“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche

Part 4 in Arc’s series: The Greatest Works In Philosophy

Dale Wilkerson

Nov 2, 2017

Nietzsche once demurred that Socrates was the “vortex and turning-point [Wendepunkt] of so-called world history” due to the fact that he had renovated Western moral and political thought from the ground up with the dream of an ideal moral and political type. For this reason, Nietzsche was drawn to engage the Socratic project in philosophy:

Socrates, to confess it bluntly, is so close to me that I am almost always waging war with him.

In an unpublished note from the fall of 1883, Nietzsche describes his own thought, particularly the attempted restoration of the pre-Socratic “innocence of becoming” through the teaching of the eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke