Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Summary

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality. At thirty Zarathustra withdraws to a mountain cave with his eagle and serpent. Ten years later, overfull with wisdom, he decides to 'go down' to humanity like the setting sun. On the way he meets an old hermit who has not heard that God is dead. In a market town he announces the Superman (Übermensch): man is a bridge to be crossed, not a goal. The crowd mistakes him for the warm-up act for a tightrope walker. When a jeering buffoon leaps over the walker, who falls to his death, Zarathustra carries the corpse away and resolves to seek companions rather than crowds. Part I collects his speeches to followers in the town of the Pied Cow: the three metamorphoses of the spirit (camel, lion, child), the body as the 'big sagacity' behind the ego, the pale criminal, the new idol of the state, friendship, chastity, and voluntary death. He leaves them with a warning against becoming mere believers. Part II returns him to his disciples on the Blessed Isles. Here he names the will to power as the principle of all life, attacks priests, scholars, poets and the 'tarantulas' of revenge disguised as equality, and sings three lyrical songs to night, life and his dead youth. A soothsayer's prophecy of universal weariness, 'all is empty, all is alike', shakes him. On a bridge of cripples he defines redemption as turning every 'it was' into 'thus I willed it'. Part III is a lonely homecoming. Aboard ship he tells the riddle of a gateway called 'This Moment' and a shepherd who bites off the head of a black serpent choking him. Back in his cave he summons his 'most abysmal thought', the eternal recurrence of all things, collapses for seven days, and is nursed by his animals, who turn the doctrine into a ditty. He then rewrites the old moral tablets. Part IV, privately printed in 1885, is a tragicomic coda. Zarathustra, now grey, hears a cry of distress and gathers a company of 'higher men': two kings, a scientist of the leech's brain, a theatrical magician, the last pope, the ugliest man who murdered God, a voluntary beggar, and his own shadow. They relapse into worshipping an ass. At midnight the ugliest man says he would live his life again, and Zarathustra sings the drunken song of joy wanting eternity. In the morning a laughing lion and a flock of doves appear, and Zarathustra leaves his guests to go to his work.

Plot or Argument

• Prologue: the down-going and the tightrope walker

  Zarathustra leaves his cave after ten years, parts from the forest saint, and preaches the Superman and the 'last man' (comfortable, health-conscious, blinking) to a market crowd that prefers the last man. A buffoon causes the rope-dancer's fatal fall; Zarathustra buries him in a hollow tree and decides to speak to companions, not to the herd.

• First Part: discourses in the Pied Cow

  Twenty-two speeches, each closing 'Thus spake Zarathustra'. Key teachings: the spirit's metamorphoses from load-bearing camel to the lion's 'I will' to the child's 'holy Yea'; mockery of the sage whose virtue is a sleeping draught; the body as the Self behind the ego; the pale criminal's 'madness after the deed'; the state as 'the coldest of all cold monsters'; and dying at the right time. Zarathustra sends his disciples away so that they may find themselves.

• Second Part: will to power and the spirit of revenge

  On the Blessed Isles Zarathustra dreams that a child shows him his own teaching distorted in a mirror and returns. He attacks pity, priests, the 'virtuous', the rabble, the tarantulas (preachers of equality motivated by revenge) and the 'famous wise ones'. In 'Self-Surpassing' he names will to power as the essence of life. The Night-Song, Dance-Song and Grave-Song are lyric interludes. After the Soothsayer's nihilist vision and the 'Redemption' speech on the will's impotence toward the past, a voice in 'The Stillest Hour' tells him he is not yet ripe, and he leaves weeping.

• Third Part: the abysmal thought

  Sailing home, Zarathustra recounts 'The Vision and the Enigma': the dwarf, the spirit of gravity, sits on his shoulder; the gateway 'This Moment' joins two eternal lanes; a shepherd chokes on a serpent, bites it off and laughs a superhuman laugh. Through 'The Bedwarfing Virtue', 'On Passing-By' and 'Old and New Tables' he works himself toward the thought of recurrence. 'The Convalescent' stages his collapse and recovery; the part closes with 'The Seven Seals', each stanza ending 'For I love thee, O Eternity!'

