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This chapter presents an account of human life primarily through Nietzsche's character of Zarathustra, who argues that human life is irreducibly diverse and thoroughly dangerous. We are constantly trying to rebuild our home within it, constantly trying to glue all the pieces of the world we live in into a whole, to order it, to turn it into “our world.” But we will never be able to remove from this world the threat of catastrophe, of destruction, of the end; we will never achieve certainty that the next step in our lives won't march us into the abyss, into which everything that has been familiar till now, everything nice and warm and orderly, vanishes. In other words, an essential feature of life as we live it is chance: the new, unexpected, alien side of life. In its every moment, life is torn open, discontinuous, fractured: diversified.

This chapter examines what links the seemingly conflicting, or even mutually exclusive, concepts of eternity and passing, and Paradise and its loss. To life as a cup running over, to life as divinity humanized, to human life marked by the effort to move out beyond everything human, to life flooded in a sunlight that is not human—to this irreducible aspect of human life Nietzsche applies the term overman, and the chapter once again returns to the character of Zarathustra in examining this concept. The chapter then turns to next concept that Nietzsche uses to characterize life—the will to power: “Where I found the living, there I found will to power.”

This chapter shows how Nietzsche develops Goethe's critique of Bildung. The early essays on Schopenhauer as Educator and on The Uses and Disadvantages of History raise questions about the authority of the mentor and of the relation of humanistic culture to historical agency. These themes come to a culmination in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which until the late 20th century was commonly read as an expression of Nietzschean doctrine through a rather idealised eponymous mouthpiece. Only recently has it been recognised that Zarathustra is a character who represents the conscious crisis of Nietzsche's own authority, or capacity to make himself understood, is less troubled by his critics than by his disciples, and is at his most despairing the more accurately these repeat the formulae of his doctrine. At the same time, it is precisely his radical, and self-encompassing, critique which gives Nietzsche's thought its almost unique and enduring power.

In this article, Paul de Man discusses his plan to complete a book entitled Allegories of Reading. The book offers a reading of four important authors — Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — along with their texts dating from 1750 to the early twentieth century. The most extensive reading offered is that of Rousseau, who is considered at length in an overview that includes the major fictional, political, and confessional writings. In the case of Proust and Rilke, the corpus is much less extended, although it claims to be representative of structures that recur in the work as a whole. No such claim is made for Nietzsche, where the reading of The Birth of Tragedy and of some sections mostly taken from the posthumous works is preparatory to an understanding of larger works such as Zarathustra or The Genealogy of Morals.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche uses the title character as a medium for exploring the project of a cultural founder or creator. Zarathustra’s project fundamentally differs from that of Free Spirits, since the Free Spirit project is in the first place one of self-cultivation, whereas Zarathustra’s project is (or begins as) one of cultivating broader human community. The motivating force that draws Zarathustra into engagement with the broad swath of humanity is his defining trait of love. Zarathustra’s love is not a romantic love that finds satisfaction in a particular person, but it is a kind of neediness which requires others for its fulfillment (others whom it can benefit through its creative activity). The drama of the work consists of Zarathustra’s attempt to fulfill this need (or determine whether it can be fulfilled). Zarathustra's self-understanding therefore evolves over the course of his journey, as he is forced to wrestle the question of how (or whether) his need for love can be made compatible with truth. On this reading, the primary function of the work's famous doctrines of the will to power and the eternal return is to drive forward Zarathustra's drama of evolving self-understanding.

In Nietzsche's late autobiographical writings he shows that the two major turning-points of his career - Human, All Too Human (which established his ideal of the Free Spirit) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (whose protagonist goes beyond the ideal of the Free Spirit) - amount to to turning points in his thought because they reflect turning points in his life, involving, above all, changes in his health around the time that he wrote each text. Nietzsche's self-account has the following structure: good health is associated with forgetting of oneself (a process that can be seen at work in and through Thus Spoke Zarathustra), while ill health is associated with returning to oneself (a process that can be seen at work in and through Human, All Too Human). And the major lesson of the autobiographical writings proves to be not the superiority of Zarathustra to the Free Spirits, or vice versa, but, instead, the necessity of each for Nietzsche as tools in a process of examining and enriching his self-understanding ever-more-deeply.

