Introduction

Clancy Martin has spent about 40 years reading, teaching and translating Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra; he fell for it at 17 and says his view of it changes every time he reads it. Here he talks you through who Nietzsche was and wasn't: not an antisemite, not a misogynist, not a Nazi, and not a man who thought of himself as the Übermensch. He also tells you how to say the name (like Porsche) and what happened in Turin in January 1889, when Nietzsche collapsed into eleven years of silence.

The turn is the reading advice. Nietzsche didn't want the book read cover to cover; he wanted you to skip what bores you, memorize what catches you, and treat it more like a collection of poems, or the Bible, than a novel. Martin explains why: the prologue and first three books were each written in under two weeks, in what Nietzsche described as dictation from a power that overwhelmed him. You leave with permission to be leisurely.

Transcript

Welcome. I'm Clancy Martin. Thank you for reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra with me. Many people have opened Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or know one of its most famous lines, that God is dead, but far fewer have tried to read and understand the whole book. I feel very lucky to have the chance to work through this great masterpiece with you. I've spent about 40 years reading, teaching and writing about this book, and I also translated it when I was first out of graduate school. I fell in love with the book when I was 17 years old and I thought it contained all the keys to life. My view of Thus Spoke Zarathustra changes every time I read it. And I think there have been few years in the past four decades when I haven't read it at least once. It's a testimony to the power and the wealth of the book that every time I read it I find new insights from Nietzsche and also make new discoveries about myself.

So a little bit about me. I'm a philosophy professor. I specialize in what's called existentialism, you've probably heard of before. I'm also a novelist and an essayist, and I've really dedicated my intellectual life to Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, or the existentialists, these characters you probably know something about.

I studied with two of the greatest Nietzsche scholars of the 20th century, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, both of whom are dear friends and co-authors of mine. And I couldn't be more excited than I am, honestly, to be talking to you about this particular book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In some ways, having translated this book and having spent so much time teaching, writing about and thinking about this book, in a way, as we work through this book together, I'm revealing to you not just what I know and think about Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Friedrich Nietzsche, but it's been so core to me that it's a little bit like I'm revealing my own soul to you as we work through this together. So if at times I'm human, all too human, as Nietzsche liked to say, you'll have to forgive me, but that's exactly how we are supposed to relate to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, according to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche frequently said that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was his most important book, and at times even claimed that it was necessary to thoroughly understand all of his other books in order to plumb the depths of this one. We'll proceed in the hope that this is a bit of an overstatement, but it's certainly true that any further reading you pursue of Nietzsche will be enhanced by your thinking about Zarathustra, and vice versa. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is by far Nietzsche's most influential and widely read book, though it was recognized as a work of genius only by a few great minds while he was still intellectually active. He lived from 1844 until 1900, but in January of 1889, in Turin, he collapsed and was completely silent for the remaining 11 years of his life. Some scholars think he had a degenerative neurological condition, perhaps syphilis, although he was celibate most or all of his life. Others think he may have achieved some kind of enlightenment.

One of the final things he wrote was a postcard to a friend. He had read Ecce Homo, which roughly translates as, "Is everybody happy? I am the God who's invented this cartoon." And this has this unmistakably mystical quality to it. But so much of Thus Spoke Zarathustra has that air of mysticism. In 1889, as I said, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was almost completely unknown. By the time of his death, as Nietzsche himself predicted in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, it was one of the most celebrated works in all of Europe, and now Friedrich Nietzsche, in large part due to Zarathustra, is one of the five or 10 best known philosophers in human history, even though he is also one of the most widely misunderstood.

On that subject, I should quickly dispel a few myths about Friedrich Nietzsche. By the way, it's Nietzsche, like Porsche, not Nietzsche. Just a good note for sounding smart at cocktail parties. We'll have a number of those as we proceed through the book.

Nietzsche was not an antisemite. In fact, he had the greatest praise and respect for the Jewish people, though he had plenty of critical things to say about Judeo-Christianity and religion in general. He was not a misogynist, though many of his remarks about women are certainly controversial.

He was absolutely not a fascist or a Nazi. Nietzsche despised the beginnings of National Socialism in Germany and wrote about it with enormous contempt, though he was unfortunately co-opted by Hitler and his thugs. And he did not think of himself as an Übermensch, or Superman, or Overman. We'll be talking about that a lot more. Nor did he identify with Zarathustra, the very peculiar hero of the book that we're reading. In fact, Nietzsche did not believe in philosophical doctrines at all. He encouraged all of us to find our own individual spiritual and philosophical path through life and the world. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written with a goal of helping us find our own paths, and absolutely not as a model for us to copy.

Finally, before I introduce the prologue and each of the four books that make up Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the short videos that follow, I want to offer a word of advice from Nietzsche himself about how to read the book.

He did not think that Zarathustra should be read linearly, from cover to cover. He thought you should look around, see what catches your eye, skip sections that bore you, read and reread, even memorize, lines, sections, or speeches that capture your attention. Though the work does have a plot, especially in Book Four, it really is made up of a series of exhortations or speeches written to inspire meditation, musing, and creativity. Much more like a collection of great poems than a novel. In this way, it is akin to the Bible. Nietzsche greatly preferred the Old Testament to the New, though he was fascinated by the letters of Paul, or other great spiritual works like the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching or the Vedas. The similarity is deliberate, Nietzsche relied on those spiritual models, and is also a consequence of the way Thus Spoke Zarathustra was composed. The prologue and first three books were all written in a state of profound inspiration while hiking, each of them composed in less than two weeks, during which Nietzsche said he really did none of the writing himself, but was just taking dictation from a creative power that overwhelmed him.

Many great writers, philosophers, and poets over the centuries have described the same experience during the creation of their most important works. Book Four, which is rather different than what precedes it, was much slower in composition and was crafted by Nietzsche in a more traditional manner. So read the whole book through, if you like, but certainly don't feel obligated to do so, because that's not what Nietzsche recommended. Rather, dip in and out and swim when you feel like the water is just the right temperature for you. And above all, be leisurely.

Take the time to really think about what you're reading. It is a book that is meant to transform and to liberate the reader. So let's get started.