There is perhaps no stranger book in the history of philosophy than Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Ever since its final instalment was published in 1885 readers have wondered what to make of it. During the First World War approximately 150,000 copies of a special ‘wartime edition’ of the book were issued to German soldiers going into battle, but as Robert Pippin (one of the editors of the 2006 Cambridge edition of the book) notes in his introduction, ‘it is hard to imagine a book less suitable for such a purpose’ (Reference Nietzsche, A., Pippin and A.2006: xi):

In this article I'll argue that one reason Zarathustra is a confusing book is that it explores a very confusing question, namely: How is it possible to teach anyone anything without at the same time harming them? Or to put it in slightly different words: How is it possible to give a gift of knowledge without at the same time taking away some of the learner's freedom? Zarathustra takes these questions very seriously and he wrestles with them throughout the book. When the book begins he has some very profound ideas about how to create a life that's worth living, but he has no idea how to teach these ideas to others. So Zarathustra is, among other things, the story of the education of an educator, and as with all stories about teachers in training it is full of embarrassing mistakes, outright failures, many tiny epiphanies, and in the end (hopefully) some profound conclusions about how teaching and learning are possible. Rather than issue the book to soldiers going into war, therefore, it would make more sense to give it to teachers preparing to go into a classroom. In this article I'll focus on just one of the profound and surprising conclusions about teaching that emerge in Zarathustra: a highly effective teacher is also a highly effective liar.

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Part I of Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra rejoicing in the discovery that he should teach only a select group of ‘companions’ or ‘disciples’; but it ends with him telling those same disciples to go away and leave him alone. ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’, the remarkable speech that concludes Part I, presents Zarathustra trying to convince his disciples that he must leave them because he's dangerous:

‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ presents a fascinating argument that should get the attention of teachers everywhere. All teachers are a danger to their students, Zarathustra argues, because they can become authorities in the minds of their students, and therefore obstacles to their students’ progress. When a student respects and admires a teacher beyond all questioning and doubt a new kind of dogmatism has been created that is arguably even more dangerous than any other form of dogmatism because it hides behind a mask of liberal education and open-mindedness. Thus teachers can be the worst thing that ever happened to their students, even when their only desire is to help them. This danger is no less serious (or ironic) than getting killed by a falling statue.

Another way to express this argument would be: no teacher should ever have disciples. So Zarathustra finds himself in an extremely awkward situation at the end of Part I because there's no denying now that he is a teacher who has acquired disciples. This is not something that he wanted or even imagined when he came down from the mountains with no particular plan in mind other than to share his overflowing wisdom out of love for mankind (2006: 3–4). Initially he just walked into the first town he found and began to proclaim the Overman to the crowd that was in the marketplace waiting for a tightrope walker to perform. He delivers two lectures in the marketplace (sections 3 and 4 in the Prologue) on the glories of the Overman, but no one understands a word of it, and some of the townspeople even laugh and taunt him. So then he does what most desperate teachers do in a desperate situation: he attacks his students. His third lecture (section 5 in the Prologue, on ‘The Last Man’) is an extended critique of human laziness, but even this doesn't work: the townspeople either completely misunderstand him or they just laugh at him again; and now Zarathustra begins to doubt that he has any future as a teacher. But after carrying the poor, dead tightrope walker out of town to bury him (the unfortunate tightrope walker got caught in the middle of this pedagogical dispute), Zarathustra has an epiphany:

After making this discovery Zarathustra's teaching career begins in earnest. In Part II Zarathustra gives twenty-one speeches to a group of people he refers to only as ‘my brothers’ and ‘my friends’ (e.g. 2006: 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 33, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 55). But when we reach the twenty-second and last speech of Part I we learn that the people Zarathustra called his friends and brothers ‘called themselves his disciples’ (2006: 55). Clearly something has gone wrong. Instead of luring independent-minded individuals away from the herd, Zarathustra has become what he wanted most of all to avoid: ‘the shepherd and dog of a herd’ (2006: 14). The people he wanted to be his companions and fellow creators have become mere followers who trust his authority instead of thinking for themselves. So Zarathustra gives them an ultimatum: if they don't change he's quitting. They have to adopt a new critical attitude towards him that will prevent them from ever thinking of themselves as disciples again; and only then will Zarathustra return to them.

