PDF Summary:Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche
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In the 1880s, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a creative presentation of his views about life and philosophy. The book is a fictitious, poetic story about a prophet named Zarathustra. Much of the book consists of monologues that Zarathustra delivers to his disciples, his pets (an eagle and a snake), or people he meets in the woods near the cave that he calls home.
In this guide, we’ll examine Zarathustra’s teaching on what humans are, what they can become, and how you should live if you want to participate in the advancement of humankind. We’ll also consider Zarathustra’s criticism of Christianity, which is interspersed throughout his teachings and comprises a large portion of the book. Yet, as we’ll see, Zarathustra shares more ideas than you might expect with certain Christian theologians. We’ll also bring in additional perspectives from great thinkers like Stephen Hawking and Tom Rath.
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Strength and Endurance
While he encourages people to pursue happiness, Zarathustra warns them not to pursue comfort. On the contrary, he emphasizes the importance of cultivating strength by enduring hardship. For humans to make evolutionary progress, life must become harder over time so that humans become stronger over time.
The primary example Zarathustra gives of cultivating endurance is his approach to dealing with the winter cold: He likens winter to an unwelcome houseguest, whom he mocks by taking a cold bath every morning. By subjecting himself to such hardship, Zarathustra grows stronger.
(Shortform note: Zarathustra’s example is particularly interesting, given that many years later, Wim Hof would argue (and arguably demonstrate) that you can fight stress, heal yourself, and improve your health by subjecting your body to freezing temperatures.)
Helping Others
Zarathustra also applies the principle of cultivating strength and endurance to how you interact with other people. He says you should cultivate strength by never letting others do anything for you that you can do for yourself, and by never doing anything for someone else that she can do for herself.
What about helping people who can’t help themselves? That’s a bit of a gray area. On several occasions, Zarathustra befriends other people or comes to their aid. But he also says there are too many people who don’t die soon enough. When you see them headed for destruction, you shouldn’t intervene to help them. If anything, you should seek to expedite their demise. He refers to pity as his “ultimate sin.”
(Shortform note: We can infer that Zarathustra believes many people are basically dead-end branches on the pathway of human evolution and that the faster they die off, the faster evolution can progress. This would explain why he helps some people but not others. He helps those that he sees as candidates for human progress but not those who are evolutionary dead-ends.)
Zarathustra also teaches that receiving charitable aid is demeaning. And because it’s demeaning for the recipient, the one giving the aid feels ashamed as well, at least if she has any empathy whatsoever for the recipient. He says he would rather let poor people steal from him than give them donations or, worse yet, see them begging for donations.
(Shortform note: We can infer that, in Zarathustra’s view, stealing is less shameful than begging for two reasons. First, stealing isn’t necessarily wrong because, as we’ve discussed, Zarathustra doesn’t believe in traditional, objective morality. If you’re good at stealing or passionate about developing your skills as a thief, Zarathustra would call that one of your virtues and encourage you to cultivate it. Second, it takes more initiative to steal something than it does to receive a gift or beg for a handout. This makes it more honorable because, as we’ll discuss next, Zarathustra emphasizes the importance of initiative.)
The Psychological Nature of Poverty
More recent studies of poverty and poverty-alleviation methods corroborate some of Zarathustra’s assertions. In When Helping Hurts, Christian missionary organizers Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert explain that poverty isn’t just a lack of money or material resources. Fundamentally, poverty is a sense of shame and helplessness that arises when you’re unable to fulfill your purpose in life.
They go on to point out that this has significant implications for poverty alleviation efforts: When a missionary or other aid worker steps in and gives a poor person something or does something to help her, it often insinuates that the poor person couldn’t help herself. This reinforces her sense of shame and helplessness, ultimately making her poverty worse, even if the aid temporarily meets her physical needs.
Unlike Zarathustra, Corbett and Fikkert advocate helping the poor to climb out of poverty, not helping them to die off. But, like Zarathustra, they do advise you not to do anything for a poor person that she can do for herself. They go on to offer advice on how you can empower the poor to help themselves, rather than shaming them with handouts that only make their poverty worse.
Free Will
Zarathustra says the essence of life is the “will to power.” This is what drives animals to compete with each other, making evolutionary progress possible. In humans, the same driving force produces a social hierarchy, as people compete with each other for power.
But Zarathustra’s “will to power” isn’t just about gaining authority over others—it has even more to do with having power over yourself. Human free will gives you the power to think for yourself and act according to your desires. Free will also makes creativity possible because you have to think for yourself to create anything new. In particular, it enables you to create yourself—in other words, to be different and unique. This is essential for evolutionary progress because humankind cannot make progress if everyone is the same.
