Who is Zarathustra’s Nietzsche?

Abstract

With the appearance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the work immediately following that — particularly, in Book Five of The Gay Science and in the 1886 Prefaces to the Second Edition of his works, there emerges a remarkably transformed sense of Nietzsche’s own self-awareness, a turn, based on his own autocritique, that basically works as a form of self-therapy — enabling him to grasp the really binding purchase the social symbolic has on the individual. In submitting himself to this autocritique, he first raises the question as to its possiblity, and then proceeds to effectuate it in a rather complex manner. Ultimately, this opens the way for his finely detailed metacritical works of the later period, especially, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals.