Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Will to Power, Eternal Return, Superman
The message of Zarathustra covers several key themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy.
1. The Will to Power
The Will to Power is not that of the psychologists, nor does it coincide with the will of Schopenhauer, although it is inspired by it. Nor is it passive will, the will to obey, the will towards the nothingness of nihilism, the will for man’s theoretical truth, the will to seek pleasure and avoid pain, nor even the will to live. On the contrary, life is Will to Power, and this is the will to excel, to be more, to live longer, to create. And more than a faculty of man, it is the whole set of forces directed towards overcoming.
Nietzsche’s interest in moral values makes the Will to Power a creative will and a destructive force against previous values. In the posthumous fragments, this will takes on a more general, cosmic dimension. The cosmos is a force that seeks to expand.
2. The Eternal Return
This is the key theme of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The theme is taken from mythology and the Presocratics, but in Nietzsche, it hardly makes cosmological sense. In The Will to Power, he seeks to refute the linear and teleological conception of the universe. If the universe had a purpose, it would have already reached it. Thus, Nietzsche asserts that there is nothing beyond this world.
So, this is our only world, and any flight to another world is a loss of reality; therefore, we must remain faithful to the earth. The Eternal Return takes on an axiological sense; it is the ultimate formula of fidelity to the earth, to life, and to the world that the Will to Power affirms. And Zarathustra is the prophet of the Eternal Return.
The Eternal Return symbolizes that this world is the only world. It also affirms that everything is good, that even the bad will happen again and is defensible. This image of a world that turns on itself is a cosmic game of self-acceptance. The Eternal Return formula thus expresses the affirmation that everything is eternal. Thus, Nietzsche’s philosophy becomes a philosophy of affirmation, a ‘yes’ to life.
3. The Revaluation of Values
Nietzsche’s thought also embodies a form of Eternal Return: it returns to the same themes and issues, which are ultimately reduced to the affirmation of life. So, the revaluation of values is yet another perspective on the same core idea.
Nietzsche argued that humanity has valued all that is hostile to life, seeing conventional morality as a force stemming from a sick and decadent spirit. There is, therefore, a need to revalue values, to value and affirm life again – the revaluation of all values.
Only in this sense does Nietzsche speak of ‘immorality’ and assert the need to recover a primitive innocence, a state of being beyond good and evil. That is, we must devalue existing values to create new ones.
4. The Übermensch (Superman)
The Übermensch (Superman) announced by Zarathustra is the new man. But it is fundamentally a moral ideal. In the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he merely announces the opposition to the ‘last man’ – that is, the most contemptible man, the one unable to despise himself.
Nietzsche does not explicitly explain how the Übermensch will come about. Perhaps we should understand that the Eternal Return is the condition for his arrival, and that the Übermensch is like the first man, the innocent primitive man, who is not perverted by the ideas that persisted even in the pre-Socratics.
Nietzsche presents the Übermensch as the result of three transformations of the spirit, leading to a state beyond good and evil. The spirit, like a camel, kneels to bear the weight imposed by the great dragon (representing Christian society). But then the spirit becomes a lion, wanting to win its freedom by shedding old values. But it is not yet capable of creating new values and needs to be transformed into a child.
The Übermensch has the innocence of a child who has no prejudice and is beyond good and evil. This represents a new beginning in the Eternal Return; he naturally possesses the will to create values and lives true to the earth. The Übermensch is the embodiment of Nietzsche’s message.
Nietzsche states that a condition for the emergence of the Übermensch is the ‘death of God,’ to the extent that God represents the antinomy of life and the negation of man’s innocence. The ‘death of God‘ – the destruction of Christian metaphysics – is the negative condition for the appearance of the Übermensch.