Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In 1880, as the science and industry of Western Europe were redefining the modern world and a newly unified Germany flexed its muscles, a lone philosopher, hiking by a breathtaking lake in the Alps, began resurrecting an ancient Persian prophet to send him into the contemporary world. Friedrich Nietzsche published the first part of his Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in 1883, and the completed volume became his best-known book. He considered it his most important work, and toward the end of his life he immodestly described it in Ecce Homo (1908) as “the greatest present” that had been made to humanity so far. In the same book, he no less outrageously proclaims that it is “not only the highest book there is ... but it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth.” So we should not be surprised to find that Zarathustra is an extremely enigmatic and often pretentious work and by no means easy to understand or to classify. It is not clearly philosophy, or poetry, or prophecy, or satire. Sometimes it seems to be all of the above. It is also difficult because it is filled with learned allegories and allusions—to the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe’s Faust, Ludwig Feuerbach, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s former friend Richard Wagner, and others-references that might not be readily recognizable by most contemporary readers. Zarathustra’s subtitle, “A Book for All and None,” also sounds like a challenge, if not a direct affront, suggesting that while anyone might pick it up and read it, no one can really understand it. In the then anxious world of modern Europe, already preparing for the calamities and traumas of the twentieth century, Zarathustra would find itself curiously at home.

The basic format of Zarathustra is familiar. It tells a story in biblical style. Zarathustra is an epic that resembles no other book so much as the New Testament, a work that Nietzsche, who had originally intended to enter the ministry (and whose father and grandfathers had all been ministers), knew very well. Like Jesus in the New Testament, the titular character of Nietzsche’s book goes into solitude at the age of thirty and returns to humanity with a mission—to share his wisdom with others, to challenge them to reform their lives. But like Jesus, Zarathustra is seriously misunderstood. The book thus chronicles the protagonist’s efforts and wanderings, his coming to understand who he is and what he stands for, by way of his interactions with the various and often odd characters he meets along the way.

Nevertheless, there are obvious and dramatic differences between Zarathustra and the Gospels. To begin with, unlike Jesus, who returns from solitude after forty days, Zarathustra enjoys solitude for ten years before beginning his mission. And while the story of Jesus is completed with his death and resurrection, Zarathustra’s story is never finished. Indeed, the book starts exactly as it begins, with Zarathustra’s leaving his mountain cave and descending once again to humanity. While Jesus is presented as enlightened throughout his teaching mission, Zarathustra matures only gradually. His whole story can be understood as an instance of the popular German genre of Bildungsroman—that is, a novel chronicling the education of its protagonist. Most important, the “gospel” that Zarathustra brings contrasts sharply with the teachings of Jesus. In Nietzsche’s version, Zarathustra utterly rejects the distinction between good and evil, and with it the basic premise of Judeo-Christian morality. He also denounces the “otherworldly” outlook of Christianity, its emphasis on a “better” life beyond this one. Zarathustra’s philosophy, summarized in a single phrase, is a celebration of what is “this-worldly.” It is a “yes-saying” to life, this life; for Zarathustra (like Nietzsche) thinks that there is no other. The combined allusions to and discrepancies from the New Testament in Zarathustra make it appropriate to think of it as a parody, although it should not be thought of just as satire, which ridicules its target. On the blasphemous side, however, Zarathustra is treated as a figure whose seriousness and importance are comparable to those of Jesus.

Many readers may not know that Nietzsche’s titular character is a very important historical religious figure. Zarathustra, also known as Zoroaster, probably lived in the seventh century B.C.E. (possibly from 628 to 551). He was a Persian who founded his own religion. Zoroastrianism, in turn, had a profound influence on both Judaism and Christianity. Zarathustra remained a fantasy figure in the West for many centuries, long before his writings were translated in the eighteenth century. Central to the teachings of the historical Zarathustra was the idea that the world is a stage on which cosmic moral forces, the power of good and the powers of evil, fight it out for dominance over humanity. This conflict between good and evil is central to both Judaism and Christianity, and given Nietzsche’s rejection of this dichotomy, it is highly significant as well as ironic that Nietzsche chose the supposed originator of that distinction as his central character and ostensibly as his spokesman. Nietzsche tells us in Ecce Homo that as the first to invent the opposition of good and evil, Zarathustra should be the first to recognize that it is a “calamitous error,” for he has more experience and is more truthful than any other thinker. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is the historical religious leader updated, offering insight into the modern world, just as the original Zarathustra addressed the circumstances of his era.

