Scott Jenkins concentrates on the specific passion of self-contempt that plays such a large role in the Prologue of Nietzsche’s book where the Übermensch is introduced. This evaluative emotional state sounds unpleasant and unhealthy, but Scott shows why Nietzsche recommends it as a distinctive self-critical stance that is actually grounded in true self-love. We must be careful, Scott says, not to confuse it with the two familiar varieties of contempt discussed by Nietzsche, noble indifference and moral vengefulness. Instead, we should regard it as Nietzsche’s secular transposition of religious-ascetic contempt. Here we take a critical attitude toward our present state as falling short of a superior future ideal that lies within us which we love and yearn to realize. This is why Zarathustra says, paradoxically, that he loves humans and wants them to perish for the sake of a superior Übermensch species.

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.

The problem, according to Janaway, is that the unchangeable past appears to overwhelm the future in such a way that it is impossible for us to create anything new. This is the meaning of that key moment in TSZ where Zarathustra is devastated by the pessimistic teaching that all is empty, all is the same, all has been (ZII: “The Soothsayer”). If he cannot creatively transform the present-day human into his envisioned future superhuman, Zarathustra loses his reason for living. But then he awakens his dormant thought of eternal recurrence and realizes that he can in fact create the past from the perspective of the present moment. Given the thought of eternal recurrence, the past is no longer closed and hence the future remains open too.