Mirror Reflections: Reading Nietzsche Dangerously 
 
 
 
 
 

A Dissertation  

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School  

of Cornell University 

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of  

Doctor of Philosophy  

 

By 

Erik Petrie 

August 2023 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

Mirror Reflections: Reading Nietzsche Dangerously 
Erik Petrie, Ph.D. 

Cornell University 2023 
 

Recently scholars have had a renewed interest in the rhetorical dimension of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 

philosophy. Moving past familiar questions about the philosophical significance of its presence, these 

scholars have begun to ask how Nietzsche’s rhetoric induces existential forms of reading where readers 

feel as though they are being personally addressed and confronted with the slavishness of their own moral 

convictions. Building on this scholarship, this dissertation seeks to compliment the common textual 

approach to understanding how Nietzsche’s rhetoric produces such experiences by turning attention 

onto the different “types” of readers affected by Nietzsche’s rhetoric and the nature of their moral 

confrontations. Moving from the question of how Nietzsche’s rhetoric works to what it does, I follow 

Nietzsche’s example of diagnosing the hidden workings of slave morality within influential intellectual 

figures who exemplify a larger “type” of personality. Engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, 

William E. Connolly, and Jack Donovan, I sketch the relationship between their respective 

interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the rhetorical “hooks” that pull them in to portray three 

such personality types:  the scholar, the democrat, and the artist. Just as each type is attracted to different 

elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy so they reject others. Exploring the relationship between these 

“typical” figures and the elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy they reject, I pursue an existential reading 

of Nietzsche from the perspective of each figure to reveal the hidden pathologies of fear, vanity, and 

resentment that animate them. Such pathologies are ultimately grounded in a moral rejection of 

suffering that forecloses opportunities for self-affirmation, and while this dynamic plays out differently 



 

in each type, there is a shared logic that extends beyond each individual thinker into different human 

types. To realize this is to see that the same diagnostic Nietzsche offers of these types is applicable to all 

who participate in them and that we, too, face the same moral confrontation if we are willing to look at 

ourselves reflected in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For this to occur, all we must do is start reading Nietzsche 

dangerously.  

Keywords: Nietzsche, reading, rhetoric, morality 
  



 i 

Biographical Sketch 
 

Erik Petrie received his bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College, his master’s in Social 

Science from the University of Chicago, and, in 2023, received his doctorate in Government from 

Cornell University. In his dissertation, Mirror Reflections: Reading Nietzsche Dangerously, Petrie 

explores what it means to read Nietzsche’s philosophy existentially, that is, as a means of confronting 

modern pathologies that enslave us to moral psychologies driven by fear, vanity, and resentment and keep 

us from the personal task of self-affirmation. His research interests include Critical Theory, affect theory, 

psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. A devoted teacher, his greatest passion has always been 

helping to foster his student’s ability to think critically about the dominate discourses that shape their 

lives, the psychological and affective dimensions of politics, and what it means to find and articulate one’s 

own vision.  

 
  



 ii 

Acknowledgments 
 

I would like to thank my dissertation committee for all their help: Tracy McNulty for her patience, 

Jill Frank for never ceasing to encourage me to be more generous, and, most of all, Alex Livingston, who, 

having read and commented on every draft and iteration of this project and guided me from start to 

finish, has always demonstrated an unflagging investment in helping me bring this project to completion.  

For his help, I will forever be grateful. 

I would like to thank friends, acquaintances, and chance encounters that have left an indelible 

impression on me during my time at Cornell: Peter Katzenstein who freed me from a number of false 

illusions, Jonathan Kirshner for revealing to me that equality is a decision rather than a state of being, 

Inni Youh without whom I would have never made it past my first year, Kyle Howard who helped me 

see I was not alone, and Alison Strongwater and Sarah Coomey who had the courage to affirm themselves 

long before I could and who showed me what that can look like. 

I would like to thank the 603 lads: Brian Chung, Nico Leonard, and Peter Shipman – my brothers 

in arms. The lessons we have shared with one another and learned together about life will remain among 

the most important I have ever learned. It has been our friendship that has carried me through so many 

of the challenges and struggles with this project and in my own personal life these past few years. 

I would like to thank Shirley Le Penne for teaching me the meaning of the phrase “you are nothing 

in this world” and continuing to illustrate what existentialism looks like as a way of life as opposed to 

just a set of intellectual ideas. She has and continues to teach me an entirely different way to be in the 

world, and I continue to learn from her with an ever-growing appreciation.  

 



 iii 

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Mark and Darlene Petrie, and my brother Jared for their 

unconditional love and unwavering support, especially at the end of this project, when I needed it the 

most.  

 

 

 
  



 iv 

Table of Contents 
 
 
 
Introduction          1 
 
Chapter One          17 
 
Chapter Two          58 
 
Chapter Three          111 
 
Chapter Four         154 
 
Conclusion           205 
 
Bibliography           214 
 
 
 
 
  



 1 

Introduction 
 

This dissertation is about reading Nietzsche’s philosophy existentially. To read Nietzsche’s 

philosophy existentially is to cease reading it solely as an object to intellectualize, contemplate, or argue 

over. To read Nietzsche’s philosophy existentially is to read it as if it were speaking directly to you. Such 

an experience might be characterized as a moral confrontation. I write “might” because, while an 

existential reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy does lead us to an experience of moral confrontation, it 

does not lead us to confront the standards of an external morality.  Unlike perhaps any other moral 

confrontation, what makes the existential experience of reading Nietzsche’s philosophy distinct is that it 

confronts us with demands that appear immoral. This is because Nietzsche’s philosophy addresses its 

readers with an altogether foreign understanding of morality, one grounded not in social standards but 

in a fundamentally amoral affirmation of life. To affirm life unflinchingly, to take it for what it is, actively 

opposes slavish forms of morality that seek to divide life up into a clear dichotomy of good and evil. Such 

affirmation leads us to a place where the only moral question is whether we are affirming or fleeing from 

ourselves, from our own unconscious drives and desires, from the tragic forces of life that shape the 

contours of our lives and are often entirely beyond our control. 

To read existentially is to collapse the intellectual distance we sometimes maintain between ourselves 

and a text. We get part of the way to such an existential mode of reading when we acknowledge that the 

construction of any text is partly the result of our own interpretation, of our own projections of ourselves 

onto it in an attempt to both create and discern its supposed meaning. But reading existentially occurs 

not only when we begin to reflect on how we contribute our own interpretations to a text. It starts when 

that text speaks to the motivations underlying our own projections. In a such a moment, the experience 



 2 

of reading leads to something more than intellectual reflection and seems to speak to a deeper register of 

our being. This register is moral for it speaks to what orients our lives, giving form to how we live, how 

and why we choose to make the meanings we do. It is a confrontation of the values and psychological 

dispositions that have shaped us into who we are, and it is a questioning of whether such things have 

successfully led us to ourselves.  

To write about the experience of reading Nietzsche’s philosophy existentially is to join and 

contribute to a renewed scholarly interest in the question of how Nietzsche’s philosophy is often capable 

of speaking directly to its readers, confronting them with themselves. About such an experience, David 

Allison has written that “Perhaps more than any other philosopher who readily comes to mind, 

Nietzsche writes exclusively for you. Not at you, but for you. For you, the reader. Only you. At least this 

is the feeling one often has when reading him.”1 These frequently cited words capture the contours of 

an experience shared by scholars, one they are continually trying to articulate in relation to the distinctive 

character of Nietzsche’s rhetoric.2  

Scholarly interest in Nietzsche’s rhetoric is not new. Works by Walter Kaufmann, Sarah Kofman, 

Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Alexander Nehamas, have long stood as exemplary studies of the 

 
1 David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), vii. Cf. Michael 
Ure, Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1. 
2 Ken Gemes, “We Remain of Necessity Strangers to Ourselves,” in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Christa Davis 
Acampora, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006): 191-208; Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: 
Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of 
Morality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); James I. Porter, “Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative 
Critique,” in Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, eds. Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger, 
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 119-136; Richard White, “The Return of the Master: An Interpretation of 
Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals,”” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 48(4), (1988): 683-696. 



 3 

rhetorical nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy.3 However, as Tracy Strong has noted, these works have left 

something to be desired: “It is the case that in recent years several authors…had turned their attention to 

the question of rhetoric in Nietzsche. For the most part, however, this has remained at the level of 

showing that he used rhetoric, not in what his rhetoric does, and especially not what the political 

implications are.”4  

Scholars are beginning to follow Strong’s suggestion that to understand how Nietzsche’s philosophy 

personally addresses its readers requires a more attentive reading of Nietzsche’s rhetoric to answer the 

questions of how it works, what it does, and what its implications may be. To this end, Hugo Drochon 

has offered a more attentive reading of the rhetorical dimensions of Nietzsche’s genealogical practice and 

raised the question of whether our abandonment of Christianity should entail that of democracy as 

well.5 Simon Lambek has offered a new way of thinking about how Nietzsche’s rhetoric by suggesting 

that its ability to induce self-critique in its readers is due to its dissonance, its uneasy juxtaposition of the 

beauty and pleasure of language with the terror of disturbing ideas.6 Additionally, Linda Williams has 

noted how many of Nietzsche’s seemingly key concepts operate as mirrors. That is, many of his better-

known concepts, such as the will to power, the overman, and the eternal return, are vaguely defined by 

 
3 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Sarah 
Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large, (London: Athlone Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. 
Barbara Harlow, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in 
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as 
Literature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Jacques Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow, (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 1979). 
4 Strong, “In Defense,” 511. Cf. Simon Lambek, “Nietzsche’s Rhetoric: Dissonance and Reception, Epoché, 25(1), (2020): 
57-80; Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 19. 
5 Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), chapter three. 
6 Simon Lambek, “Nietzsche’s Rhetoric: Dissonance and Reception, Epoché, 25(1), (2020): 57-80. 



