Summer 2022 Volume 48 Issue 3
285 Jason Blakely Thomas More’s Hermeneutic Politics
307 John Kirby “ A Mysterious Communication”: Schopenhauer’s Will
to Live in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer
323 Thomas L. Pangle egel’s Philosophy of Nature as Foundational
H
for His Political Philosophy
Timothy W. Burns, Leo Strauss on Democracy,
Technology, and Liberal Education: An Exchange
347 Devin Stauffer emarks on Timothy W. Burns’s Leo Strauss on
R
Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education
351 Timothy W. Burns Reply to Devin Stauffer
Heinrich Meier, What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?:
An Exchange
373 Shilo Brooks ook Review: What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?
B
by Heinrich Meier
379 Laurence Lampert R
eview Essay: On Heinrich Meier’s What Is Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra? A Philosophical Confrontation
397 Heinrich Meier A Short Response to a Polite Request
399 Laurence Lampert Reply to Heinrich Meier
Book Reviews
401 Jacob Boros imits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why
L
Environmentalists Should Care by Giorgos Kallis
407 Steven H. Frankel mil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical
E
Sources, ed. Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe
©2022 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be
reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635
Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University
General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns
General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987)
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International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier
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Book Review: What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? 373
An Exchange
Book Review
Heinrich Meier, What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? A Philosophical Confrontation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021, 194 pp., $50.00 (cloth).
Shilo Brooks
University of Colorado, Boulder
[email protected]
Many of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings are explicitly about Friedrich
Nietzsche. The titles of Ecce Homo and Nietzsche contra Wagner, to name
just two, draw attention to the writer’s singular personage and distinctive
intellectual biography. But even those of Nietzsche’s writings whose titles do
not explicitly refer to Friedrich Nietzsche address some aspect of his per-
sonal development. Nietzsche called his Dawn and Joyous Science his “most
personal” books.1 In Ecce Homo, he says that his third and fourth Untimely
Meditations, entitled Schopenhauer as Educator and Richard Wagner in
Bayreuth, are visions of his own past and future rather than odes to the men
named in their titles.2 The self-referential prefaces in later books like Twi-
light of the Idols and The Antichrist, and the personalizing prefaces Nietzsche
1
Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in Studies in Platonic Political
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 174.
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I write Such Good Books,” Untimely Ones 3, in Basic Writ-
ings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000).
© 2022 Interpretation, Inc.
374 Interpretation Volume 48 / Issue 3
added to earlier books like Human, All Too Human, also place the author’s
life before his philosophy.
If there is any book in Nietzsche’s oeuvre whose autobiographical char-
acter is difficult to discern it is his most famous book, and his only work of
fictional poetry, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathus-
tra?, Heinrich Meier does the welcome work of showing how and why Thus
Spoke Zarathustra is about Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, he argues that
Nietzsche’s Book for All and None represents a crucial turning point in his
intellectual life because it contains the philosophic essentials of Nietzsche’s
search for self-knowledge and intellectual independence. In Thus Spoke Zara-
thustra, Nietzsche again tells the story of how one becomes what one is.
According to Meier, the primary purpose of Nietzsche’s parodic poem is
to explore the differences between the typology of the philosopher and the
typology of the prophet. Nietzsche deliberately leaves ambiguous who his
Zarathustra is—philosopher, prophet, or both—and by doing so creates an
occasion to explore concurrently who Friedrich Nietzsche is—philosopher,
prophet, or both. The book is a workshop for Nietzsche’s self-ascertainment
because Zarathustra the man, like Nietzsche the man, is attempting to unite
in himself what, according to Meier, cannot be united: the philosopher and
the prophet. In Meier’s view, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra provided Nietzsche
the opportunity to gain clarity over the options of the philosopher and the
prophet” (187). It gave him occasion to explore the limits of each type, and to
separate in his own mind what belongs to the psychology of each.
The prophet longs to change the world whereas the philosopher finds
satisfaction in understanding it. The prophet is motivated by love of man,
whereas the philosopher is motivated by love of wisdom. Both risk falling
prey to the distorting desire to take revenge on reality: the prophet by pro-
claiming a new and promising future that negates a miserable past, and the
philosopher by willing a systematic philosophy that distorts reality and force-
fully compels its knowability. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does not know which
world-historical type he is at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nei-
ther, Meier argues, did Friedrich Nietzsche when he began writing the book.
“The knowledge Nietzsche attained about himself can be considered by far
the most important yield of the years he spent in the company of Zarathus-
tra,” Meier says, and “everything” that the book is and that Nietzsche intends
with it is secondary to the task of self-understanding (187).
