COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

A. VON ENDE

The growth of Nietzsche corresponds with that of the new school; first he threw off the burden of the historical and traditional past; then he shattered with the hammer of his genius all the small, low, and weak ideals of the present; and finally, upon the ruins he preached to his apostles the gospel of the only one—the Übermensch. This over-human being, discarding all humanity with the great herd, and from the unscaled heights of his temple throwing thunderbolts which flash upon the whole world—this Overman, with all his consciousness of superiority and his claim of being beyond good and evil, felt too human, all too human, to dispense with being in touch with his fellow-beings. Nietzsche himself was the least free of free men; but his soul, wavering from pole to pole, asking questions and not answering them, found a universal echo, and this echo is the keynote of the poetry of young Germany.

—from The Critic (February 1900)

THOMAS COMMON

Besides being a philosopher, Nietzsche is at the same time the most interesting of all writers for cultured men and women to read. In brilliancy of style and originality of thought he is perhaps unequalled. He is not only the most serious and profound of writers, he is also the gayest and most cheerful. There has never been such a master of aphorisms. As a prophetic writer also he stands alone.

—from Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet (1901)

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Nietzsche is worse than shocking, he is simply awful: his epigrams are written with phosphorus on brimstone. The only excuse for reading them is that before long you must be prepared either to talk about Nietzsche or else retire from society, especially from aristocratically minded society (not the same thing, by the way, as aristocratic society), since Nietzsche is the champion of privilege, of power, and of inequality.... His pungency; his power of putting the merest platitudes of his position in rousing, startling paradoxes; his way of getting underneath moral precepts which are so unquestionable to us that common decency seems to compel unhesitating assent to them, and upsetting them with a scornful laugh: all this is easy to a witty man who has once well learnt Schopenhauer’s lesson, that the intellect by itself is a mere dead piece of brain machinery, and our ethical and moral systems merely the pierced cards you stick into it when you want it to play a certain tune. So far I am on common ground with Nietzsche. But not for a moment will I suffer any one to compare me to him as a critic. Never was there a deafer, blinder, socially and politically inepter academician.... To him modern Democracy, Pauline Christianity, Socialism, and so on are deliberate plots hatched by malignant philosophers to frustrate the evolution of the human race and mass the stupidity and brute force of the many weak against the beneficial tyranny of the few strong. This is not even a point of view: it is an absolutely fictitious hypothesis: it would not be worth reading were it not that there is almost as much evidence for it as if it were true, and that it leads Nietzsche to produce some new and very striking and suggestive combinations of ideas. In short, his sallies, petulant and impossible as some of them are, are the work of a rare spirit and are pregnant with its vitality.

—from Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Volume 1 (1906)

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Among my writings my Zaratbustra stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights-the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance-it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness. Here no “prophet” is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of religions. Above all, one must hear aright the tone that comes from this mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice to the meaning of its wisdom....

It is no fanatic that speaks here; this is not “preaching”; no faith is demanded here: from an infinite abundance of light and depth of happiness falls drop upon drop, word upon word: the tempo of these speeches is a tender adagio. Such things reach only the most select. It is a privilege without equal to be a listener here.

—translated by Walter Kaufmann, from Ecce Homo (1908)

H. L. MENCKEN

Despite Nietzsche’s conclusion that the known facts of existence do not bear it out, and the essential impossibility of discussing it to profit, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is by no means unthinkable. The celestial cycle put forward, as an hypothesis, by modern astronomy—the progression, that is, from gas to molten fluid, from fluid to solid, and from solid, by catastrophe, back to gas again—is easily conceivable, and it is easily conceivable, too, that the earth, which has passed through an uninhabitable state into a habitable state, may one day become uninhabitable again, and so keep seesawing back and forth through all eternity.

But what will be the effect of eternal recurrence upon the superman? The tragedy of it, as we have seen, will merely serve to make him heroic. He will defy the universe and say “yes” to life. Putting aside all thought of conscious existence beyond the grave, he will seek to live as nearly as possible in exact accordance with those laws laid down for the evolution of sentient beings on earth when the cosmos was first set spinning. But how will he know when he has attained this end? How will he avoid going mad with doubts about his own knowledge? Nietzsche gave much thought, first and last, to this epistemological problem, and at different times he leaned toward different schools, but his writing, taken as a whole, indicates that the fruit of his meditations was a thorough-going empiricism. The superman, indeed, is an empiricist who differs from Bacon only in the infinitely greater range of his observation and experiment. He learns by bitter experience and he generalizes from this knowledge. An utter and unquestioning materialist, he knows nothing of mind except as a function of body. To him speculation seems vain and foolish: his concern is ever with imminent affairs. That is to say, he believes a thing to be true when his eyes, his ears, his nose and his hands tell him it is true. And in this he will be at one with all those men who are admittedly above the mass today. Reject empiricism and you reject at one stroke, the whole sum of human knowledge.