 4 

Nietzsche, forcing readers to put a part of themselves into the gaps between his ideas to arrive at an 

interpretation, one that they in time come to see as their own.7 

The idea that Nietzsche writes his philosophy in such a way that it forces us to project ourselves into 

the spaces created by its aphoristic, fragmented, vague, and digressional nature occurs frequently in 

contemporary scholarship. Nietzsche writes with gaps, and his readers, to the degree that they are 

compelled by what he writes, find themselves in a position of needing to make sense of it. This urge on 

the part of readers is a desire for resolution, an attempt to resolve the dissonance of Nietzsche’s ideas. 

But as we strive to bring resolution to Nietzsche’s philosophy, it constantly alludes us. In time, once we 

recognize that we are unable to bring all of Nietzsche’s ideas together into a consistent whole and that 

our attempts to do so exclude elements of his philosophy that direct us to our own partiality, we are 

brought to see our interpretations for what they are, our interpretations. Strong describes this experience 

of reading Nietzsche in the following way: 

Nietzsche’s writing thus calls up…a critical relation between what the reader wants and what the text makes available 
and requires of the reader. The effect is to call into question precisely the desire to give resolution and to bring 
consonance to the experience. Nietzsche has reversed the traditional picture of the reader and text: it is as if the text 
has become the analyst and the reader the analysand…In reading Nietzsche…one can call into question what one 
wants to make of Nietzsche – and that teaches one something about oneself. The text is intended to produce a “self-
critique.”8 
 

It is such a readerly experience of self-critique that I am interested in, not as something to understand 

intellectually but as something to pursue. For as much as I appreciate the renewed turn to rhetoric by 

recent scholarship and make my own humble contributions to it, what I am primarily after in these pages 

is something akin to the experience of such existential readings, of the moral confrontations they lead us 

 
7 Linda Williams, Nietzsche’s Mirror: The World as Will to Power, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001). 
8 Tracy Strong, “In Defense of Rhetoric,” Political Theory, 41(4), (2013), 522. 



 5 

to encounter. Studying Nietzsche’s rhetoric may get us to answers about how his philosophy leads 

readers to such experiences, but it can also reassert an intellectually distant and impersonal relationship 

to Nietzsche’s philosophy, one that wishes to understand how Nietzsche’s rhetoric produces moral 

confrontations rather than attend to the very nature and implications of such confrontations.  

Nietzsche knew that his readers would always be tempted to adopt an “objective” orientation to his 

philosophy, relegating it to an intellectual register. Because of this, he repeatedly stressed the importance 

of understanding the existential register on which morality operates, insisting that it is not enough to 

intellectually acknowledge our relationship with morality as problematic but that we must embrace the 

appropriate relationship to this problem. Addressing the challenge of confronting morality on such 

registers, Nietzsche writes that it “makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal 

relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness, or an 

‘impersonal’ one, meaning he is only able to touch and grasp them with the antennae of cold, curious 

thought.”9  

Because Nietzsche did not want his philosophy to be merely read “impersonally,” he repeatedly 

stressed the psychological confrontation he wished it to precipitate and his desire to find readers 

courageous enough to submit to it. Nietzsche describes himself a “psychologist without equal” and writes 

of his philosophy that “one word from me will drive all your bad instincts into your face.”10  With such 

an estimation of his own philosophical project, Nietzsche knows that the temptation to read his work 

 
9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §345. 
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, eds. Aaron 
Ridley and Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103-105. 



 6 

intellectually will always be there, that “People become ‘impersonal’ when they do not want anything to 

do with the content of my writings.” Nietzsche draws out this tendency to bring it to his readers 

attention, to recognize that whatever they gain from his philosophy, if they have not submitted 

themselves to it personally rather than merely intellectually, then they have missed something. To 

encounter such confrontation, Nietzsche tells his readers, “You need to never have gone easy on yourself, 

you need to have harshness in your habits if you are going to be cheerful among harsh truths. When I 

imagine a perfect reader, I always think of a monster of courage and curiosity who is also supple, 

cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer.”11  

To have the courage to read Nietzsche’s philosophy existentially is to read it in relation to oneself. 

Scholars attentive to Nietzsche’s rhetoric often study its textual aspect, but they ignore its relational 

aspect. That is, while rhetoric may itself be textual, the effect of rhetoric only exists in relation to a reader 

– and who this reader is matters. For different types of readers will read the same text, the same instances 

of rhetoric, differently. The omission of the question of who the reader is in studies of Nietzsche’s 

rhetoric is, on the one hand, curious, for the notion that there are different personality types that people 

participate in is a common feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy. To be one type as opposed to another is to 

be attracted to different aspects of Nietzsche’s rhetoric, to make different interpretations, to avoid 

different forms of confrontation. We cannot write about the effect of Nietzsche’s rhetoric or perhaps of 

his rhetoric at all without reference to the type of reader we assume is reading his philosophy.  

 
11 Nietzsche, Ecce, 103-104.  



 7 

To avoid the question of what type of reader we are assuming, what perspective we are adopting, gets 

us out of the thorny question about how we scholars can offer readings of Nietzsche from perspectives 

outside of our own experience of the text. But the fact is we cannot. Beyond the types that we specifically 

participate in, we have no ability to find our way into the reading experiences of other types of people. 

There is a limit to our readerly experience, one that curbs our desire to be objective and presses us to own 

our own interpretations and the implications they have for us personally. This brings about the challenge 

of realizing that to write about the personal address of Nietzsche’s philosophy means that we must 

include ourselves in our readings of Nietzsche, the fact that we share in the very type we see being 

confronted, that we are ourselves still struggling with slave morality, and that wrestling with such 

enslavement means we have already ceded the means of our own self-affirmation.   

To offer readings of Nietzsche that include something of ourselves is difficult for two reasons. First, 

because it leads us to the problem of locating a space between scholarship and autobiography, when these 

two genres are often seen as opposed to one another. Scholarship is often understood as the attempt to 

be impartial, impersonal, and objective. Contrarily, autobiography is about our subjective experience, 

our account of our own lives. How can we effectively straddle both tasks simultaneously? Second, to 

write honestly about oneself, to do so in a way that runs up against instances of our own moral 

confrontations, brings us into contact with our own psychological defenses and resistances, our desires 

to save face or hide the truth about ourselves, even from ourselves. To be honest about oneself is one 

thing. Confessing it aloud for others to hear is something else entirely. I have long struggled with these 

challenges, and in this I am not alone. No one has been more open about wrestling with them as a scholar 

and reader of Nietzsche than Lawrence Hatab, who writes:  



 8 

 
Normally philosophy presumes an impersonal stance in the pursuit of truth. Personal interjections are at best a 
rhetorical flourish and at worst an embarrassing impediment to the enterprise. There has been some relaxation of 
such a mandate in recent years. Yet engaging the philosophy of Nietzsche would seem to require a complete 
suspension of the mandate. For Nietzsche, philosophy cannot be grounded in rational argumentation but in the 
reflective exposure of interests. Accordingly, it might be that no interpretation of Nietzsche could be considered 
serious if it did not mimic Nietzsche’s case by interjecting one’ sown story of motivations and interests. So, here 
goes. (Fervent impartialists and voyeurs, please skip to the next chapter).12 

 
I have long admired this reflection and the courageous autobiography that follows it. It is an example I 

strive to follow as I struggle to determine how to walk the line between a scholarly investigation of the 

experience of reading Nietzsche existentially and being honest about this as a part of my own personal 

experience. 

In an attempt to navigate these challenges, my own experiment is to follow Nietzsche’s example of 

offering a diagnostic account of different types of people in the grips of slave morality, types to which he 

belongs. Nietzsche often seems to offer scathing critiques of other thinkers, philosophers, and writers, 

calling them out by name. But despite appearances, Nietzsche repeatedly states that none of his criticisms 

are personal, either in terms of working out a vendetta or of attacking people as people. Instead, 

Nietzsche criticizes what he believes are exemplary figures, exemplary in that they clearly and powerfully 

put on display a human type enslaved to morality. It is the type illustrated by some influential figure, that 

Nietzsche is criticizing. Nietzsche does not lay the blame for slave morality at the feet of individual 

people. Rather he seeks those who illuminate something true about us all, about our own moral 

decadence. Following Nietzsche’s practice of critique, I hope, will keep my project from unproductively 

 
12 Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence, 111. Perhaps Kaag offers yet another, more fruitful model of weaving the academic and 
the personal: John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018). 



 9 

slipping into autobiography and ease the challenge of self-disclosure, allowing it to start as an awareness 

of a decadent culture before acknowledging the form it takes in my own life.  

Thus, following Nietzsche’s lead, I pursue the experience of reading his philosophy existentially in 

relation to three types of people, those of the scholar, the democrat, and the artist. To do so I engage with 

the work of Michel Foucault, William E. Connolly, and Jack Donovan. Beginning with each figure’s 

respective interpretation of Nietzsche, I highlight the rhetorical dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophy 

that hooks each of them, exploring the effect of Nietzsche’s appeals to knowledge, nobility, and artistic 

creativity. Then I note the aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy each interpretation chooses to reject or 

modify. Picking up these discarded or ignored aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I read each of these 

interpretations in light of them to pursue the existential reading they all pass by and the moral 

confrontation they do not wish to experience.  

