Impact: Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Man Who Wrote It in Ten Days

By the time Nietzsche began Thus Spake Zarathustra in 1883, he had already resigned his professorship at Basel, largely on account of ill health — blinding migraines, failing eyesight, stomach ailments so severe he could barely eat. He was thirty-eight years old, living alone in rented rooms in various European cities, subsisting on a small pension and writing books that sold almost nothing. His previous work, The Gay Science, had just introduced the idea that 'God is dead' — a provocation that landed to near-total silence.

Nietzsche was not, it should be said, an atheist who thought religion was simply foolish. He was a diagnostician who thought Christianity had undergirded European moral life for two thousand years, and that its intellectual collapse — already underway, whether people admitted it or not — would leave a vacuum that most people were entirely unprepared to fill. Zarathustra was his attempt to describe what a human being might look like who was genuinely prepared for that vacuum: someone who could create new values rather than merely inherit old ones. He chose to name this figure after the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster — partly because Zoroastrianism had, in Nietzsche's reading, introduced the sharp moral dualism of good and evil into human thought, and partly because it pleased him to have the man who started that particular fire be the one to end it.

A Prophet Nobody Wanted

The reception of Thus Spake Zarathustra was not a disaster in the way that, say, Moby-Dick was a disaster. It was something quieter and, in its way, sadder. Nietzsche published the first three parts himself between 1883 and 1884. For Part IV — the final section — he had only forty copies printed, and distributed seven of them personally to friends he thought might understand it. The total readership in his lifetime was somewhere in the dozens.

In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a complete mental collapse in Turin — he reportedly threw his arms around the neck of a horse being flogged in the street and never recovered his sanity. He spent the remaining eleven years of his life in a state of mental incapacity, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a nationalist and anti-Semite who would go on to manage his literary estate with catastrophic results. When Nietzsche died in 1900, he was famous — but the fame had arrived while he could no longer comprehend it, and it had already been filtered through his sister's ideological agenda.

How a Philosopher Got Stolen

The story of how Thus Spake Zarathustra became canon is inseparable from the story of how it was grotesquely misappropriated. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche controlled the Nietzsche Archive and cherry-picked her brother's unpublished notes to construct a text called The Will to Power — a book Nietzsche never wrote, assembled to suggest he endorsed German nationalism and racial hierarchy. He had, in fact, written viciously against German nationalism and anti-Semitism in his actual published work, once calling German culture 'a swindle.'

The damage was done anyway. By the time of the First World War, copies of Zarathustra were being distributed to German soldiers alongside the Bible and Faust. By the 1930s, the Nazis had claimed Nietzsche as a philosophical godfather. Hitler visited the Nietzsche Archive. A copy of Zarathustra was presented to Mussolini. None of this would have surprised the real Nietzsche, who had written in his letters that he dreaded being read by Germans above all. The rehabilitation of his actual thought — distinguishing what he wrote from what his sister wanted him to have written — was a slow, largely postwar academic project, with scholars like Walter Kaufmann doing the essential work of returning the texts to something like what Nietzsche intended.

What the Book Is Actually About

At the center of Zarathustra are three ideas that Nietzsche considered his most important contributions to human thought, and which are worth taking seriously on their own terms before attaching any ideology to them. The first is the Übermensch — usually translated as 'Superman' or 'Overman' — not a racial category but an aspiration. As the book's own translator's notes make clear, Nietzsche saw evolution not as something that had concluded with modern humanity but as something ongoing; the Übermensch is the being who creates values rather than receiving them, who says yes to life rather than escaping it into religion or resentment. 'Man is something that shall be surpassed,' Zarathustra announces in the Prologue. It is a challenge, not a blueprint for eugenics.

The second idea is eternal recurrence: the thought experiment that asks whether you could will your life to repeat itself, identically, infinite times. Nietzsche presents this not as a cosmological claim but as a test — a way of asking whether you are living in a manner you could genuinely affirm. The third is the will to power, which Nietzsche explicitly distinguishes from mere domination over others; it is closer to self-mastery, to the drive toward growth and creative expression. All three ideas are delivered not through argument but through Zarathustra's discourses, parables, songs, and confrontations — a deliberate stylistic choice. Nietzsche wanted the reader to experience these ideas rather than simply process them.

The Cultural Footprint

The book's influence on the twentieth century is simply enormous, and runs in directions that contradict each other. Richard Strauss composed his tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra in 1896; Stanley Kubrick used its opening fanfare in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making it one of the most recognizable pieces of music on earth. Rilke read Nietzsche obsessively. So did Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Jack London, George Bernard Shaw (whose Man and Superman is explicitly Nietzschean), and Albert Camus, who spent much of his career arguing with Nietzsche's conclusions while absorbing his questions. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus is in part an extended meditation on what happens when Nietzsche's ideas enter the wrong hands.

In popular culture, the fingerprints are everywhere, even when they're not acknowledged. Every superhero narrative that asks whether exceptional individuals are bound by ordinary morality is working on Nietzschean ground. Every character who refuses inherited values and insists on forging their own is doing something Zarathustra would recognize. The problem, as Nietzsche himself might have predicted, is that the version of his ideas that filtered into mass culture is usually a simplified one — a license for individualism rather than a demand for genuine self-overcoming.

Reading It Now

What makes Thus Spake Zarathustra genuinely difficult — and genuinely worth the difficulty — is that it refuses to do the reader's thinking for them. Zarathustra is not a mouthpiece for a system. He contradicts himself. He fails. He is mocked. He has disciples and distrusts them. In one remarkable passage, he explicitly warns his followers not to follow him: 'One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.' The book is structured as a kind of education in independence, which means it cannot simply be summarized and absorbed. You have to sit with it.

The style is also, once you're inside it, genuinely beautiful. Nietzsche wrote in a heightened, incantatory prose that borrows the rhythms of scripture to deliver anti-scriptural messages — a paradox he was entirely aware of and delighted in. Zarathustra's habit of giving nicknames to entire schools of thought ('the herdsmen,' 'the good and just,' 'the afterworldsmen') gives the book an almost satirical edge beneath its prophetic register. It is not, whatever its reputation suggests, a grim book. There is real wit in it, real exhilaration. Nietzsche believed that a philosophy worth having should make you want to dance, and Zarathustra, at its best, does exactly that.

We are still living inside the questions this book asked. What do we do when inherited frameworks for meaning stop working? What does it mean to create values rather than simply receive them? What does a life look like that is genuinely affirmed rather than merely endured? Thus Spake Zarathustra does not answer these questions cleanly — Nietzsche was too honest a thinker for that. But it asks them with an urgency and a literary force that no subsequent thinker has quite managed to match.

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