This chapter describes the odd ending Nietzsche chose for “Sanctus Januarius” and The Gay Science. After sections that reasonably enough present conclusions to his reflections on morality, life, and “the dying Socrates,” Nietzsche ends with a section that mysteriously announces eternal return as a teaching that can either exalt you or crush you, and with a last section announcing the return of a Zarathustra who prepared himself with ten years in the mountains. Only over the next years would Nietzsche make that ending understandable as he published the three Parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. My chapter shows the cohesion that these final sections of a January book have as summary expressions of an ending and a beginning. What will replace the dying order that Socrates initiated is a new standard of measure and a new teacher who was historically even more fundamental than Socrates in establishing the order that has prevailed for millennia and is now passing.

This chapter discusses the prehistory of the Indo-Aryan peoples ancestral to those who composed the Ṛgveda. On the basis of shared linguistic and cultural evidence it defends the view that these peoples migrated into northwest South Asia, splitting off from the larger group of Indo-Iranians, a branch of Indo-European, who migrated south and east from the steppes. In particular it takes up the shared heritage of Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic) and Old Iranian (Avestan) language, literature, and religion, specifically comparing the poetry and ritual practices of the Ṛgveda with those found in Avestan, particularly the hymns, called Gāthās (songs), attributed to Zarathustra. It also examines the soma/haoma cult that dominated the ritual practice of both Vedic and Avestan elite populations.

This chapter discusses the First Part of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra's speech to the people, “which is also called 'the prologue',” determines the historical position of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is not addressed to the Persian or Greek people, to the Jewish or German people, but to the people in the market of the “nearest town,” who can stand, just as well as those of any town, for mankind. The post-Christian prophet turns toward mankind. He is not concerned with this or that polity, but with the future of the human race. In fact, the teaching of the overman and of the last man, the effective core of “Zarathustra's Prologue,” is a post-Christian teaching in every sense. It attempts to give a response to the “greatest recent event,” which at the same time designates its most important presupposition, the event that “God is dead.” The philosopher comes to the fore on the following day, when, after the speech to the people and the encounters, Zarathustra speaks in solitude of a “new truth.”

This chapter examines Heidegger's first post-war lecture course of “What E-vokes Thought?”. Stretched over two semesters, the theme is developed in two different ways. In the winter semester, Heidegger's purpose was to approach the problem in terms of the philosophical tradition. With Nietzsche as his dialogue partner in learning, it is here that the author elaborates the Zarathustra analysis as signifying the correlation between Being and man. In the summer semester, he devotes himself to an exposition of his own composition of thought, developed through dialogue with the pre-Socratics. This chapter argues that it is Being that e-vokes thought as it is the process by which all beings emerge into presence. In order for the process to take place, there is a need for a There among beings. This want of a There is already an e-vocation of thought conceived as a fundamental structure.

‘Otobiographies’ is just one of several titles that introduce into the labyrinth of an ear: another is ‘Tympan’, the opening or threshold essay in Margins of Philosophy, and ‘Heidegger's Ear’, the second part of Politics of Friendship. Otobiographies appeared in a volume of conference proceedings entitled L'oreille de l'autre, The Ear of the Other, a phrase that also resonates in Derrida's text. For example, already in the parenthetical phrase ‘(everything comes down to the ear with which you can hear me)’, where everything comes down to the ear. Which ear? Whose ear? The ear of what? And even we might ask, recalling Zarathustra's strange encounter, the ear, who?

This chapter is a discussion of the legacy of Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. I concentrate on his basic claim, that “Nietzsche’s model for the world, for objects, and for people turns out to be the literary text and its components; his model for our relation to the world turns out to be interpretation.” The criticisms of this notion that I raise have to do with whether this “model” accounts for the way Nietzsche understands self-knowledge and self-realization. I note as well the dangers of too aestheticized a view of Nietzsche’s enterprise.

This chapter explores quasi-Nietzschean visions of psychological or spiritual utopia that found voice in works by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Zemlinsky, in self-conscious rejectionof visions of redemption proffered by Schopenhauer and by Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Working in a milieu saturated with reflections on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg glimpsed redemption from suffering in personal identification with the recurring cycles of death and rebirth in the natural world. In an early setting of verse by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen, Zemlinsky identified, through tonal means, human life and desires with the cycles of the natural world. In his Gurrelieder, Schoenberg transformed Jacobsen's poetic epic into an extended meditation on this quasi-Nietzschean vision, in which the suffering of the poet's human protagonists dissolves into an ecstatic hymn to the perennial springtime rebirth of all life.