My selection of readers is not arbitrary and my accounts of self-confrontation are more than mere 

speculation, for I personally stand behind each of the readings I offer. That is, I am personally drawn to 

the ideal types of the scholar, the democrat, and the artist and have at different times in different ways 

approached and read Nietzsche’s philosophy through each of these perspectives. Each of the 

interpretations of Nietzsche and the intellectual figures I choose to represent them have previously 

influenced and mediated my relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this, I am not unique. For each of the 

readings I offer, readings of Nietzsche as a genealogist, democratic, and artist are influential and familiar, 

influencing in some way most readers’ experience of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Indeed, often we cannot 

come to Nietzsche’s texts without some sense of the intellectual history that surrounds and weighs upon 

them. Those of us drawn to these interpretations share in their selective reading of Nietzsche, in their 



 10 

embrace of his personal address, his invitation for projection, in the desire to have him affirm what we 

consciously wish for and want. But we also share in the refusal to read Nietzsche further, to adopt a 

mode of self-critique. That is, going to the root of these interpretations is necessary if we are to find the 

parts of ourselves that are already co-opted by them, leading us to read Nietzsche one way as opposed to 

another. There is no path to oneself that does not require the questioning of interpretations handed 

down to us that shape our experience. To discover what they must reject reveals why we are drawn to 

them, the disavowals we wish to share. 

* 
The structure of my project takes the following form. In the first chapter, I argue that one of the 

central tasks of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to bring its readers to encounter a state of moral confrontation 

and that we see this most powerfully and clearly in his work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Starting with 

Nietzsche’s remarks about his own philosophy, namely, its ability to confront readers with their own bad 

instincts, his bold claims about Zarathustra being the most profound book ever written, and his 

instruction to approach it existentially rather than intellectually, I turn my attention to a close reading 

of Zarathustra to ask not what it means but what type of experience it seeks to communicate. Identifying 

and placing to the side the enigmas and interpretative challenges of the text, I draw out and connect 

elements of its narrative to unpack not what it means for its protagonist to overcome himself but what 

is entailed in the experience of doing so. This leads to a reading of Zarathustra’s own experience of self-

confrontation. That is, I track Zarathustra’s start as a naïve, prophetic figure seeking to share his 

teachings of wisdom and make disciples and his growing experiences of disappointment and rejection 

that ultimately lead him back into solitude. There he is forced to confront that he has not affirmed the 



 11 

implications of his own philosophy. Attending to Zarathustra’s experiences of moral confrontation 

illuminates the challenge entailed in any self-confrontation; and, while the precise implications of 

Zarathustra’s confrontation are left vague, the importance of such confrontation and what it entails are 

clear, as Zarathustra is forced to relinquish control over the outcome of his actions and instead affirm his 

tragic task. 

Seeing self-confrontation at the center of Nietzsche’s philosophy, each of the subsequent chapters 

of my project explores how it differently confronts three types of readers. In the second chapter, I turn 

to the genealogical interpretation of Nietzsche in the work of Michel Foucault to bring out and diagnose 

the scholarly type. Foucault wishes to extract a genealogical method from Nietzsche, a means of tracing 

the origins of essentialist claims to reveal their contingency and open alternative political possibilities. 

This interpretation turns Nietzsche into the source for a scholarly methodology that provides a new way 

to think about and study the acquisition and use of knowledge as well as its entanglement in power. 

Foucault grounds his interpretation of Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, so I turn to this text to 

ask what draws Foucault to it, what ideas he adopts, and what aspects he rejects to facilitate his 

interpretation.  

Through an existential reading of the text, I then reveal that the Genealogy addresses itself to the 

figure of the “scholar,” a figure seeking knowledge as a means of escaping the challenge of self-knowledge. 

Drawing attention to Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategies – his appeals to the modern desire for knowledge, 

his offer of a vicarious release of resentment, and the disguise of moral comfort in the form of scientific 

truth – I show how Nietzsche leads his readers to confront their own fear of themselves, of the 

unconscious, beastly desires that lie within them, existing beyond the security of morality. Ultimately, 



 12 

Nietzsche brings the reader to confront the silent alignment of religious morality and scholarly notions 

of truth as both use morality to shield themselves from the dangers of self-affirmation and self-

knowledge. This leads Nietzsche to conclude that the pursuit of knowledge is undergirded by a moral 

desire to know truth as a means of shielding us from suffering. And this, in turn, leads us to confront the 

need for a different relationship to suffering, where we affirm it in or actions instead of keeping it at an 

intellectual distance. 

In the third chapter, I explore William E. Connolly’s democratic interpretation of Nietzsche’s 

philosophy to illuminate the democrat as an ideal type. Connolly reimagines Nietzsche’s figure of the 

noble, transfiguring it into a democratic ethos attainable for all. Drawn to Nietzsche’s theorization of 

nobility’s transcendence of resentment through an affirmation of the constant processes of change and 

becoming, Connolly wishes to co-opt such a disposition to respond to the dangers of identarian conflict 

in today’s increasingly pluralistic democracies. Connolly finds the means for such a project in the “arts 

of the self” nobles use to give style to themselves and sees in these practices of self-fashioning an 

opportunity to foster respect among different identities.  

Starting with Connolly’s own curious attraction to nobility, a symbol of social and political 

hierarchy grounded in inegalitarianism, I adopt and expand upon Daniel Conway’s observation of 

Nietzsche’s use of nobility to appeal to the vanity of his readers. While Conway argues that Nietzsche 

uses nobility to draw in readers and then expose the disparities that exist between them and his noble 

ideal, I extend this insight by exploring Nietzsche’s claims about vanity as a social pathology endemic to 

democracy itself. Doing so, I argue that Nietzsche sees vanity as an ascetic form of self-affirmation that 

results from slave morality’s relationship to suffering. That is, vanity is the result of the bifurcation and 



 13 

turning of one part of the self again another through the adoption of ascetic techniques. These 

techniques, in turn, have the effect of inflicting moderate forms of suffering on oneself to create 

compensatory meanings that shield us from the greater suffering of self-affirmation. Seeing this, I argue 

that Connolly puts on display the democrat’s desire to refashion asceticism into democratic respect for 

all in a way that maintains rather than addresses an inner torsion in the self that keeps it grounded in 

resentment and makes a truly noble vision of self-affirmation impossible. 

In the fourth chapter, I explore the resonances between Nietzsche’s philosophy and its far-right 

interpreters, focusing on its articulation in the recent work of Jack Donovan to illuminate the danger of 

resentment for the artist as an ideal type. A fellow traveler of the Alt-Right, Donovan shares with 

Nietzsche a critical and abusive rhetoric as well as an attraction to masculine conceptions of power and 

domination. Offering a critique of contemporary culture through the lens of gender, Donovan derides 

the effeminacy of our times and turns to Nietzsche’s vision of the noble warrior to articulate a political 

vision of male tribalism. However, what sets Donovan apart is the recognition of his own ressentiment 

and his turn to Nietzsche to address it. Using Nietzsche’s theorization of Apollo and Dionysus as 

representative of different aesthetic forms, Donovan argues for a future-oriented project of cultural 

creation to reestablish traditional notions of masculinity free from the psychological dangers of 

ressentiment.  

While Donovan wishes to resist resentment, his gloss on Nietzsche’s notion of artistic creation 

becomes my point of entry for reading the space between him and Nietzsche’s philosophy. Turning to 

Nietzsche’s evolving understanding of Dionysus, I show that, in contrast to Donovan’s take on the 

dynamic between Apollo and Dionysus, where the later imposes himself on the former, Nietzsche sees 



 14 

such creation as the attempt to hold at bay the destructive and uncontrollable forces of life Dionysus 

represents. Later breaking with this vision once he sees it uses art to shield us from suffering, Nietzsche 

grows increasingly interested in the psychology of creation represented in the figure of Dionysus. No 

longer interested in the question of how to represent the god, Nietzsche becomes increasingly interested 

in how to follow Dionysus’s example of being subject to the destructive forces of life that continually 

recreate the god anew. 

To exemplify the process of submitting to fate, of the interrelationship between creation and 

destruction Dionysus signifies, I turn to the greatest example in Nietzsche’s philosophy – himself. 

Tracking Nietzsche’s transformation as he leaves his academic profession and breaks with all his former 

philosophical influences and presuppositions to become the itinerate philosopher who sought self-

affirmation in solitude, I pay particular attention to the evolution of Nietzsche’s relationship with 

Richard Wagner and how this parallel’s his evolving understanding of Dionysus. In Nietzsche’s own life, 

we see how under the influence of Wagner he was led to use art and creation to mediate suffering and 

posit a justification of life. However, after breaking with Wagner and wrestling with the personal and 

psychological challenges of solitude, Nietzsche comes to know the experience of Dionysus’s suffering, 

being forced to sacrifice friendship and happiness to seek himself and his fate as a true philosopher. In 

the process of suffering this loss, Nietzsche comes to a place of profound creativity, giving birth to a 

philosophy that has shaped the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. 

Thus, in tracking Nietzsche’s developing understanding of Dionysus we see that, in contrast to 

Donovan’s desire to be an artist by asserting a masculine conception of creation, Nietzsche reveals the 

only forms of creation that escape ressentiment are those that submit to larger, unconscious and external 



 15 

forces of fate beyond our control. It is only once we do this, once we allow the forces of fate to tear from 

us everything that keeps us resentful, that we become capable of creating in a way that does not impose 

our conscious desires on the world but finds opportunities to give expression to the creative forces of life. 

In this way, I argue that Donovan’s desire to hold a masculine conception of Nietzsche’s noble warrior 

with his early articulation of art does not overcome ressentiment but displaces it in a way typical of 

decadent artists. In contrast, we see in Nietzsche someone who has overcome the decadence of this 

personal type and thereby discovered that creation is an unconscious process of submitting to what is 

largely outside of one’s control. It is only in submission to such forces that we begin to create through a 

remaking of ourselves  

* 
 

Over the course of this work, I aim to make two scholarly contributions. First, I wish to make a 

humble contribution to the renewed study of Nietzsche’s rhetoric. While I do not follow Strong’s call 

for careful attention to the specifics of Nietzsche’s rhetoric and how it operates, I do underline three 

rhetorical ways Nietzsche’s philosophy not only can but has “hooked” specific types of readers as well as 

the interpretations they have produced. Seeing how these interpreters get hooked and what they leave 

out of their accounts of Nietzsche’s philosophy presents us with an opportunity to turn each one back 

toward Nietzsche and what they eschew, opening the possibility to confront them – and ourselves – 

with the morally motivated psychologies of fear, vanity, and resentment that animate them.  

