Thus Spoke Zarathustra Study Guide

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers in the modern period.  He was the son of a Lutheran minister, and many of his later ideas were developed in reaction to Christian teachings. A brilliant young student, Nietzsche was appointed to a university chair in classical philology at Basel when he was only 24 years old. Nietzsche was not a great success in the academic world, however: he became chronically ill in 1871, and he resigned his professorship in 1879 because of the sustaining a teaching schedule was too difficult (not to mention that his colleagues’ critiques led to his lectures being emptied out). He became a much more prolific writer after this, however, and developed his distinctive style, focusing on a critique of traditional morality and its European Christian foundations. In 1882, the year before he began writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche also suffered the deepest romantic disappointment of his life when it became clear that he would never marry Lou Salomé, the woman he loved. Writing Zarathustra seems to have been part of how he resolved this heartbreak, and the book was also an intellectual breakthrough that helped him overcome his earlier nihilism. During the last decade of his life, Nietzsche suffered increasingly from dementia and was cared for by his sister, Elisabeth. He died of a stroke in 1900. After Nietzsche’s death, Elisabeth saw to the initial publication of his writings, though her anti-Semitic beliefs had an editorial influence on his work that Nietzsche would probably have rejected.

Two of Nietzsche’s biggest influences were the German philosopher Schopenhauer and the scientific theory of evolution. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), like Nietzsche, espoused atheism; however, Nietzsche’s rejection of Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism is evident in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Furthermore, even though Nietzsche may not have studied or agreed with every element of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory (introduced in On the Origin of Species in 1859), Darwin’s ideas clearly impacted Nietzsche’s thinking about the possibility of ongoing change in the world instead of fixity, especially the idea that humanity could evolve yet further into the Superman. The titular Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, was a real-life historical figure, the founder of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism. He is believed to have lived in the 7th century B.C.E. In a later book, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explains that he chooses Zarathustra as his book’s “prophet,” because the historical figure based his religion on the struggle between good and evil, thus creating that “most fateful of errors, morality.”

Nietzsche was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), reacting against the pessimism of this book in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He also draws on ideas from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) in his musings about human origins and ongoing evolution. Some of the ideas that Nietzsche presents in Zarathustra were introduced in his preceding book, The Gay Science (1882), and were further developed in subsequent books Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which especially critiques the idea of altruism. Nietzsche also loosely bases the book’s style on the New Testament of the Bible and on Plato’s philosophical dialogues.