(Shortform note: The question of whether creativity requires free will is a subject of debate. Some studies indicate that creativity enhances a person’s sense of freedom, implying a connection between free will and creativity that tends to corroborate Zarathustra’s perspective. However, since about 2022, computers have become very efficient at producing graphic artwork and other material traditionally thought to require human creativity. Computers, of course, have no free will, so this raises questions about the definition of creativity. If AI-generated content can truly be considered creative, then creativity doesn’t require free will.)
Furthermore, Zarathustra encourages you to take the initiative to think and act for yourself because exercising free will is what makes you feel free. Conversely, if you always submit to others’ ideas of what you should do and who you should be, or conform to social norms instead of thinking for yourself, then your life will feel empty because you’ve given up your free will, and with it your essence of life.
The Free Will Debate
There is an ongoing debate about the significance of free will—and even about its existence. Some, like Yuval Noah Harari, author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, argue that free will is an illusion. What you perceive as your will is produced by biochemical reactions in your brain, which in turn are triggered by stimuli in your environment. For example, if you sense danger, you’ll naturally want to run away.
So, according to Harari, your “free will” and the decisions you think you make aren’t really free at all. Instead they’re constrained by your biological makeup. He goes on to predict that even the illusory significance of your decisions will likely diminish in the 21st century, as computer algorithms make more of our decisions for us.
Since, like Harari, Zarathustra believes that your soul—and thus also your will—are just part of your body, it might be difficult for him to refute Harari’s argument. This is arguably a point of inconsistency in Zarathustra’s teachings.
However, other studies indicate that deliberately exercising free will has an empowering effect on your life, which leads to greater success. In Smarter, Better, Faster, Charles Duhigg advises you to make a habit of choosing to do things that are against the rules or that challenge the status quo. He says these “subversive decisions” will give you a greater sense of control, which in turn will amplify your sense of motivation. And higher motivation will lead to greater success. Thus, Duhigg’s studies arguably refute Harari’s argument, or at least his conclusion that free will is unimportant, and support Zarathustra’s position.
Progressing Beyond Revenge
No matter how resolutely you take the initiative to direct your own life, sometimes things that you don’t want to happen still happen because other people cause them. Zarathustra observes that this tends to offend your “will to power.” When something happens that you didn’t want, your free will becomes frustrated because, while it can shape the future, it can’t change the past.
For example, suppose you decide to take a vacation at a beach-front resort in another country. But the taxi driver who’s supposed to take you from the airport to the resort instead takes you out into the jungle and robs you, taking your money, identification, and passport. After he disappears, you feel angry and frustrated—this is not what you had in mind when you planned your vacation.
Zarathustra says that when this happens, the only way to truly resolve the problem is to convince yourself that what happened was what you wanted after all. You can’t change the past, but you can change what you want, both for the future and in the past. In our example, maybe you learned some jungle survival skills and made friends with some locals who helped you get home. In hindsight, you’re actually glad it happened because you ended up building valuable relationships, feeling more self-reliant, and having a much better story to tell your grandchildren than if your vacation had gone as planned.
(Shortform note: In The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama asserts that human suffering is caused by hatred, cravings, or other negative thoughts and feelings. He further asserts that because the cause of suffering is internal, you can overcome your suffering by changing your perspective: If you learn to view the difficulties that your enemies cause you as opportunities to grow in character, building tolerance and kindness toward them, you will no longer suffer as a result of what they’ve done to you. This tends to complement Zarathustra’s perspective, reinforcing the idea that you can let go of frustration over the past by changing how you feel about past events.)
However, Zarathustra observes that many people don’t do this. Instead they seek revenge. In Zarathustra’s view, concepts like justice and punishment are just euphemisms for revenge, and government institutions that enforce “justice” are just facilitating revenge. Zarathustra sees no value in taking revenge and believes that ceasing from revenge (and from enforcing justice) will be a significant milestone in human evolution.
So, if someone wrongs you, Zarathustra advises that the best thing you can do is convince both yourself and the person who wronged you that what they did actually benefited you. For example, if they did something that caused you hardship, maybe enduring the hardship made you stronger. And the second-best thing you can do, according to Zarathustra, is to retaliate in kind. He describes this as competing with the person who wronged you, which to him is different than taking revenge.
(Shortform note: The idea of retaliation without revenge may sound self-contradictory, but we can infer from Zarathustra’s discussion that the difference lies in the motive. Revenge seeks to right the wrongs of the past, which he sees as a counterproductive motive because you can’t change the past. But competitive behavior seeks to change the future in a way that makes the future better for you than for whoever you’re competing against. So, if someone stole money from you, taking her to court and demanding justice would be revenge because you’re motivated by the desire to undo the past. But stealing your money back with interest would just be competition because you’re aiming to improve your future.)
