Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In brief

Friedrich Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra in instalments from 1883, added a Fourth Part in 1885 and printed that part for friends only. It is a fable with no plot to speak of. A sage leaves his cave after ten years, tells a town that man must be surpassed, is laughed at, withdraws, returns, falls ill on a thought he can hardly say, recovers, and gives a dinner for a set of failed great men. Between these events he talks, in eighty discourses that sound like the Gospels and mean the opposite.

Nietzsche thought it the summit of his work. In Ecce Homo he calls it “the greatest gift that has ever been bestowed” on his fellow men. Harold Bloom called it a gorgeous disaster. Both are fair. It is often embarrassing, and it is most alive when it catches its own prophet being ridiculous.

The Superman and the last man

Zarathustra’s opening claim comes in the market-place of the first town he reaches: “Man is something that is to be surpassed” (Prologue). God is dead, as he has told himself on the way down, “This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it”, and so meaning must come from here: “The Superman is the meaning of the earth.” The image that follows is the best definition he ever gives. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.” The Superman is less a person than a direction, and the book insists none has existed: “Never yet hath there been a Superman” (The Priests). In Common’s text the word appears forty-three times, thirty-six of them before the Third Part: the famous coinage thins out.

The crowd does not stir, so Zarathustra tries contempt, and the alternative he paints is what still bites. The last man is comfortable, healthy and bored. “No shepherd, and one herd!” “We have discovered happiness”, say the last men, and blink. The crowd’s reply is the funniest moment of the Prologue: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra”. The Superman exists mainly as the refusal of this figure, and the worry is about a well-run society with nothing it wants.

The scorn falls on equality as such, “every one is equal”, and it is hard to admire once you notice how much of the last man’s life, health and peace, is what most people have fought for.

The shape of the book

The First Part follows the Prologue with twenty-two discourses to disciples, beginning with the camel, lion and child of The Three Metamorphoses and ending on the great noontide. The Second Part brings him back, with The Night-Song and the idea of will in Self-Surpassing and Redemption, where the past becomes the problem: “To redeem what is past, and to transform every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus would I have it!’—that only do I call redemption!” The Third Part is the crisis, from The Vision and the Enigma through The Convalescent to The Seven Seals, and it was written to be the end. The Fourth Part is something else, a comic narrative spread over about a day.

A parody of scripture

The form is the book’s boldest idea and its biggest risk. Zarathustra is thirty when he leaves home, he has disciples, he speaks in parables, he goes on the olive-mount, and he holds a supper. The discourses keep closing on the same formula, “Thus spake Zarathustra”, and the rhythm comes from Luther’s Bible, which Nietzsche, a pastor’s son, knew from childhood. In a letter of 1884 he claimed to have brought German to a culmination, after Luther and Goethe. The sermons reverse the content and keep the voice: “I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH”.

Does it work? For long stretches, no. Parody needs to know it is parody, and much of the First Part simply preaches, with a preacher’s self-regard and no one to answer back. A form built to mock prophecy ends up as prophecy. It works when the book turns on itself. Zarathustra’s animals turn his great thought into a jingle, and he calls them “wags and barrel-organs”. And in the Fourth Part the higher men, whom he has spent a day teaching, are caught kneeling to a donkey and chanting a litany that runs through the Bible’s stock phrases, “he hath taken upon him the form of a servant”, each verse answered by the bray “YE-A” (The Awakening). The old pope’s defence is as good as anything in Nietzsche: “Better to adore God so, in this form, than in no form at all!” (The Ass-Festival). The book knows what people do with a void, including the people who read it.

The thought he cannot say

Nietzsche called eternal recurrence “the fundamental idea” of the work, and dated it to August 1881 by a rock near Surlei. He had already put it as a thought experiment in The Gay Science (1882, section 341), where a demon tells you that you must live this life again, innumerable times. Readers still divide over whether it is a claim about the cosmos or a test of how you stand towards your life, and the book gives them little help.