—from The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908)

MAX NORDAU

There are two kinds of men who have a natural propensity for exaggerated language: madmen and charlatans. The insane, who suffer from systematic delirium and maniacal excitement, receive very few impressions, but they are very strong. Their consciousness is filled with a very small number of ideas, often by a single one around which all their thoughts revolve in an impetuous whirl, as the waters of a rushing torrent boil around a rock that rises in the midst of their course. These sufferers have no connection with reality, and no comprehension of it. The violence of their subjective feelings renders them insensible to outside impressions. Their obsessions drive from their minds every other thought, and cover with their shadow the entire image of the world. They have lost the sense of proportions, and the faculty of comparing objective phenomena among them and with their reflection in their minds. The contents of their consciousness, feelings, or images, have for them the importance of the absolute, and when by language they express their impulses and their inward visions, no word, no expression seems strong enough to do justice to the peerless importance of their mental pictures. The writings of Nietzsche, especially those of the last period, the fourth and last portion of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Antichrist, and so forth, are good examples of these overstrained modes of speech, always rising to the most extreme tonality of madmen attacked by acute or chronic mania. Among charlatans, the case is incomparably more simple. Extreme exaggeration is not with them an internal necessity, but a very external one, not an organic impulse, but a deliberate intention with an object in view. They raise the voice powerfully to dominate the noise of the friars, to attract attention imperiously to themselves, to disturb, to deafen, to hypnotise the hearers and, by paralysing their faculty of judgment, subject them to their suggestion.

The natural superlativists, madmen and charlatans, serve as models for many imitators, who employ their grotesque and piercing shouts not by instinctive impulse, but in a coldly methodical fashion, because the method seems to them impressive, fine, efficacious, and above all, the very latest modern fad.

—from The Bookman (March 1912)

EDWARD GARNETT

Nietzsche’s appearance in European thought marks a strong, savage reaction against the waves of democratic beliefs and valuations now submerging the old aristocratic standards, more or less throughout Europe. Other philosophers such as Herbert Spencer have made their protest against modern tendencies; other thinkers, as Ibsen, have put some of Nietzsche’s questions in a tentative spirit; but Nietzsche is the first man to fall foul of democratic values altogether, and try to formulate his aristocratic standards of life into a definite creed-Master-Morality versus Slave-Morality.

There lies Nietzsche’s value. It is because Nietzsche challenged Modernity, because he stood and faced the modern democratic rush which is backed by rank on rank of busy specialists today, because he opposes a creative aristocratic ideal to negate the popular will, instincts, and practice, that he is of such special significance. He showed the way the crowd is not going. Than this, nothing is more valuable in an age where the will of the majority is apt to become an imitation of its chance environment, a will to copy the majority; when the “standard of values” is chiefly given by the mass of minds that are anxious to think and do what they are told the majority is thinking and doing. And Nietzsche’s antipathy to the crowd largely springs from his conviction that to give the reins of power over to the popular mind is to put a premium on the “wholesale,” the “average,” and “machine-made” ideal, for that suits it, that pleases it, that it is its instinct to follow....

Nietzsche’s special inspiration, the key that unlocked his most secret depths, was pain. Pain, cruel and prolonged, pursued, chased, and captured him, deepened the world for him, and forced into the light all the tendencies of his nature. It was pain attacking his aristocratic soul that brought out all his endurance, pain that emphasized so violently the will-to-power. For what is this philosophy, in his case, but the definition of the spirit in which he dared it, and scorned to bend. And this power to face suffering, the lack of which casts the weak, delicate, or ordinary mind outside itself, into the arms of “reliance on a God,” exhibited in a satiric light to Nietzsche the sufferings of inferior natures, and made vulgar all sentimentalism, expression of suffering, the daily illusions of mankind, and the panaceas of the priests. And suffering also threw into Nietzsche’s mind the deep light of understanding as to how life fabricates in man his petty concepts of what is good and what is evil, what he wishes to avoid and escape—i.e., what he is afraid of. Thus pain brought to Nietzsche the necessity for hardness, courage, sternness even cruelty, if mankind is to be shaped on fine, strong, and heroic lines. Pain also it was that gave him aspiration towards joy, gaiety, and the mocking spirit, because these are the antithesis to the weak despairing soul. But to give in to suffering! to give in to life! that is the part of the vulgar soul; to face reality, to triumph over it, was the fundamental instinct of Nietzsche’s indomitable spirit. Pain therefore it was that made Nietzsche inhuman, intensified his caste bias, and transformed his natural distaste for the cheap idealism and shallow optimism of the mass of men (who cannot either suffer life nobly or enjoy nobly) into a virulent hatred of Modernity, that Modernity which advertises all its benefits aloud! and is afraid to even recognize its weaknesses. Suffering it was that made Nietzsche isolate himself from the outer world, and concentrate on himself on the immensely richer world of passions, tastes, hatred and distastes within him. Pain forces him to revise all his acquired opinions, to cast away his enthusiasms, his first idealistic interpretations of life, and it forces himself also into keen self-analysis, into a passion for analysing all “goodness” and discovering its motive.