Zarathustra and Bonhoeffer on Revenge
Comparing Zarathustra’s teachings on revenge to those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows us that they arrived at remarkably similar conclusions from diametrically opposite viewpoints. Like Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer lived in Germany, and both of them criticized the Christian church. But where Zarathustra advocated abandoning the Christian religion, Bonhoeffer advocated restoring it.
When Bonhoeffer outlined what practicing true Christianity should look like in The Cost of Discipleship, abstaining from revenge was one of his key points. He argued that revenge is what allows evil to reproduce, so abstaining from revenge allows evil to die. (Unlike Zarathustra, Bonhoeffer believed strongly in objective good and evil.)
So if someone wrongs you and you seek to right the wrong, either by taking her to court or by taking the law into your own hands, your revenge only perpetuates the wrong that was done. The only way to stop the evil, according to Bonhoeffer, is to accept what was done to you cheerfully and forgive the person who wronged you.
So despite their stark disagreements, Bonhoeffer and Zarathustra both advise you to accept the past as it is and refrain from seeking revenge or “justice” by earthly means. However, where Zarathustra does condone competitive retaliation, at least in some cases, Bonhoeffer sees all forms of retaliation as revenge.
Criticism of Christianity
As he dispenses his wisdom, Zarathustra probably spends more time warning his hearers what not to do and be than he spends teaching them how to act. And most of his warnings hinge on his criticism of the Christian church and all the “good people” who endorse and enforce the social values taught by Christianity. So now that we’ve discussed Zarathustra’s philosophical teachings, let’s contrast them with what he says Christians believe and practice.
Criticizing the Christian Idea About What Humans Are
Christianity teaches that your body and soul are distinct from one another. Your body is the part of you that exists in the physical realm, while your soul exists in a spiritual realm, where it can live on after your body dies. But Zarathustra argues that trying to separate the physical from the spiritual is unhealthy because it leads Christians to emphasize the importance of spiritual wellbeing while de-emphasizing the importance of physical wellbeing. We can infer that in his view, you can’t have a healthy spirit without having a healthy body, since Zarathustra believes your spirit is just part of your body.
(Shortform note: While practically all Christians agree that your spirit isn’t just part of your body and will experience an afterlife, they have differences of opinion on exactly how your spirit and body relate to each other on earth. Some Christians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, advocate spiritual well-being even at the expense of physical well-being through asceticism, just as Zarathustra alleges. But other Christians, such as Norman Vincent Peale, argue that your body and spirit are so intimately connected that you have to keep your spirit healthy in order to keep your body healthy.)
Criticizing Belief in God
Zarathustra contends that God and the whole spiritual reality that Christians believe in are imaginary, and he provides both emotional and rational reasons for his position. At the emotional level he says that he cannot believe in the existence of superhuman gods because if they existed, he couldn’t stand to live as a mere human.
(Shortform note: We can infer that this is because Zarathustra’s purpose in life is to be a stepping stone on the pathway of human evolution. His ultimate goal for himself and all of humanity is to bring about the evolution of superhumans. But if superhuman deities already exist, then he would lose his purpose for living because they don’t need him to bring them into existence through human evolution. As a human in a world where superhuman deities exist, he would be an inferior being destined for extinction.)
Zarathustra’s rational argument hinges on God’s identity as creator of the world. Zarathustra argues that God could not have created the world because God, by definition, is perfect, and the world is so full of imperfections and randomness that it cannot be the creation of a perfect God. Therefore the world must be the product of random processes, and God must not exist.
How God Can Create an Imperfect World
Christians have offered at least two counterarguments to Zarathustra’s allegation that the world is too imperfect and random to have been created by a perfect God.
One attributes all the disorder and imperfection in the world to humans’ rebellion against God’s created order. God created a perfect world, but humans corrupted creation through sin. A variation of this argument attributes part of the blame to Satan, who also rebelled against God and tempted the first humans to do likewise.
The other argument is that this world is perfect for the purposes that God intended it for. God never intended this world to last forever. Instead, he created it as a temporary staging ground for all the drama of human history. All its “imperfections” like death and disease ultimately work out for the best, whether by refining people’s character, preventing people from committing greater sins against each other, or serving some other purpose. And someday, when human history has run its course, God will destroy this universe and create a new, more permanent world where people who were reconciled to God in this life will live with him forever.
The Benefit of Randomness
Zarathustra goes on to say that this random, imperfect, ever-changing world is better than any perfect, eternal world that God could have created. This is because creativity and progress are possible in this world and are what make life meaningful. But in a perfect, unchanging world, there would be nothing left to create, and therefore no reason to live.
(Shortform note: Some Christians would disagree with Zarathustra’s assertion that creativity is only meaningful in a world created by random processes. They assert that creativity is one way humans can both glorify God and relate to God because creativity is a trait that reflects God’s character as the creator. This makes creativity an important virtue for Christians as well as for disciples of Zarathustra, since Christians find purpose and meaning in their relationship with God.)
