Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Summary, Explanation, Structure and Commentary of Nietzsche’s Work. Meaning of God is Dead, Review, Quotes.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the main work of the third phase of Friedrich Nietzsche ‘s philosophy , the one that opens with the alternatives that manifest themselves with the death of God: the advent of the “last man” or the superman . Zarathustra is the prophet of the superman . It is he who exclaims: “All the gods are dead: now we want the superman to live.”
The work is divided into four parts:
- the first is dedicated to the destruction of Platonic-Christian morality ;
- the second is dedicated to redemption ;
- the third and fourth to the doctrine of return .
The entire book is presented as an endless cyclical journey that continues beyond the conclusion of the text, persisting throughout life. Zarathustra’s path symbolizes the constant mental journey that the reader undertakes both during reading and in future rereadings. Even if the path and the places described remain unchanged, the multiplicity of meanings and the different keys to reading generate interpretations and messages that are always new, perceived based on the reader’s daily and personal experiences, continually enriching understanding with new details.
After ten years, Zarathustra returns to the city to teach what he has learned up to that point, but, not being appreciated, he takes the way back to “his mountains and his animals”. However, during the journey he meets other men in search that he invites to his house to talk with him. Once he reaches his destination, after having spoken with his guests, just like the reader, he realizes his own mistakes and limits and, managing to overcome them, he is charged with a new strength that leads him to retrace the road of the city, sure that this time he will find “friends” ready to listen to him.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Brief Synopsis
Below is a brief summary of the text, with its key stages and major points of interest.
Zarathustra walks along a desolate and uphill path, followed by the spirit of gravity. The atmosphere is one of gloomy silence, the only sound is that of the gravel under his feet. Who is Zarathustra ? He is the one who must announce a new dimension of the world and therefore ” Thus Spoke Zarathustra ” means that he has the task of speaking .
He, walking along this path, finds himself talking to his spirit of gravity : half mole, half dwarf, half cripple, his devil and capital enemy tells him: Zarathustra, you threw the stone far away, but it will fall back on you . This sentence means that no matter how much human work can reach other heights, in the end everything must fall back down.
Zarathustra does not give up: his spirit is full of courage and he tells the dwarf that he does not know his abysmal thought and that he could not bear it: only then can the abyssal thought defeat the spirit of gravity. The dwarf, having said this, descends from his shoulder and Zarathustra feels lighter.
He now finds himself in front of a carriage gate (which is called attimo ): the carriage gate by its nature is a point of suture, it unites two roads, which symbolize:
- Past
- Future
In both cases, these are infinite paths and therefore impassable to the end. The two infinities of time are both convergent and divergent. The instant is the point from which the two infinities approach each other, but at the same time move away: it therefore creates an extreme tension between the two infinities.
The Riddle of Zarathustra
Zarathustra asks the dwarf, ” Do you believe that these paths contradict each other forever? ” The dwarf simplifies Zarathustra ‘s description and solves the riddle in a contemptuous way: ” Time itself is a circle ,” he replies. Zarathustra then reproaches the dwarf for taking this riddle too lightly. Zarathustra poses the problem of eternal return first of all by starting from the moment: from this gateway called the moment a long, eternal path begins backwards , and then goes on to say that all events and things that happened in the past have already existed, just as the things that are to happen. If thought of from the perspective of eternal return, the past and the future no longer contradict each other but rather call each other to mind.
The convalescent
In this passage Zarathustra speaks with his animals: the eagle and the serpent . He evokes his abyssal thought and, addressing it, urges it to come up from its depths. His song finds no answer and Zarathustra collapses to the ground, remaining there for a long time. When he wakes up he wants neither to eat nor to drink for seven days.
His animals urge him to come out of his cave. Zarathustra is now a convalescent, a new transformation has taken place in him .
The way in which animals exhibit the eternal return is the one experienced by nature: everything goes, everything comes back, the wheel of being eternally turns. Everything dies, everything blooms again .
The infinity of time requires that every life, every being has no origin, no moment in which it began. This is why Zarathustra’s animals say: The center is everywhere. The path of eternity is curved .