• Fourth Part: the higher men and the ass-festival

  Zarathustra baits his 'honey sacrifice' and meets a procession of distressed higher men, each an emblem of a declining value (rule, science, art, religion, piety, charity, free-thinking). He hosts them in his cave, teaches them to laugh, and is appalled when they worship the ass. The ugliest man's 'Once more!' leads into the eleven-part Drunken Song. 'The Sign' ends the book with Zarathustra rejecting pity for the higher men as his last temptation.

Characters

• Zarathustra, prophet, speaker

  A teacher who descends from solitude, preaches to crowds and disciples, repeatedly withdraws, and struggles to affirm a thought (eternal recurrence) that sickens him.

• The eagle and the serpent, Zarathustra's animals

  Emblems of pride and wisdom who keep him company, nurse him through his seven-day collapse, and turn his hardest doctrine into a sing-song.

• The saint in the forest, hermit

  An old man who loves God rather than men and has not heard that God is dead; he and Zarathustra part laughing.

• The rope-dancer and the buffoon, figures of the Prologue

  A tightrope walker who falls when a jeering jester leaps over him; dying, he is consoled by Zarathustra that he made danger his calling.

• The dwarf (spirit of gravity), antagonist

  A heavy, mocking spirit that rides Zarathustra's shoulder and drips 'thoughts like drops of lead' into his ear; the embodiment of seriousness and weariness.

• The soothsayer, prophet of nihilism

  Proclaims that all is empty and alike; returns in Part IV among the higher men.

• The ugliest man, higher man

  The murderer of God, who could not bear a witness who saw everything; at midnight he asks to live his life once more.

• The spiritually conscientious one, higher man

  A scientist who has given up everything to master the brain of the leech, letting leeches feed on his arm in a swamp; a portrait of specialist rigour.

• The magician, higher man

  An old performer who stages a lament of suffering to deceive Zarathustra; widely read as a caricature of Richard Wagner.

• The other higher men, guests in the cave

  Two kings with an ass, the last pope 'out of service', the voluntary beggar who preaches among cows, and Zarathustra's shadow, a free spirit worn thin by wandering.

Lessons

• The body is the larger reason

  In 'The Despisers of the Body' Zarathustra calls the ego a small instrument of the body's 'big sagacity'. Thoughts, pains and values are expressions of a living organism, not commands from a separate soul. The book insists that ideas be read for what they reveal about the health of whoever holds them.

  • What does Zarathustra mean by saying the Self 'dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body'?
  • How does the claim that backworlds were invented by 'the sick and perishing' change the way we evaluate a belief?
  • Is reading philosophies as symptoms a form of insight or a way of avoiding argument?

• Comfort can be a kind of despair

  The last man's 'little poison now and then' for pleasant dreams, and the sage whose virtues are a sleeping draught, portray a life arranged to avoid all strain. Nietzsche presents this frictionless contentment not as health but as the exhaustion of the will.

  • Which features of the last man look like ordinary modern wellbeing, and which look like something worse?
  • Is Zarathustra fair to the wise man who simply wants to sleep well?
  • Where would you draw the line between relief of suffering and the last man's sedation?

• Affirmation must survive the worst thought

  Eternal recurrence is presented less as cosmology than as an ordeal. Could you will every moment, including the smallest and ugliest, to return forever? Zarathustra's own nausea and collapse show that the test is psychologically costly, and that 'yes' is earned rather than declared.

  • Why does the thought of recurrence make Zarathustra physically ill?
  • What does the shepherd's bite in 'The Vision and the Enigma' dramatise?
  • Is the ugliest man's 'Once more!' a real conversion or an intoxicated moment?

• Revenge against time poisons the will

  'Redemption' diagnoses resentment as the will's inability to undo the past: 'It was' is the stone it cannot roll. Punishment, guilt and theories of cosmic justice grow out of that grievance. The alternative is to reinterpret the past as something one would have willed.

  • How does the speech to the hunchback and the cripples set up the account of revenge?
  • Can the past really be redeemed by a change of attitude, or is this a consolation in disguise?
  • Where do you see the 'spirit of revenge' in modern moral or political language?

• A teacher who wants no believers

  Zarathustra repeatedly sends disciples away, mocks his animals for turning his doctrine into a song, and treats the higher men's worship of the ass as a relapse. The book stages the risk that a prophetic style will produce followers instead of free spirits, and tries to undermine its own authority.