One could argue that Nietzsche used his fictional Zarathustra much as Plato used his teacher, Socrates (who never wrote down his teachings), to express his own views. And given that Nietzsche had a doctorate in classical philology and taught the classics for many years, we should not be surprised to find that Nietzsche’s book makes extensive references to Plato’s dialogues and their hero. Socrates, along with Jesus, remained one of the focal points of Nietzsche’s philosophy from his first book to his last. Socrates is a figure of profound importance to the Western tradition. In Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872; The Birth of Tragedy), he called Socrates “the one vortex and turning-point” of Western culture. In one of his last books, Die Götzen-Dämmerung (1889; Twilight of the Idols), he devotes an entire chapter to “The Problem of Socrates,” which is nothing less than the problem of Western civilization as such. In his life, Socrates was a self-styled gadfly to his contemporaries, provoking them to question their basic beliefs, which for the most part they held just because others held them too. His unrelenting challenge to common morals and public authority ultimately led to his being convicted on trumped-up charges and executed. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is similarly devoted to challenging both “common sense” and the authority of tradition, and he similarly arouses hatred in those committed to them.

Yet again there are sharp differences between Socrates and Zarathustra. Socrates was devoted to what Nietzsche came to see an “absurd rationality” that undervalued the emotions and other irrational aspects of our nature. Moreover, Plato’s Socrates contends that the philosophical life is a long practice in learning how to die, and he offers an ethereal vision of truth in a separate, heavenly plane. According to Plato’s hero, the body drags the soul down and distracts it from this true reality, which can be grasped only by reason. Consequently, Nietzsche sees Platonism as otherworldly and life-denying, a prefiguring of the Judeo-Christian worldview in its negativism; in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886; Beyond Good and Evil) he calls Christianity “Platonism for the masses.” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a parodic counterpart to Plato’s Socrates, for Zarathustra urges appreciation of this world, the body, and our passions, directly contradicting Plato’s account of the purely rational, otherworldly philosophical life.

Thus the opening of Zarathustra recalls the Myth of the Cave from Plato’s Republic 7. In that work, Socrates describes a cave in which people bound to a wall see shadows cast onto the cave’s wall; the shadows are the entirety of their experience. One individual, who represents the philosopher, manages to get loose and emerge from the cave, where he discovers the whole world that the sun illuminates. He returns to his companions in the cave to tell them what he has found. But his companions want none of his reports. They are convinced that he has ruined his eyesight, since it took him some time to readjust to the darkness, and they want to kill him. Zarathustra similarly emerges from the cave, but the wisdom he has to share comes from his experiences inside it. The sun, which represents the all-illuminating form of the Good for Plato, is also the image of Apollo, the god of reason and order. Nietzsche describes Greek tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy as combining the wisdom of Apollo with that of Dionysus, the god of drunkenness, passion, and the irrational powers of the psyche. Nietzsche insists that Apollo alone or Dionysus alone represents only part of the human experience, and that the psychological reality of the human being as a whole requires a combination of what these gods represent. Zarathustra appreciates both the insights of his cave and the illumination of the sun, in that his wisdom appreciates both parts of our nature, while Plato addresses only one.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra opens with a prologue that is a minidrama unto itself. Its plot, in brief, is this: Zarathustra emerges in the morning from his mountain cave and sings a hymn to the sun, vowing like the sun to bestow his riches on humanity, which in Zarathustra’s case amounts to the wisdom he has discovered in his solitude. He descends and meets an ascetic saint in the forest, who urges him not to go to humanity. Continuing his descent, Zarathustra comes upon a group of people who have gathered for a circus performance. It is here that Zarathustra addresses them and attempts to inspire them with a speech about the Übermensch (“superman”), but he is grotesquely misunderstood. The people think that Zarathustra is a circus barker and that the Übermensch is the tightrope walker about to perform above their heads. As the tightrope walker begins his performance, he is taunted by a jester and falls to his death. Zarathustra comforts the performer as he dies and promises to bury him. Taking the corpse with him, Zarathustra is threatened by the jester and some gravediggers. He wanders in the forest and takes refuge in the home of a hermit, who offers him and his dead companion bread and wine to eat. After burying the corpse in a hollow tree, Zarathustra, feeling misunderstood, takes stock and concludes that he should seek companions, or at least like-minded individuals, instead of addressing crowds en masse. At the end of the Prologue, an eagle and a snake join Zarathustra, who calls them “my animals” and compares them to his pride and his wisdom. (Such comparisons with animals occur throughout Zarathustra.)

