Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) is a philosophical novel by the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche. It came out in four installments from 1883 to 1885. The main character is based on the historical figure Zarathustra, known in the West as Zoroaster. Most of the book is made up of speeches Zarathustra gives on many different topics, and these speeches almost always end with the line "thus spoke Zarathustra." This character first showed up in Nietzsche’s earlier work The Gay Science, in section 342.

The writing style is full of analogies and figurative language, so there is no agreement on exactly what Zarathustra means, though there is some agreement on what he talks about. The book covers everything from everyday matters to deep philosophy—metaphysics, war, perspectivism, and nature’s lack of morality—and it introduces or expands on key Nietzschean ideas like the Übermensch, the death of God, the will to power, and eternal recurrence. Nietzsche grew up in the Bildungsbürgertum, a highly educated middle class.

Origins

As a teenager he wrote music and poetry. His aunt Rosalie gave him a biography of Alexander von Humboldt for his 15th birthday, which sparked a love of learning for its own sake. His schooling and surroundings encouraged an interest in Bildung, a concept that touches on many themes in Zarathustra, and he worked very hard. He became an outstanding philologist almost by accident, giving up his earlier artistic ambitions.

This training made him especially aware of how ideas are passed on and changed, which matters for Zarathustra. But Nietzsche grew to dislike philology as his interest in philosophy grew. As a student, his work on Diogenes Laertius combined both fields, and even then he strongly opposed accepted views. His later philosophical books continued that opposition and have been called acts of nihilistic destruction.

This destruction, along with growing isolation and the rejection of his marriage proposals to Lou Andreas-Salomé, left him devastated. While writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he walked a great deal. The images from those walks mixed with his physical, emotional, and intellectual pain, as well as his decades of hard work, and what "erupted" was Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche said the central idea of the book is eternal recurrence. He claimed this idea first came to him in August 1881, while walking near a "pyramidal block of stone" by Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine. He jotted down a note: "6,000 feet beyond man and time." A few weeks later, he paraphrased something Friedrich von Hellwald had written about Zarathustra in a notebook, and that paraphrase grew into the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A year and a half after that, Nietzsche was living in Rapallo.

He said the entire first part was conceived while walking—specifically on "the magnificent road to Zoagli" and around "the whole Bay of Santa Margherita." In a letter, he wrote that the first part "was conceived in the course of strenuous hiking: absolute certainty, as if every sentence were being called out to me." He returned to "the sacred place" in the summer of 1883 and "found" the second part. The following winter, in Nice, he "found" the third part. According to his autobiography Ecce Homo, the whole work took "scarcely one year," with each part written in ten days. But he also said in a letter: "The whole of Zarathustra is an explosion of forces that have been accumulating for decades." He finished the third part in January 1884 and thought the book was done.

By November, however, he expected a fourth part to be finished by January, and he mentioned plans for a fifth and sixth part leading to Zarathustra’s death, "or else he will give me no peace." After finishing the fourth part, he called it "a fourth (and last) part of Zarathustra, a kind of sublime finale, which is not at all meant for the public." The first three parts were published separately at first, then together in one volume in 1887. The fourth part was written in 1885. While Nietzsche was still mentally capable and involved in publishing his works, he had forty copies of the fourth part printed at his own expense and gave them to his closest friends, telling them he had "a vehement desire never to have the Fourth Part made public." In 1889, however, he became severely incapacitated.

Part four was published separately in March 1892, and all four parts appeared together in a single volume that July. In Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche explained why he chose the Persian figure Zoroaster as his protagonist. He wrote that people never asked him what the name Zarathustra meant in his mouth, as the first immoralist—because this Persian was the exact opposite of an immoralist. Zarathustra was the first to see...