My second contribution is bringing to the fore several of the ideal types Nietzsche appeals to and 

demonstrating the importance of thinking about specific readers when we approach questions about his 

rhetoric. I do not offer an exhaustive account of the various types Nietzsche identifies and appeals to in 



 16 

his philosophy. Instead, I focus on three: the scholar, the democrat, and the artist. I choose these three 

because they are types that I participate in, that characterize parts of myself. I have been personally 

hooked by Nietzsche’s appeals to knowledge, nobility, and art, and I have been forced to confront the 

fear, vanity, and resentment lurking within myself. This is what it means to participate in these types. 

Avoiding the question of the specific types of readers drawn in by Nietzsche’s rhetoric and how we 

ourselves participate in them can be a way of further intellectualizing one’s relationship to Nietzsche’s 

philosophy, leading us to get bogged down in questions that take us away from the dangers of self-

confrontation. But to offer an existential reading of Nietzsche requires confrontation, and I try to stage 

this and recreate my own experiences of reading Nietzsche’s philosophy as a means of diagnosing the 

hidden psychologies of slave morality as they can be seen in the work of Foucault, Connolly, and 

Donovan and as they extend potentially to us all, all those who share with them participation in a 

particular type.  

 
 
 

  



 17 

Chapter One 
 
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: The Experience of Moral Self-Confrontation 
 
 In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy is centrally concerned with precipitating 

experiences of moral confrontation in its readers. To show this, I first turn to Nietzsche’s comments 

about his philosophy to establish that Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands at its center. Not only does 

Nietzsche see Zarathustra as a pinnacle of his philosophy. He also articulates how we should approach 

the text, how we must read it existentially, sharing in the experience it articulates. This leads me to offer 

a reading of Zarathustra that suspends more typical questions about what the text means and instead 

focuses on understanding its protagonist’s experience of self-confrontation. Attending to the narrative 

development of the work, we come to see that Zarathustra’s teachings about overcoming and the 

overman are things he must reject insofar as they participate in a moral desire to escape from the 

limitations of human existence. In their place, we see Zarathustra come to terms with a different process 

of overcoming, one not based on a volitional desire to change the world but understood as the process 

of coming to terms with and relinquishing our mistaken moral demands on life.  

 My argument proceeds as follows. In the first section (1.0), I turn to Nietzsche’s remarks about 

Zarathustra and his own philosophy more generally in an attempt to find the most sympathetic way into 

the text. This leads to Nietzsche’s unequivocal comments about the importance of Zarathustra and the 

designs of his philosophy to bring readers toward the existential experience it transmits. I then turn to 

scholarly debates over Zarathustra to show how the attempt to discern the meaning of the text has long 

been frustrated and possibly misplaced. Finally, I suggest that a more fruitful way into the text, one that 



 18 

takes its lead from Nietzsche himself, is to attend to the question of Zarathustra’s experience of moral 

confrontation over the entire course of the narrative.   

 In the next section (2.0), I attempt to orient my reader in preparation for my own reading of 

Zarathustra. I do this by providing a brief overview of the text and explain why I believe that an often-

overlooked dream in the center of the text is an ideal place from which to unfold an understanding of 

Zarathustra’s experience. The rest of the chapter (2.1-2.3) is devoted to a reading of this dream that seeks 

to demonstrate how it captures, in an abbreviated form, Zarathustra’s personal experience through the 

trials and tribulations of his story, as he continually returns to the challenge of accepting the implications 

of his own teachings. In this way, I try to bring us closer to an experience of moral confrontation that 

Nietzsche dramatizes and places at the center of his philosophy, inviting us to follow suit. 

 
 
 
  



 19 

1.0 The Challenge of Zarathustra 
 
 In this section, I demonstrate the importance of Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s philosophy and the 

different challenges it presents to its readers, both interpretative and personal. I begin by turning to 

Nietzsche’s comments about Zarathustra to demonstrate the central place it occupies in his philosophy. 

Then, I note the curious fact that, despite the importance Nietzsche places on Zarathustra, this text has 

long been ignored and derided by scholars. While more recent reception of the text has been relatively 

positive, most scholars approach Zarathustra while ignoring Nietzsche’s own comments about the 

challenge of getting into the text in the right way. That is, Nietzsche insists that Zarathustra is not simply 

a text to be read intellectually. Rather, it is a text to be read existentially. Taking my lead from Nietzsche’s 

own remarks, I suggest that how we approach the text is crucial, for to understand it we must have an 

existential reaction to it, one where our own experience resonates with that of Zarathustra as he 

perseveres through his own personal trials and tribulations.  

* 

 When we begin to look at what Nietzsche says about his own philosophy, it becomes evident, as 

Jeremy Fortier has recently put it, that “No reader can reasonably ignore Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”13 Not 

only does Nietzsche consider Zarathustra to be his most important work, but he claims it is the greatest 

book ever written: “Zarathustra has a special place for me in my writings. With it, I have given humanity 

the greatest gift it has ever received,”14 and, again he writes: “I have given humanity the most profound 

 
13 Jeremy Fortier, The Challenge of Nietzsche, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 104. Cf. Tom Stern, 
“Introduction: Nietzsche’s Life and Works” in Tom Stern (ed), The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2019), 20. 
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, eds. Aaron Ridley 
and Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 72. 



 20 

book in its possession, my Zarathustra.”15 Nietzsche’s belief in the importance of his work even leads 

him to predict that someday, “there will be endowed chairs dedicated to Zarathustra interpretation.”16 

And his hyperbolic praise of Zarathustra continues as he claims that “there was no counter-ideal” to the 

various forms of slave morality that have long plagued humanity, not, that is, “until Zarathustra.”17 As 

the counter-ideal to all hitherto existing morality, Nietzsche approvingly sees the protagonist of his story 

as a great “Dionysian monster” that will overthrow all metaphysical consolation, as the “guest of all 

guests” who will usher in a feast of victory that will make the whole world laugh and tear down the 

curtain that separates good from evil. 18 

 Nietzsche not only considers Zarathustra to be the greatest gift bestowed on humanity. He also sees 

it as the “solution” or culmination of half his philosophy. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes that, after 

having finished writing Zarathustra, the “task for the years that followed was as clear as could be. After 

the yea-saying part of my task had been solved it was time for the no-saying, no-doing half…”19 As the 

“solution” to the yea-saying half of his philosophy, Nietzsche claims that Zarathustra possesses the 

“highest possible formula of affirmation” in the idea of the eternal return.20  Nietzsche does not further 

elaborate what this means, deciding instead to characterize affirmation as a psychological problem.21  But 

 
15 Nietzsche, Ecce, 223. 
16 Nietzsche, Ecce, 100. 
17 Nietzsche, Ecce, 136. 
18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2007), Preface §7; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178-180. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith 
Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 2§25. 
19 Nietzsche, Ecce, 134. 
20 Nietzsche, Ecce, 123. 
21 Nietzsche, Ecce, 130. I tackle this puzzle in chapter four.  



 21 

while he does not explicitly unpack the puzzle of what affirmation is or looks like, he is clear that, with 

Zarathustra, he had completed half of his philosophical task. 

 The significance of completing his positive task takes on even greater importance when we realize 

that the other “negative” task of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to “hook” readers and reel them in to his 

philosophy.22 While Nietzsche characterizes the no-saying, no-doing half of his philosophy as a series of 

critical engagements with existing moral values, he also claims it involves  “slowly looking around for 

anyone related to me, for anyone who, out of strength, would give me a hand with destruction.” Nietzsche 

claims that, “All my writings from this point on,” that is all his post-Zarathustra writings, “have been 

fishhooks” meant to draw people in to help him with the Dionysian task of finding “joy even in 

destruction,” the very thing Zarathustra is said to disclose. And nearly all Nietzsche’s subsequent work 

bears this out. For many of his works – Beyond, the 1886 preface to Birth, the original plan of the 

Genealogy, and Twilight – end with direct references to Zarathustra, as if pointing the way to the final 

summit of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Moreover, Zarathustra is mentioned in all Nietzsche’s subsequent 

works, which is true of no other work in his corpus. And each mention of the text praises it, enticing the 

reader to learn more.23 Thus, we see in Nietzsche’s own words that Zarathustra has a central place in his 

 
22 For other scholars who have also pointed out the implications of Nietzsche’s fishhooks, see Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s 
Teaching, (New Haven: Yale University, 1986), 247; Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 
trans. Harvey Lomax, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 19. 
23 All quotations in this paragraph are from Ecce, 134. References to Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s subsequent published work 
are as follows: Nietzsche, Beyond, 180; Nietzsche, Genealogy, P§8, 2§25, epigram to E3; Nietzsche, Birth, 11-12; Friedrich 
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, eds. Aaron Ridley 
and Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 223, 224, 229; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of 
Wagner, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 233; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce, 72-73, 79, 83-85, 91-92, 99-107, 123-135, 
143-151; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, eds. 
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Preface, §§53-54. For more on the 



 22 

philosophy, for everything he writes before it finds its culmination in it, and everything he writes after it 

points back to it. It is, in Nietzsche’s view, his crowning achievement.  