This chapter provides an overview of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. At the beginning of the philosophical life in the strict sense, Nietzsche attributes the passion of knowledge to the philosopher as the passion characteristic of him. Zarathustra, the skeptic, proves on closer inspection to be a philosopher. The philosopher, however, bears the name of a prophet. If Zarathustra is supposed to be both a prophet and a philosopher, the drama must prove the compatibility of the two personae or else make their conflict obvious. Closely bound up with the question of whether Zarathustra is one or two is the other question of whether Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a tragedy, or to what extent it is a parody. The terms philosopher and prophet, tragedy and parody, do not occur in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche consciously places himself within the ambit of the language of the Luther Bible, which in the following book, in which he again speaks with his own voice, he will praise as a “masterpiece of German prose.”

This chapter analyzes the Second Part of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The conflict of prophet and philosopher comes openly to light in the Second Part, where wisdom is placed in the center, and the teaching of the overman is thrown into crisis. Long before the drama, which began with Zarathustra's resolve to bring men a gift, reaches its peripeteia, the reader can become aware of Zarathustra's tornness. Zarathustra is not where he wants to be, and he is not living the way he would like to live. If the First Part's teaching activity aimed at changing mankind, and Zarathustra had cherished hope for the institution of a new order, then the Second Part testifies that he has not progressed a step with the intended reshaping. The education of the disciples was a political failure. The first danger for his teaching or the first danger of his teaching lies in the confusion of the overman with the Christian God. The overman is supposed to take God's place, but not occupy his position; he is supposed to be successor to the monotheistic God, without standing in his line of succession; he is supposed to remove God's authority, but not claim it.

This chapter examines the Third Part of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Whereas the Second Part revolved around the philosopher's self-knowledge, his homecoming forms the center of the Third Part. The work's center is determined precisely: At midnight on the blessed isles, Zarathustra starts on the path that is to lead him to the inward turn bei sich selbst. Over the ridge of the island on which he has taken leave of his disciples, he sets out for an anchorage in order to embark. He travels for days across the sea, wanders on dry land to the town of “The Motley Cow,” in which he once began his teaching activity, and finally climbs up to his cave in the mountains, where he not only spends the second half of the Third Part, but where he will remain until the end of the work. Zarathustra's inner liberation, change, and inward turn is laid out in three speeches with which, in the sea's open horizon, he speaks to himself and other knowers who have left behind the security of dry land. In the central of the three speeches that belong to the freedom of the sea, Zarathustra seeks to reconcile the prophet's mission with the philosopher's inward turn, or to strike a balance between his love for men and the orientation toward his own good.

This chapter assesses the Fourth and Final Part of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Picking up the thread from the beginning of the Second Part, the Fourth Part's first sentence laconically reports: “ — And again moons and years flowed over Zarathustra's soul, and he paid them no regard; but his hair turned white.” Zarathustra has become an old man without having taught anyone the Eternal Return. For the time being, he shows no readiness to speak his “word” and shatter. Year after year, the long-envisaged sacrificial death is postponed. Is Zarathustra's postponement the method of choice for taking the sting out of the tragedy and pragmatically bringing closer together what cannot be reconciled in principle? But can tragedy still be spoken of in the case of a philosopher who does not know how to reach clarity about a conflict of principle and to master his moral tornness? There is no doubt, the drama's fourth act necessarily becomes comedy. Ultimately, Zarathustra's happiness stands in the center of the Fourth Part. It is the subject of the chapter “At Midday” (IV, 10), which depicts the philosopher's return to himself.

When individuals tell awakening stories, they weigh in on cultural disputes over truth and meaning that emerged during various historical eras and evolved through time. This chapter sketches a cultural history of the awakening narrative formula, showing how awakening narratives proliferated over time with the rise of various discursive communities. It discusses several cases that span different contexts, belief systems, and historical periods -- from the Axial Age to the late modern era -- in order to show how awakening stories emerged in various historical eras to mark the prominent cultural and moral tensions of those eras. These cases variously express philosophical, religious, political, scientific, psychological, and sexual worldviews and span different levels of analysis. These include the story of Zarathustra, Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Buddhist story of Siddh?rtha Gautama, the Christian story of Paul the Apostle, the Western Enlightenment narrative, the Marxist account of false and class consciousness, and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Finally, this chapter discusses the proliferation of awakening stories that accompanied the rise of identity politics and new social movements, including New Age movements, in the 1970’s and 80’s.