—from Friday Nights (1922)

EDWIN MUIR

It was Nietzsche’s fate to be always more true and interesting than his philosophy. However unsound his thesis might be, he uttered truths in supporting it which came clean out of reality, so that he seemed sometimes to hear life itself speaking. This union of something artificial and something true in his nature is what makes him so difficult and so interesting.

—from Latitudes (1924)

CARL JUNG

Zarathustra is in a way a document of our time, and it surely has much to do with our own psychological condition. I quite understand that it may have very bad effect, I myself often felt when I was plowing through the text that it had disagreeable effects upon me. There are passages which I intensely dislike and they really are irritating. But when you plow through your own psychology you also come across certain irritating places. So when I am irritated in those places in Zarathustra I say, well, here is a sore spot or an open wound. I take note of it, and then I know where the trouble is. I would advise you to take it in the same way, and then I think we can get safely through. You see, when we can stand Zarathustra we can stand a part of our modern world, particularly our European world: we feel it here very immediately.

—from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 (1988)

CRANE BRITON

Zarathustra ... would be lost without his “saith” and “thou” and “yet,” helpless without his exclamation points. In English translation he sounds very pseudo-biblical, like the King James version gone wrong.... Indeed, Thus Spoke Zarathustra has become, for a certain type of half-educated intellectual throughout the world, a kind of Enchiridion.... Yet the long white robes, prophetic beard, and phosphorescent glances of Zarathustra ... have unquestionably helped Nietzsche to his present prestige in ... Germany.... Zarathustra sounds as far-off as any Hebrew prophet, and much more unreal. All the better for Nazi use. The vagueness, the dithyrambic energy, the mantic arts, the tortured rhetoric of Nietzsche—Zarathustra seems able to move men in a way no concrete proposals at the level of mere laws or arrangements ever can move them.

—from Nietzsche (1941)

ALBERT CAMUS

Nietzsche’s philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion. With him, rebellion begins at “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then rebellion hinges on everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonour on a world which undoubtedly has no direction but which remains the only proving-ground of the gods.

—translated by Anthony Bower, from The Rebel (1951)

BRAND BLANSHARD

I must confess that often, when I have tried to read the most popularly effective of German philosophical writers, Nietzsche, I have felt like throwing the book across the room. He is a boiling pot of enthusiasms and animosities, which he pours out volubly, skillfully, and eloquently. If he were content to label these outpourings “Prejudices,” as Mr. Mencken so truly and candidly labels his own, one could accept them in the spirit in which they were offered.... But he obviously takes them as philosophy instead of what they largely are, pseudo-Isaian prophesyings, incoherent and unreasoned Sibylline oracles.

—from On Philosophical Style (1954)

KARL JASPERS

Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85) is basically a series of addresses by Zarathustra to crowds, companions, the “higher men,” his animals, and himself, within a frame of situations and actions of this fictitious figure. What Nietzsche regarded as his magnum opus resists all traditional means of classification: it is to be taken as poetry as well as prophecy and philosophy, and still it cannot be viewed as precisely any one of these.

—translated by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, from Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (1965)

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

We must learn how to learn from the teacher, even if it were only to raise questions that go beyond him. Only then shall we one day discover who Zarathustra is-or we will never discover it.

-translated by Bernd Magnus, from Review of Metaphysics (March 1967)

WALTER KAUFMANN

After all has been said, Zaratbustra still cries out to be blue-penciled; and if it were more compact, it would be more lucid too. Even so, there are few works to match its wealth of ideas, the abundance of profound suggestions, the epigrams, the wit. What distinguishes Zarathustra is the profusion of “Sapphires in the mud.” But what the book loses artistically and philosophically by never having been critically edited by its author, it gains as a uniquely personal record.

