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.

Psychology’s past in Eastern civilizations were an inherent part of the religious and moral philosophies. In an overview of those non-Western traditions in psychology, points of interaction between East and West occurred in Persia, which served as a crossroad between India and the Arab world. Ancient Indian culture followed the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. The writings of the Vedas, especially the Upanishads, provided the foundation for Hindu philosophy. In China, imported Buddhism taught that self-denial and proper thinking were necessary to achieve well-being. However, the older philosophical movement of Confucianism offered a stronger basis for Chinese intellectual progress. Both Buddhism and Confucianism were exported to Japan, where they were transposed into Japanese philosophies to support nationalistic aspirations. Two Middle Eastern cultures, Egyptian and Hebrew, are important as predecessors for the ancient Greeks whose philosophical formulations would provide the foundations for the emergence of psychology. Egyptian achievements in art and architecture left us a legacy, especially expressed in astronomy and medicine. The Jewish foundation of monotheism and law, along with an understanding of the person as a unity of spirit and matter, interfaced with the Greek culture that was to dominate the Mediterranean world.

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.