Thus Spake Zarathustra

In the nearest town a crowd has gathered in the market square to watch a tightrope walker (a “rope-dancer” in Thomas Common’s translation). Zarathustra seizes the moment. “I teach you the Superman,” he announces. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What the ape is to us—a laughing-stock, a thing of shame—we shall be to the Superman. Stay true to the earth, he urges, and do not trust anyone who sells you hopes beyond it. Humanity is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over an abyss; what is great about us is that we are a bridge and not a goal.

The crowd laughs, and someone shouts that they have heard enough about the tightrope walker and would now like to see him. So Zarathustra tries the opposite tack and describes the most contemptible creature he can imagine: the Last Man. He is comfortable, careful and small. He has abolished poverty and riches, ruling and obeying, because they are all too much bother. He takes a little poison now and then for pleasant dreams, keeps an eye on his health, and wants exactly what everyone else wants. “We have discovered happiness,” say the last men, and blink. Zarathustra means this as a horror story. The crowd hears an advertisement. “Give us this last man,” they shout. “Make us into these last men!” There is ice in their laughter.

Then the show begins. Halfway across the rope between two towers, the walker is overtaken by a gaudy buffoon who bursts out of the same little door, jeers at him to get out of the way, and leaps clean over his head. The walker loses his footing and falls, smashed, right beside Zarathustra. Dying, he fears that the devil will drag him to hell. There is no devil and no hell, Zarathustra tells him gently; your soul will die even sooner than your body. Then, says the man, I am little more than an animal taught to dance by blows and scraps of food. No, says Zarathustra: you made danger your calling, and there is nothing contemptible in that. I will bury you with my own hands.

That night, warned by the buffoon to leave town, he carries the corpse past jeering gravediggers into the forest and lays it in a hollow tree. He wakes at noon with a new truth. He has been talking to a herd. He needs neither followers nor corpses but companions: fellow creators who will follow him because they want to follow themselves. Overhead circle his eagle and his serpent, the proudest and the wisest animals under the sun.

The rest of Part One is a string of speeches to a small band of disciples in a town called the Pied Cow. Each reads like a sermon turned inside out, in the rolling rhythm of Luther’s German Bible.

The first and most famous, “The Three Metamorphoses,” is a tiny myth about how a spirit grows up. First it becomes a camel: it kneels, asks to be loaded with the heaviest duties, and carries them into the desert. There it becomes a lion, and fights a great dragon whose every golden scale says “Thou shalt.” The lion answers, “I will.” But a lion can only win freedom; it cannot create anything new. So at last the spirit becomes a child: innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a game, “a holy Yea.” Obedience, then rebellion, then play.

Other speeches praise the body as a “big sagacity” that the thinking mind merely serves; call the state “the coldest of all cold monsters”; and advise people to “die at the right time.” One speech, “Old and Young Women,” is notorious. Zarathustra declares that everything in woman has one solution, pregnancy; that man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. It ends with an old woman’s parting advice: “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!” Defenders note that the whip line is the old woman’s, perhaps a joke at Zarathustra’s expense; but the speech around it is plainly contemptuous and matches much else Nietzsche wrote about women. It is a real blind spot in a book that prides itself on seeing through everything.

At a crossroads the disciples give him a staff with a golden handle, a serpent coiled around the sun. In “The Bestowing Virtue” he praises generous giving, then does something no ordinary prophet does. Go away from me, he tells them. Be on your guard against Zarathustra; better still, be ashamed of him, for perhaps he has deceived you. “Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me.” Only when you have all denied me, he says, will I return to you.

Back in his cave, Zarathustra waits for months and years, like a sower who has scattered his seed. Then he dreams that a child holds up a mirror, and in it he sees not himself but a devil’s grimace: his teaching is being twisted by his enemies. (Anyone who knows what later happened to Nietzsche’s reputation tends to shiver here.) So he goes down again, this time to his friends on the Happy Isles.

God is a conjecture, he tells his friends, and he wants their guessing kept within what they themselves could create. He attacks the “tarantulas,” the preachers of equality, whom he suspects of dressing up envy and revenge as justice. “Men are not equal,” he says flatly, and here the book’s anti-democratic edge cannot be explained away. He also sings some of the book’s finest lyrics, among them the aching “Night-Song,” about the loneliness of always giving and never receiving.

In “Self-Surpassing” the will to power arrives. Wherever I found a living thing, he says, there I found will to power; even in the servant there is the will to be master. Life whispers him her secret: she is that which must ever surpass itself. Power here is closer to growth, mastery and self-overcoming than to pushing people around, though Nietzsche never fully untangles the two.

