Chapter 5 - Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Summary

Meyer discusses the intensely debated topic of Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism and thinks that the key is Nietzsche’s study of Schopenhauer. For Meyer Nietzsche’s argument has to do with completing the project of naturalism that Schopenhauer thinks cannot be completed. Meyer thinks that Nietzsche’s naturalism in TSZ leads him to endorse the truth of cosmological eternal recurrence and that this truth entails for Nietzsche a kind of fatalism that leads us beyond a morality of good and evil and beyond the conception of agency that underlies this morality. Meyer thinks that Nietzsche constructed a narrative in which Zarathustra comes to abandon his non-naturalized conception of himself and his agency, thereby attaining a childlike state of innocence beyond good and evil.