 Given that Nietzsche sees Zarathustra as the centerpiece of his philosophy, it is peculiar that its 

reception has long been one of neglect. Nietzsche himself writes that there was an “absurd silence” 

around Zarathustra in his own time, and Kathleen Marie Higgins observes more than one hundred years 

after its publication that “Zarathustra has been relegated to the fringes of scholarly interest, even 

scholarly interest in Nietzsche.”24 Higgins claims its neglect has long been due to its hybrid nature, 

combining as it does elements of philosophy, fiction, poetry, and lyric. Its collage of genres has made 

Zarathustra notoriously difficult to understand and interpret, and these difficulties have in turn led 

many scholars to see it as inferior to Nietzsche’s later, more straightforward philosophical texts. 

 But scholarly attitudes toward Zarathustra have begun to change, and it is now beginning to garner 

more attention. Within more recent literature, Zarathustra is often interpreted in one of two ways. Some 

scholars have offered a utopian reading of it as a prophetic work that provides a new vision of a future 

humanity. Other scholars read Zarathustra in the opposite way, seeing it not as a work of prophecy but 

as a text that seeks to deflate the very prophetic ambitions it puts on display. 25 The debate that ensues 

 
original plan of the Genealogy, see Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2010), 209. 
24 Nietzsche, Ecce, 143; Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), xii.  
25 For examples of “utopian” readers, see Douglas Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching, (New Haven: Yale University, 
1986); Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Stanley Rosen, 
The Mask of Zarathustra, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004 [1995]). For examples of the “deflationary” reading, see 
Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Kathleen Marie 
Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Alexander Nehamas, “For Whom the Sun 
Shines: A Reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in Klassiker Auslegen: Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, (Berlin: Akademie 
Verlag, 2000). For another useful overview of this scholarly divide, see Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence, 155. Loeb has a helpful 



 23 

between these perspectives often turns on the question of how to interpret the relation between the 

different parts of the text. On both sides of the debate, all agree that there is a significant stylistic 

difference between the fourth and final part and the rest of the work. Part Four is said to deviate from 

the serious, quasi-religious tone of the first three parts and is instead a kind of satire, replete with slapstick 

humor, insults, awkward interactions, and a continually confused and dithering Zarathustra. 

Additionally, Part Four is largely narrative driven, while the rest of Zarathustra is mostly focused on the 

speeches and songs of Zarathustra. Because of these stylistic differences and the publication history of 

Zarathustra, which makes the relation between the different parts even more ambiguous, it is not clear 

whether, and if so how, the work should be read as a whole.26 Scholars who endorse the utopian reading 

of Zarathustra insist that Part Four is a separate work, one of less importance that should not directly 

bear on the significance of the rest of the text. These scholars tend to see Zarathustra unironically as the 

wise man the narrator tells us he is, a man striving to find followers and create new values that will lead 

to the overcoming of humanity and all hitherto existing moralities. In contrast, scholars who adopt the 

deflationary reading argue that Part Four as an integral part of the rest of the work, one that adds a 

 
breakdown of the differences between these two different interpretations, calling the former the “utopian” reading and the 
latter the “deflationary” reading of Zarathustra (119-122). 
26 Scholars have noted that Nietzsche originally wrote Part Four as a separate work, possibly the first part of a new, separate 
work devoted to the character of Zarathustra. They note that Nietzsche saw the first three parts of Zarathustra as a completed, 
stand-alone work. However, because Nietzsche later abandoned the idea of writing further episodes and because he was 
unable to find a publisher for Part Four, he appended it to a new, private publication of Zarathustra. Only forty copies of this 
new edition were published, and Nietzsche only dispersed them among his friends. Thus, when Nietzsche refers in his 
published work to Zarathustra, he is only referring to the first three parts, Though, there is an allusion to the existence of Part 
Four (Nietzsche, Ecce, 79). Moreover, near the end of his sane life, Nietzsche wrote to a friend expressing the desire to retrieve 
all the private editions of Zarathustra, claiming that the world was not ready to receive Part Four, and suggesting to some that 
he wished to reaffirm that the first three parts were meant to stand alone.  For more on this history, see Laurence Lampert, 
Nietzsche’s Teaching, (New Haven: Yale University, 1986), 287-288; and Del Caro’s footnote in Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 199. 



 24 

satirical conclusion and announces the impossibility of Zarathustra’s desire to overcome humanity and 

morality.  

 I wish to take a step back from this debate to find another way into the text of Zarathustra. I am also 

interested in the question of how to read Zarathustra. But by this I do not mean how to understand the 

relationship between the different parts that make up the text. Rather, I am interested in the relationship 

between Zarathustra and its readers and the question of how they should orient themselves toward the 

text. On this question, Nietzsche is far from silent. And I believe that shifting our attention here will 

reveal that, regardless of the stylistic differences contained in Zarathustra, there is a strong line of 

continuity that runs through the whole work as Nietzsche never loses sight of trying to draw his readers 

into the existential experience of Zarathustra. 

 Nietzsche is clear that reading Zarathustra is challenging. This difficulty is not related to 

interpretative challenges. Rather the challenge is found in Nietzsche’s insistence that we cannot simply 

read Zarathustra intellectually. To truly understand what the text is doing requires us to feel our way 

into it: “Regarding my Zarathustra…I do not acknowledge anyone as an expert on it if he has not, at 

some point, been both profoundly wounded and profoundly delighted by it, for only then may he enjoy 

the privilege of sharing, with due reverence, the halcyon element from which the book was born and its 

sunny brightness, spaciousness, breadth, and certainty.”27 Nietzsche is insistent on this point, further 

claiming about Zarathustra that “to understand six sentences from it” can only mean “to have 

experienced six sentences from it,” and that to gain this kind of understanding of the text “would raise 

 
27 Nietzsche, Genealogy, Preface §8. 



 25 

you to a higher level of existence than ‘modern’ men are capable of achieving.”28 To feel our way into 

Zarathustra, to be wounded and delighted by it, requires us to do more than intellectually contemplate 

the teachings of Zarathustra. We must also seek to “understand” the experience of Zarathustra as he finds 

himself continually confronted with the implications of his own teachings. Thus, regardless of where we 

fall in the debate between utopian and deflationary readings, regardless of where we think the original 

text of Zarathustra ends, the narrative of the various sections continues to tell the same story, a story 

about moral confrontation.29 To see Zarathustra struggle with such confrontation, to relate this 

experience is what is required to understand Zarathustra.  

 However, the challenge of understanding Zarathustra – the text and the character – is harder than 

meets the eye. While Nietzsche insists that we must experience Zarathustra, he also knows that there is 

no easy or direct route to such an experience:  

You will not have an ear for something until experience has given you some headway into it. Let us take the most 
extreme case, where a book talks about events lying completely outside the possibility of common, or even 
uncommon, experience – where it is the first language of a new range of experiences. In this case, absolutely nothing 
will be heard, with the associated acoustic illusion that if nothing is heard, nothing is there. At the end of the day, 
this had been my usual experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience. Anyone who thinks that they 
have understood me has made me into something after their own image.30 
 

In response to this difficulty, Nietzsche adopts a particular style of writing. In his own words, he describes 

it as a style that aims “to communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos,”31 one that is tied to an 

experience of confrontation, for, as Nietzsche unabashedly writes, “one word from me will drive all your 

 
28 Nietzsche, Ecce, 100. 
29 Discerning Zarathustra’s experience requires attending to the plot of Zarathustra, and as Dirk J. Johnson has recently 
noted, this is an often-neglected aspect of the text. See Dirk J. Johnson, “Zarathustra: Nietzsche’s Rendezvous with Eternity,” 
in Tom Stern (ed), The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 187. 
30 Nietzsche, Ecce, 101. 
31 Nietzsche, Ecce, 104. 



 26 

bad instincts into your face.”32 Thus, he concludes that to be such a reader of his philosophy “you need 

to never have gone easy on yourself, you need to have harshness in your habits, if you are going to be 

cheerful among harsh truths.” To be such a reader of Nietzsche is to have felt the initial “hooks” of his 

philosophy, to be drawn in and pulled toward Zarathustra, to a text and a character who exemplify the 

kind of self-confrontation that must be adopted to understand the experience Nietzsche wishes to 

communicate. Coming to feel and understand such confrontation is possible here because, in the words 

of Wendy Brown, “Zarathustra’s exceptionality in what he is willing to confront and bear…is Nietzsche’s 

device for revealing us to ourselves.”33  

  

 
32 Nietzsche, Ecce, 103.  
33 Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory, 21(3), (1993), 405. 



 27 

2.0 An overview of Zarathustra 

 Before turning to my reading of Zarathustra to illustrate the experience of self-confrontation it 

contains, I would first like to orient my own reader by providing a sketch of the general contours of the 

text and providing an account of why I choose to find my point of entry into it through a reading of one 

of Zarathustra’s dreams.  

 Zarathustra is divided into four parts. Part One begins with Zarathustra descending from his 

mountain solitude to share his wisdom with humanity. On his way to the market, Zarathustra is warned 

about sharing his wisdom with people who do not want it. But this does not deter him. Upon reaching 

the market, Zarathustra begins to preach to the people. He teaches the overman, a vague notion of what 

human beings will evolve into; the immanence of the earth, trying to draw attention to the death of God 

and all religious and metaphysical notions of another world that lead us to devalue our own material 

existence; and the last human being, the current state of humanity as it enjoys happiness and ease and is 

no longer interested in or even aware of the ineluctable becoming of life that continually remakes things 

anew. Zarathustra’s teachings are met with confusion, misunderstanding, and ultimately rejection, and 

he finds himself at the end of his adventure alone. Returning to a state of solitude, Zarathustra realizes 

that he needs to abandon his pride, his desire to convert the masses. So, instead, he chooses to go in search 

of more receptive disciples.  

 The rest of Part One is devoted to a series of Zarathustra’s speeches. While the themes of these 

speeches are varied, they share in their rejection of all religious, moral, and metaphysical notions of 

another world, citing the moral and temporal relativism of all such ideas and values, and they also share 

in Zarathustra’s celebration of the “earth,” that is, of sex, death, war, aggression, and becoming – all 



 28 

things morality usually condemns as “evil.” At the conclusion of these speeches, Part One concludes with 

Zarathustra’s address to his disciples just before he leaves them to return to his solitude. In his speech, he 

warns them against himself, noting that to be his disciples is to question him and his teachings and 

continue to pursue self-affirmation.  

 Part Two opens with Zarathustra in solitude atop his mountain. Awakening from a nightmare, 

Zarathustra grows concerned that his teachings are being distorted and his disciples led astray. So, he 

descends from his mountain and returns to them. What follows are more speeches, but their tone and 

subject matter shift substantially. In place of his announcement of the death of God and his celebration 

of the earth, Zarathustra’s speeches now express disgust, contempt, and even resentment toward the 

baseness of humanity. Mixed into these denunciations are admissions of Zarathustra’s own ponderings 

over whether the mediocrity of humanity is alterable and a growing tension within himself that he must 

confront in his dreams, visions, and more astute interlocutors, a tension that begins to reveal that he has 

not come to terms with the implications of his own teachings.  

 In Part Three, Zarathustra dawdles about before returning to the solitude of his mountain, offering 

a few final speeches and “passing by” lesser “enemies.” Back in solitude, he offers a set of speeches on 

reclaiming the three great sins, his arch enemy the spirit of gravity, and an account of the moral tablets 

he has cast off and the new ones he wishes to put in their place. Then, suddenly, Zarathustra collapses. 

The rest of Part Three tracks his struggle to affirm the idea of the eternal return, the idea that the constant 

state of transformation, becoming, or overcoming he has repeatedly discussed in his teachings is not 

progressive but cyclical, that, while he is calling for something beyond the current state of humanity, the 

qualities that drive him to disgust will return, that there is no final salvation from them. Realizing the 



 29 

weight of the eternal return, Zarathustra is torn between becoming the teacher of this idea or else ending 

his life. In this state of tension, he sings a song to a female personification of life that questions how, after 

all the ways he has demonstrated his love for her, she has the gall to forsaken him. In response to his song, 

life appears and speaks with Zarathustra. What transpires in this conversation is not clear, but its 

consequence is that it brings the two of them back together. This leads to the final song that closes out 

Part Three, where Zarathustra proclaims his love for life and for eternity.   

 In Part Four, we return to Zarathustra years later, still atop his mountain, waiting for a sign to lead 

him back down again in search of his disciples. One day, while thinking about himself as a fisher of men, 

he encounters a familiar nihilistic soothsayer who has come to seduce Zarathustra to his final sin, his pity 

for the “higher man.” During their conversation, Zarathustra hears a cry of distress from the higher man 

and goes off to find him. As Zarathustra searches for the higher man, he comes across a whole host of 

initially unsavory characters who have heard his teachings and are looking for him. Informing them that 

he is currently responding to a cry of distress, he directs them to his home and promises to entertain 

them later in the evening. After spending the day in search of the distressed cry, Zarathustra returns 

home to realize that the sound has been coming from all the characters he encountered throughout the 

day.  

 The dinner scene that ensues finds Zarathustra torn between wanting to be happy for the higher 

men who are pleased to have found him and feeling a reoccurring desire to leave them and escape into 

the fresh air. Everything comes to a head when, returning from outside, Zarathustra finds that the higher 

men have exalted an ass as their new god. In response, Zarathustra ultimately sings a song that 

distinguishes between the higher men’s search for a new religious authority, first in Zarathustra himself 



 30 

and later in the ass, and the truth of his teachings about the eternal return, of the need to confront such 

desires. The next morning, Zarathustra receives a sign that it is time for him to descend from his 

mountain and return to his task. Receiving this sign, Zarathustra is struck by the events of the previous 

day. He sees in his response to the cry of distress and his ambivalence over the higher men that he has 

been caught up in pity for them, in a desire to help and aid them rather than to pronounce the eternal 

return and place the weight of it on any who claim to seek after his teaching.   

* 

 Throughout Zarathustra, there are several highly symbolic moments that both capture and 

foreshadow the future events of the text. Most of these explicitly call out for interpretation, are 

misinterpreted, and only later become clear as the plot develops. For example, in Part Three, Zarathustra 

has an enigmatic vision of a shepherd choking on a snake that symbolically anticipates his confrontation 

with the thought of the eternal return, and in Part Two Zarathustra shares a dream about a coffin that 

falls, knocks him over, and breaks open to release sounds of laughter that anticipates his later 

conversation with life and the inescapability of his fate.  

 Throughout Nietzsche’s philosophy, he holds several views on dreams and imagistic thinking.34 

From the start of his philosophy, dreams are associated with the Greek god Apollo and are seen as the 

paradigm of all imagistic aesthetics. Nietzsche believes that dreams are both the result of misunderstood 

 
34 For Nietzsche’s views on dreams as the ideal representative of imagistic aesthetics see Nietzsche, Birth, §§1, 4; for dreams as 
translations of physiological states see Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1996), §13; for dreams as the origin of dualistic thinking see Nietzsche, Human, §5; for views 
that “anticipate” psychoanalytic views about phylogenetics and wish fulfillment see Nietzsche, Human, §§12, 74, as well as 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, eds. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 
§§119, 312. 



 31 

physiological process operating during sleep as well as being rooted to the primitive history of humanity. 

Additionally, Nietzsche believes that the phenomena of dreams are responsible for humanity’s belief in 

metaphysical dualism, the division between the real world and a world of appearance. But among these 

views, Nietzsche also argues that, “dreams are…chains of symbolic scenes and images in place of the 

language of poetic narration; they paraphrase our experiences or expectations or circumstances with such 

poetic boldness and definiteness that in the morning we are always astonished at ourselves when we recall 

our dreams.”35 However, Nietzsche insists that dreams only communicate clearly to us on “rare 

occasions” and that “usually the dream is a bungled product,” something that needs to be disentangled 

and disambiguated. This contrast between the force of a dream and its need to be deciphered is 

repeatedly seen in Zarathustra and seems to be the role dreams play in its narrative.  

 In the rest of this chapter, I provide a close reading of the dream that occurs at the start of Part Two. 

Though brief, this dream is different from the other moments of symbolism and imagery in Zarathustra 

in that it is never explained. Moreover, unlike his other dreams and visions, which usually leave him at a 

loss as to their meaning, Zarathustra quickly offers his own interpretation of this dream. While this may 

appear to provide its meaning, Zarathustra offers his interpretation with an odd calm that contrasts with 

the terror initially felt within the dream. Moreover, his interpretation leads him to descend from his 

mountain solitude for the sake of his teaching and his disciples, yet it is clear that there are other more 

pressing, selfish motives driving his behavior. What I aim to show in what follows is that Zarathustra 

misinterprets his dream and the reason we are never offered an interpretation of it in the narrative is that 

 
35 Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §194. 



 32 

it captures the experience of self-confrontation Zarathustra is struggling to embrace throughout 

Zarathustra, the very thing Nietzsche wants his readers to feel their way into rather than contemplate.  

 
 
  



 33 

2.1 Zarathustra’s Dream: The Mirror 
 
 One night, years after leaving his disciples and returning to the solitude of his mountain cave, 

Zarathustra dreams that a child approaches him holding a mirror and says, “O Zarathustra look at 

yourself in the mirror!” Zarathustra looks into the mirror and sees a devil grimacing, sneering, and 

laughing. This image frightens him, and he cannot bring himself to look at it. Upon awakening, 

Zarathustra is troubled by the dream and interprets it to mean that his teachings have been distorted by 

his enemies, that his disciples have been led astray, and that he must return to them, to save them.36 

 There are at least three reasons why we might choose to believe Zarathustra’s interpretation of this 

dream. First, the epigram to Part Two, which immediately precedes Zarathustra’s dream, supports 

Zarathustra’s interpretation. The epigram reads: “only when you have all denied me will I return to 

you,”37 and, if Zarathustra’s dream interpretation is correct, this is exactly what happens. Second, it 

appears that Zarathustra is not the only one to see a distorted image of himself in a mirror. In Part Four, 

Zarathustra encounters two kings who also claim to have seen a distorted image of Zarathustra in the 

mirrors of his enemies,38 thereby seeming to confirm Zarathustra’s dream interpretation. Third, the 

imagery of the mirror is used on another occasion to convey that Zarathustra’s teachings have been 

distorted.  In Part Four, Zarathustra announces to the group of higher men who have sought him atop 

his mountain that, “I need clean, smooth mirrors for my teachings; on your surfaces, even my own image 

is distorted.”39 Because Zarathustra is pointing out how the higher men, despite their intentions, have 

 
36 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 63-65. 
37 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Martin), 69, 71. 
38 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Martin), 211. 
39 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 229. Cf. Zarathustra’s conversation with his soul at the end of Part Three. 



 34 

failed to respond properly to his teaching, the language of mirrors and distorted images in this scene also 

seems to build on and reinforce the idea that Zarathustra’s teachings are distorted in the mirrors of 

others. 