  • Why does Zarathustra say he wants to be a railing beside the torrent, not a crutch?
  • How does Part IV's comedy complicate the solemnity of Parts I–III?
  • Given the book's later political misuse, did its form invite the very discipleship it warns against?

Context

Zarathustra belongs to the crisis of belief in Bismarck's newly unified Germany, when historical criticism of the Bible (David Friedrich Strauss), Darwinian biology and Schopenhauer's pessimism had unsettled Protestant culture. Nietzsche had recently broken with Richard Wagner, whose Bayreuth festival he saw as Christian-nationalist decadence, and with Paul Rée and Lou Salomé after the failed 'trinity' of 1882. The book's attacks on pity, the state, 'preachers of equality' and anti-Semitic resentment respond to that milieu. Its biblical diction is a deliberate parody of the Luther Bible and the Gospels.

Composition

Nietzsche dated the thought of eternal recurrence to August 1881, beside a pyramid-shaped rock near Surlei on the lake of Silvaplana. Part I was written in about ten days at Rapallo in February 1883, finishing, he said, in the hour Wagner died in Venice. Part II followed at Sils-Maria that summer and Part III at Nice in January 1884. Part IV was printed at his own expense in 1885 in forty copies and circulated only to a handful of friends. The first public edition of all four parts appeared in 1892. The 'Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche' in the stored text reports his struggle to give up chloral hydrate in the spring of 1883.

Reception

Almost ignored on publication, the book became a cult text after Nietzsche's collapse: Richard Strauss's tone poem (1896), Gustav Mahler's setting of the Midnight Song in his Third Symphony, and pocket editions carried by German soldiers in the First World War. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's Weimar archive promoted it in nationalist and later Nazi terms. After 1945, Walter Kaufmann, Heidegger and the French poststructuralists reread it as a philosophy of self-creation and a critique of metaphysics. It remains the most quoted and most misquoted of Nietzsche's books.

Comparisons

• beyond-good-and-evil

  Nietzsche called Beyond Good and Evil (1886) a commentary on Zarathustra in plain prose: the will to power, the critique of pity and the 'free spirit' reappear as numbered aphorisms instead of parable and song.

• the-birth-of-tragedy

  The early book's Dionysian intoxication returns in Zarathustra's dance-songs and midnight roundelay, but without the Wagnerian hope; the magician of Part IV is often read as Nietzsche's settling of accounts with the composer he once championed.

• the-world-as-will-and-representation

  Schopenhauer's suffering will and his counsel of denial are the foil for Zarathustra's affirmation; the Soothsayer's 'all is empty, all is alike' voices the Schopenhauerian pessimism Nietzsche had to overcome.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Kierkegaard treats despair as a sickness healed only by resting transparently in God; Zarathustra treats the same despair as convalescence after God's death. Both books make spiritual life a clinical drama of sickness and recovery.

• the-bible

  Zarathustra parodies the Gospels: a teacher of thirty, disciples, sermons, a last supper and an ass-festival that mocks the Palm Sunday ass and medieval Feast of the Ass. Reading the two together shows how much of Nietzsche's style is borrowed scripture turned against itself.

• siddhartha

  Hesse, steeped in Nietzsche, also follows a solitary seeker who leaves teachers behind; but Siddhartha arrives at serene acceptance by a river, while Zarathustra's affirmation is laughter after nausea.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Zarathustra's descent from his cave in the Prologue, his parting from the old saint in the forest, and his speech to the market crowd, which cheers for the comfortable last man instead of the Superman.
• The fall of the rope-dancer when the buffoon leaps over him, and Zarathustra's decision to carry the body away and to seek companions rather than crowds.
• The three metamorphoses of the spirit in Part I, in which the camel becomes a lion and the lion becomes a child.
• The vision of the gateway called This Moment and the shepherd who bites off the head of the serpent in Part III, followed by Zarathustra's seven-day collapse in The Convalescent.
• The higher men of Part IV, including the ugliest man who killed God, the last pope, and the scientist of the leech's brain, and their festival of the ass.

Key terms and names

Superman (Übermensch)

The goal Zarathustra proclaims after the death of God: man as a rope stretched toward something beyond himself. Translators also render it Overman.

Last man

The comfortable, cautious, health-conscious human being the market crowd prefers, who has invented happiness and wants nothing great. Zarathustra presents him as the most contemptible outcome of modern life.

