Thus Spoke Zarathustra seems on the surface a work of Orientalism: the protagonist is a Persian prophet, the setting desert, mountains, oases, and marketplaces, the supporting players include a soothsayer, dancing girls, and camels, figs and lamb are eaten.Why this fancy dress? In his previous books Nietzsche was content to speak in the voice of a thoroughly modern 19th century scholar and thinker. Are these robes and this antique-inflected speech meant to impress us with the wisdom and power of the speaker, like the elaborate outfits of a pope or tsar? No one would heed the words of a man who appeared attired in full papal regalia if he was encountered on the subway – for such apparel to be accorded honor it needs the proper setting, a St. Peter’s, a cathedral, a shrine. Such a setting is provided for Zarathustra – the book is usually published as part of a publisher’s ‘classics’ line and is to be found in the Philosophy section of bookstores and libraries. Or is that this is all meant to be self-evident playacting, the oriental paraphernalia is meant to evoke not the actual East but the theatrical world of the painted backdrop and the trunk of mildewed stage properties and moth-eaten costumes? Certainly Nietzsche has Zarathustra play the buffoon at times, and his inclination is sometimes, particularly in Part Four, not only to laugh at himself but to provide the opportunity for mirth by making himself laughable. Translator Walter Kaufmann’s introduction, quoting Stefan Zweig at length on Nietzsche, emphasizes the loneliness and illness suffered by the author during the writing of the book. Perhaps, like Zarathustra’s disciples, his companion animals, and his physical endurance, the exoticism provides fictional compensation for what the author lacked in his daily life. Another possibility, indicated by some notes that Kaufmann quote in The Portable Nietzsche immediately after Zarathustra, is that Nietzsche wanted to get away from an atmosphere of “Germanness” and so set his book in a land distant from the homeland for which he came to feel such antipathy. * There are two dangers for readers of this book, one for younger readers and one for older. For younger readers the danger lays in this book’s status as a classic of philosophy and the temptation that presents them to try to take what it contains as a template for life and opinion. But, as prescription, the work is self-contradictory and attempting to piece together from it an approach to life could easily lead to terrible outcomes. A budding objectivist can take its praise of selfishness and scorn for pity as Ayn Rand ab ovo. Heeding the call to move “beyond good and evil” can justify a range of nightmarish excesses; anyone who claims the Nazis were totally unjustified in claiming Nietzsche as a prophet are ignoring aspects of his thought that fit into their worldview with little need for mis-reading (not about anti-Semitism or racial superiority, but about the prerogatives of power and the idea that “it is the good war which justifies every cause “). And woe to the youth who finds the book’s style worthy of emulation! He has probably brought his writing career to a premature end with that decision.The danger for older readers is that the book’s tone, the “adolescent” emotions that Kaufmann speaks of in his introduction, will overwhelm its message, that the emotional immaturity of the work will lead them to reject or ignore its intellectual and artistic accomplishments. * The most famous line in this book has to be the statement, “God is dead”. If the reader is an atheist, the book may strengthen his unbelief, but it does not present a cogently reasoned argument for becoming an atheist. Like Yossarian, Nietzsche has a precise idea of the characteristics of the god he does not believe in, and it is the Christian god. Arguments against Christianity, its practices, and texts abound, but adherents to other religious traditions may well find their doctrines unscathed by the scorn Zarathustra heaps on believers. * This is one of those books, and I suspect that there may be a number of such filed under “Philosophy”, that, at any point during the reading of it, most readers will find easy to put down and never pick up again. The book proceeds from section to section, each with a brief descriptive title, each containing some ideas, or some description of Zarathustra’s wanderings and encounters, or occasionally a poem in prose or verse. Ideas and situations are sometimes repeated, but the whole thing seems to be leading nowhere, or, in a meandering fashion, to the same place over and over (talk about the Eternal Recurrence!). But the book does come together, in a fashion, at the end; I found myself closing it on the last page with much more satisfaction and sense of its worth than at any point I had closed it, partially read, over the last two weeks. At the end, one way of conceiving the entire book is as a lengthy commentary on a short poem first presented in Part Three and repeated near the end of Part Four, the last section of the book; it is the poem Mahler set as the fourth movement of his Third Symphony. Since one way of reading this poem is as a commentary on and reply to Faust’s apostrophe to the moment, “Stay, thou art so fair”, in Faust Part 2, and since the closing lines of that work are alluded to and critiqued