The word “return” in this sense comes up in only a handful of chapters. In The Vision and the Enigma Zarathustra stops at a gateway named “This Moment”, where two endless roads meet. The dwarf on his shoulder says the easy thing, “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle”, and is rebuked for it. Zarathustra’s own version is all questions: “must we not eternally return?”, spoken “always more softly”. Then the scene breaks off and a young shepherd lies choking, “with a heavy black serpent hanging out of his mouth”. Zarathustra shouts “Bite!”, and the shepherd bites and rises, “a light-surrounded being, that LAUGHED!”.

The nearest thing to a gloss comes in The Convalescent. After seven days prostrate, Zarathustra says the monster crept into his own throat, and that what strangled him was “The great disgust at man”, above all “the eternal return also of the smallest man”. So the thought is hard because it includes the last man, forever. The plainest statement in the whole book, “that all things eternally return, and ourselves with them”, is given to his eagle and serpent. They speak for him, and he does not reply, for he “communed just then with his soul”. After that come the refrain of The Seven Seals, “the ring of the return”, and the drunken verses of The Drunken Song: “Said ye ever Yea to one joy? O my friends, then said ye Yea also unto ALL woe.” Nietzsche’s central doctrine is thus asked, dreamed, mocked, delegated and sung, and never argued. That can be taken as evasion. I think it is the honest course: an idea whose force lies in how you take it cannot be proved at you.

Why Zarathustra

Nietzsche chose the name knowingly, and his explanation in Ecce Homo (1888) is printed in the introduction to the free text. The historical Persian was, he says, the author of the moral picture of the world: “Zarathustra CREATED the most portentous error, MORALITY, consequently he should also be the first to PERCEIVE that error”. The book’s hero is therefore the inventor of good and evil come back to take it down, and the passage ends “that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth”. Very little else is Persian: a few details from Friedrich von Hellwald’s account of the prophet, including the thirtieth year and the ten years in the mountains.

The people

The dwarf and the soothsayer

The dwarf is the spirit of gravity, “half-dwarf, half-mole”, who says things too easily. The soothsayer brings the nihilist’s line, “All is alike, nothing is worth while”, and is generally taken to stand for Schopenhauer.

The higher men

The two kings, the leech, the magician, the old pope, the ugliest man, the voluntary beggar and the shadow come to his cave in the Fourth Part, each having seen through something. The magician is generally read as Wagner. The ugliest man is “the murderer of God”, who killed him for having seen too much of man (The Ugliest Man).

The Fourth Part

After the third part Nietzsche thought the book finished. He wrote a fourth over the winter of 1884 to 1885, had forty copies printed at his own expense, and called it, in a letter, a sublime finale not meant for the public. His sister says the manuscript bore the note “Only for my friends, not for the public”, and that he found only seven people to give it to. It reached the public in March 1892, three years after his collapse, when he could no longer consent, and the four parts were joined in one volume soon after.

Some readers find it a descent into farce after The Seven Seals. For me it makes the rest bearable. For once things happen: Zarathustra hears a cry of distress, the soothsayer tempts him to pity, and the visitors turn up one at a time and are given dinner. They fail him. Then, in The Sign, he recognises what the last temptation has been, “FELLOW-SUFFERING WITH THE HIGHER MEN!”, gets up, and leaves the cave “glowing and strong, like a morning sun coming out of gloomy mountains.”

His sister and the Nazis

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche married Bernhard Förster, a prominent nationalist and antisemite, in 1885, the year of the Fourth Part, and Nietzsche stayed away from the wedding. After Förster’s suicide in Paraguay and her return in 1893 she took control of her brother’s papers and founded the archive, which moved to Weimar. The 1950s account, promoted by Walter Kaufmann among others, had her falsifying him into a Nazi. Later scholarship disputes how far the motive was ideological, while agreeing that she edited selectively. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar, which now owns the house, says she “stage-managed and instrumentalised” him.