The Death of God
While he sometimes argues directly for the nonexistence of God, Zarathustra usually regards God as a person who used to exist but had recently died. He repeatedly remarks that “God is dead.”
In several places, he suggests that God’s pity for mankind was such a source of stress to him that he became ill and eventually died. On one occasion, Zarathustra meets the pope, who corroborates this account. The pope claims to have been with God in his last hours and seen God die with his own eyes.
But on another occasion, Zarathustra meets a man who confesses to having murdered God. His motive for murder was that he could not escape from God’s pity or from the shame that being pitied caused him.
(Shortform note: Nietzsche asserts that “God is dead'' in some of his other books as well, where he elaborates further on what he means by it. Nietzsche believed that God only existed in your imagination, so God would “die” if you stopped believing in him. As such, Zarathustra’s various accounts of God’s death are simply poetic imagery that Nietzsche used to express his unbelief in God and highlight his perspective that pity was a vice.)
Criticizing the Christian Concept of Virtue
When Zarathustra discusses how humans ought to live, he often contrasts his perspective with that of the Christian church. We’ve already discussed Zarathustra’s perspective on virtue, but we’ll recap his values briefly here to show the key contrasts with Christianity that he discusses:
- Zarathustra promotes individuality, arguing that right and wrong are not the same for everyone. Christianity promotes conformity to an objective standard of right and wrong.
- Zarathustra teaches self-love. Christianity teaches selflessness.
- Zarathustra advises you to be joyful and passionate. Christians tend to be solemn and temperate.
- Zarathustra thinks the concept of justice is counterproductive. Christians believe in moral and civil justice.
- Zarathustra believes that the desire for power is not only wholesome but crucial to the advancement of humankind. Christians warn that desiring power is unwholesome.
How Well Did Zarathustra Describe Christianity?
The way Zarathustra portrays Christians as he contrasts his views with theirs is arguably inaccurate, or at least incomplete. Let’s round out his description of what Christianity teaches on the subjects he mentions:
Individuality: Zarathustra is correct that Christians promote conformity to a moral standard, but they also promote some amount of individuality under that moral standard. Christians refer to the Bible as a standard of objective morality, but the Bible also teaches that God gives individual Christians unique tasks to do or roles to fill.
Some Christians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, have taken the concept of Christian individuality even further, arguing that every true Christian has a dynamic, personal relationship with Christ: Christ tells you exactly what to do, and true Christianity consists of obeying Christ, not conforming to codified doctrines, per se. Presumably this doesn’t turn into relative morality, because Christ would never tell you to steal or murder or do other things that the Bible says are evil, but it does make virtue a very personal matter, much as Zarathustra’s perspective does.
Self-love: Zarathustra’s perception that Christians encourage you to be selfless, not selfish, is mostly correct, though there are nuances to how Christians address the concept of self-love. Some Christians point out that for Christ’s commandment to “love your neighbor like you love yourself” to be meaningful, you have to love yourself. But other Christians caution that humans are so innately self-loving that deliberately practicing self-love is counterproductive. Instead, they argue the focus of Christ’s commandment is on loving others, which is a constant challenge.
Joy: It’s possible that the Christians Nietzsche personally met were solemn or even miserable people, but if so, they were not representative of Christianity as whole. The Bible urges Christians to be joyful and thankful, regardless of their circumstances, and religious people are statistically happier than non-religious people.
Justice: Most Christians believe in civil justice consistent with Zarathustra’s description, but there are exceptions. For example, as we discussed earlier, Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed Christians should only look to God for justice, not to civil governments.
Power: As we’ve discussed, Zarathustra’s concept of the desire for power encompasses both the power to lead your life as you see fit and competition for power or superiority over other people. Since Christianity teaches that you should submit to God’s will, seek to help others, and avoid conflict with them to the extent practicable, at face value, Christian teaching is opposed to Zarathustra’s ideas about the desire for power.
However, there are some nuances that make the controversy less stark. For one thing, some Christians argue that accepting the salvation of Christ actually gives you greater control over your own actions. The idea is that after you become a Christian, God gives you power to overcome your own sinful nature. This, in turn, gives you more freedom to do what you believe is right and to refrain from evil. This could be considered a Christian analog to Zarathustra’s desire for power to live as you see fit.
Additionally, in discussing how competition for power creates a social hierarchy, Zarathustra says that your desire for power drives you to obey people who are too powerful for you to overcome. This is because you’ll still hold more power under them than you would have if you picked a fight with them and lost. If an all-powerful God exists, as Christians believe, then Christians who submit to God’s will could be seen as acting in accordance with Zarathustra’s advice to attain power by associating with more powerful entities.
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