Creating values › A teacher whose audience resists him

Zarathustra comes down from the mountain to teach, but his first audience wants entertainment. When he warns them about a life reduced to comfortable satisfaction, they ask him to give them precisely that life. The opening of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra makes the difficulty of teaching part of its philosophical problem.

The book asks how values can be created and transformed when an inherited divine authority no longer commands assent. Its response takes the form of speeches and encounters rather than a systematic set of moral rules. Zarathustra's listeners misunderstand him, and the reader must consider whether a memorable declaration has also been understood.

The prologue introduces Zarathustra after ten years in the mountains. He decides that his accumulated wisdom should be given away. His descent brings him first to an old saint who praises God. After their encounter, Zarathustra wonders that the saint has not heard that God is dead.

This is a statement within the book's drama. It does not describe a divine organism that once lived and then ceased to live. The saint's continuing devotion also makes it impossible to read the scene as a report that every person has stopped believing. The passage raises a problem about the authority of inherited belief through the encounter between these speakers.

Zarathustra then addresses a crowd assembled to watch a rope-dancer. He presents humanity as something to be surpassed. The crowd's response exposes a gap between what he wants to communicate and what it is ready to hear. A declaration of wisdom does not guarantee that teaching has occurred.

Eventually he decides to seek companions rather than speak to the people as a whole. He wants fellow creators rather than a herd of followers. The relation between teaching and independence remains difficult: someone who merely repeats his declarations has not yet become a creator. This difficulty returns when he later tells his disciples to leave him.