The confirmed record of use runs as follows. Some 150,000 copies of a durable wartime Zarathustra went to German troops in the First World War, according to Steven Aschheim. Alfred Baeumler’s Nietzsche, the Philosopher and Politician (1931) enrolled him for German heroism. Hitler visited the archive in 1932, 1933 and 1934, came to her funeral in November 1935, and pledged funds for a memorial hall that was never finished. The same Weimar account says it is unknown whether he gave the writings any serious thought.

The book also says “it is the good war which halloweth every cause” (War and Warriors), and a reader wanting a slogan did not have to forge one. The line about the whip is a trap of a different kind: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!” is said by an old woman to Zarathustra, who reports it without dissent (Old and Young Women). Yet the same book calls the state “the coldest of all cold monsters” (The New Idol), and Nietzsche elsewhere attacked antisemitism and German nationalism. The use was a misuse, made easier by a style that hands out commandments and leaves the qualifications to be guessed.

How it was made

Nietzsche’s own account, quoted in the introduction, gives ten days each for the first three parts: the first at Rapallo, the last lines “in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the ghost in Venice”; the second at Sils Maria; the third at Nice. That speed is his claim, and he also called the book an explosion of forces that had been gathering for decades. The break with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée in late 1882 lies just behind it.

Readers and critics

The book was almost unread when it appeared, and it became a popular success only after his collapse. Bloom’s verdict in The Western Canon (1994), a gorgeous disaster and unreadable, is the strongest statement of the case against. Even the annotator of the free text warned that it “is by no means the first of Nietzsche’s works that the beginner ought to undertake to read”, which is still sound.

Afterlives

Music took the book most readily. Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra had its first performance in Frankfurt on 27 November 1896, and Stanley Kubrick’s use of its opening in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) made it the book’s best-known afterlife. Gustav Mahler set the midnight song, “O man! Take heed!”, for alto in the fourth movement of his Third Symphony (1896). Frederick Delius used the German text in A Mass of Life, completed in 1905. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) sets out from recurrence and tries its opposite.

How to read it

Know what the free text is. Thomas Common’s translation (1909) is complete: the Prologue and all eighty discourses, matching the German’s twenty-two, twenty-two, sixteen and twenty. The running Roman numerals are not Nietzsche’s. It was based on Alexander Tille’s version of 1896 and on a German text later shown to be flawed. Its weakness is the mock-biblical diction, all “hath”, “thou” and “verily” (“verily” alone comes nearly two hundred times). Luther’s German was still familiar to Nietzsche’s readers, whereas this English is costume. It also misses much of the wordplay on über and unter. Kaufmann mocked its “baddest” for the German for most evil, a real error given how much Nietzsche made of bad and evil.
Know what else is in the file. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s introduction, dated Weimar, December 1905, is a useful anthology of his remarks on the writing, with an interested gloss. It presses the idea of “the rearing of the Superman”, offers “All that proceeds from power is good, all that springs from weakness is bad” as the leading principle, and says Zarathustra himself is an example of the type, shortly after quoting “Never yet hath there been a Superman”. Anthony Ludovici’s notes follow the text, a chapter-by-chapter guide by a young disciple who became an anti-egalitarian writer and advocate of eugenics. They read the book as a call for “a higher aristocracy”. Neither is a neutral guide.
Buy a modern version. Walter Kaufmann’s (1954, in The Portable Nietzsche) is the most widely available, gives “overman”, and has been faulted by Clancy Martin for tidying the text. R. J. Hollingdale’s (Penguin, 1961) keeps “Superman” and reads cleanly. Graham Parkes’s (Oxford World’s Classics, 2005) aims at the music. Adrian Del Caro’s (Cambridge, 2006, edited with Robert Pippin) restores the versification.
Do not read it as doctrine. Treat every statement as said by someone, at some moment, to someone.