An entire year stands between the publication of The Gay Science and the writing of Part I, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It was, however, one of the most tragic years in Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche met Paul Ree in 1873 in Basel while Ree was working on his graduate studies. Ree later published a book on his work, Psychological Observations. He became one of Nietzsche's closest intellectual associates. Another character in the drama was Malwida von Meysenbug, characterized as a "motherly intellectual" who entertained the promising young academics and artists of her day in her home, in Rome, rather after the style of the Parisian salons. Nietzsche and Ree were frequenters of Malwida's when in Italy.
There is some evidence that Nietzsche had made off-and-on clumsy attempts to arrange a marriage in the years preceding and that both Ree and Malwida were aware of this. But in March 1882, after receiving a letter (now lost) from Paul Ree telling him about the 21-year-old Russian woman, Lou von Salome, Nietzsche wrote, "Greet this Russian for me, if that has any purpose: I lust for this species of soul. Yes I shall now look forward to plunder, and with what I have in mind for the next ten years, I will need her. An entirely different chapter would be marriage --- at most, I could agree to a two-year marriage." Of course, without Ree's letter, it is hard to see what might have brought out these bizarre thoughts.
At any rate, this was the beginning of a relationship with Lou Salome that had a strong impact on both Nietzsche and Lou. While Lou went on to embrace extended relationships with Paul Ree, Rainer Maria Rilke, and, much later, Sigmund Freud, she never forgot her connection with Nietzsche and wrote one of the first interpretive books about his thought (Lou Salome. Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894)). Nietzsche first met Lou in Rome in April of 1882 and greeted her with his most gallant manners. As time passed (quickly), both Nietzsche and Ree fell thoroughly in love with Lou, though neither seemed aware of the other's intentions or feelings. Meanwhile, Lou herself was looking for intellectual satisfaction and liberation, not love. Lou's hopes turned toward the possibility of a three-way intellectual companionship, or commune (an outrageous idea for the time). Meanwhile Nietzsche and Ree were each trying to win Lou's heart through short romantic trips and deeply intellectual experiences. [All of this is detailed in Siegfried Mandel's extensive Introduction to the English edition of Lou's Nietzsche (University of Illinois Press, 1988).]
Ultimately, Nietzsche's hopes of spending an extended period of time (the summer of 1882) with Lou and Paul Ree were crushed by the manipulations of his mother and sister, Elizabeth. Lou went off with Ree alone and wound up living with him for several years. Nietzsche allowed his jealousy to pour forth and wrote some terrible letters to his two formerly-best friends, also slandering them to other friends. It was an experience that he looked back upon with deep regrets, even guilt. Meanwhile, however, Nietzsche was finding himself alienated from everyone he had known, with the exception of a few friends in Basel. It was a dark period of time and the Overbecks, in Basel, feared that Nietzsche was suicidal.
In many respects, the writing of Zarathustra was the healing process that brought Nietzsche out of this darkness. Part I was written in only about ten days, in January 1883. In February, Wagner died, yielding yet another blow to Nietzsche. Part II was written in June 1883 and Part III, in November. Part IV, written in January 1884, was circulated to only a small group and not published during Nietzsche's lifetime. It was viewed as too blasphemous. The full collection was published together, for the first time, in 1892.
In the Prologue, we see Zarathustra coming down to teach the people the message that god is dead and that man is to be overcome. But his message is not understood and is symbolically confused with the tightrope performer who falls to his death. Zarathustra sees the herd-like quality of the people as a whole and abandons his attempts. Going off to Part I, he grasps the need to teach only a few followers. This, of course, is the position that Nietzsche adopted long ago and echoes throughout his life. He is, after all, ahead of his time and writes for people who do not yet live.
Part I
The spirit (der Geist, or spirit, mind, or intellect) must take on three transformations --- the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel picks up its burden and stocks up on water and, then, ventures out into and across the desert. As Nietzsche has said before, it is a long lonely journey for the free spirit. But the spirit must now become a lion in order to become free. It requires conquest to be free. Nietzsche's imagery is very important here. We have to conquer the "great dragon" which is cloaked in all the "values" of traditional times, that places its "thou shalt" above us, and that denies us our "I will." It is the lion that empowers spirit to say, "I will;" and it must first utter a "sacred No." In the end, the lion must give way to the child because only the child represents a "sacred Yes" --- innocence, a new beginning, first movement. The project of a revaluation of all values begins here.
