A Thousand and One Goals

Over every people Zarathustra visits hangs a tablet: a short list of what that people calls good, and no two tablets agree. Clancy Martin follows the count through Greek, Persian, and Confucian examples, calls in David Hume for backup, and arrives at the discovery that gives the episode its title: a thousand peoples, a thousand goals, and still no goal for humanity itself. From there the same lens turns on love thy neighbor, which Zarathustra reads as flight from a self you cannot bear to sit with, and Martin closes on the love the book offers in its place: a further one, and a harder one.