Nietzsche's Core Ideas in Zarathustra

Nietzsche uses the figure of Zarathustra to develop and link the four main elements that are present throughout his work and are exhaustively treated in this book: Death of God, the Übermensch, the Will to Power, and (although not explicitly developed) the eternal return of the identical.

Zarathustra is a hermit who lives secluded in the mountains, where he reflects on the life of man and nature. Once he feels the time is adequate, he decides to return to the world to share the fruit of his knowledge.

Death of God

Nietzsche notes that 'God is dead,' meaning that God is no longer a central force in our culture. Society is no longer primarily moved by religious sentiments but by political, economic, or scientific reasons. This is why Nietzsche never expressly attacks belief in God; he merely seeks to draw the consequences. The problem now, he says, lies in the replacements we have put in place for the vacuum left by God, as we find it difficult to live without some form of transcendence at the end of our civilization.

The Übermensch

Nietzsche sees in his time the decline of man, who lives at the sad end of a civilization where all values are already dead. Man is prematurely nihilistic, unhealthy, devoid of values.

The Übermensch (superman) is capable of overcoming himself, of creating new values. He is the meaning of the earth. Zarathustra announces that the Übermensch is not a final state, but the result of three transformations:

• The camel (normal man) represents the man capable of carrying the weight of moral law.
• The lion (man on the way to the Übermensch) fights against the old morals and values.
• The child (positive nihilism) represents the creator, wanting true freedom and spontaneity. He represents existence as play and adventure, beyond good and evil. He is the innocent affirmation of life.

The Will to Power

The Will to Power is a complex concept that Nietzsche describes as a fundamental psychological drive. It is a basic element of reality in all things. All phenomena, all natural life, can be understood as quantities of energy.

Nietzsche sees life as a struggle to impose one's own destiny and advance, even to overcome oneself. The world is not created by God but is a perpetual play of forces, affirming itself in generation and destruction. The universe is a Dionysian chaos, without meaning or law, beyond good and evil.

The Eternal Return

The supreme affirmation is accepting the eternal return. Morality, born of resentment, hates time because time is destructive. Time is guilty of the disappearance of all things, of the evil and pain that exist.

The eternal return can be considered to have a hypothetical value. The idea of the eternal return is a hypothetical means of living as if it were true, in order to live life positively: If everything unconditionally returns, then everything is linked in a chain that cannot be broken. You must affirm everything or nothing. Affirming an instant means affirming all of existence.

The weak cannot bear the eternal return because Western morality waits for a paradise and seeks peace. They lack the strength to face the eternal return as a kind of ethical imperative. It demands a desire to act and to want each moment so that you could live it eternally, even if it must pass. The world follows a circular, not linear, conception of time.