Thus Spoke Zarathustra

For those who may still be unsure, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not a new religious book. Rather, it is a book that totally breaks with old style religion and any form of priestliness. This is a book that employs the old shamanistic technique of reversal of roles and identities in order to highlight the nature of the roles we play. So it is that the Zarathustra of yore (Zoroaster) is permitted to perform his acts anew, only with the totally reverse conceptions in mind:

It is believed that Nietzsche creates a characterization of Zarathustra as the mouthpiece for Nietzsche's own ideas against morality. Nietzsche did so because—so says Nietzsche in his autobiographical Ecce Homo (IV/Schicksal.3)—Zarathustra was a moralist ("was the exact reverse of an immoralist") and because "in his teachings alone is truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue." Zarathustra "created" morality in being the first to reveal it, "first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things." Nietzsche sought to overcome the morality of Zarathustra by using the Zarathustrian virtue of truthfulness; thus Nietzsche found it piquant to have his Zarathustra character voice the arguments against morality. [ESTEEMED WIKI]

To reverse a previous act of history by reproducing it in part, only with entirely different actors and emotional valences seems to be a common form of shamanistic intervention in history. Marechera has done this, and I have attempted it myself.

In its overarching philosophical and poet sense, however, Thus Spoke Zarathustra should be understood as a formal investigation into nihilism as a philosophical position. That is the meaning of the "abyss" and why no values are rock solid in this book. Rather they are spoken forth and then to some degree withdrawn again. The end sections of the book ought to be understood as a withdrawal of these values from their absolute position, as the author descends further into his own depths of consciousness through rigorous self-reflexivity.

There is a surface contradiction between embracing nihilism and trying to form a more rigorous philosophical outlook on its basis than previous religious systems were able to manage. The bedrock of Nietzsche's book (the non-nihilistic part) is a sense of religious piety that has been inculcated into Nietzsche (and presumably his European readers) through their conditioning in accordance with Christian morality. It is the rigour of this originally Christian piety (which demands truthfulness in morality to an ever greater degree) that, according to Nietzsche, has ended up killing the Christian God. (Paradoxically, as it seems, the Christian religion and its deity could not survive the rigour of Christian piety when taken to more extreme levels.) Taking moral rigour to its extreme produces philosophical nihilism. Yet this nihilism is still driven by a purpose -- that is to find a more authentic basis for living (in other words, the nihilistic project is also morally driven, but in an entirely different way from in the times of yore -- as in when "God" was still alive).

The motif that Nietzsche most commonly uses in opposing the studious "camel" (Zoroaster, according to esteemed Wiki)is that of the lion that destroys existing values and systems of law. Zarathustra can be correctly read as this lion. Nietzsche proposes that instead of using morality as a system for self-preservation, we no longer seek to preserve ourselves but to embrace life as it is, along with our fear of it. This is his reversal of Zoroaster's ancient law, which used morality as a system for self-preservation.

An historical period of destructiveness of the old Christian values is prescribed by Zarathustra, (the nihilistic "prophet" of doom), as a means to restore humanity's innocence again, so that is becomes like "a child", playing with naked reality instead of conjuring up a false system of values (religious morality) in order to protect oneself from it. The means by which this destruction is to be wreaked is actually Christian piety -- but, importantly, without the Christian dogma or belief system.

What is important to realise about Thus Spoke Zarathustra is that it is not a book that is designed to impart to you beliefs -- but rather, an attitude towards a crisis. You are not meant to come away from reading it thinking "women are shit". If you do so, then you have only succeeded in swapping your Christian morality (with its surface appearance of benevolence) for a version of Christian morality stripped of its masks!