Book Review: What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? 375
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a parody of the Luther Bible, one that opens
with Zarathustra the Counter-Jesus lamenting from a lonely mountaintop
that he is not self-sufficient. In Part I of the book Zarathustra is full of wis-
dom, but his wisdom does not sustain him. He loves mankind in addition
to, or perhaps more than, his wisdom. He longs for a “going-under” which
would place him in the company of men so that he can give them a gift. As
Meier pointedly observes, Zarathustra loves men “as recipients of his gift,
what they could become through him” (12). It is this aspect of Zarathustra’s
longing that makes him a prophet. He aims to change mankind by bringing
them the great gift of the Overman, which he declares is the future toward
which all human affairs should aim. In announcing the Overman, Zara-
thustra also prophetically announces an impending calamity by invoking
the great danger of the last man. This impending calamity is uttered with a
prophet’s “triple ‘Woe!’” (15). In Meier’s telling, Zarathustra the prophet is a
“revolutionary,” whose “futurist teaching appears as an enemy to the status
quo” (23). He seeks to gain power over the past by asserting power over the
future. Friedrich Nietzsche, who is not ashamed to call himself “a destiny” in
Ecce Homo, is similar in this regard. “You want a formula for such a destiny
become man? That is to be found in my Zarathustra.”3
It is in Part II of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that Zarathustra begins to real-
ize that his prophetic longings and his high hopes for the future of man have
deceived him. He is unhappy, and he begins to long either again or for the
first time for the self-sufficiency of the philosopher, and for the life of wisdom
whose richness he did not fully appreciate in his loneliness on the mountain.
His reversal is spurred by the fact that his going-under disillusioned him with
men and politics. The men who heard his speeches did not truly have ears to
hear him. He has been misunderstood and even ignored. He sought disciples
among men, but his charges have proved unsuitable. Zarathustra’s disillusion
with man reveals to him that his love of mankind originated in a deep dis-
satisfaction with mankind combined with a profound disappointment with
the world as it is (75). Zarathustra twice weeps in Part II (89). The world is
unbearable to the prophet, and this is precisely what made the prophet Zara-
thustra long to re-create the world and save it thereby. In Meier’s formulation,
Zarathustra’s “orientation toward the future proves to be dependence on the
future, on the imaginary” (75). Zarathustra’s futurist teaching of the Over-
man as the man of tomorrow is rooted in his indignation over reality. His
longing to teach arises out of “a previously unacknowledged neediness” (81).
3
Ecce Homo, “Why I am a Destiny,” 2.
376 Interpretation Volume 48 / Issue 3
Zarathustra has gained self-knowledge about this neediness, and through
him so has Friedrich Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s task in the remaining parts of
the book is to find and articulate a contentment that is independent of the
caprices of mankind and thus independent of the success or failure of the
prophet’s attempt to change mankind.
The last two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra show Zarathustra aban-
doning or overcoming his prophetic longings and embracing philosophy,
understood as the life of the “knower.” He frees himself from the prophet’s
desire to take revenge on reality at the same time that he realizes that the
revenge-taking trap is likewise the “philosopher’s greatest danger” (49). To
overcome this vengeful danger Zarathustra confronts the will of the knower
to do violence to the world by harnessing the spirit of revenge and transform-
ing the world into what is thinkable for man (58). This vengeful desire to
create the world in one’s own image is the “Will to Power,” and it animates
the philosopher’s desire to know the world as much as it does the prophet’s
desire to rule it. According to Meier, the doctrine of the Will to Power is not
a solution for Zarathustra or for Nietzsche but rather a problem driven by
anger or thumos in their souls that must be overcome (78). By exposing the
Will to Power’s operation on, or infection of, the will to truth, Zarathustra
teaches that the Will to Power of the aspiring knower must be turned against
itself and subdued. The Will to Power hinders the pursuit of truth because it
poses falsely as the will to truth itself, bending reality into philosophic sys-
tems and formulas according to its own wishes and prejudices. This resembles
what a prophet does when he propounds a futurist prophecy like that of the
Overman, which Zarathustra realizes was meant to tyrannize the world by
making the past, present, and future appear intelligible through the prism
of a single fact. “Once Zarathustra too cast his delusion beyond man, like all
backworldsmen” (21).