Man (unlike animals who are dragged in the eternal current of time without a goal) is immersed in time and at the same time is a participant in it in the sense that he has goals, plans, purposes. This is why Zarathustra says to his animals: ” And you have been spectators of all this? “
The Eternal Return and the Superman
The goal of man for Zarathustra is the overman . This means that the restlessness that grips man in thinking of the eternal return lies in the fact that everything he overcomes must eternally return. The animals tell Zarathustra that he is the teacher of the eternal return . Zarathustra is therefore both the one who teaches, that is, announces the overman, and the teacher of the eternal return.
Important: Zarathustra ‘s animals not only say what Zarathustra is, but also that Zarathustra must become what he is : this is now your destiny .
What eternally returns is not an approximation of that finite event that Zarathustra experiences with his animals, but it is precisely this uniqueness in its finite entirety that eternally returns, that eternally repeats itself.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: meaning
The animals of Zarathustra , it has been said, are mainly two: an eagle and a serpent . Upon careful analysis, they turn out not to be two random animals, but fundamental symbols for Catholic culture. “Now the serpent was more cunning than any wild beast that the Lord God had made ” (Gen 3:1). The serpent, symbol of good and evil, is also used in medicine in the form of a caduceus. This animal therefore represents the possibility of choosing one’s own path , the personal road to follow. An eagle, symbol of spirituality, with its eye fixed on the sun, represents John, Christ’s favourite disciple, because his Gospel opens with the contemplation of Jesus-God ” in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ” (Jn 1:1). The eagle has always represented fundamental values, in fact, it is also the symbol of Zeus and is used by Dante in Paradise (canto XVIII vv. 94-114, canto XX vv. 1-72) to indicate power, glory but above all justice .
The three metamorphoses
After the tightrope walker, Zarathustra presents the theory of the three metamorphoses : from camel to lion, from lion to child and from child to superman. They represent the journey that the superman must undertake to free himself from the beliefs imposed on him in order to reach the superman and happiness.
- The first metamorphosis causes man to free himself from superstitions and religions just as the camel that fears its master bows before his greatness and takes on his weight must transform into a lion. The camel therefore represents the man who must.
- The second metamorphosis causes man to free himself from morals by recognizing the state of alienation from which he had escaped by reaching the second phase, just as the lion, in order to have the possibility of self-control and not only of acting, must transform into a child. The lion represents the man who wants.
- The third metamorphosis causes man to create laws for himself and to force himself to follow them, just as a child in his innocence acts without conditioning. The child represents the man who acts.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, quotes
Phrases taken from the book:
- They were steps for me, I climbed them; for that purpose I had to pass over them. But they thought that I wanted to rest on them.
- Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over the abyss.
- Your weaknesses have risen to the heaven of virtues.
- There is always a bit of madness in love. But there is always a bit of wisdom in madness.
God is dead: meaning
God is dead is one of Nietzsche’s most famous phrases, present both in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The expression means not so much the physical death of God, but the death of the moral or teleological values that he embodies. The rejection of these values - or of any other value in its place – leads, according to the philosopher, to nihilism .
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Commentary
Nietzsche ‘s text is full of enigmas, allusions, mysteries, ambiguities that lead the thought to question itself directly on the reality of life that is in continuous change. Its immense facets never really allow the book to extinguish its meaning: for this reason what counts are the particulars, the details, the individual visions and not the contents and fundamental thoughts that have, instead, the task of fusing philosophy and poetry together in order to use languages and symbols of already known realities (as philosophy would do) to identify non-concrete realities and objects (poetry). The risk we run is to transform a reading that could lead to happiness into a path that would lead to dissatisfaction. The text is therefore, like a kykeon, a blessing or a misfortune for humanity according to the interpretation that the individual brings to himself.
The main message that the text wants to leave is contained in the proclamation of the beauty of the earthly world . The task that Zarathustra sets himself is, in fact, to succeed in making people appreciate the earthly world for what it is, leading man to actively live the present without waiting for a possible and certainly not otherworldly world. He teaches to live fully in the present because man is not able to know the future and could spend his life wasting time that will never be returned to him. Man must, therefore, consider himself a means, in evolution, to reach the superman.