In a succession of two powerful aphorisms, Nietzsche fully develops his materialist "naturalism." Afterworldly beings are simply human creations and they are creations out of our weaknesses and sicknesses at that. "This god whom I created was man-made and madness, like all gods! Man he was, and only a poor specimen of man and ego (Ich)." We are urged to turn away from otherworldly creations and to place our faith in the body. "Listen rather . . . to the voice of the healthy body . . . it speaks of the meaning of the earth." "Body am I entirely, and nothing else" And, "your body and its great reason: that does not say 'I,' but does 'I'." Underneath it all lies what Nietzsche calls the self (das Selbst). "The creative self created respect and contempt; it created pleasure and pain. The creative body created the spirit as a hand for its will." In short, the way we think about ourselves is highly corrupted by language, driven by long-term dualism and in which the body is shunted into a marginal position. Nietzsche asks us to transcend this language and to re-construct our vision of human life as centered in body. But we must resist understanding this as classic materialism. It is no metaphysical thing-in-itself. One must guess that we know the body like we know all else --- as a self-preserving perspectival "error" that possesses utility. Such knowledge is our evolutionary way of coping with the chaos of experience.
Finally, in the section called "On the Thousand and One Goals," Nietzsche introduces his concept of the will to power in the context of self-overcoming as the creative activity behind our "tablets" of our good. All of this must be understood in the context of Nietzsche's anthropological naturalism and the gradual evolution of human peoples. 'Will' and 'power' are dangerous words for us because their contemporary meanings are charged in directions that can only offer misunderstandings. How does Nietzsche mean "will"? As Kant uses it in his ethics? What does Nietzsche see in "power"? Force exercised over others? All very unlikely. It is best to understand as well as we can the situation of primordial beings emerging out of chaotic experiences, struggling to "put life together," making stabs at species-preserving errors. Physics thinks of force in terms of moving mass. Work is moving mass some distance; and power is work done over time. This is closer to Nietzsche than the metaphoric political concept of power. Force, for instance, does not have to be exerted against something external; it requires force to expand and pull inner material forward into a larger volume. Thus, we can think of Nietzsche's power as the energy required over time for a people or, later, an individual to differentiate and liberate. It is a process of self-creation in which the "resistance" or the "barrier" is really the mass of self-imposed preliminary structures. Hence, our will to power is always both the creative force of new value-giving but also the destructive self-overcoming involved in pulling away from the old inhibiting values.
Part II
When Zarathustra returns from his retreat into the mountains, he is filled with a new spirit (or speech). Indeed, in "On the blessed isles," Nietzsche powerfully returns to and amplifies the themes of The Gay Science. When we look into the sea (nature), we should see overman (human destiny) and not god. God is an unthinkable human conjecture. Man "should think through [his] own senses to their consequences." The will to power as it is manifest in human thinking should be a "will to truth," and that should mean pondering only the thinkable. Repeating his claim that "world" is what we make it, Nietzsche suggests that "creation . . . is the great redemption from suffering, and life's growing light."
