Böyle Buyurdu Zerdüşt (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

I did not understand this book. Even so, one chapter has been in my mind for years.

What kind of book

Zarathustra goes up the mountain at the age of thirty. He stays there for ten years. Then he comes down and tries to tell people something.

No one listens. In a town he speaks of the Übermensch, and the crowd laughs. Then he finds disciples for himself, then abandons them too.

The book has four parts, and each part consists of short speeches. There is no argument, there are parables. This is what surprises the reader who expects a systematic philosophical text: the book is written more like an imitation of a sacred text, even mocking the style of the Bible.

The chapter that stayed with me

The three metamorphoses. At the very beginning of the book and its clearest place.

The camel carries the load. It accepts everything that says "thou shalt" and takes it on its back. It chooses the heaviest, because carrying is counted as a virtue.

The lion refuses. Against "thou shalt" it says "I will." It wins freedom but can only tear down; it cannot put anything in its place.

The child begins again. Innocence, forgetting, a new beginning. It is able to create its own values.

This sequence felt to me like a map.

Why

For a long time I was the camel.

I carried all the "you shoulds" that came from outside, and because I could not carry them, I found myself flawed. I had not made the list, but not finishing the list was my fault.

Then I learned to refuse, and for a while I thought this was salvation. Saying no, not making commitments, cutting expectations off from the start.

What Nietzsche says is this: refusing is a stage, not the last one.

The lion tears down but cannot put anything in its place, and staying at that point is also a blockage. A person who defines themselves only by what they refuse is still tied to those things.

When I read this, I noticed that I was stuck somewhere, and noticing was useful.

The loss at the center

The sentence "God is dead" circulates like a declaration of victory. In Nietzsche it is an announcement of loss.

Values given from outside no longer hold, and a void is left. Somewhere in the book it is said that it was we who did this, and it is asked whether we can bear it.

No one does the filling in for you.

This is the difficulty of the book: you will build your own values yourself, and there is no guarantee. You may also build them wrong, and no one will tell you.

The disturbing idea

Eternal return. The hardest place in the book, and even Zarathustra has difficulty saying it; for one chapter he falls ill.

The idea is this: how would you feel if you had to live exactly the same life, with all its pain, with nothing changed, an endless number of times?

It is read not as a cosmological claim but as a test. Your answer shows your relationship with your life.

My answer did not come right away. That it did not come is also information.

The last man

A chapter little talked about but, I think, the most accurate.

Zarathustra speaks of the Übermensch, the crowd laughs. Then he describes the "last man": a type of person who wants nothing, takes no risks, makes do with small pleasures, fears falling ill, and in whom everyone is the same.

The crowd gets excited when it hears this: "Give us this last man!"

After reading Huxley, this chapter settled in a completely different place.

Its misuse

After Nietzsche's death, his texts were compiled and distorted by his sister Elisabeth. Elisabeth was part of an antisemitic movement and arranged her brother's notes according to her own views.

Nazi ideology adopted this arranged version.

This is not something in the text itself. Nietzsche had openly opposed nationalism and antisemitism; he fell out with his sister for this reason.

Still, concepts like the "Übermensch" are easily misread. It needs to be read not as praise of power but as a person able to create their own value.

How to read it

I have had two attempts. In the first I tried to understand it from beginning to end and gave up.

In the second I read it chapter by chapter and accepted that some chapters would open up years later. I did not stop at the places I did not understand.

And: choose an edition with a good afterword. Without context it is much harder.

Try reading aloud. Its rhythm is part of the text, and it is lost when you read with your eyes.

Around four hundred pages, and suited to being read in pieces.