The Prologue reads a bit like a dream report, yet it serves as a kind of overture to Zarathustra as a whole, raising many of the book’s main themes and suggesting the basic problems that Zarathustra will confront. The opening section of the Prologue, Zarathustra’s hymn to the sun, is virtually identical to the last section of Nietzsche’s previous book, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science, 1882; also translated as The Joyous Wisdom). In that work, the section is titled “Incipit tragoedia,” Latin words meaning “the tragedy begins.” Nietzsche had suggested at the beginning of The Gay Science that tragic ages are those that seek some purpose to human existence and accept the doctrines of some moral teacher about the nature of values, good, and evil. Thus there is the hint that Zarathustra’s hymn initiates a tragedy. But according to Nietzsche, also in The Gay Science, tragic ages give way to comic ages, in which the meaning or purpose of life is no longer raised as a question, for life is assumed to be valuable just as it is. The recovery of that sense that life is valuable for its own sake is also the goal of Zarathustra.

The second section of the Prologue announces one of Nietzsche’s most famous lines and one of the central themes of Zarathustra, the idea that “God is dead.” Zarathustra takes this idea for granted, for after his encounter with the old saint he remarks to himself, “ ‘Could it then be possible? This old saint in his forest has not yet heard of it, that God is dead!’ ” (p. 9). Nietzsche does not have in mind any metaphysical claim about a Supreme Being here; he is referring instead to people’s belief in the Judeo-Christian God. His claim is that many people who think that they believe in God really do not believe. That is, their “belief” makes no difference in their lives, a fact that they betray through their actions and feelings. By comparison with medieval Europe, in which people based their sense of place in the world directly on their ideas about God and his relation to humanity, the modern world understands a person’s role in completely secular terms, whether or not an individual considers himself or herself a Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

At the same time, many of the corollaries to the West’s previous belief in a supernatural Almighty, which in The Gay Science Nietzsche calls “the shadows of God,” remain alive and well. For example, the views that our significance is compromised by the discovery that our planet is in an undistinguished part of the universe, and that nature is somehow deficient, and that our lives are without mooring unless they are lived under the watchful eye of Providence remain implicit in the modern person’s worldview, even if these are not conscious beliefs. Since they no longer have a real sense of the presence of God in human life, these background beliefs promote a sense that our lives are meaningless and that our values are without grounding. This is the condition that Nietzsche calls “nihilism.” Zarathustra’s role is to address modern humanity in this situation and to suggest possibilities that might lead us beyond the crisis of nihilism.

In Zarathustra’s speech to the circus audience, he gives us the single most famous image from Zarathustra, the idea of the Übermensch (“superman”). The Übermensch is often envisioned as a cartoonish character not unlike Conan the Barbarian, brute strength combined with an utter lack of sophistication or civilization. Combined with the fact that Nietzsche celebrates what he calls “the will to power” (a topic we consider below), the Übermensch would seem to suggest that Nietzsche has an unhealthy enthusiasm for unbridled, unrefined, naked power. But Nietzsche was among the most refined men of his generation. He had exquisite taste, and he had little but contempt for those who did not appreciate the finer things in life, such as music, art, and poetry. In fact, the Übermensch idea appears only briefly in Zarathustra (and nowhere else), with few mentions beyond the first part of the book. (The popularity of the image was greatly enhanced by the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who gave the “Superman” a role in one of his funniest plays, Man and Superman.) There is very little in Zarathustra or in any other of Nietzsche’s texts to support the importance given to the Übermensch in popular conceptions of Nietzsche and his philosophy. Once again, it is important to take a careful look at what Nietzsche actually wrote as opposed to snatching a quotation or an image from its context.

The idea of the Übermensch is not prophecy but a provocative image, characterized in a number of brief but powerful statements. Zarathustra announces in his first speech, “I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome.... What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just the same shall man be to the Übermensch: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment” (p. 9) and “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch” (p. 11). But as we mentioned in our summary of the Prologue, the scene of Zarathustra’s speech is ironic, his speech is thoroughly misunderstood, and the whole scene is quite embarrassing to him. The crowd hears him not as a prophet or a sage but mistakes him for a circus barker and takes the Übermensch not as an inspiring vision but as another circus performer.