Death of God

Zarathustra's news that the old saint has not heard. It names the collapse of belief that, in Nietzsche's view, leaves inherited morality without foundation.

Will to power

Named in Part II, in the discourse on Self-Surpassing, as the basic drive of all life: not mere survival but growth, mastery, and self-overcoming.

Eternal recurrence

Zarathustra's most abysmal thought: that all things, including every moment of one's own life, will return endlessly. To affirm one's life is to will that it recur.

Spirit of gravity

The dwarf who rides Zarathustra's shoulder and drags him down with heavy, mocking thoughts. He stands for solemn seriousness and the weariness that opposes laughter and dance.

Higher men

The guests of Part IV, each a representative of an older value in decline. Zarathustra hosts them but finally rejects pity for them as his last temptation.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Zarathustra teach the crowd in the market square, and why do they prefer the last man to the Superman?
2. Comprehension What are the three metamorphoses of the spirit, and what does each one stand for?
3. Comprehension Who are the higher men who gather in Zarathustra's cave in Part IV, and what do they do that dismays him?
4. Interpretation Zarathustra calls the eternal recurrence his most abysmal thought, and it makes him collapse for seven days. Why would the idea that life returns endlessly be so hard to affirm?
5. Interpretation In the Redemption discourse, Zarathustra names the will's helplessness before the past as its lonesomest tribulation. How does the shepherd biting off the serpent's head answer that problem?
6. Interpretation Nietzsche writes Zarathustra in the cadence of Luther's Bible, with parables, discourses, and a prophet who gathers and sends away disciples. Why might he choose the form of scripture for a book that announces the death of God?
7. Big Question If no one could promise you that life has a purpose beyond itself, would you still choose to live your life again exactly as it has been?

Faith Connections

• Luke 4:23 (Scripture)

  Zarathustra's saying to the physician who must heal himself before his patient borrows the proverb Jesus quotes in the synagogue at Nazareth. The borrowing is typical of the book, which takes biblical speech and turns it to new purposes, and students can compare what the proverb means in each setting.

• Matthew 18:1-4 (Scripture)

  Jesus says that unless one becomes like a little child one will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Zarathustra's third metamorphosis also ends in a child, a new beginning and a sacred yes, which makes a direct conversation possible about what childlikeness means in each teaching.

• Augustine, City of God, Book XII (Church Fathers)

  Augustine argues against the ancient philosophers who taught that the ages of the world revolve in endless cycles, holding instead that time has a beginning and moves toward an end in God's purpose. His argument is the classic Christian alternative to the eternal recurrence Zarathustra struggles to affirm.

• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's argument that without God everything is permitted (Great Conversation)

  Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both saw that the loss of belief in God would shake the foundations of morality. Ivan Karamazov and Zarathustra respond in opposite moods, one in torment and one in a striving toward affirmation, and reading them together sets up a fair comparison.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: God is dead, so the values that rested on him have lost their ground. If humanity settles for comfort, it will become the last man. Life is will to power and self-overcoming, so humanity must be surpassed by creating new values. The final test of whether one has overcome resentment against life is whether one can will the eternal recurrence of every moment. Therefore the highest affirmation is to say to one's whole life: once more.

Rhetorical device: refrain modeled on prophetic formula. Each discourse of Part I closes with the same formula naming Zarathustra as speaker, echoing the prophets' thus says the Lord, and the voluntary death discourse varies it in a line that names Zarathustra as teacher. The refrain gives the book the weight of scripture while replacing the divine speaker with a human one.

Debate: Resolved: The last man is a greater danger to human greatness than the believer whom Zarathustra opposes.

Memory Work

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star

Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death. ‘Well! Once more

Writing Prompts

Essay: Zarathustra repeatedly gathers disciples and then sends them away or withdraws to his cave. Argue what this pattern of descent and withdrawal reveals about the kind of teacher Zarathustra wants to be and the kind of followers he does not want.

Comparison with The Sickness Unto Death: Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that becomes itself only by resting transparently in God, while Zarathustra calls the self to overcome itself and create new values after the death of God. Compare their accounts of becoming a self and of despair or weariness, and argue which better describes the struggles of the higher men in Part IV.