But in spite of his insistence at the end of Part I that he must leave so that his followers can transform themselves, Zarathustra returns almost immediately at the beginning of Part II. So it would seem that he must have very quickly changed his mind about the dangers of statues and teachers. Or it could be that he didn't change his mind at all – he remained convinced of that danger, but he realized that the best way to address this problem was to transform himself, rather than waiting for his students to change. That's the conclusion that I'll argue for: that when Zarathustra returns in Part II to those who continue to think of themselves as his disciples his method of teaching has changed in order to address the problem of falling statues.

The story of how this pedagogical paradigm shift occurs at the beginning of Part II is worth considering in more detail. Part II opens with Zarathustra going back to the mountains alone, prepared to wait as long as necessary for the transformation of his disciples; but then a dream about a child and a mirror upsets his plans and changes his whole paradigm.

Though this dream frightens Zarathustra it also gives him an insight that makes him very happy. He realizes that instead of waiting for his ‘disciples’ to transform themselves, he must transform himself. So he resolves to go back among his friends – and also his enemies – but to do it differently this time.

All of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a meditation on teaching – how it is possible and how it can utterly fail. The pedagogical epiphany that occurs at the beginning of Part II is analogous to the breakthrough that takes place at the end of the Prologue, when Zarathustra realized that the vast majority of people will never understand him so he should focus instead on teaching a small group of companions who are willing to struggle with his ideas. But whereas the Prologue concludes with a rather clear announcement of how Zarathustra plans to share his wisdom in the future, this is not the case with the epiphany that begins Part II. In ‘The Child and the Mirror’ Zarathustra celebrates his discovery but doesn't really explain the specifics of what he plans to do; all he tells us is that he's going to do things differently. Instead of explaining his new paradigm for teaching, he performs it in Parts II and III. I will focus just on Parts II and III because I believe that Zarathustra's teaching effectively ends when Part III ends. In Part IV the other characters – The Soothsayer, The Magician, The Last Pope, etc. – take over and Zarathustra mostly watches from the sidelines. I would argue that Parts I–III contain Zarathustra's teaching while Part IV demonstrates the consequences of his teaching. So if we want to understand how and why Zarathustra transforms himself in the remainder of the book, and why he says that the performance of his new ‘wild wisdom’ may scare away both his enemies and his friends, we will have to analyse this performance.

There are many different dimensions to Zarathustra's performance but they can all be safely characterized in this way: in Parts II–III Zarathustra disrupts the efforts of his ‘disciples’ to have faith in him or to think of him in any way as an authority by continually performing the liar's paradox. Zarathustra's teaching in Parts II and III consists of speeches of great wisdom and profundity followed by other speeches that directly contradict them.

The most explicit example of how Zarathustra is performing the liar's paradox is in the seventeenth speech of Part II, called ‘On Poets’. In this section Zarathustra is discussing the relationship between mind and body with one of his disciples when the disciple reminds him that the last time they discussed this topic Zarathustra had also said, ‘But the poets lie too much’ (2006: 99). ‘Why then did you say that the poets lie too much?’ asks the disciple, and Zarathustra replies:

Zarathustra continues these criticisms of poets at great length, decrying poets for their lack of knowledge and their compulsion to lie (after first pointing out that he himself is a poet), and this has a very interesting effect on his disciple: ‘When Zarathustra had spoken thus, his disciple was angry with him’ (2006: 101). (By the way, it's interesting to note that in Part I Zarathustra calls his companions only his brothers and friends, but beginning in Part II he also starts to call them his ‘disciples’. I think this is more evidence that Zarathustra realized at the beginning of Part II that his companions would continue to think of themselves as his disciples no matter what, and that he couldn't change that simply by commanding them to change their attitude towards him. Instead he adopts strategies to erase his own authority and thus subvert his students’ attempts to defer to him.)

In this speech ‘On Poets’ Zarathustra has very explicitly performed the liar's paradox, and it has the same effect on his disciple as it has had on nearly everyone since it was first articulated in the fourth century BCE by Epimenides when he said, ‘Epimenides of Crete says that all Cretans are liars’: it leaves people confused and perhaps even a little angry. The liar's paradox introduces undecidability into formal systems and it very effectively undermines the authority of the liar. The disciple who reacts with anger to Zarathustra's discourse on poets seems to have recognized that Zarathustra has made being a disciple of Zarathustra incoherent.