several times in the course of the book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra might also be considered as Nietzsche’s Faust, Part 3.Kaufmann claims that Part Four was originally intended as an “intermezzo” and not the conclusion of the book. Having finished the book, I find that claim hard to believe. If Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a fragment, it is one that makes a particularly satisfying whole. What gesture would be made by the arms of the Venus de Milo? * What about the Übermensch? Anybody who knows a little bit about Nietzsche’s philosophy knows that it is concerned with the creation of the “overman” (or the “superman”, before that term became exclusively attached to Clark Kent’s alter ego). Well, the overman is mentioned a lot in Zarathustra (“man is a rope, tied between the beast and overman – a rope over an abyss”), but I am no closer to being able to define what Nietzsche meant by the term than I was before reading the book. Is it the next evolutionary step? Even though that idea fits certain statements, like that just quoted, it’s hard for me to believe that Nietzsche meant the term in that way: he offers nothing like a program of eugenics or makes anything like biological predictions. Is it a new stage of the organization of society? Nietzsche does offer some individual behavioral guidelines, but nothing like Plato’s Republic or More’s Utopia which would lay out a blueprint for the society that would produce or nurture the overman. Is it a change to be brought about in individual humans? If so, Zarathustra would seem to be the embodiment of Nietzsche’s prescriptions for human behavior, and he specifically claims to herald the overman, not to be the overman. (One is reminded of Nietzsche’s remark in The Gay Science that Socrates chose to be known as a lover of wisdom (philosopher) rather than calling himself a wise man.)And what does the overman have to do with the Eternal Recurrence? The overman is an event of the future, but the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence would claim that he has already arrived infinite times in the past, as he will again infinite times in the future.In the end, the “overman” seems to be a terminology in search of a concept. If, subsequently, the Nazis or Leopold and Loeb thought themselves qualified to provide that concept, I am not sure that Nietzsche can be considered entirely blameless.
There's a lot to review here. To start with, there's the original writing by Nietzsche, including four complete works many excerpts from his other works and letters. There's also the translation from German to English, and the curatorial choices of inclusion, both by Kaufmann. This is a great cohesive package. Having started from nothing before reading this volume, I now feel like I have a strong overview of Nietzsche. That's saying a lot for a single volume.This volume begins with quotes and letters, which like the other selections in the book, are exhaustive, and do an excellent job of revealing both Nietzsche the man as well as Nietzsche the philosopher.The first and largest of the complete works is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a ponderous tome using a forced pseudo-biblical writing style. Nietzsche considered this his masterwork, which is revealing both of his obsessively strong attention to detail, and also of his tendency to frustratingly cleave to ideals beyond feasible use. I struggled through much of the book before finally giving up midway through the third part. This is Nietzsche at his most inaccessible and overblown, though there are certainly passages of brilliance. Nietzsche really could have used an editor for this work.The next complete work was Twilight of the Idols, which is a wonderful distillation of Nietzschean thinking. This is both the easiest book to read, and the best example of Nietzsche as social philosopher. If somebody is looking to start studying Nietzsche, this is the best place.The last two complete works, The Antichrist and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, are Nietsche's last works before he entered the asylum. It's tempting to see these as the last, strained work of a dying mind. Though I could find a few snatches that supported this view, I think they stuck out more because I was looking for them. Earlier works, such as Zarathustra, seem to show as many or more flaws. There's a bit more strain in these later works, but I think that has more to do with the fact that Nietzsche is overreaching with some of his arguments here.Though I'm no Nietzsche scholar and thus have no experience with similar Nietzsche overview works, I can recognize that the translation and quote selection are both very strong. There's a good amount of discussion about the difficulties of translation in the editorial preface to Zarathustra, and the excerpted quotes are almost always Nietzsche to the hilt, delivered with his trademark incisive clarity. The editorial commentary by Kaufmann is also very good, identifying Nietsche's strong points and calling out the philosopher when he gets overly disconnected from reality. This collection, published almost 60 years ago now, seems to still be the definitive starting place for Nietzsche, and that's a testament to Kaufmann's work.
What do You think about The Portable Nietzsche (1977)?
