Nietzsche’s Leib: A Glance at Zarathustra

Abstract

The essay is a close reading of Nietzsche’s view on the body in his famous Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The essay seeks to show that in his Zarathustra, Nietzsche attempts a philosophy of the body that looks like an inversion of Plato’s view on the soul from his Phaedo. At a certain point in the discussion it will become obvious that Nietzsche doesn’t simply go for a reversal of Plato’s stance: he attempts more, a whole new, “body-centered”, philosophy. The paper will try to identify and describe three main clusters of concepts (soul-body, spirit-body, body-earth-life) around which Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body in Zarathustra appears to take shape.

Keywords: body, soul, Plato, spirit, Zarathustra