In the Library
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1909
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Thomas Common
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 81
- Length
- Length 89k words
£1.99
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I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A book everyone treats as a forbidding stone tablet of philosophy when it is closer to a wild comic prose poem in the costume of scripture, full of songs and jokes and a hermit who keeps making a fool of himself.
The reputation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is that it is the dense, dangerous core of Nietzsche, a book of doctrines about supermen and the will to power that you are supposed to extract, master, and possibly be corrupted by, written in a clotted prophetic style that keeps ordinary readers out. Almost all of that is a misreading that has hardened over a century. What you are actually opening is a comic prose poem dressed up as a holy book, a deliberate parody of the Bible in which a hermit comes down from his mountain to preach to people who laugh at him, misunderstand him, and wander off, and the ideas everyone treats as a system arrive inside parables, songs, and slapstick rather than as arguments you could underline.
If you like this, try
The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche writes the aphorisms that Zarathustra dramatises: the same ideas, but without the mountain and the eagle.
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Faust (Part I)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's striving man is the ancestor of the Übermensch, and the bargain is the same: everything, at the cost of everything.
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Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
Hesse sends another solitary figure into the wilderness to find wisdom, but the answer is gentler than Nietzsche could permit.
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About the book
In a forest at the edge of the world, Zarathustra meets an old hermit still singing his devotions to God, and walks on astonished that the saint has not yet heard the news the book will carry down into the marketplace: that God is dead, and the work of becoming human has only now begun. Nietzsche wrote his hardest thinking not as argument but as scripture, in parables and songs and a voice that swings between ecstasy and laughter, certain that logic would only tame what he had to say. He teaches the Overman, man as a rope stretched over an abyss, something to be surpassed rather than worshipped. And he sets down the heaviest question philosophy has ever asked: could you love your one life so completely that you would will every moment of it back, unchanged, forever. The book does not persuade so much as press, and what it presses for is a different way of carrying your days. Zarathustra ends alone, walking out glowing into his morning, having kept no last disciple.