The knowledgeable person "walks among men as among animals." There is great suffering in the world, but how do we deal with it appropriately. Largely, in this world we are taught to pity one another for this suffering. But Nietzsche suggests that "man has felt too little joy: that alone . . . is our original sin." How can we feel joy when we are engaged in pitying? That is, in effect, sharing someone's pain and grief, getting down with them ourselves and bathing ourselves in the worst of it all. In pitying, we harm not only ourselves but we harm them. The true direction for man is elevation. As leaders in the culture of pity, the priests are of Zarathustra's blood, but they have gone completely astray. "They did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man" --- to be taken literally (Christ) but also figuratively (life-denying Christian culture). "And if man goes through fire for his doctrine --- what does that prove? Verily, it is more if your own doctrine comes out of your own fire." (my emphasis)
"On self-overcoming" marks a significant amplification of Nietzsche's theory of the will to power. The idea of will to power is crucial in understanding Nietzsche and yet it is also largely misunderstood. Nietzsche himself brings much of this misunderstanding upon himself by continually applying warrior rhetoric and leading us to think of his theory as a simplistic appeal to humans struggling against each other to exert power over one another --- life as a giant pecking order! Once again, then, as above (discussion of Part I), we need to remember Nietzsche's basic assumptions of the situation of human life. In particular, the "universe" is entirely chaotic and we have no organs for understanding it as such. Having found ourselves (in an entirely vague sense) thrust into life, we must struggle (warrior-like) to create footholds for survival. These "footholds" are essentially moments of "valuation" or decisions to put one or another thing, concept, etc. first. This is all the human can do. It is the human's only primitive attribute, our will to power. Power, far from flinging ourselves against others, is a continual exertion toward life, and the tokens of our will to power are our valuations, our footholds which gradually make systematic living possible. Knowledge, Nietzsche has said, is an assortment of self-preserving errors which have "utility" in that sense the they have successfully brought us to where we are. The age of truth and falsehood is just beginning. This "will to truth" represents a thoughtful reconstruction of knowledge along the path to freedom or yes-saying to life. It is a hard path because it means breaking through ancient valuations of good and evil. It is a precarious path because, having no organ for understanding chaos or for understanding the utilities of ancient knowledge, we take great risks in stepping beyond established valuations. But we must do this out of a lust for life because the "safety" of past valuations crushes life. In the advanced stage, the will to power is manifest as self-overcoming. In effect, it is the continuing need to re-value all values. It is the movement toward the overman.
At the end of this section and in the dream described in "The soothsayer," Nietzsche begins an ominous ascent to the idea of "eternal recurrence of the same." The idea itself will not become clear until Part III but it is handled dramatically, here, so as to introduce its overall importance.
Part III
Nietzsche introduces his concept of the eternal recurrence in "On the vision and the riddle." This is the culminating idea connected with Zarathustra so I will devote this entire part to a discussion of that concept. While it seems clear that Nietzsche actually gave some thought to formally proving this idea, it remains possible that it was only a "what if" concept in his mind. I am personally not convinced that this matters. It is seemingly most important as an ethical premise.
The concept of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same must be seen in the light of Nietzsche's concept that god is dead or that god has become unthinkable. Indeed, taking Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical position at its extreme, humans have experience and that is pretty much that. If there is a universal cause of experience, whatever that might be, it is a chaos for which we have no organ of perception and no understanding. What constitutes the human being is a will-to-power, that is, a struggling and energized need to gain footholds out of this chaos by placing value in something. There is a collective aspect to all of this which Nietzsche never articulated well but is implicit in his writing. That is the fact that other humans are parts of what we experience and that language is invented as a means of communicating between humans. While each individual must struggle through his/her own will to power to gain a foothold in life, this occurs in a collective language environment so that we are aided in this by an existing culture. Thus, every culture has its tablets of good and evil, that is, the product of its collective and accumulated wills to power. Equally, we are in possession of primitive knowledge which Nietzsche calls our self-preserving errors. It is "erroneous" because it has no real reference but it does have long-stranding utility.
It is in this total context, that Nietzsche understands the absence of a god or any compelling moral scheme of things. Thus, Nietzsche is fully aware of the "existential" problem that there may be nothing that directs our ethics. Is there, in fact, any conceivable way in which human choice can be constructively directed? This problem is not dissimilar from the problem that Kant faced in the Second Section of his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals where he observed that there is a fundamental problem in "the relation of a will to itself so far as it determines itself only by reason." Even though reason may dictate how one should act according to the categorical imperative, there may be nothing that dictates a human will act in accordance with reason. Kant solves his dilemma by creating the concept of a "realm of ends." "Morality, therefore, consists in the relation of every action to the legislation through which alone a realm of ends is possible." As Kant imagined it, the individual must elect to rule himself by reason for that is the only way to truly manifest human dignity and realizing the realm of ends.
For Nietzsche, the concept of the eternal recurrence meant that every moment counts in that monumental sense that nothing in our past can be passed over frivolously but is, rather, to be returned to us over and over. This was Nietzsche's way of asserting a profound seriousness to every moment. Perhaps without god or morality we really can do anything we please, but if it will return to us over and over, wouldn't we always want to do our best work? Perhaps one does not know what is "best" at any point, but wouldn't one want to bear that moment out of his finest energy, at least?
This is a heavy burden and challenge. No wonder that Nietzsche treated it with so much importance.