4.5 stars.

I suspect I didn’t fully understand the depths of this book (I only found out after the fact that this is apparently considered one of Nietzsche’s more opaque works), but I feel I got a huge amount out of it all the same. However, I don’t feel it’s so inaccessible as some of its commentators make out: much of it is allegorical and sermonising, and if you have some understanding of Zoroastrianism (especially from background in classical study, like that of Nietzsche himself) then you aren’t being flung into wholly unfamiliar territory. Part of the challenge is that he’s so much less direct than other philosophers: his ideas are plain enough to those who know him well, but in the texts themselves he’s often subtle and indirect. You have to leaf through the letters to get to what he’s actually saying. However, this style makes him more enjoyable than other philosophers, and resembles a mystic religious text more than a straightforward philosophical treatise.

Nietzsche has chosen to use a similar structure to the Gospels — Zarathustra comes down from his mountain, enlightened, as Jesus returned from the desert — but the ‘teachings’ are really more like propositions for the reader to contemplate. I imagine Zarathustra somewhere between Jesus and Cyrus (he was their first Zoroastrian king, after all), who at least is framed as a ‘destined’ leader by Herodotus, even if he’s not a religious one. Nietzsche criticises dogma and ‘belief’ as values, but despite popular belief, he doesn’t want people to lose hope or live for nothing: his point is that art and philosophy should matter as much as religion did in the past, and answer the ‘big questions’ in the same way. By emphasising a kind of ‘life force’ and self-actualisation over religious values, Nietzsche is not being a nihilist at all — he puts matters into our own hands.

However, not all the content is so etherial. There were some amusing comments on human social roles: the woman understands children better, but the man is more like the child — how exactly are we meant to take this? The man is realised by war, the woman by childbirth and rearing: these traditional roles are to be expected in a text like this, yet don’t seem to match up with the man being ‘like the child’ if he is to face war (but perhaps I am oversimplifying). To deserve a child, you must have conquered yourself and been vitreous in your endeavours — how different society would be if the bar were really this high! It also presupposes people settling down to start families much later in life, something lamented by society today.

In conjunction with the indirectness of the text, the language is surprisingly poetic, which I loved, particularly the address to Eternity (probably the highlight of the book for me). The ‘politics’ of creation, and how it is expressed, form one of the most interesting aspects of the text: now that the power is in our own hands, we can create a god, “then be silent about all gods”, discarding our ‘god’ in the way that Nietzsche famously argued is possible (“God is dead, and we have killed him”: we create gods and destroy them at our own volition). ‘Creating’ the superman from ourselves, destroying ourselves and rebuilding from the ashes, is not so different, once we have proved capable of it (“Thy fruits are ripe, but thou are still not ripe for thy fruits”). However, with this power in hand we must be more careful than ever before how we use it: “Thou star-destroyer. Thou threw thyself so high, by every stone must fall”.

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”