Zarathustra's Love Beyond Wisdom

By David Goicoechea

This reading of Zarathustra shows it to be a drama developing through the five acts of spirit-camel-lion-lioness-child. With attention to the original meaning of philosophy as the love of wisdom the drama proceeds through a series of criticisms and transformations. Spirit is the interplay of the forces of will to power that can love foolishly or wisely. The camel of Christian Platonism loves God and neighbor for the afterlife and thus with ressentiment against this life. The lion of Enlightenment Humanism does that for a better future but with ressentiment against the present. The lioness of Romanticism loves the other as a pregnant mother loves her child, but still in the fear and trembling of sorrow. But the child of contemporaneity, in a folly that witnesses to the departure of the serpent's wisdom, loves with an amor fati that out of joy says Yes and Amen to all of existence. The folly of this complacent love for each singular's intrinsic worth puts concern's eros and agape for utility value into the open spaces of creativity.

It is here implied that instead of reading Nietzsche Without Zarathustra it is helpful to see that after 1881, Zarathustra is Nietzche's forerunner for the rest of his writing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586842404
• ISBN13: 9781586842406
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Distribution Partners
• Length: 418 Pages