 However, each of these three instances is more complicated. Regarding the first, though Zarathustra 

appears to be afraid that his teachings are being distorted, a closer look reveals that what is really at issue 

is that Zarathustra is struggling to live up to his own teachings. At the end of Part One, just before he 

returns to his solitary mountaintop, Zarathustra warns his disciplines they should be on their guard 

against him: 

 Truly, I advise you: go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of 
him! Perhaps he has deceived you. 
 The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies; he must also be able to hate his friends. 
 One repays a teacher badly if one remains always only a student. And why do you not want to pluck at my 
wreath: 
 You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware that a statue does not slay you! 
 You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra?  You are my believers: but what matter all 
believers? 
 You had not yet sought yourselves: then you found me. Thus, do all believers; therefore, all belief comes to so 
little.40 

 
Zarathustra warns his disciples against his own possible mistakes, but he also tells them that they must 

overcome him, avoid remaining his disciples, and seek themselves. But if his disciples need to create space 

between themselves and their teacher, Zarathustra seems unable to give them the very space he 

encourages them to take: 

 Thus, I want to die myself, that you friends may love the earth more for my sake; and I want to become earth 
again, to have rest in her that bore me. 
 Truly, Zarathustra had a goal, he threw his ball: now you friends are the heirs of my goal, I throw the golden 
ball to you. 

 
40 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Martin), 68-69, 167. I may need to think more about why this passage is also quoted in Ecce Homo, 
Preface, §4. 



 35 

 Best of all I like to see you too, my friends, throwing the golden ball! And so, I still linger a little on the earth: 
forgive me for it!41 

 
These lines capture the beginning of Zarathustra’s growing ambivalence. On the one hand, he wants his 

disciples to overcome him and his teachings and seek themselves. On the other hand, Zarathustra cannot 

bring himself to leave his disciples. He lingers when he should leave. Knowing that his continued 

presence can only be an obstacle to their own self-overcoming, Zarathustra pleads for forgiveness. On 

some level, Zarathustra begins to feel the tension between his teachings, which tell his disciples to 

overcome him and find their own way, and his own longings, which communicate to his disciples that it 

is not time to become independent of their teacher. 

 Eventually, Zarathustra does tear himself from his disciples and return to his mountain cave, but 

there his longing for them continues. At the start of Part Two, just before Zarathustra’s dream, the 

narrator relates that Zarathustra’s “soul…became impatient and full of longing for those whom he loved: 

because he still had much to give them. For this is hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love and 

to keep a sense of shame as a giver.”42 This comment reveals that, though Zarathustra has found the 

strength to leave his disciples, he is not strong enough to overcome his longing for them. He has given 

them his wisdom, but when it comes to the most difficult part of giving, of leaving his gift with its 

recipients to do with as they see fit, to allow them to find themselves, Zarathustra is shameless, unable to 

close his hand because he desires to keep giving, to keep teaching, to keep having disciples. 

 Zarathustra’s ambivalence in relation to his teachings make it harder to believe his dream 

interpretation. Considering the context, it is less likely that Zarathustra’s teaching is in danger of being 

 
41 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Martin), 65. 
42 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Martin), 73. 



 36 

distorted and more likely that Zarathustra is unwilling to confront the implications of his own teachings, 

just as, in his dream, he is unwilling to look at himself in the mirror. For what would it matter if 

Zarathustra’s teachings are being distorted if he has already encouraged his disciples to move beyond 

them? There is no obvious answer to this question, and it, combined with Zarathustra’s ambivalence, 

leads us to question Zarathustra’s dream interpretation. Is he right that his teachings have been distorted, 

or is he using this dream interpretation to indulge further in his longing for disciples, to allow him to 

return to them, to keep giving, to be without shame? Because of the content of Zarathustra’s own 

teachings and the comments of the narrator, we have reason to suspect Zarathustra’s dream 

interpretation when it conforms to his desire to have disciples rather than his wisdom, which tells him 

to let them go.  

 Just as Zarathustra’s dream interpretation allows him to escape the implication of his teachings, the 

testimony of the kings, who claim to have seen his image distorted in a mirror, seems to reflect a similar 

relation to Zarathustra’s teachings. It is true that the kings relate encountering Zarathustra’s image and 

the words of his teachings from his enemies, and they confirm that his image is distorted in a mirror. But 

this is not all the kings say. They also relate that while they found Zarathustra’s image terrifying and 

could not look at it, they heard his words, were affected by them, and came in pursuit of Zarathustra to 

hear more. In particular, these kings were captured by two of Zarathustra’s teachings, namely, that “you 

should love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace more than the long one!” and “What is 

good? Being brave is good. The good war hallows any cause.” In response to these teachings, the kings 



 37 

remark that “our fathers’ blood stirred in our bodies at the sound of such words.”43 But Zarathustra sees 

through the kings. The narrator tells us: “As the kings talked in this manner and gabbed enthusiastically 

about the happiness of their fathers, Zarathustra was overcome by no small desire to mock their 

enthusiasm; after all, these were visibly very peaceful kings he saw standing before him, the kind with old 

and refined faces.”44 The significance of this comment is that the kings have come to Zarathustra to hear 

more about war, yet Zarathustra sees that their interest in war is at best academic, that in their very being 

they have neither the interest nor the capacity to engage in war. For this reason, Zarathustra must resist 

the urge to mock the discrepancy between reality and the words the kings want to discuss, for, while they 

wish to speak of war, they have no real interest in engaging in it.  

 But Zarathustra’s reaction is curious given that the kings’ response to Zarathustra’s teachings mirrors 

his own. The kings see Zarathustra’s image in the form of a devil reflected in a mirror, just like 

Zarathustra. The kings are frightened by this image, just like Zarathustra. Rather than fixate on the 

image, the kings get lost in the teachings of Zarathustra, wanting to better understand and continue to 

converse, just like Zarathustra. The kings remain fascinated by a teaching that they themselves do not 

want to confront, one that would force them to overcome their peaceful constitution. And here a 

question arises concerning what the kings verify: Zarathustra’s distorted image or the unwillingness – 

shared by Zarathustra – to look at themselves in the mirror.  

 The third invocation of distorted images and mirrors presents the same question. When Zarathustra 

tells the higher men that, “you are not beautiful or wellborn enough for me. I need clean, smooth mirrors 

 
43 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 199-200. 
44 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Martin), 212. 



 38 

for my teachings; on your surfaces, even my own image is distorted,” he is partially right. Throughout 

Part Four, the higher men demonstrate again and again that they can learn but they cannot live 

Zarathustra’s teachings. The kings who seek war turn out to be profound lovers of peace; the last pope 

who has lost faith in God ends up claiming that it is better to worship God in the form of a braying ass 

than in no form at all;45 and the ugliest man, the one who has killed God and should be able to affirm life 

for himself, can only affirm the festival aspects of life for the sake of Zarathustra.46 These “higher men” 

surely cannot reflect Zarathustra’s teachings. But then neither can Zarathustra. In fact, the overarching 

point of Part Four is that Zarathustra – the preacher who scorns pity, proclaiming “Oh, where in the 

world has greater folly occurred than among the pitying? And what in the world causes more suffering 

than the folly of the pitying?” – continually finds his actions motivated by pity for the higher men. At 

the end of Part Four, he realizes this:  

“To my last sin?” cried Zarathustra and laughed scornfully at his own words. ‘What has been left me now as my last 
sin?’ 
– And once more Zarathustra became immersed in himself and sat down again on the great stone, and he reflected. 
Suddenly he jumped to his feet –  
“Pity! Pity for the higher men!”47 
 

With this realization, Zarathustra sees that he too, just like the higher men, is not a clean or smooth 

enough mirror for his own teachings. Thus, when Zarathustra says to the higher men, “you are not 

beautiful or wellborn enough for me. I need clean, smooth mirrors for my teachings,” he is right that 

they are not mirror reflections of his teachings. But when Zarathustra continues, saying: “on your 

surfaces, even my own image is distorted,” we have reason to pause. Insofar as Zarathustra’s relation to 

 
45 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 255. 
46 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 258. 
47 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 266. 



 39 

pity for the higher men stands in opposition to his teaching, insofar as his pity is tied up with the search 

for clean, smooth mirrors for his teachings, insofar as Zarathustra is still looking for disciples, we see that 

the higher men are accurate mirror reflections of Zarathustra and his relation to his own teachings. 

Neither the higher men nor Zarathustra can reflect his teachings, to live them rather than merely speak 

of them.   

 
  



 40 

2.2 Zarathustra’s Dream: The Devil 
 
 If Zarathustra’s refusal to look in the mirror represents his inability to face the divergence between 

himself and his own teachings, then next we need to ask what the image of a grimacing, laughing devil 

in the mirror represents. Fortunately, throughout Zarathustra, there is one consistent reference to a devil 

as Zarathustra’s “archenemy.” This devil is also called the “spirit of gravity,” and it is no coincidence that 

it always appears just before Zarathustra begins to contemplate the idea of the eternal return.48 

 But before turning to Zarathustra’s confrontation with this harbinger of the eternal return, it is 

worth pausing over Nietzsche’s first articulation of the eternal return, for here we also find a demonic 

spirit. At the original conclusion of The Gay Science, we are told, imagine that a demon appears and tells 

you that you will be forced to live your life exactly as you have lived it over and over again without ever 

having the possibility of experiencing anything new. How would you respond? Would you gnash your 

teeth and curse the demon, or would you worship it as a god? Would you weigh every decision you have 

left, knowing that whatever you choose you shall have to choose eternally, that you will be tied to that 

decision forever, unable to alter anything, never able to choose an alternative – or would your disposition 

simply change, would your relationship to yourself and to life be altered such that you would “long for 

nothing more” than to live the same life over and over again?49 

 Much has been written about the eternal return, and there is little consensus about how it works or 

what it means.50 But most conversations about the eternal return begin with and fixate on the question 

 
48 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro): 29, 83-84, 124, 158. 
49 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §341. 
50 See Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence, (New York: Routledge, 2005), 
Chapter 6; Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chapter 1.  



