Thus spoke Zarathustra

 

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Writer: Friedrich Nietzsche. Field: philosophical poetry. Composition: four parts.

Main theme: the eternal return of the same.

Secondary themes: the superman, the death of God, the will to power, desire, redemption, prophecy, poetry. Creation, play.

Historical context: In a nineteenth century that was becoming increasingly industrialised and where the norm of civilisation seemed to be a technicist norm, Nietzsche's discourse was out of place. Naturally, we hesitate to classify it as a poetic discourse, but it is nonetheless the strange form that this text takes. It is not a prose novel, nor is it the usual prose of philosophical discourse. Rather, it is an indirect discourse ready to present paradoxical ideas. The new ideas are never presented head-on. They have to be seen laterally. This is why Nietzsche presents them in this way. The eternal return is arguably the culminating idea of the work. But we need to know what this eternal return is about. It is, one might say, the return of the will to power, of play and creation. We know that Nietzsche frequented Wagnerian circles, only to denigrate them completely afterwards. That is not the point. The point is that Nietzsche had experienced the grandiose and mythical potential of a work of art. Nietzsche presented this book as a book for everyone and for no one, and was convinced, no doubt in a Stendhalian way, that he was only writing for a relatively small elite (Stendhal's happy few). The fact is that the text is difficult to get to grips with. At times parodying the Gospels, it also contains passages of dithyrambic Greek poetry. The ideas it puts forward are unusual and deeply counter-intuitive: the eternal return of the same abolishes the distinction between past and future. If the future is that which is indeterminate and open-ended and the past, on the other hand, is that which has always happened and cannot be changed, then to abolish this distinction in cyclical time is to make the future a determined destiny and the past something indeterminate. All this may seem very strange.

Why read this text today?

Nietzsche's book is a rich, thought-provoking work. The presentation of the ideas in it leads the reader to a stage of awakening that is almost religious: either in Buddhism or in Christianity (both religions rejected by Nietzsche as forms of nihilism, however). But there is no doubt that the book is a book of awakening. The form of the book is quite surprising. There is a fairly regular recurrence of songs: Song of the night, song of the dance, for example. This strangeness of song in a text that usually refers to philosophy is no doubt explained by a desire to present truth in poetic rather than conceptual form. This is not simply a vain aesthetic ornament, or a singular taste on Nietzsche's part to write in the form of a poetic image rather than a conceptual one. The point is to recapture the creative moment in which truth is created as creation. For the creative act is what makes it possible to institute truth as a game. As we have said, the highest idea in the book is that of eternal return. This presentation of the eternal return begins with the third part of the book. The second, according to Eugen Fink, is devoted to the notion of the will to power, and the first to the idea of the superman and the death of God. The superman establishes man's nature as transcendence, i.e. as transcendence, which means that man is that being which has no nature (an idea commonly shared in German philosophical circles). The question is then to know what is repeated in the eternal return. We can say the will to power if we read the second part, but also if we follow the first part, the cycle of creation presented in the three metamorphoses of the spirit. The spirit is first of all a spirit of gravity, like the camel: it accumulates and obeys. But then it becomes a spirit of freedom, but a negative freedom that says "no". It becomes a lion. But then it becomes positive freedom: that of the child: "Childhood is innocence and oblivion, a new beginning and a game, a wheel that rolls over itself, a first movement, a sacred 'yes'. It is his will that the spirit now wants, it is his own world that he who is lost to the world wants to win".