‘On Poets’ is something like an explicit and formal presentation of the liar's paradox, but there are many other speeches in Parts II and III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that also perform the liar's paradox in less explicit ways. Zarathustra has come down from the mountains to teach a new ideal of how to live, a vision of personhood that involves constant self-overcoming. Every time he contradicts this ideal, in either his words or his actions, he performs another version of the liar's paradox, and any ‘disciple’ who is paying attention should realize that it is ridiculous to be a disciple of Zarathustra.

For example, there are many speeches in which Zarathustra – who is supposed to be the arch-enemy of nihilism – acts like a nihilist. How little it takes in these speeches to seduce Zarathustra into nihilism is very funny. One such speech is ‘The Soothsayer’ in Part II. In this speech Zarathustra happens to overhear a soothsayer proclaim a completely transparent version of nihilism:

Zarathustra, who has spent the whole book up to this point teaching his students to recognize and resist far subtler forms of nihilism than this, immediately surrenders all of his principles when he hears this soothsayer and converts to nihilism himself. Similarly speedy seductions occur in ‘The Dance Song’ and ‘The Grave Song’ in Part II, and ‘The Convalescent’, ‘On Great Longing’ and ‘The Other Dance Song’ in Part III. In all of these speeches Zarathustra succumbs to nihilism quite easily, thus creating an unbridgeable incongruity between what Zarathustra teaches and how he actually lives, and completely undermining his own moral authority on the subject of nihilism.

‘The Soothsayer’ speech is also a remarkable example of another version of the liar's paradox that Zarathustra performs throughout Parts II and III: a moment when Zarathustra becomes completely incoherent and unintelligible. In ‘The Soothsayer’ Zarathustra becomes such a nihilist that he refuses to eat, drink or sleep for three days, after which he is so overcome with despair that he falls into a deep sleep. When he finally wakes up he narrates a bizarre dream to his disciples. He dreamed that he was a night watchman in a cemetery – a horrible job in a frightening and depressing place – when one night the silence is interrupted by a loud banging at the gate. A coffin bursts through the cemetery gates, breaks open ‘and spewed forth thousandfold laughter. And it laughed and mocked and roared against me from a thousand grimaces of children, angels, owls, fools and butterflies the size of children’ (2006: 107). When Zarathustra narrates this dream to his disciples he doesn't pretend to know what it means, but one of his disciples immediately provides an interpretation: ‘everything in the dream symbolized you, oh marvelous Zarathustra’. The disciple goes into great, enthusiastic detail, explaining how all the symbols in the dream are simply meant to glorify Zarathustra (even though he just spent several days in a nihilistic coma). Zarathustra responds to the interpretation of his dream thus: ‘he gazed long into the face of the disciple who had served as the dream interpreter, and he shook his head’ (2006: 108). It seems like the correct interpretation of the dream would have been: ‘It doesn't mean anything; it's just gibberish and nonsense.’ Zarathustra did his best to be incoherent and unintelligible, but his disciples still insisted on imposing some meaning on his madness. Other speeches that should probably be dismissed as unintelligible nonsense include the many speeches where Zarathustra sings songs or recites poetry, such as ‘Before Sunrise’, ‘On the Mount of Olives’ and ‘The Seven Seals (or: the Yes and Amen Song)’ in Part III. ‘On Great Events’ from Part II probably also belongs in this category since it involves a story about Zarathustra flying through the air at high noon on his way to a conversation with the ‘Fire Hound’ that no one can understand.

A third variation on the liar's paradox that Zarathustra performs occurs in the many speeches where he acts like a misanthrope. Zarathustra, who proclaimed that love for mankind was his only motivation for leaving the mountains and engaging in a teaching career, sometimes acts like a very angry teacher. ‘On the Rabble’ and ‘The Night Song’ in Part II, and ‘On Apostates’ and ‘The Homecoming’ in Part III, all present Zarathustra as someone who despises his fellow humans. Just as Zarathustra occasionally slides into nihilism he also regularly slips into misanthropy, and in both cases he directly contradicts his own principles and undermines his own authority.

These are just a few examples of some of the very odd speeches in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that have puzzled readers ever since the book was released. My argument is that all of them should be understood as demonstrations of highly effective teaching through highly effective lying. Zarathustra shows his concern for his students when he lies to them. By contradicting himself he undermines his own status as an authority and does everything in his power to help his students avoid being killed by a statue.