Thus Spoke Zarathustra was published across eight years in the late 19th century and in this novel – for a novel of philosophical proportions it is – Nietzsche expands upon earlier ideas he introduced in The Gay Science. These include the eternal recurrence – the idea that time is cyclical, not linear – and the Ubermensch, the titular character and narrator’s goal for humanity, a superhuman of flesh and blood, in contrast to Christianity’s traditional “other-worldly” spirit embodied in God.

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