Nietzsche’s late text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has an important formal aim: to release images from the demands of reason. It also has a moral aim – to release the human will from its enslavement to preordained images, including from the image of itself. What would an image be for which its viewer still had to be invented? for which its viewer was being invented – in the image itself? This is the adventure of Nietzsche’s major work, which, like some literary works, is drunk with images, but they take a certain path of development, from knowing images to willing images. Instead of an image that presents knowledge for a knower, Nietzsche, through trial and error, develops a “willing image,” which first has a negative task, to liberate the will from its tie to established knowledge. But across the momentous book he also gradually sets aside images that stimulate an already existing will. The aim of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is thus like the aim of some literature, to give desire, wishing, wanting, hoping, and loving a new landscape in which it can change its genre and its objects, where it can learn to self-determine.

This chapter presents and assesses Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism in terms of how its hedonic axiology has levelling-down effects on the perfectionist values he cared most deeply about, namely, creativity and achievement. Starting from Nietzsche’s repeated claims that suffering is in some way extrinsically tied to ‘greatness’, the chapter considers Nietzschean arguments for its value through an analysis of the role of ‘admiration’ and the doctrine of will to power. The philosophical force of these ideas is then considered in light of Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between human flourishing and a naturalistic psychology. Seeking to improve upon dominant views in the secondary literature, the chapter then investigates the specific extrinsic relation Nietzsche takes there to be between suffering and greatness, arguing that an analysis of his ‘pessimism of strength’ suggests that it ought to be construed as constitutive rather than instrumental. The chapter ends by attempting to provide a solution to the ‘scope problem’ raised in Chapter 5.

Gabriel Zamosc argues that a proper understanding of TSZ will help to advance the contemporary transhumanist movement that often claims to be inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch. According to Zamosc, Zarathustra warns us against falsely or sickly transcendent versions of his superhuman ideal that are actually a veiled hatred of our unchangeable human-all-too-human past. Indeed, this is why he teaches eternal recurrence, in order to show us how to love this past as an embodiment of our creative will to power. The transhumanist movement must therefore incorporate this doctrine so as to secure a joyful version of itself that embraces our transitional destiny of forever remaining mere bridges to the superhuman.

According to Paul Franco, Nietzsche constructed TSZ as a political drama in which the protagonist overcomes his reluctance to rule and accepts his political responsibility. His reluctance to rule springs from his compassion for the suffering that his disciples will have to endure as a result of his teaching. And his political responsibility is to teach eternal recurrence as a cultivating philosophical idea that creates a new ruling class that will help bring about his goal of the Übermensch – a collective goal that will rescue modern Europe from its nihilistic democratic trajectory. In this essay, Franco explains how Nietzsche’s “great” politics presents a radical challenge to our usual assumptions about the need for a common political life and for politics in the mundane and institutional sense.

Hegel’s successors adopt his historicism but they emphatically deny his claim that history has unfolded teleologically and is reaching its fulfillment. Marx launched the first assault on Hegel, from the Left. The next assault came from Nietzsche on the Right. Both rejected Hegel’s view that history’s harmonious and belligerent aspects of history unfolded together, culminating in the bourgeois nation-state. They view history as entirely oppressive to date, but envision a radical future transformation of mankind, abandoning the state. Nietzsche blamed Hegel for exposing the truth that values are historically time-bound and relative, paralyzing our capacity for commitment. He challenges us to draw upon history as inspiration for creating new horizons instead of being paralyzed by the dead hand of the past, guided by his two premises of the Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence. Through his prophet Zarathustra, he summons us to will the Overman into being to replace God, sparking a global war in the twentieth century between the Last Man of democratic herd morality and a new caste of rulers: not Marx’s socialist struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but an antidemocratic struggle between masters and slaves, seen by some as a precursor to fascism.

The chapter discusses Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s metaphilosophical investigations. They result in two different versions of a postmetaphysical philosophy of finitude. For Nietzsche, metaphysics puts forward ideas of the absolute and of absolute value, such as goodness or freedom per se. The qualities and qualifications that specify human beings, however, are provisional and relational, in short: finite. They are, in fact, instances of one unique force that feeds them all, viz the will to power. Even our thoughts and values seem to supervene on actual power relations. Metaphysics completely misses this point, Nietzsche argues; hence, we should abandon it. Heidegger, too, wants to dismiss metaphysics because it fails to accommodate human finitude. For him, metaphysics initially dealt with the question of the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) but, unfortunately, has forgotten about Being altogether. Focusing on the understanding of beings as beings instead, metaphysics, including Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, has been occupied with fleeing from Being. Yet,for us humans, our very Being (as well as the meaning of Being in general) is always an issue about which we most deeply care, even though it entails nothing but time, transience, and, ultimately, death.

The overarching aim of philosophy, according to Nietzsche, should be to determine values and it is this task that differentiates philosophy from scientific inquiry (BGE 211). It has been argued in the secondary literature that Nietzsche’s emphasis on the creation of values commits him to a nonrevisionary account of the natural – mechanical – sciences and a demarcation of the sphere of values from that of naturalistic causes. This paper argues that to interpret Nietzsche in this way commits him to an intractable dualism that is also evident in some contemporary efforts, outside Nietzsche studies, to reconcile naturalism and normativity. Drawing on the resources of his will-to-power thesis, it is argued that Nietzsche provides an alternative and nondualist account of how values fit into nature. This view broadens what we mean by the natural beyond the narrow perspective of the natural sciences to include within it the human evaluative point of view. It is concluded that the creation of values, for Nietzsche, does not leave the natural sciences alone, but, rather, it inverts the current hierarchy between science and philosophy (BGE 204) by subjecting the Enlightenment view of nature to challenge.

This chapter argues that Nietzsche hoped to emancipate genuine philosophers, as exemplified by his idealized Zarathustra, from the long-standing ascetic influence of science and religion in order that they might finally embrace their proper role as autonomous value-creating rulers in both these spheres.

In this chapter, I first examine two metaphors – the astral and the entomological – that extend through Nietzsche’s entire corpus to track the development of certain key themes in Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical reflections as they evolved from the early days of his professorship at Basel up to the mature writings of 1886 and 1887. By then, I argue, Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical meditations had crystallized around his critique of the so-called will to truth. I then argue that key to this critique is Nietzsche’s conviction that philosophical “knowledge” is not just different in kind to the type of knowledge produced by scholars and scientists, but that the two have contrary properties. Finally, I make use of these results to mount a Nietzschean metaphilosophical critique of the now prominent analytical reception of Nietzsche. A sizable share of contemporary English-language philosophical work on Nietzsche, I argue, is not just metaphilosophically discontinuous with Nietzsche’s understanding of and approach to philosophy, but expressive of deep-set resistance to precisely those transformations in philosophy that Nietzsche sought to bring about as an engaged metaphilosopher.