Heinrich Meier’s new book, What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, which first appeared in German in 2017 and which is now available in a rather elegant translation by Justin Gottschalk, presents a distinctly Straussian reading of Nietzsche’s text. For this reason, it is as interesting as it is frustrating: Meier rightly draws our attention to the tense and complex relationship between the philosopher and the prophet as it unfolds in Nietzsche’s text, but his book remains frustrating in its lack of critical distance.

Nietzsche published his philosophical poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in four parts between 1883 and 1885, marking an obvious transition from his so-called middle period to his more mature philosophical work. Zarathustra’s main strength was never its poetic finesse. Rather, Nietzsche attempted to think through some of his most influential ideas and concepts in a language that itself sought to overcome the limits of traditional, and mainly academic, philosophical prose. The last few decades have seen the rapid growth of a veritable industry of scholarly interpretations of the work. Nietzsche himself, of course, had always viewed Zarathustra—at least in his letters and notebooks—as a sort of crowning achievement (even though he promptly returned to philosophy proper, producing some of his most influential and critically most sophisticated analyses of modern moral and political philosophy, such as Beyond Good and Evil [1886] and On the Genealogy of Morality [1887]). This poses the obvious question: was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra a failure, after all? This is not the exact question Meier asks, but it does stand in the background of his relentlessly Straussian close reading, which unfolds in four chapters, mirroring the overall structure of Zarathustra.

Meier, of course, will be known to an English-speaking audience mainly because of his previous work on Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The reading of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra he delivers on this occasion seeks to unearth a hidden unity in Nietzsche’s text, which has already often been proclaimed by other commentators, albeit without much success. Derived from a series of seminars Meier gave in Munich and Chicago in 2014, his book certainly accepts that Zarathustra largely remained a transitional work in Nietzsche’s œuvre. Although—like any other reader of Zarathustra—Meier has to confront the contentious relationship between poetry and philosophy that Nietzsche himself always criticizes while writing in poetic form, the central question Meier seeks to address is really concerned with the relationship between the prophet and the philosopher, and ultimately between politics and philosophy. This is raised by the figure of Zarathustra as both a failed preacher in the marketplace and in the public sphere on the one hand, and a thinker of wisdom withdrawn into solitude on the other. Consequently, it is, first of all, not altogether surprising that Meier reformulates the question of Heidegger’s famous essay “Who Is Zarathustra?,” first published in 1954, into the more interesting question, “What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” Whereas Heidegger simply presents Zarathustra as the philosopher of eternal recurrence, thereby adopting a distinctly metaphysical stance that removes the figure of Zarathustra from the realm of politics, Meier’s reading attempts to investigate what kind of thinker Zarathustra really is—that is, whether he is either a prophet or a philosopher, or whether he is perhaps both in unison. In each of the four parts of Zarathustra, either the prophet or the philosopher takes a more prominent role, to be sure, but the open ending of Nietzsche’s text also leaves open the question of what Zarathustra really is.

Meier’s discussion of the relationship between prophet and philosopher ultimately mirrors the relationship between the Straussian categories of exoteric teaching and esoteric teaching. As a prophet, Zarathustra seeks to give meaning to life in the public sphere, conveying his teaching to potential disciples, an audience that eventually laughs and forces him into solitude—a solitude, in which he is now able to criticize and overcome his own earlier teaching from a perspective of philosophical wisdom. This should not be taken to imply, however, that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra withdraws from politics. Instead, as Meier rightly points out in his reading of the second part of Nietzsche’s work, “Zarathustra pulls out all the stops in the treatment of the philosopher to highlight the tension between philosophy and politics,” which itself rests in the tension between the “will to truth,” on the side of philosophy, and mere “belief,” which seems central to the realm of the modern political world (p. 51). The philosopher’s failure, then, is not that he cannot rule because of some commitment to the vita contemplativa, but that he does not wish to rule (p. 84). Or does he?

Although Meier seems to side with the philosopher’s passion for knowledge, there can also be little doubt that he attempts to assimilate the philosopher to the prophet. This is because it is only on the basis of philosophical insight into the necessity of self-overcoming that the philosopher can also recognize more fully that (a) social hierarchies and human interactions are governed by a will to power; (b) the meaninglessness of the world, the presumed nihilism of modernity, can only be overcome by accepting its eternal recurrence with joy and laughter; and (c) it is possible to overcome, in the figure of the “overman,” a human world conditioned by the fateful alliance of Christian morality and political philosophy. Zarathustra therefore rejects the standard repertoire of moral pity and social equality. But in favor of what exactly? Meier, for whatever reason, tends to leave this open. An obvious candidate, however, is a kind of aristocracy of the mind centered on Zarathustra as a “Counter-Jesus,” who is “supposed to take God’s place, but not occupy his position,” removing the authority of a Judeo-Christian God, “but not claim it” (p. 41)—a political theology in disguise, as it were, not unlike Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty?

What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? continues the central theme of Meier’s previous book translated into English, Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion (2017), which presents modern European philosophy’s political turn as a response to the authority of monotheism. Consequently, he certainly and quite rightly shifts the center of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to the relationship between philosophy and politics, or between the philosopher and the prophet, but he also fails to address the political responsibility of the philosopher. Zarathustra’s, and perhaps Nietzsche’s, main worry is that he will be misunderstood (coupled with the possible consequences of such a misunderstanding). Many of Zarathustra’s philosophical insights originate in precisely this worry. Meier, though, has a tendency to ask such questions without ever really following up in any great detail. This is perhaps not surprising, given that his interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra follows the model of a close reading that reformulates, and often also paraphrases, Nietzsche’s text, which does not always allow for a critical take on the issues at hand. As a close reading, Meier’s interpretation also consciously refrains from any engagement with relevant research literature—an approach that might be Straussian in spirit but that is detrimental to any critical perspective. The difference between the real Nietzsche, the imaginary Zarathustra, and Meier as an ideal reader seems to evaporate at times, and such an approach tends to leave other readers somewhat empty handed.