Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None: Volume 4 (The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: The First Complete and Authorised English Translation) - Softcover

Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a classic philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885 and published between 1883 and 1891. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Übermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science (also translated as The Joyful Wisdom).

The book chronicles the fictitious travels and speeches of Zarathustra. Zarathustra's namesake was the founder of Zoroastrianism, usually known in English as Zoroaster. Nietzsche is clearly portraying a "new" or "different" Zarathustra, one who turns traditional morality on its head. He goes on to characterize "what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist:"

For what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. [...] His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist" who flees from reality [...]—Am I understood?-The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite-into me-that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.

—Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny", trans. Walter Kaufmann

—WIKIPEDIA

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of 24.

Era: 19th-century philosophy

Region: Western philosophy

School:
Continental philosophy, German idealism, Metaphysical voluntarism

Main interests:
Aesthetics, Anti-foundationalism, Atheism, Ethics, Existentialism, Fact–value distinction, Metaphysics, Nihilism, Ontology, Philosophy of history, Poetry, Psychology, Tragedy, Value theory, Voluntarism

Notable ideas:
Apollonian and Dionysian, Übermensch, Ressentiment "Will to power", "God is dead", Eternal return, Amor fati, Herd instinct, Tschandala, "Last man", Perspectivism, Master–slave morality, Transvaluation of values. Nietzschean affirmation "genealogy"

Influences:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Heraclitus Johann Gottfried Herder, the French moralists, Voltaire, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Wagner, Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Influenced:
Theodor W. Adorno, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Menno ter Braak, Judith Butler, Joseph Campbell, Albert Camus, Emil Cioran, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Julius Evola, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Muhammad Iqbal, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Anthony Ludovici, H. L. Mencken, Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Strauss, Bernard Williams, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Simon Vestdijk

—Wikipedia