{"id":92971,"date":"2023-02-23T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-23T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=92971"},"modified":"2023-02-23T10:48:22","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T14:48:22","slug":"friedrich-nietzsches-thus-spoke-zarathustra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/friedrich-nietzsches-thus-spoke-zarathustra\/","title":{"rendered":"Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Want an overview of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>? What are his views about life and philosophy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em> to present his philosophical views on life. Through Zarathustra\u2019s teachings, Nietzsche explains what he believes humans are, what they can become, and how to live if you want to participate in the advancement of humankind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read on for an overview of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra <\/em>is a creative presentation of his views about life and philosophy. Written in the 1880s, the book is a fictitious, poetic story about a prophet named Zarathustra, who is an avatar for Nietzsche and through whom he expounds his philosophy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zarathustra lives in a cave in the mountains with an eagle and a snake for companions. At one point he feels compelled to share his wisdom with others and visits a nearby village. He tries speaking to the crowd in a marketplace, but they aren\u2019t interested in his teaching. Later he gathers a group of disciples and teaches them his philosophy. Much of the book consists of monologues that Zarathustra delivers to his disciples. <\/strong>Eventually, Zarathustra sends his disciples away, after which he continues to monologue, talking to himself, his animals, and people whom he encounters near his home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Shortform note: Zarathustra is another name for Zoroaster, the founding prophet of Zoroastrianism. However, any resemblance between the historical Zarathustra and Nietzsche\u2019s Zarathustra is either coincidental or satirical<\/strong>, as what Nietzsche teaches through Zarathustra has almost nothing in common with Zoroastrianism. For example, Zoroastrians believe in a spiritual afterlife where people are rewarded or punished for the good or evil deeds<\/a> they did in life. As we\u2019ll discuss later, Nietzsche\u2019s Zarathustra believes that the spirit dies with the body and there is no objective difference between good and evil<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zarathustra\u2019s monologues span a wide range of topics and are organized only by stream of consciousness. Nietzsche also makes extensive use of literary devices and symbolism (the meaning of which has caused much disagreement among experts). In this guide, we\u2019ll focus on the book\u2019s most prevalent themes. We\u2019ve organized Nietzsche\u2019s ideas (as presented by his character Zarathustra) topically and drawn additional connections and inferences based on what Zarathustra says about certain issues in different parts of the book. We\u2019ll also compare Nietzsche\u2019s ideas with the perspectives of other great thinkers, such as Stephen Hawking and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Humans Are<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>, his avatar Zarathustra argues that a human being is made up of a human body\u2014not a body and<\/em> soul, as some people believe. Zarathustra teaches that your soul, spirit, and consciousness are just parts or features of your body.Zarathustra doesn\u2019t believe in an afterlife in the usual sense, but he does believe in what he calls \u201ceternal recurrence.\u201d In his view, time is infinite in both directions: No matter when<\/em> you live, there is always an infinite amount of time before and after you. He reasons that on this infinite timeline, everything that can<\/em> happen eventually will <\/em>happen. And eventually, it will all happen again<\/em>. So after you die, someday in the eternal future, the same chain of events that led to your birth will happen again, and you will live again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And What They Can Become<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Zarathustra believes in ongoing human evolution<\/a> and sees it as the ultimate solution to humans\u2019 problems and weaknesses. He doesn\u2019t think evolutionary progress is inevitable, though: The human race could either advance or stagnate and die off. According to Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that your highest purpose in life<\/a> is to live in a way that contributes to the evolutionary progression of humans into superhumans<\/strong>\u2014a future species as far superior to modern humans as humans are to animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Humans Should Act<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

According to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>, unique individuals contribute the most to human progress<\/a>. We can infer that this is based on Darwin\u2019s theory that a combination of natural selection<\/a> and random variation drives evolutionary progress: The more variation there is in a population, the more natural selection will favor the superior individuals and the more rapidly the species will evolve. Zarathustra never discusses this mechanism explicitly, but he does repeatedly assert that uniformity\u2014especially compulsory conformity to social norms\u2014hinders the evolution of humans into superhumans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This leads Zarathustra to a kind of relative morality: As a unique individual, what\u2019s good for someone else may not be good for you and vice versa.<\/strong> He denounces any objective distinction between good and evil as a concept that humans invented for the purpose of controlling others, usually in ways that promote conformity and thereby hinder progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, suppose someone is fascinated with stealing. If she cultivates this passion and becomes an expert thief, her children might become even better thieves because of what they learn from her and inherit genetically. So stealing would become an increasingly refined trait for natural selection to either favor or weed out. But if she suppresses her inclination to steal for fear of criminal punishment, that won\u2019t happen, and natural selection will be less effective because the population will be more uniform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Shortform note: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em> doesn\u2019t seem to differentiate between genetic traits and learned behaviors when it comes to evolutionary progress. Biologists tend to view genetic traits as the primary driver in evolution because they are heritable. But the science of genetics didn\u2019t really take off until a few decades after Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>, so he wouldn\u2019t have been as familiar with genetics as we are today. And humans can \u201cinherit\u201d non-genetic skills by learning them from their parents or from others who pass on information to them<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n