To avoid the pitfalls of a revenge-seeking Will to Power, the knower must
awaken himself to the psychology of his own Will to Power and turn against it
in a laughing feat of self-conscious self-overcoming (61–62, 77). Zarathustra’s
most famous doctrine, the doctrine of the Eternal Return, serves as a linch-
pin for the process of overcoming the desire for revenge because it teaches
that liberation from indignation over reality is possible only by saying yes to
becoming as a whole. One must will what is past as past, what is present as
present, and what is future as future. The Eternal Return is merely a doctrine
because it prepares the knower’s disposition for the search for knowledge but
does not itself consist in knowledge. In Meier’s terms, Zarathustra teaches
Book Review: What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? 377
that the knower’s will “must be converted to the belief that it is the ground of
the acceptance of the world as it is, so that the world is in harmony with the
direction of the will’s willing” (79–80). In an especially insightful section of
What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, Meier discloses seven meanings or “steps”
of the Eternal Return, the fourth and central of which is that “in the teaching
of the Eternal Return, the teaching of the Overman finds its complement and
correction.…By negating the neediness of redemption of that which was, it
puts in its place the spirit of revenge at work in the [prophet’s] futurist vision
of the eventual triumph over nonsense and senselessness” (184). The Eternal
Return is a teacher’s tool rather than a philosophic principle.
In the rich conclusion to What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, Meier asserts
that the most well-known aspects of Thus Spoke Zarathustra all recede behind
the fact that the book is “a monument to self-understanding for the philoso-
pher” (187). Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity, his attempt to establish a new
aristocracy, and his doctrines of the Overman, the Will to Power, and the Eter-
nal Return are all ancillary to the self-knowledge-seeking crux of the book.
In Meier’s view, Nietzsche sought to “test out options and play through pos-
sibilities” with these doctrines and pronouncements, none of which he makes
his own despite their being inextricably connected to his name in the popular
and scholarly imaginations (188). For Meier, no comprehensive doctrine or sys-
tem emerges from Zarathustra’s teaching because Nietzsche “will neither abet
the confusion of philosophy with a doctrinal edifice, nor provide additional
nourishment to the foreseeable elevation of a tool of knowledge and means of
understanding into a metaphysical principle” (189). Nietzsche did not write a
book entitled The Will to Power, nor did he write one entitled The Eternal Return.
Instead, the self-knowledge he acquired in Thus Spoke Zarathustra compelled
him to begin speaking of the philosopher’s task (not the philosopher’s doc-
trines) in the writings that followed its publication. In Meier’s interpretation,
Nietzsche takes up the philosophic life in Ecce Homo and he confronts the
question of what a philosopher is in The Antichrist, finally providing answers
to the questions he began exploring in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Meier’s 2019
book Nietzsches Vermächtnis: “Ecce homo” und “Der Antichrist” (C. H. Beck)
examines these writings and is forthcoming in English translation.
What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? is a book that scholars with even a
tangential interest in Nietzsche will find invaluable. For anyone with a deep
intellectual interest in the subject matter, the book is essential. That said, read-
ers who do not fully subscribe to Meier’s careful manner of reading may balk
at what could look to some like an overwrought and overreaching esotericism
378 Interpretation Volume 48 / Issue 3
that pervades both Meier’s book and his interpretation of Nietzsche’s book.
Deliberately convoluted paragraphs that run four full pages or longer are com-
mon in What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, and Meier does a stupefying amount
of arithmetical gymnastics to count words and verses that fit into groups of
seven and three. Consider the following characteristic passage: “The refrain
constituted by the three identical verses, which invoke return seven times and
eternity three times seven times, contains Zarathustra’s sevenfold declaration
of love for eternity, the sevenfold expression of his desire for the ‘nuptial ring
of rings,’ and the sevenfold assurance never to have found ‘the woman’ from
whom he wanted children, except it be eternity” (126).
That Nietzsche was an esoteric writer is beyond dispute, but the manner
of his esotericism is richer and more profound than the mere counting of
threes, sevens, and arithmetical centers reveals. In Beyond Good and Evil,
he says that “the difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly
known to philosophers,” is that “the exoteric approach sees things from
below, and the esoteric looks down from above.”4 He adds that “there are
books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether
the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more vigorous ones turn
to them: in the former case, these books are dangerous and lead to crumbling
and disintegration, in the latter, heralds’ cries that call the bravest to their
courage.” Meier’s interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is masterful, but it
would be invigorating to see him integrate Nietzsche’s living way of reading
and writing into his scholarly dissection of these bio-graphic works.
4
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 30, in Basic Writings, trans. Kaufmann.
