Читать книгу Thus Spoke Zarathustra - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Friedrich Nietzsche - Страница 28

Two strands of interpretation stand out. On one side, there has been a preoccupation with the notion of the Übermensch. Since Zarathustra declares this vision to be the new meaning of the earth and announces it in prophetic terms in the prologue, readers have expected that the entire text is meant to conceptualize and promote a future human ideal.

If one also considers that the work appeared during the dissemination of Darwin's findings and Zarathustra even seems to refer to a model of human evolution, it is understandable that many early commentators assumed Nietzsche had proposed an evolutionary ideal for humankind.

But Zarathustra is a literary work. It works with all the conventions and subtleties of narrative, and that requires us to be cautious and never to take at face value what it seems to promote. Even though Zarathustra proclaims the future of the Übermensch early in the prologue, he already distances himself by the end of it and suggests it will be a promise for only a select few.

Later in the text, the Übermensch almost disappears completely from view. The narrative then centers on the protagonist's personal crises and sets the stage for his impending encounter with the eternal return (Parts Two and Three). Significantly, the supposed visionary ideal rarely appears in the rest of Nietzsche's writings. This is surprising if one believes it to be a central premise of his philosophy.

Instead, one should see Nietzsche playing with the expectations of an audience already formed by Darwinian ideas. The initial readers were inclined, then, to see in the concept of an Übermensch a future‐projected higher human type according to the popular theory of evolution. But Zarathustra's mounting anxiety as the narrative progresses is not due to his concern that he is failing to win over followers to his ideal – but because he has begun to doubt the basis for his original prophetic mission.