Then a soothsayer arrives with a gospel of exhaustion: “All is empty, all is alike, all hath been!” It lays Zarathustra low. For three days he neither eats nor speaks, then dreams of a black coffin bursting open in a thousand peals of children’s laughter. In “Redemption,” on a bridge crowded with beggars, he tells his disciples that the will’s deepest misery is that it cannot will backwards: it gnashes its teeth at every “It was.” To redeem the past is to turn every “It was” into “Thus would I have it!” And then he stops mid-sentence, looking terrified, as if he had walked to the edge of a thought he dare not finish.

In “The Stillest Hour” a voice without sound tells him that he knows that thought but will not speak it. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world, it whispers; your fruits are ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruits. Weeping aloud, Zarathustra leaves his friends in the night.

In Part Three Zarathustra sails away from the isles. After two days of silence he tells the sailors a vision, in the speech Common calls “The Vision and the Enigma.”

He was climbing a lonely mountain path with a creature on his shoulders, half-dwarf, half-mole, dripping thoughts like lead into his ear. This is the spirit of gravity, his arch-enemy: the voice that says every stone thrown high must fall. Zarathustra summons his courage, the kind that says even to death, “Was that life? Well! Once more!” The dwarf jumps down, and they stand before a gateway named “This Moment.” Behind it a lane runs back for an eternity; ahead of it another runs forward forever. If time has no end, Zarathustra asks, must not everything that can happen already have happened—this spider, this moonlight, the two of them whispering at this gate—and must it not all come round again? The dwarf shrugs that time itself is a circle. Zarathustra is furious: for him this is not a clever theory about time but the heaviest thing he knows.

Suddenly the dwarf and the gate are gone. A dog is howling, and on the ground a young shepherd is writhing and choking, a heavy black snake hanging out of his mouth. Zarathustra pulls and cannot free it. Then a cry bursts out of him: “Bite! Bite!” The shepherd bites off the snake’s head, spits it far away and springs up transformed—no longer a shepherd, no longer a man, but a being surrounded by light, laughing as no one on earth has ever laughed. Who is the shepherd? Zarathustra asks the sailors. He does not yet know that it is himself.

Then he travels slowly home, through towns where everything seems to have shrunk, past a ranting fool known as “the ape of Zarathustra,” who has borrowed his phrases without his spirit, and back to his cave, where he composes “Old and New Tables,” a hammering speech about smashing the old tablets of the law and writing new ones.

One morning Zarathustra leaps from his bed like a madman and calls up his “most abysmal thought” out of the depths. It comes—and he falls down as if dead. For seven days he lies there while his eagle heaps berries, rosy apples and even two stolen lambs around him. When at last he picks up an apple and finds that it smells good, his animals start talking. Everything goes, everything returns, they sing; eternally rolls the wheel of existence.

He teases them: you wags, you barrel-organs, you have turned it into a pretty tune. They watched while the monster crawled into his throat and he had to bite off its head. Now we learn what choked him. It was disgust: the knowledge that the small man, the man he was so weary of, would return forever too.

This is eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche called the fundamental idea of the whole book. It first appeared in The Gay Science (1882) as a thought experiment: suppose a demon told you that you would live your life again, every pain and joy in exactly the same order, countless times. Would you curse him, or call it divine? Whether or not Nietzsche thought it literally true, many readers treat it as a test: could you say yes to your life so completely that you would want all of it again, including the parts you regret? Zarathustra’s convalescence is the story of someone crushed by that question and learning, slowly, to sing again. He is, the animals tell him, the teacher of the eternal return.

Part Three ends in ecstasy. In “The Seven Seals” he sings seven verses to Eternity as to a bride, each ending “For I love thee, O Eternity!” The famous phrase amor fati, love of fate, never appears in this book—Nietzsche uses it in The Gay Science and Ecce Homo—but this is what it sounds like set to music.

Part Four, which Nietzsche printed in only forty copies for his friends, leaps ahead. Moons and years pass and Zarathustra’s hair turns white. He tells his animals that he gave up striving for happiness long ago; he strives for his work. He climbs a mountain to make a “honey sacrifice,” which is really a fishing trip, with his happiness as bait for anyone ready for him.

