The Thinking Man’s Bible and Messiah: A Personal Reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Part 1)

A great many clichés we usually associate with Nietzsche – “God is dead” (often quoted out of context), “Man must be overcome,” “the Übermensch” – have their origin in the infamous 1883-5 text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen). It is a “treatise” generally ignored by professional philosophers for being “too artistic”; for the common reader, if he is not religious, it is a trying reading experience due to its cryptic nature, and if he is a believer in God, a full-frontal attack. It is a text many have heard of (and think they can quote from it), but few have seriously read from cover to cover. My aim is to synopsise some its recurring (pun intended) messages and explain why it is essential reading – now more than ever – for any man who strives to rise above himself and others.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary/philosophical bulldozer: it attempts to raze to the ground all extant moral codes and religious tenets. But it does more than simply destroying the Old Order; it also teaches us what should replace it and how we can achieve a higher degree of happiness. The aim to instruct the reader towards greater happiness is unique to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Nietzsche would denounce this goal in Twilight of the Idols.) Pre-Zarathustra Nietzsche was a nihilist, as demonstrated in works such as Human, All Too Human (1878) and The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880). His mission had always been to demolish the concept of (Christian) morality by exposing its “irrational basis,” and to “abolish the ‘higher’ world, the metaphysical, by accounting for all its supposed manifestations in terms of the human, phenomenal, and even animal world” (Hollingdale). After the completion of The Gay Science in 1882, in which Nietzsche had declared the death of God, he found himself in an intellectual, ideological crisis. He had waged war against every artificial belief imaginable; all moral and value systems had been deconstructed. What was a man of intellectual ferocity to do with all this destruction? Thus Spoke Zarathustra was Nietzsche’s ideological breakthrough. It was here that he began constructing rather than deconstructing. He transformed nihilism into affirmation.

Thus say and stammer: ‘This is my good, this I love, just thus do I like it, only thus do I wish the good.

‘I do not want it as a law of God, I do not want it as a human statute; let it be no sign-post to superearths and paradises. (Of Joys and Passions, 23)

These lines from Part One set the tone for the rest of the text. It is self-empowering solipsism. The prophet-to-be, Zarathustra, states that he loves only his idea of “good,” and that “good” as a law of God is undesirable as it tends to deceive the believer, making him put his faith in “superearths and paradises.” The word of emphasis here is “I.” Individual choice (rather than collective choice) wins the day. Institutionalised religion, Christianity in this case, is bête noire to Nietzsche because of its tendency to prescribe one set path to the truth. To him, the notion of there being one right path to the truth is absurd:

I came to my truth by diverse paths and in diverse ways: it was not upon a single ladder that I climbed to the height where my eyes survey my distances…

All my progress has been an attempting and a questioning – and truly, one has to learn how to answer such questioning! That however – is to my taste:

not good taste, not bad taste, but my taste, which I no longer conceal and of which I am no longer ashamed.

‘This – is now my way: where is yours?’ Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way’. For the way – does not exist! (Of the Spirit of Gravity, 213)

The individual gets the spotlight. Nietzsche is concerned with the individual’s way rather than the way. He also advocates diversity (there are many different paths) and self-reliance (find your own path). The last point is particularly of interest: there is no such thing as the way. He emphatically states that he does not wish to be followed or mimicked. 

Nietzsche repeatedly refers to Man as “the evaluator.” This is attributed to the fact that Man “first implanted value into things to maintain himself – he created the meaning of things, a human meaning.” He goes on to say: “Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creative men! Valuating is itself the value and jewel of all valued things. Only through evaluation is there value: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow” (Of the Thousand and One Goals, 85).  The Christian notions of good and evil are therefore “manmade”; it is men, not God, who have brought them into existence (“it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven”). If Man is to create, he must first be aware of his capacity as the sole creator.

From this point on it is only logical to leap to one of Nietzsche’s most enduring symbols: the Übermensch (Super/Overman). He asserts that “the body purifies itself through knowledge; experimenting with knowledge it elevates itself” (103). A spirit of adventurousness is required if a man is to get the best out of life. He needs to have the courage to stand apart from the herd and choose his own path. This is why Nietzsche applauds solitaries, men who do not blindly follow others. He addresses them thus:

You solitaries of today, you who have seceded from society, you shall one day be a people: from you, who have chosen out yourselves, shall a chosen people spring – and from this chosen people, the Superman. (Of the Bestowing Virtue, 103)

If the language here is reminiscent of Moses’ to “the children of Israel,” it is fully intentional on Nietzsche’s part. Zarathustra is depicted as a Moses figure; but unlike Moses, he does not tell his people to follow him. He tells them instead to find their own way, to enlighten themselves and become Supermen of the future.

But why must Man overcome himself and become the Superman? Thus Spoke Zarathustra answers this question with a paradoxical mix of startling clarity and head-scratching opacity. [*] Throughout the course of the text, the reader is introduced to several typically Nietzschean ideas: the Spirit of Gravity, Eternal Recurrence, herd mentality. He is told these are phenomena to be defeated if life is to have any meaning at all. The Superman is Nietzsche’s ultimate symbol for Man’s physical and mental capacity to withstand adversity.

Being a disciple of Dionysos, Zarathustra loves life for all its beauty, ugliness, and madness. He says he “should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.” This is because in his eyes the devil is the “Spirit of Gravity” which ruins the living experience (Of Reading and Writing, 68). A life not savoured is a life not worth living. He therefore urges the reader to kill the Spirit of Gravity. Christianity as an institutionalised religion in particular receives the brunt of his tirade. It is a religion, according to Zarathustra, that preaches false, effeminate values (e.g. pity), and it is these so-called values that destroy the heroic potential in Man, turning him into submissive, cowardly creatures incapable of independent action and thought. It incapacitates him by imposing guilt (a specimen of the “Spirit of Gravity”), and conditions him to fear life, robbing him of the opportunity of seeing life for what it really is: a vertiginous experience to be embraced with courage. This leads Nietzsche to the notorious declaration that God is dead:

Thus spoke the Devil to me once: Even

God has his Hell: it is his love for man.

And I lately heard him say these words:

God is dead; God has died of his pity for man. (Of the Compassionate, 250)

There is a common misconception that Nietzsche the philosopher has “killed” God. These lines, however, reveal a message of another kind: it is not Nietzsche who is responsible for the death of God; it is Man’s eternal demand for love and compassion that has resulted in his death. Man’s weakness (in particular his self-pity) is the cause of God’s death. In a later passage, Nietzsche claims that it is God’s omniscience that has killed him: “The god who saw everything, even man: this god had to die! Man could not endure that such a witness should live” (The Ugliest Man, 279). Nietzsche again puts the blame squarely on Man. Man has done away with his own creation because he is ashamed of having all his imperfections exposed to an all-seeing God. This is a logical conclusion on Nietzsche’s part in regards to God owing to his restricting Calvinist background.

[*] This “opacity” is largely due to Part 4 of the text, a later composition, which departs from the first three parts in terms of tone and narrative style, reading more like a “mock fable” rather than a philosophical treatise.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans: R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 2003.

Link to Part 2: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah_23.html