Nietzsche’s prophetic warning to the modern world.

In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On 5 November, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, or why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, “So I really am going into utter solitude.” He never saw Salomé or Rée again.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent out letters mentioning overdoses and suicide. On Christmas day, he wrote to Overbeck: “This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this much into gold, I am lost.”

Fortunately, Nietzsche did discover the alchemical trick, and the result was his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written as a stylised, biblical, and poetic narrative about a prophet, Zarathustra, who isolates himself in the mountains with his animals, a snake and an eagle. After ten years of solitude, he comes down to share his wisdom with humanity, in the form of speeches, parables, and aphorisms. When the masses laugh at him, he recruits an elite band of followers.

But he remains ambivalent about having followers: “You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to little.” He instructs his followers to leave him and become free thinkers: “I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only then… will I return to you.”

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, the prophet Zarathustra, who is an alter-ego of Nietzsche, advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In so doing, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes, including the Übermensch (or Superman) and Last Man.

The Übermensch

Zarathustra exhorts his followers to remain faithful to the earth. Instead of harbouring otherworldly hopes, they should embrace life as it is and take responsibility for creating their own values. The meaning of the earth is the Übermensch (or Superman), a higher, self-overcoming type of human that is yet to exist.

Humanity is not an end, but a bridge between its animal past and its Übermensch future. Humanity is a “rope over an abyss”—a “dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still”—that most people fail to cross, falling instead into nihilism, that is, into despondency and mediocrity.

What is great is man is that he is a bridge and not an end in himself: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under.

Although the Übermensch is a future concept—not even Zarathustra is an Übermensch—in later works Nietzsche discusses certain “higher men” who approached the ideal, like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Goethe, and Beethoven. The Übermensch rises above the conventional morality of the herd to become a law unto himself.

The Last Man

The antithesis of the Übermensch is the Last Man, a mediocre, apathetic, comfort-seeking creature who fears risk and struggle and chooses security over greatness. Without the drive to create or achieve, the Last Man focuses only on “little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night” while maintaining a strict regard for his health.

Have you noticed how, when people are overwhelmed, they start blinking? Nietzsche famously describes the Last Man as “blinking”, because his vision of humanity is so small.

Last Men, who are in the majority, arrange things so that everyone is like them, so that no one rises, or even can rise, above the herd, so that no one can dare to dream or risk having an original thought. Any deviation from the norm is interpreted as a form of madness.

Zarathustra challenges the complacency of the herd: “Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.”

Ironically, the crowd does not heed the warning, but cheers and demands that Zarathustra make them into these Last Men.

Nietzsche’s Last Man marks the end of human evolution and ambition. It is a prophetic warning of what humanity could become if it settles for nothing higher than material wealth, risk-aversion, technological pacification, and a culture of feeling “safe and happy”.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.