Walter Kaufmann is the man responsible for Nietzsche studies in the English speaking world, and the collection he edited of Nietzsche's writings is outstanding. The book has several complete works: "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Nietzsche's opus about the philosopher-king character Zarathustra; "Antichrist" and "Twilight of the Idols," both shorter, more mature works; "Ecce Homo," Nietzsche's exceedingly narcissistic study on himself; and "Nietzsche Contra Wagner," which is self-explanatory. The book also has selections from almost all of Nietzsche's other works, as well as selections from his notebooks and letters. So the book is not without "The Madman" passage from "The Gay Science," nor is it without the essay "Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense," which, if read closely, contains the whole of Foucault's corpus. Kaufmann has provided extensive footnotes that allow one to keep up with Nietzsche's often subtle references as well as the nuances that do not translate from German to English.
—Spoust1
Just finished reading "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," this weird hybrid of philosophy, biography, myth and poetry. The cross-breeding (or -bleeding) of genres makes the book sound like a monstrous plant from a hothouse or an alchemical tome from a monastery. It is not. It is a book conceived while striding over mountains. It is best read in the open air, as I did, much of it, in Central Park, American elms arching above the Literary Walk to form the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. From one perspective (and Nietzsche is very much--essentially?--about perspectives), the book can be seen as a parody--a competitor--of the gospels. So Part 1 begins with Zarathustra "going under" from the mountain to the marketplace to preach to the people. Much of the book is made up of these "sermons," often in the form of parables. (Part 4 is different in being a continuous narrative.) And like Jesus, Zarathustra gathers round him disciples, is tested by various trials, provides a last supper, and receives a final revelation. The radical difference in Z's gospel is that God is dead, and man must find his ultimate value in himself, in overcoming himself, or, in Nietzschean terms, in becoming an overman. Z. is a prophet of the overman, and in his noblest moments is also a type of the overman. Although so much of the book is noble and inspiring, parts of it are marred by a limited view of women. The book is the work of a very lonely man, whose hasty marriage proposals were all turned down. It is also the work of a man who suffered from bad health--bad headaches, bad eyes, sleeplessness--and so spoke of suffering with an obsessive vehemence. The miracle is the high praise the book accords to the body and to laughter. The book is thus a triumph of Nietzsche's will to power, the will to overcome oneself. Joy, not anguish, longs for eternity. The ultimate sign of acceptance and overcoming is a desire for eternal recurrence, not just of bliss, but also of agony. It is a book that demands to be read over and over again.
—Jee Koh
My first two years at Grinnell College were conflicted. I was genuinely interested in study, but felt morally compelled to devote considerable time to political work and to the study of such subjects as history and political science which contributed to doing it intelligently. Then, having been at loggerheads with the DesPlaines draft board for some time for resistance, I was notified that proceedings against me were soon to begin.Paying my own way through school, the prospect of being pulled from school in the middle of a term was too much to risk. I finished the sophomore year and took a job as an orderly at a convalescent and nursing home, the kind of job that might look good to the board.The future was uncertain. I was back amongst old friends and there were a lot of them thanks to the sixties having created a suburban counterculture. Socially, I was much happier than I had been in college where I had felt myself the only virgin on campus and where I was insecure about my size, my age and my slow rate of physical maturation. Here there were younger people. But there were also more girls who I knew well enough to talk to, girls towards many of whom I felt strong ambivalence owing to being at once attracted to them and repulsed by my own lasciviousness. Here, also, there wasn't the constant need to study every day, to perform assignment after assignment with nary a day to read what I felt like reading.With the the civil rights struggle in a militant phase, the war still going on, a possible prison sentence hanging over my head and a sexual neurosis which led me to consciously avoid looking at attractive females, I was a pretty serious little guy. Although I spent a lot of time ostensibly in the company of friends, a good deal of that time was occupied by reading owing to my aforementioned neurosis inhibiting my social behavior.Being free to read what I liked, I began to delve into areas like philosophy and psychology in addition to my usual socially responsible readings. Nietzsche was the first philosopher per se who really captured my attention, both for his radical ideas (many of which I felt to be simply truths not often spoken) and for his lively writing style. Furthermore, he, like myself, was, according to Kaufmann's remarks, a social misfit and idealist.Oh, although it has nothing to do with philosophy except that it may have scotched my chance to become a precocious one, the DesPlaines draft board was twice torched that summer. Some person or persons had poured soap flakes and kerosene through the ventilators on the single-storey structure's roof, napalming the place. I never heard from them again and was able to return to school in the fall.
—Erik Graff
