Towards the end of the last millennium, when the postmodernist trend in Nietzsche reception was slowly abating, the ‘immoralist’ philosopher of ‘will to power’, but also of ‘will to truth’, quietly entered the lists of moral philosophy under the banner of normative ethics. Of particular interest to contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophers is Nietzsche’s theory of value, the specific type of ethical theory that might be attributed to him and his views on normativity. While the former theoretical concerns lie outside the scope of this study, the normative dimension of Nietzsche’s work lies at the very heart of my critique and is writ large in the text with which I am principally concerned, namely Thus Spoke Zarathustra. My primary objective is to interrogate the normative injunction that dominates the first half of Zarathustra and lay bare the means of its execution as set down by Zarathustra. The said injunction is the self-overcoming of the lingering but ingrained residues of Christian morality in the human breast. And the means by which this overcoming is to be put into practice is through an ascetic discipline of self-legislation, self-negation and self-sacrifice. It is my contention that these three practices as delineated by Zarathustra can be respectively and fruitfully compared to the Kantian rational will, the Hegelian ‘labour of the negative’ and Feuerbach’s indivisible trinity of love, sacrifice and suffering. These concepts, I submit, resurface in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as the joint agents of a ferocious, self-eviscerating doctrine of self-overcoming that bears all the marks of a moral tyranny.

Another formula for self-overcoming is what Nietzsche in The Gay Science refers to as ‘incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive’ (GS 11, KSA 3:383). ‘To what extent can truth endure incorporation?’ he asks later in the same work; ‘that is the question; that is the experiment’ (GS 110, KSA 3:471). In Zarathustra, ‘that’ experiment is figuratively rendered as the planting of one’s highest aim into the heart of the passions and is enjoined by Zarathustra through a profusion of violent rhetorical tropes. It is an experiment, moreover, which Zarathustra himself is in the midst of conducting but with self-shattering results.