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The Prophet
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Rethinking Morality
The Superman and the Will to Power
Death of God and Christianity
Eternal Recurrence
Summary
Analysis
One day Zarathustra is going across the great bridge when he’s stopped by beggars, and a hunchback tells him that even “cripples” must be convinced of his teaching. In reply, Zarathustra argues that taking away people’s physical infirmities just gives them opportunities to develop new vices. There are also people whom others regard as geniuses but whom Zarathustra calls “inverse cripples,” because they have too much of a single thing (like hearing or sight).
Zarathustra teaches that those with certain overdeveloped faculties are themselves “disabled” by this excess, much as someone might be disabled by a physical lack. And healing a disability isn’t necessarily a spiritual advantage to a person. This all fits with Nietzsche’s belief that the most important human drive is the will to power.
Themes
Zarathustra tells his followers that it is terrible to walk among fragmented human beings. If he weren’t a seer of the future, he doesn’t know how he would bear it. It is his goal to someday bring all these fragments together into one. The will’s loneliest affliction is that it cannot liberate the past. In its frustration, the will can become vengeful. The spirit of revenge appeases itself by believing that it justly inflicts punishment.
Zarathustra’s role as prophet is lonely, and his only consolation is that he knows humanity will someday evolve. Part of that evolution includes humanity’s ability to accept the past. The “spirit of revenge” is an inability to accept the past, which leads to a futile desire to enact vengeance as an outlet for one’s frustration with the past.
Themes
Eventually, the spirit of revenge goes mad, believing that because everything passes away, everything deserves to pass away. Existence begins to seem like “an eternally-recurring deed and guilt.” The only escape is that the will redeems itself when the creative will says to the past, “I willed it thus,” thereby unlearning the spirit of revenge. The will to power must learn to will backwards. At this point in the discourse, Zarathustra is terrified, and he falls silent.
For Nietzsche, redemption means being able to look at the troubled past and say, “I willed it thus.” Someone with this ability can even be grateful for enemies and disasters, because he is able to turn the worst parts of life into the best.
Themes