What did Nietzsche have in mind? He had read and appropriated Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Thus Zarathustra’s image of the Übermensch might well be taken to suggest a further stage of evolution, beyond humanity. But Nietzsche makes very clear that such progress is anything but assured. We could live our lives in such a way that humanity progresses toward this higher stage, but Nietzsche seems to think that for most people this is highly implausible. More likely, we will collectively hasten human devolution. Thus Zarathustra juxtaposes his talk of the Übermensch with a much less flattering image of what humanity might become: “the last man.” The last man is the ultimate couch potato. He proclaims, “We have invented happiness” and blinks, wilfully ignoring anything that would interrupt his dull contentment. But whereas the Übermensch is a fantasy, Nietzsche rightly fears that the last man is all too real-humanity devoid of striving and creativity, reduced to a life of mere comfort and contentment. Zarathustra presents this image to the townspeople to horrify them. Instead, they welcome the world of the last man as utopia.

In Zarathustra’s portrait of the last man, Nietzsche is taking on a formidable foe: the English philosophy of utilitarianism, which calls for the greatest good for the greatest number of people and defines “good” in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche cracks, “Man does not live for pleasure. Only the Englishman does.” The centrality of pleasure and happiness (the utilitarians did not carefully distinguish these) seems to Nietzsche both banal and psychologically false. Pleasure and pain go hand in hand, in his view, and to minimize one is to minimize the other. He also rejects utilitarianism’s doctrine that every person’s interests should be counted equally. Nietzsche’s conception of “the greater good” is anything but egalitarian. For him, the greater good is determined by and for the exceptional individual, “the higher man.” Thus the political appeal of Nietzsche’s fantasy of the Übermensch in the new militaristic Germany of the twentieth century.

After the tightrope walker’s accident, the jester who caused it threatens Zarathustra; he says, “ ‘Leave this town, O Zarathustra.... The good and just hate you, and call you their enemy and despiser; the believers in the true faith hate you, and call you a danger to the multitude’ ” (p. 16). This anticipates Zarathustra’s opposition to conventional morality and his assault on both the Judeo-Christian and the Platonic traditions. The morality that Nietzsche attacks is the Judeo-Christian and Platonic morality of absolute codes of right and wrong—a morality that treats good and evil as metaphysical abstractions. In opposition, Nietzsche contends that “good” and “evil” are always reflections of the interests and aspirations of historically situated groups of people, and that these notions have varied over time and even among groups within a single society. Moral values are, accordingly, “relative,” and they are also political tools employed by the powerful to maintain or establish control. Nietzsche described himself as an “immoralist” (and in one of his last books, even as “the Antichrist”), and he called for a radical “revaluation of values,” a deep questioning of the values of Christianity in particular. This was particularly shocking as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, with the usual panic and apocalyptic thinking that have typically marked the turn of centuries in Europe. The stage was set for such a “revaluation of values,” and Nietzsche’s philosophy was well-suited to the role.

Zarathustra can be read as a seminal text in this revaluation of basic values. Essential to this project is Nietzsche’s diagnosis of human motives, the hidden purposes behind our actions. These often differ from what the moral tradition has commended and what we ourselves are willing to acknowledge. Much of what we consider to be altruistic (and hence “good”) behavior is actually subtly selfish. Many acts judged harshly, on the other hand, have the same motives as those judged to be good. Underlying all of our actions, Nietzsche hypothesizes, is the “will to power,” the drive to express and enhance one’s vitality and to control one’s circumstances.

The expression “will to power” is exciting and seductive, and it caught on in the increasingly war-mongering years after Nietzsche’s death. Certainly Nietzsche means for this expression to draw attention to the role of sheer strength in the world, but he by no means restricts the idea to military power and political domination. Zarathustra describes the will to power as “the unexhausted procreating will of life” (p. 100), indicating that it is creative, not merely controlling, and that it represents self-mastery, not just power over others.

