Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody

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Graham Parkes 2005

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

A Book for Everyone and Nobody

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
GRAHAM PARKES

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (18441900) was born in Rcken, Saxony, and educated at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At the age of only 24 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, but prolonged bouts of ill health forced him to resign from his post in 1879. Over the next decade he shuttled between the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coast, devoting himself entirely to thinking and writing. His early books and pamphlets (The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations) were heavily influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, but from Human, All Too Human (1878) on, his thought began to develop more independently, and he published a series of ground-breaking philosophical works (The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals) which culminated in a frenzy of production in the closing months of 1888. In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he was never to recover, and he died in Weimar eleven years later.

GRAHAM PARKES is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii. He is the editor of Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsches Psychology (1994), and co-translator of Georges Liberts Nietzsche and Music (2004).

For Helen

The following abbreviations are used in the references to Nietzsches works (references to individual books are to part and/or paragraph numbers):

Thus Spoke ZarathustraA Book for Everyone and Nobody: the subtitle, at first puzzling, is also telling. The work is for nobody insofar as its an intensely personal piece of philosophizing: There is in this book an incredible amount of personal experience and suffering that is comprehensible only to memany pages strike me as almost blood-thirsty (B Aug. 1883). So why did Nietzsche bother to make public his personal experience? And to what extent is the result philosophy, whose practitioners have traditionally aimed at impersonality, generality, or even universality? The answer lies in Nietzsches unusual understanding of philosophy and the philosopher, as exemplified in his most unusual book: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche knew that what is personal may after all touch others, though the process remains obscure. Strange! he wrote in 1880, I am dominated at every moment by the thought that my history is not only a personal one, that I am doing something for many people when I live like this and work on and write about myself this way (W9: 7 [105]). A few years later he says this about the way philosophers can transform life-experience into thought: We must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and nurture them with everything we have in us of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. Life to usthat means constantly transforming everything we are into light and flame, as well everything that happens to us (