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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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'.

• 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'.

• 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'.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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'.

• 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.

• 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.