The will to power is also posed in opposition to the metaphysical Will or “will to existence” of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a philosopher whom Nietzsche very much admired but whose views he came to reject. Schopenhauer contended that the nature of reality, expressed in human beings and every other creature or entity, was Will, and that the Will in various creatures struggled with the Will in others; the result was suffering all around. Schopenhauer’s emphasis, however, was on the creature’s drive to maintain itself in existence, and he contended that ultimately we should overcome our tendency to struggle and suffer by recognizing that all of reality is driven by the same will. Thus Schopenhauer called for renunciation of the Will within us as the only route to release from suffering, an idea he inherited from Buddhism and its Four Noble Truths. Despite the seeming similarity of their language, Nietzsche’s will to power is an explicit rejection of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of renunciation. With the will to power, Nietzsche advocates an appreciation of life with all of its “overcomings” as it exists within us and outside us, in its exuberance and excess. Nietzsche acknowledges that life involves suffering, much of which stems from conflict; but, against Schopenhauer, he insists that we can make the most of suffering by our willing participation in the world. Far from pointless, as Schopenhauer argued, life is joyful and well worth the price of suffering.

In the popular imagination, however, the coinage “will to power” continued to have overtones of imperialistic ambition. After World War I, Nietzsche was reviled throughout Europe because he had become associated with German nationalism, and a few years later he was interpreted as a precocious spokesman for the Nazis. It did not help that his sister Elisabeth became part of a proto-Nazi group and then promoted her brother’s philosophy to the new Nazi party. (There is a famous photograph of Hitler nose to nose with a bust of Nietzsche, staged by Elisabeth.) But Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism, and he was no lover of German nationalism. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that his reputation started to be disentangled from the Nazi horror, and even then, Nietzsche’s antimoral and antireligious stance kept him marginalized even in academic and intellectual circles. Nevertheless, some of Nietzsche’s concerns (for example, his critique of modernity, his insistence on willing participation in the world, and “the death of God”) made him attractive to the existentialists of the mid-twentieth century (in particular, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger).

In the latter part of the twentieth century, history caught up with Nietzsche. By that time, the legacy of two world wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, fascism, Stalinism, and a new appreciation for relativity, in science as well as in culture, made Nietzsche, who stressed the modern crisis in values, the darling of the avant garde and a figure of importance for intellectuals and academics everywhere. Nietzsche’s reception in intellectual history parallels the course of Zarathustra’s mission in the Prologue. What is initially offered to the world at large is misunderstood, and Zarathustra must content himself with the search for like-minded individuals. This gives us a more sympathetic sense of the book’s subtitle; Nietzsche offers his book to whoever cares to read it, but he doubts that he will find any contemporary readers receptive to it. Thus Zarathustra’s speeches include Nietzsche’s “untimely” complaints about the folly of his time and the directions he saw his contemporaries taking. But in Nietzsche’s philosophy, critiques of human foolishness and warnings about the horrors of the future are always tempered by an abstract hope and a concrete love of life. This is the tone that is set in Zarathustra. Like the New Testament, which it both imitates and mocks, it is ultimately a book of hope, enthusiasm, and good cheer.

This good cheer is evident, in part, in Nietzsche’s brilliant, buoyant, and enthusiastic writing style. He is often said to be among the very best writers of German prose, comparable to the great poet Goethe (who is in turn often compared with Shakespeare). But his style also raises philosophical concerns. Philosophers tend to be tediously literal, but Nietzsche was a flamboyant rhetorician who rarely shied away from even the most outrageous overstatements and accusations. As a consequence, he seems to invite all sorts of wild interpretations that go far beyond what he could have literally intended. Nevertheless, it is evident that he was willing to be misunderstood if that was the price of attracting our attention. The pseudobiblical style of Zarathustra is but one example of this. Another is his sometimes vehement attack on the Judeo-Christian worldview, despite the fact that he himself was very much a product of it. This attack is a provocation to “self-overcoming,” making a revolutionary change in our lives and the way we see the world.