 41 

of how or whether the hypothetical idea of life infinitely recurring is supposed to work. Few scholars 

accept the idea of the eternal return as a hypothetical idea that should be explored without questioning 

its premises. When we simply stick with what Nietzsche writes about the eternal return, we see that the 

force of the idea is supposed to lead us to two alternative responses to the fact that “there will be nothing 

new” in our lives. Either we will focus on making the “right” decision with every choice we have left, of 

choosing things that we would like to repeat for eternity, that will enrich our lives and make them worth 

living, or we will alter our disposition, and learn to long for nothing more.51 

 Rhetorically, Nietzsche seems to align an initial distinction, between gnashing our teeth or praising 

the demon as a god, with a second, between fretting over our future choices or changing our disposition 

toward life. In this way, Nietzsche suggests that either we gnash our teeth and fret over our decisions, or 

else we embrace a befuddling cheerfulness as we relinquish our longing for innovation. Given all that 

Nietzsche writes about cheerfulness in Science, one is tempted to assume that he is advocating for the 

second response to the eternal return. This assumption is strengthened when we scrutinize the first 

option concerning how to respond to the eternal return. For the more we push on the first option, the 

less it makes sense. To fixate on making right choices misses the true weight of the eternal return, namely, 

that we must face living everything, good and bad, pleasurable and painful, over and over again without 

any possibility of experiencing something new. That is, the eternal return is not meant to lead to a 

utilitarian calculus, in which our willingness to live our lives over again depends on whether the pleasure 

 
51 For a surprising example of the first, oddly Kantian interpretation of the eternal return as a formal principle of personal 
ethics, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Chapter 
3. 



 42 

of our lives outweighs the pain, nor is it meant to lead us ask whether we have performed enough virtuous 

actions such that the life we live is good enough to repeat for eternity.52 Irrespective of whether our life 

has more good things than bad, more pleasure than pain, the weight of the eternal return is the loss of 

“newness” in the face of endless redundancy. Even if our lives have more good things than bad, more 

pleasure than pain, we still must live them over and over again without even the remotest possibility of 

something new, something more, something different. This is the weight of the eternal return: that in 

the absence of newness the ratio in our lives between the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the 

painful, simply does not matter, for the weight of redundancy will weigh on us all the same if what we 

continue to long for is something new, something more, something different. 

 But if the first option seems to lead to a dead end, the second leads to a puzzle. When we push 

Nietzsche’s second possible response to the eternal return, that we should instead come to change our 

disposition rather than fret over what decisions we have left to make in our lives, we are forced to 

speculate about what it means or how it is possible to “long for nothing more.” Nietzsche’s own answer 

to this question, even in Science, seems to point to Zarathustra, for the section that immediately follows 

the articulation of the eternal return is a facsimile of the first section of Zarathustra, and Nietzsche writes 

elsewhere that the basic idea of the text is the thought of the eternal return.53 

 The first time Zarathustra encounters the spirit of gravity and contemplates the eternal return he 

rejects the spirit’s suggestion that time is cyclical, that everything repeats itself forever.54 Rather, just as 

 
52 Nietzsche, Science, §12. 
53 Nietzsche, Ecce, 123. 
54 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 156. 



 43 

Nietzsche moves from the mere thought of eternal recurrence to its implications in Science, Zarathustra 

also turns his attention to its implications. In this context, the implication of the eternal return is that 

the present moment is not new, and that the appearance of choice and the possibility of innovation are 

illusory. Zarathustra presents the eternal return in terms of a spatial metaphor. He says, imagine there is 

a path that recedes backwards, another path that proceeds forwards, and a gate at the place where they 

meet marked “Moment.” Here is the past, the future, and the present. Next, imagine these two paths go 

on for eternity, such that both contain everything that will ever happen. The consequence of this is that 

time breaks down. The distinction between the past and the future no longer makes sense. Both are 

simply eternity, contained within a closed set that contains everything that will ever be. Moreover, the 

present Moment, that which always seems to feel new, filled with choices and possibilities, is devoid of 

these things. There is no choice to make or deliberate over, there are no alternative futures hanging in 

the balance, what was will always be and the power of creation, the idea that something new could be 

brought into being is an illusion:  

 “Must not whatever can already have passed this way before? Must not whatever can happen, already have 
happened, been done, passed by before?  
 “And if everything has already been here before, what do you think of this moment, dwarf [the spirit of 
gravity]? Must this gateway too not already – have been here?”55 

 
That is, the “can,” the idea that alternative options exist, that we might have the power to transcend the 

infinite repetition of life, that we could discover or create something new – all these things are an illusion.  

 When Zarathustra encounters the eternal return for the second time, he again rejects the idea of the 

eternal return and focuses on its implications.56 This time, Zarathustra formulates the implications of 

 
55 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 125-127.  
56 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro) 175. 



 44 

the eternal return differently, doing so in terms of the impossibility of doing away with the human, all 

too human quality of humanity. Abandoning his metaphor of time, Zarathustra articulates the eternal 

return in a new way while still capturing what is most horrifying in it for himself. He says, do not make 

light of the eternal return. It is not enough to think that everything returns. We must further realize what 

this means. It means that what eternally returns is the little human being, the accuser of life, the 

conscience-stricken one, the one incapable of enough evil to overcome himself.57 But this is not all, for 

the return of the little man is not the worst of it. The reason he returns eternally is not simply that he 

lacks sufficient evil to overcome himself but that all human beings lack this capacity, for all are trapped 

within the eternal return, unable to find a way out of it. That is, not only is the little man insufficiently 

evil to escape the eternal return, so too is the supposedly great man. Both remain trapped in their 

humanness. This is why, when we compare the greatest with the littlest, we realize that they are “all too 

similar to one another – all too human still even the greatest one!”58 Thus, once again, this time in terms 

of the strength to do evil rather than time, Zarathustra underlines the true implications of the eternal 

return – that there is no possibility of creating something new.  

 When we compare Zarathustra’s two encounters with the eternal return, we are left with 

observations and questions but no answers. Contrary to so much scholarship, both times Zarathustra 

contemplates the eternal return it is his interlocutor – the first time the spirit of gravity, the second time 

Zarathustra’s own animals – who articulates it as an abstract idea.59 Both times, Zarathustra rejects this 

 
57 Cf. Nietzsche, Science, §4. 
58 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 177. 
59 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 123-124; 174-179. 



 45 

reductive conception of the eternal return as false and facile. In its place, Zarathustra offers two very 

different versions of the eternal return, the first emphasizing that there is no moment in which to act 

contrary to the eternal return and the second that no human possesses enough power to act contrary to 

the eternal return. Here the emphasis is less on a cyclical conception of time or the idea that everything 

repeats itself for eternity. The emphasis is rather on the impossibility of acting and overcoming in any 

way that is more than human, where to act as a human is to be subject to fate, to the possible illusion of 

choice, and to human weakness, the inability to transcend or to be truly greater than another. 

 One insight we do gain by comparing the accounts of the eternal return in Zarathustra with the 

account in Science is that Zarathustra responds to the eternal return in terms of wanting to act, of 

wanting to make the right choices, wanting to overcome the wrong choices, wanting to find a way to 

overcome the eternal return. This is why for Zarathustra, the man who wishes to create disciples and new 

values, the implications of the eternal return signify the impossibility of his own longings. But all this 

fretting over the impossibility of action reveals that he has still not come to terms with his own 

disposition, with how he longs not only for disciples but for something beyond this world, something 

capable of escaping the eternal return of a human, all too human life.  

 
  



 46 

2.3 Zarathustra’s Dream: The Child 
 
 To gain an understanding of how Zarathustra begins to come to terms with the eternal return, with 

his own longings, we need to go back to one more element of his dream – the child. The child approaches 

Zarathustra carrying a mirror and tells him to look into it. All this happens so fast it is easy to miss that, 

despite the frequent use of the image and language of children, this is the only time a child appears in 

Zarathustra. Moreover, it is the only time a child speaks for itself.  

 This sole appearance may initially seem trivial, but when we contrast it with the way Zarathustra 

talks about “the child” as a symbol, we find curious discrepancies. In the dream, the child functions as a 

means of confrontation, directing Zarathustra to look at himself in the mirror, to confront himself and 

the idea of the eternal return, with how it throws into question the possibility of realizing his desire. But 

when Zarathustra introduces the concept of the child, precipitating confrontation is not part of his 

description: 

 The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, 
a sacred yes-saying. 
 Yes, for the game of creation my brothers a sacred yes-saying is required. The spirit wants its will, the one lost 
to the world now wins its own world.60 

 
Here Zarathustra describes the child as a symbol of something god-like.61 It seems to possess tremendous 

powers of creation capable of making a new beginning; it is a primary mover, the cause of other things 

without being the effect of something else; and it is innocent and forgetful, not imbricated or weighed 

down by the world but capable of turning its will into a world of its own. But what does it mean if the 

image Zarathustra uses to embody his desire for god-like creation is what confronts him with the idea of 

 
60 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, (Del Caro), 17. 
61 Berkowitz, Ethics, 159. 



 47 

the eternal return? In Zarathustra’s dream, the child does not bring creation but literally carries with it 

the eternal return, a doctrine that announces the end of new experiences, of moments of free choice, of 

a human strength capable of great evil, of doing away with the smallness of human beings, of engaging 

in anything close to an act of divine creation. In short, the child that appears before Zarathustra is the 

antithesis of his ideal child. It not only carries with it an idea that stands opposed to Zarathustra’s great 

ambition to overcome humanity, an ideal so radically immanent that it makes the possibility of god and 

creation impossible, but by doing so, the child literally stands before Zarathustra as a testament to the 

impossibility of satisfying his own personal longings for transcendence.  

 This discrepancy between the child as a symbol for creation and as the carrier of the eternal return 

leads to further questions about Zarathustra’s initial description of the child. Zarathustra presents the 

child as the third and final transformation of the human spirit, but, when it comes to his own spirit – 

the only spirit we see develop over t