Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None was written by Friedrich Nietzsche in four parts between 1883 and 1885 and published in pieces, with Part 1 appearing in 1883. It follows the prophet Zarathustra, the Persian form of Zoroaster's name. At thirty, he leaves home for the mountains. After ten years he decides to go back down among people, and tells a saint he meets in the forest that God is dead. In the town, he proclaims the Ubermensch, usually translated as overman or superman: humans are something to be overcome, as apes were once overcome by humans. He contrasts this with the last man, a comfortable and timid creature who blinks and wants nothing great.¹²

The book is full of parables. In the three metamorphoses of the spirit, a camel that bears heavy burdens becomes a lion that says no, and finally a child who creates new values. Its most demanding idea is the eternal recurrence, the thought that you must live this life again and again for ever, which Nietzsche first put forward in The Gay Science as the heaviest weight. Can you will that? The book also announces the will to power. Nietzsche wrote it in a Biblical voice, on purpose, to answer the New Testament with a new teaching, and he made Zarathustra the speaker because the historical Zoroaster first made morality a cosmic struggle between good and evil, and so should be the first to discover the error.¹²

Sales were tiny. Nietzsche had only about 40 copies of Part 4 printed privately in 1885 and gave away just a few. Later editing by his sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and appropriation by the Nazis distorted his reputation, though scholars have since separated him from those uses. Richard Strauss wrote a tone poem based on the book in 1896, whose opening is famous from the film 2001.¹³