Medical Lens

Zarathustra is saturated with the vocabulary of sickness and convalescence. Nietzsche thought of himself as a 'physician of culture', and his own illness shaped the book: chronic migraine, vomiting, near-blindness, and insomnia treated with chloral hydrate, which his sister's introduction says he was trying to give up in 1883. The book offers an embodied psychology in which the ego serves the body's 'big sagacity' and values express physiological states. That view anticipates Freud's id, a debt Freud acknowledged ambivalently. The last man's 'little poison' for pleasant dreams and the sage whose virtue is a soporific are sharp images for psychopharmacology debates about sedation versus flourishing. 'Voluntary Death' is a key text in the history of rational-suicide arguments and should be handled with care. Nietzsche's 1889 collapse was diagnosed by the asylum doctors at Basel and Jena as progressive paralysis (general paresis of the insane); that syphilitic diagnosis has been contested, and frontotemporal dementia, CADASIL and a retro-orbital meningioma have been proposed. All are retrospective readings. The prophetic, ecstatic style of the book should not be treated as evidence of illness in itself.

• Prologue, §5

  The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.

  Pharmacology PoisonsSleep InsomniaDeath DyingAsylum Institution
• Part I, Discourse II: The Academic Chairs of Virtue

  A sage's lecture on sleep hygiene as ethics: ten self-overcomings, reconciliations, truths and laughters a day as 'poppy to the soul'.

  Sleep InsomniaPhilosophy AS Therapy
• Part I, Discourses III–IV: Backworldsmen; The Despisers of the Body

  Otherworldly belief traced to the weariness of the sick body; the ego as the instrument of a bodily Self; the body as 'a plurality with one sense'.

  Mind BodyPsychology UnconsciousMelancholia Depression
• Part I, Discourse VI: The Pale Criminal

  A murderer whose reason misinterprets his own impulses; 'madness before the deed' and 'madness after the deed'; a plea to judges to say 'invalid' rather than 'wretch'.

  Madness PsychosisObsession MonomaniaPsychology Unconscious
• Part I, Discourse XXI: Voluntary Death

  Praise of dying 'at the right time' and scorn for lingering decline; important for the history of arguments about suicide and end-of-life choice.

  SuicideDeath DyingAging Senescence
• Part II, Discourse XLII: Redemption

  Cripples and a hunchback ask Zarathustra to heal them; he replies with folk sayings on the costs of cure and describes 'reversed cripples' who are all ear or all eye.

  Disability Deformity
• Part III, Discourse LVII: The Convalescent

  Zarathustra falls 'as one dead', lies seven days without eating, is fed and watched by his animals, and recovers to describe his 'great disgust at man'.

  Melancholia DepressionNursing CaregivingMind Body
• Part IV, Discourse LXIV: The Leech

  A scientist lies in a swamp letting leeches bleed his arm to study the leech's brain; Zarathustra calls him a 'cupping-glass' of conscience and offers to tend his wounds.

  BloodlettingAnatomy DissectionObsession Monomania
• Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche (stored text, before the Prologue)

  Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes the Rapallo winter of influenza and her brother's effort in spring 1883 to stop taking chloral hydrate.

  Pharmacology PoisonsSleep InsomniaMelancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation the spiritually conscientious one and Zarathustra might have had that night in the cave about whether specialised neuroscience can tell us anything about the Self of 'The Despisers of the Body'.

• Essay

  Compare the seven-day collapse in 'The Convalescent' with a modern description of a depressive episode. What does reading it as illness reveal, and what does it flatten?

• Fiction

  Tell the Prologue from the point of view of the dying rope-dancer, who hears Zarathustra's consolation that he made danger his calling.

• Classroom

  Run a seminar on 'Voluntary Death' alongside current guidance on assessing suicide risk and on medical aid in dying, asking where Zarathustra's 'right time' would and would not fit.

Further Reading

• Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche

  Nietzsche's late account of how Zarathustra came to him, including the Surlei rock and the Rapallo walks.

• Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

  The prose counterpart to Zarathustra's teachings.

• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann

  The 1950 study that rescued Nietzsche from his Nazi reputation in the English-speaking world.

• Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Laurence Lampert

• I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, Sue Prideaux

• The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis, Richard Schain

  A psychiatrist's challenge to the traditional diagnosis of Nietzsche's collapse.

• Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30, Richard Strauss

  The 1896 tone poem whose opening became famous through 2001: A Space Odyssey.