-from the editor’s preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche (1968)

HAROLD ALDERMAN

Thus Spoke Zaratbustra is a work of fiction; that is to say it contains no facts or empirical arguments and no metaphysical axioms from which Nietzsche purports to deduce eternal verities. Philosophers, however, have been bothered by the fictional character of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the point of saying that it is not a work of philosophy; such philosophers apparently do not realize that all philosophy is fiction. For Nietzsche, however, this fact was one of the clearest things about the nature of philosophy; it was so clear that he decide to emphasize the fictive character of philosophy by constructing his major work as a conversation among a number of fictional characters.

—from Nietzsche’s Gift (1977)

HANS-GEORG GADAMER

The style of this text is not for everyone’s taste, at any rate not for my taste or the taste of my generation.

—translated by Zygmunt Adamczewski, from The Great Year of Zaratbustra (1881-1981), edited by David Goicoechea (1983)

JACQUES DERRIDA

The future of the Nietzsche text is not closed. But if, within the still-open contours of an era, the only politics calling itself—proclaiming itself-Nietzschean will have been a Nazi one, then this is necessarily significant and must be questioned in all of its consequences.

—translated by Peggy Kamuf, from The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (1985)

J. HILLIS MILLER

The basic idea of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the thought of the eternal return, with its associated presupposition of the idea of the death of God.... Why is it appropriate for this thought to be expressed in the form of a fictional narrative in which Nietzsche projects himself into an imaginary protagonist, namely Zarathustra, and then doubles that protagonist with a narrator or witness who reports what Zarathustra said and did, as the gospel-makers reported the doings and sayings of Jesus?

—from International Studies in Philosophy XVII:2 (1985)

ALAN WHITE

The labyrinthine nature of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is apparent to all who have struggled with it; this book “for everyone and no one” contains a wealth of details, presented in an order that often seems simply chaotic.

—from Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth (1990)

DAVID ALLISON

If the very title of the work—Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One—suggests a profound enigma, the specific themes Nietzsche engages are at least recognizable from the start: the dynamics of the human will, the death of God, the critique of traditional Christian morality, the will to power, the eternal return, and the overman (the higher form of humanity, envisaged by Nietzsche, which has not yet been attained). Nevertheless, despite the breadth and recognizability of these often-discussed topics, there remains a deeply personal, largely hidden stratum to Zarathustra, wherein Nietzsche reflectively engages his own most personal, philosophical, and emotional concerns. Foremost among these personally perplexing issues were the questions about his own capacity to effectively communicate his idea, the stress brought on by his continually failing personal health, and the disastrous state of his personal relations during this period.

—from Reading the New Nietzsche (2001)

THOMAS K. SEUNG

The epic of self-relation is Nietzsche’s daunting invention. Nobody has ever attempted such an inventive task before or after his Zarathustra. Especially unique is the nature of Nietzsche’s epic hero. He is so unique that he does not fit the traditional mold of an epic hero. Sometimes he even behaves like an anti-hero. But he does not really fit this model, either, because he has the power to wrestle with his cosmic self Hence it is hard to classify the Nietzschean hero by using standard labels.... Nietzsche has constructed his epic of the soul by naturalizing the Christian God. Zarathustra’s epic journey is sustained by the visible power of God, Mother Nature, and it is a secular offshoot of the long venerable tradition of Christian sacred epics. In this secular form ... Nietzsche’s psychological epic reads more like the Zen fable of ox-herding on enlightenment and redemption than the Christian psychological epics.

—from Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005)

Questions

1. Is Zarathustra a blowhard who postures, struts, and puffs up his chest in an attempt to prove to his audience and himself that he is not a blowhard? Does Nietzsche side with Zarathustra or does he make fun of him?

2. H. L. Mencken describes Nietzsche’s thought as “a thorough-going empiricism,” the work of an “utter and unquestioning materialist.” What does Mencken mean? Do you agree with him?

3. Suppose as an experiment in thought (not in action) you were to throw out the distinctions between good and evil-throw out the very concepts of good and evil-and renounce all that religion, philosophy, and tradition have to say about them. Would the result be a crippling anxiety or a sense of liberation? Would it follow from this experiment that you should contemplate acts that most people have almost always considered evil?

4. Does Nietzsche include material in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that undercuts Zarathustra as a speaker, that makes him ambiguous? Would you characterize Zarathustra’s overall message as a doctrine or a life-affirming fiction?