Reading Zarathustra, it is clear that Nietzsche intends to shock and provoke us because it is only by being shocked and provoked that we will feel compelled to undertake a serious and critical self-examination. What is not so clear is exactly how we should take the many outrageous things Zarathustra seems to say. But part of the problem is that quotations are so often snatched out of context from Nietzsche’s texts. For instance, he often wrote in a hypothetical way (“What if...”), suggesting a thought-experiment or an ironic expression. He sometimes puts words in the mouth of one or another fictional character, not clearly expressing his own opinion at all. The overall fictional context of Zarathustra makes the question “What is Nietzsche saying to us?” particularly complicated. One notorious example is the oft-quoted line “ ‘You go to women? Do not forget the whip!’ ” (p. 59). This line is often attributed to Nietzsche, as if he offered this as advice, demonstrating his extreme misogyny. However, the line is quoted by Zarathustra as the comment of a little old woman with whom he has been speaking. The meaning and seriousness of the comment is thus deeply in question. It certainly does not follow that Nietzsche is an unenlightened woman-hater. In fact, just before he wrote Zarathustra, his most intimate soul mate was the young Lou Andreas-Salomé, one of the most liberated women in Europe at the time.

So, too, there are serious questions about how we should take Zarathustra’s (and Nietzsche’s) denunciations of the sentiment of pity (Mitleid—literally, “suffering with,” also translated as “compassion” and “empathy”). Historically, these are part of his attack on Christianity, on Schopenhauer (who insisted that compassion was the basis of all morality), and, by implication, on Buddhism. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s comments are prone to misunderstanding. Nietzsche and his Zarathustra frequently claim that pity is useless and hypocritical, a claim that leads readers to believe that Nietzsche was misanthropic, devoid of concern for other people. And Nietzsche does seem at times even to make fun of weakness and poverty. But we know both from his letters and from the reports of those who knew him that Nietzsche was an extremely compassionate and sensitive man. So how should we understand the extreme things he says?

Nietzsche’s condemnation of pity is a discomforting example of his diagnosis of the underlying motives behind human morals. A person who pities, Nietzsche suggests, is relishing his or her own superior position with respect to the person pitied. Far from being altruistic, the pitying person is hypocritically gaining a psychological advantage through another person’s misfortune. Being pitied, on the other hand, is psychologically debilitating; it makes the person pitied feel his or her weakness and inferiority by comparison to the supposed benefactor; and it encourages the person to doubt his or her ability to cope with the difficulties at hand. Regarding the “compassion” that the moral tradition promotes, Nietzsche contends that tough love and a stance of not allowing oneself to become debilitated by “suffering with” another person is really the more compassionate approach.

Perhaps the most interesting idea to make its appearance in Zarathustra (and in several of Nietzsche’s other books) is “eternal recurrence,” which he immodestly claims to be his greatest idea and the fundamental conception of the book. Eternal recurrence is the idea that the sequence of events, including the events that make up one’s life, has already happened and will recur again and again and again. This metaphor (although there is some evidence that he took it literally) underscores Nietzsche’s endorsement of the affirmation of this life, exactly as it is. True, life always involves suffering. The proper response to suffering, however, is not resentment or disengagement but wholehearted “Dionysian” acceptance. Embracing the idea of eternal recurrence, being willing to endure one’s life, with all of its pains as well as its pleasures, indicates a real love of life. Resentment, regret, and remorse, by contrast, suggest an unwillingness to accept one’s life as it is and thus an unwillingness to live one’s life again. There is a difference implied here between loving one’s life because of its achievements and enjoyments and loving one’s life for the sake of life itself. It is one thing to relish one’s victories and successes. It is something else to love one’s life despite or even because of one’s failures and suffering.

Near the end of The Gay Science, Nietzsche gives us a provocative description of eternal recurrence:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal? (pp. 273-274).

The same proposition is repeated in Zarathustra: “not ... a new life or a better life or a similar life” but “this identical and selfsame life” (p. 190). This phrase, “this identical and selfsame life,” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. It certainly seems to mean “the same in every minute detail.” Indeed, we have all observed, perhaps to our dismay, that changing even one small event in the past might have resulted in any number of dramatic alterations of the present. Indeed, if one had been born only five minutes earlier, so the argument goes, one would have been, in some significant sense, a different person. If one regrets having gone to business school instead of pursuing one’s true love of literature, or having never gotten married and had children so young, the question of who one might otherwise be is truly bewildering.