The next day the old soothsayer reappears, and the two of them hear a long cry of distress rising from the depths. It is calling you, says the soothsayer, who has come to tempt Zarathustra to his last sin: pity. Searching for the sufferer, he spends the day meeting a gallery of extraordinary misfits. Two kings, fleeing a fake and vulgar “good society,” driving a single ass before them. A scholar who lets leeches bite his bare arm because he has devoted his life to knowing one thing exactly: the leech’s brain. A magician whose melodramatic lament to a cruel, unknown God turns out to be an act. The last pope, out of work because his master is dead. The ugliest man, the murderer of God, who could not bear a witness who saw him through and through and pitied him. A voluntary beggar who gave away his riches and now preaches a sermon on the mount to cows. And his own shadow, a worn-out wanderer who has followed him everywhere, believing nothing is true and all is permitted, and has lost his goal.

Zarathustra sends each of them up to his cave. When he comes home in the evening, the cry of distress is coming from inside: it was their cry all along. These are the higher men, people who have outgrown the old values and been broken by the effort. He feeds them and gives a long speech: God is dead; the market-place will always blink and insist that we are all equal; they must learn to laugh at themselves. They try, with songs and arguments of their own, and they are getting better. They are also, Zarathustra suspects, not quite getting it.

Suddenly the cave falls silent and smells of incense. Zarathustra peeks in and finds all his guests on their knees worshipping the ass, while the ugliest man chants a mock-biblical litany and the ass brays “Ye-a” (in German its bray, I-A, sounds like Ja, yes). It is one of the funniest scenes in philosophy: people who cannot live without something to adore have found a god who never says no. Zarathustra scolds them one by one, and each has a sly answer. Better to adore God in this form than in none at all, says the pope. You yourself taught us, says the ugliest man, that one kills not by wrath but by laughter. Zarathustra decides it is a good sign—only convalescents invent such festivals—and tells them to celebrate it again in remembrance of him.

Outside under the moon, the ugliest man asks the book’s great question. For the sake of this one day, he says, he is content for the first time to have lived his whole life. “Was that—life?” he will say to death. “Well! Once more!” The higher men are overwhelmed; the soothsayer dances; some say even the ass danced. As a bell tolls towards midnight, Zarathustra sings the “Drunken Song,” whose refrain ends: woe says “Go!”—but joys all want eternity. To say yes to a single joy is to say yes to all the pain chained to it.

In the morning he greets the sun exactly as he did at the start. The higher men are still asleep; they are not his proper companions. Then a cloud of doves swirls around him and a great yellow lion lays its head on his knee and licks the tears from his hands. “My children are nigh, my children,” he says. When the higher men come out, the lion roars and they flee. Then he understands: his last sin was fellow-suffering with the higher men, and that has had its time. He leaves his cave, glowing and strong like the morning sun coming out of dark mountains, to meet the great noontide. The book ends not with an arrival but with a beginning.

On the Happy Isles he preaches to his friends again. Wherever he finds life, he finds will to power: the urge to grow and to surpass oneself. He attacks the preachers of equality and sings of loneliness and of Life as a teasing dancer. He also dreams of a child holding up a mirror in which his teaching wears a devil’s face—a grim forecast of what others would later make of it. A soothsayer’s message that “all is empty” knocks him flat for three days. He teaches that real redemption is turning every “It was” into “Thus would I have it!”—then stops in terror at a thought he cannot yet speak, and leaves his friends in tears.

Sailing home, he tells the crew a vision. Climbing a mountain with a dwarf—the spirit of gravity—on his back, he reached a gateway called “This Moment” and asked whether everything must return forever. Then he saw a shepherd choking on a black snake, cried “Bite!”, and watched him bite off its head and rise up laughing like no one before. Back in his cave he summons this “abysmal thought” and collapses for seven days, sick with disgust that even the smallest, meanest man must return forever. His animals nurse him and sing him the doctrine of eternal recurrence, and he recovers to sing his love for eternity. The thought works as a test: could you love your life so much that you would gladly live every moment of it again?

Years later, white-haired, Zarathustra hears a cry of distress. He meets a string of broken seekers: two kings, a scholar who studies only the leech’s brain, a fake magician, the last pope, the ugliest man who killed God, a beggar who preaches to cows, and his own worn-out shadow. Each, in a different way, has lost faith in the old values without finding new ones. All gather in his cave, where he urges them to laugh at themselves. That night they worship a braying ass; Zarathustra scolds, then blesses the festival. The ugliest man declares that for this one day he would gladly live his whole life again: “Was that—life? … Well! Once more!” At midnight Zarathustra sings that joy wants eternity. At dawn a lion and a flock of doves come to him, the higher men flee, and Zarathustra, freed from pity, sets out alone to his great noontide.