Friedrich Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra between 1883 and 1885 in four separate parts. It is a philosophical prose poem, written in the cadences of the Lutheran Bible and in deliberate parody of them. Zarathustra, a hermit who has spent ten years on a mountain, descends to share three ideas with humanity: the death of God, the Übermensch as the meaning of the earth, and the eternal recurrence of all things. He is largely ignored, frequently misunderstood, and periodically overcome by nausea at the human condition he is trying to address. Nietzsche described it afterward as the most important book ever written, a judgment that tells you something about Nietzsche and something about the book.
The Übermensch is the concept most consistently misread in Nietzsche, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the text responsible for most of the misreadings. The Übermensch is not a racial category or a social class; it is a psychological ideal, a person who creates values rather than inheriting them, who affirms life without requiring it to be other than it is, and who takes responsibility for their own judgments rather than deferring to tradition or social consensus. The eternal recurrence, the thought that everything that has happened will happen again, infinitely, is presented as a test: if you could live your life again exactly as it has been, would you choose to?
Zarathustra is the most formally unusual of Nietzsche's major works and the most difficult to excerpt usefully, because its argument is cumulative and its method is rhetorical rather than argumentative in the conventional philosophical sense. What it does that no other text in the tradition does is stage the act of thinking about value, the effort required to reexamine received ideas while continuing to live, as drama. Zarathustra's repeated failures, his bouts of nausea and loneliness, his recognition that his most important insights will be misunderstood by the disciples who claim them, these make the philosophy experiential in a way that propositional argument cannot achieve.
Plato's real name was Aristocles. 'Plato' was a nickname meaning 'broad-shouldered' given by his wrestling coach.
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