrain "Thus spoke Zarathustra", and parables, riddles and songs follow one another. Nietzsche called this tone "halcyon" and warned that whoever failed to hear it rightly would mistake the meaning of the wisdom.

What are the overman and the last man?

At forty, after ten years in the mountains, Zarathustra comes down to share his wisdom with men. When an old saint in the forest tells him that he still praises God, Zarathustra says to himself that the old saint has not yet heard that God is dead. Reaching the market place, he speaks to the crowd that has gathered to watch a tightrope walker: "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome."

Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll.

After the death of God the meaning of life must lie in "the earth", not in a world beyond, and man is not a goal but a bridge and a passage. "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman."

Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Thier und Übermensch

When the crowd laughs, Zarathustra offers to show them what is most contemptible and describes "the last man". The last man knows neither love nor creation nor longing, wants everyone to be the same and cherishes only small pleasures, health and comfort. "'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

„Wir haben das Glück erfunden“

The crowd shouts back that they do not need the overman: make us into these last men! Zarathustra gives up speaking to the masses and goes in search of companions. The first speech of Part One, "On the Three Metamorphoses", describes how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion and the lion finally a child. The camel bears the burden of existing values, the "thou shalt"; the lion says "I will" and breaks those values but cannot create new ones; the child, an innocent new beginning, speaks a sacred yes to life.

Drei Verwandlungen nenne ich euch des Geistes: wie der Geist zum Kameele wird, und zum Löwen das Kameel, und zum Kinde zuletzt der Löwe.

The concept of the overman itself, and how it differs from eugenics or race theory, is treated in the separate entry on the Übermensch.

How do the will to power and eternal recurrence appear?

This book is also where the will to power first appears as a theme in Nietzsche's published work. In "On Self-Overcoming" in Part Two Zarathustra says: "Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the one who serves I found the will to be master."

Wo ich Lebendiges fand, da fand ich Willen zur Macht; und noch im Willen des Dienenden fand ich den Willen, Herr zu sein.

What Nietzsche himself called the fundamental thought of the book, however, was eternal recurrence. In "On the Vision and the Riddle" in Part Three Zarathustra shows the dwarf riding on his shoulders a gateway where two paths meet. One runs back for an eternity, the other forward for another eternity, and the name of the gateway is written above it: "Moment".

Der Name des Thorwegs steht oben geschrieben: „Augenblick“.

The dwarf says lightly that "all truth is crooked, time itself is a circle", but Zarathustra knows how heavy the thought is. If everything has already been innumerable times and will recur innumerable times, then even the smallest and meanest things return eternally. Near the end of Part Three, in "The Convalescent", Zarathustra collapses in disgust at the thought, then accepts it and rises as one who affirms life as a whole. Part Four tells how Zarathustra receives the "higher men" in his cave (two kings, the last pope and other castaways of the age) and, having seen their limits, sets out again. These concepts are explained in the separate entries on the will to power and eternal recurrence.

How was the book used politically?

Zarathustra offers no political programme, but his hostilities are plain. In "On the Tarantulas" in Part Two he likens "the preachers of equality" to spiders and charges that behind their word "justice" hides the vengefulness of the powerless: "To me you are tarantulas and hidden avengers!"

Taranteln seid ihr mir und versteckte Rachsüchtige!

The passage anticipates the diagnosis of the later works, in which Nietzsche saw socialism and democracy as movements born of ressentiment, the rancour of the weak. Passages like this are why early socialist critics such as Franz Mehring saw Nietzsche as a philosopher for exploiting masters. According to the German Wikipedia's article on Nietzsche's reception, during the First World War field editions of selected Nietzsche texts authorised by the Nietzsche Archive sold briskly, giving rise to the saying that every German soldier had "Zarathustra in his knapsack", while Allied propaganda conversely portrayed Nietzsche as the thinker of German aggression. Under the Nazis Alfred Baeumler dressed Nietzsche up as a forerunner of National Socialism, foregrounding the overman and the will to power; that Nietzsche had despised antisemitism and German nationalism in the 1880s was erased in the process.

Who carried it on, and how?

The book's language captivated artists from the start. Richard Strauss wrote a tone poem of the same title in 1896, whose opening became even more famous in the twentieth century through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In philosophy, Karl Löwith placed eternal recurrence at the centre of Nietzsche's thought in Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1935), and Martin Heidegger, in his Nietzsche lectures of the 1930s and 1940s, interpreted the unity of the will to power and eternal recurrence as the completion of Western metaphysics. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus portrayed a man who affirms his fate of endlessly rolling his rock uphill, carrying on Zarathustra's affirmation in his own way.

On the Marxist side, György Lukács in The Destruction of Reason cast Nietzsche as the founder of German bourgeois irrationalism in the imperialist age; this judgement became in effect the official view in East Germany, where Nietzsche's books were hardly published at all. The ideal of overcoming and self-creation in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and its contempt for the last man, sounded to socialists sometimes like a language of emancipation and sometimes like a language of aristocracy. That ambivalence is why the book is still read amid controversy.