So considered, the eternal recurrence is not an archaic theory of time but a psychological test: “How would you feel if... ?” To be sure, it is a model of time that has ancient and illustrious roots, back to the Indian Vedas and the pre-Hellenic Greeks, but there is little evidence that Nietzsche seriously intended to embrace such metaphysical systems of which this view of time is a part. The eternal recurrence, certainly as it is presented in Zarathustra, is a thought-experiment. Its significance lies not in the details but rather in the general affirmation of one’s life. Commentator Maudemarie Clark offers this nice explanation of eternal recurrence: At the end of a long marriage, would one be willing to do it again? In other words, was it worth it, all things considered? A few minor changes here or there, or perhaps even some major changes, would not affect your view. It is rather the whole of the marriage—the whole of your life for that considerable amount of time-that is in question. If you would gnash your teeth and curse the very suggestion, you would have to say that you do not really value your married life. If, on the other hand, you claim to have no regrets, all things considered, then that is what we would call a happy marriage. It is also what makes for a happy life.

Although eternal recurrence is a dominant idea in Zarathustra, it emerges only gradually over the course of the book, which presents Zarathustra’s discovery and articulation of this idea, as well as his various reactions to it. When the idea of eternal recurrence itself first appears in Zarathustra’s mind, he does not want to admit it. It appears in various formulations in the third part of the book, and not all of these seem life-affirming. Zarathustra worries that eternal recurrence might be seen as condemning us to repeat the same traumas over and over, and that all of life’s pettiness might be made eternal if this vision were true. He has real ambivalence over this idea, suggesting that it is more easily accepted intellectually than existentially. Eventually, however, he learns to embrace the entirety of his life. But first he has to recognize that what is needed to redeem humanity is the elimination of “the spirit of revenge” against the past, the kind of chip on one’s shoulder that, because of past events, one can no longer change. Zarathustra concludes that to overcome this vindictive attitude, one needs to have a sense that the past does not coerce one to do anything. The past does not determine our will, but our will shapes our lives in the future. The third part of Zarathustra ends with a rapturous wedding song to eternity, indicating his willingness to spend his life bound to time’s cyclical recurrence.

Only in the fourth part of the book, however, does Zarathustra tie his affirmation of life to his actual work in the world. We should note that Nietzsche wrote the parts of the book separately, each of them in a fit of inspiration, with months elapsing between one outburst and another. But the fourth part is in a distinctively different style than the first three parts, with a more prominent narrator, several ironic characters (“the higher men”), and a humorous, sometimes slapstick, tone. (Some commentators think that Zarathustra should have ended with the third part and view the fourth part as something of an afterthought, an add-on, a view with which we disagree.) In the fourth part, the parodic aspects of Zarathustra take on their most comical qualities, with satires of the Last Supper and Moses’ return from Mount Sinai, for example. These were not to everyone’s taste, and Nietzsche himself published it only privately for fear of public censure. We believe, however, that the fourth part performs a vital role in the work as a whole. In it Zarathustra objects to the higher men’s “betrayal” of his doctrines and realizes that he has been distracted from his mission by his pity for them, his “final sin,” an admission that he has lost touch with his original message. He laughs at himself and shares with the higher men a song (a “round”) celebrating eternal recurrence. The fourth book ends with Zarathustra emerging from his cave in the morning and seeing what he takes to be signs that he is approaching his spiritual goal. He concludes, “Should I strive for my happiness? I strive for my work!” (p. 281). The comparison and contrast with Jesus is again evident. Zarathustra, too, is devoted to his mission, but that mission is opposed, not furthered, by pity.

So the book ends as it begins, with Zarathustra again descending from his mountain home to resume spreading his wisdom to others. Zarathustra has yet to find companions who are really prepared for his message. In this sense, he has not accomplished anything of his purpose over the course of the book. But the book has demonstrated his achievement of a transformation, an endogenous attitudinal transformation. He has reached the stage of embracing his life in all of its fullness. Although his beginning and end may look the same from an external point of view, his work and the entirety of his life have become transfigured. So, too, we find after reading Nietzsche and struggling with his ideas and images that we are transformed. Not that we now fancy ourselves Übermenschen, but we do find ourselves thinking with just a bit more imagination, aspiration, and inspiration than when we began this curious and sometimes infuriating book.

Kathleen M. Higgins and Robert C. Solomon are professors of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Together they have written What Nietzsche Really Said and A Short History of Philosophy and co-edited Reading Nietzsche. They have also made an audio-video “Superstar Teacher” tape on Nietzsche for the Teaching Company, The Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Higgins is also the author of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science. Solomon is also the author of Living with Nietzsche, The Joy of Philosophy, and Spirituality for the Skeptic. They are married and live in Austin, Texas.