In his 1967 essay, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” Martin Heidegger explores the ways in which “the speaker Zarathustra is an ‘advocate’—a Fürsprecher.” Yet Heidegger, like most of the scholars who sought to identify the role of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, never bothered to examine who Zarathustra was in the first place. A deeper examination of this question reveals not only why the founder of Zoroastrianism was not an accidental choice, but the ways in which the problems of representation, advocacy, and “Fürsprache” are central to the construction of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). To what extent does Nietzsche speak for Zarathustra, or is it Zarathustra who speaks for Nietzsche? The question of representation is imbricated with Zarathustra’s own apparent role as a “mouthpiece and advocate” [Mundstück und Fürsprecher] in the book (Nietzsche 2006, 110).
This paper offers another answer to the question of “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” by examining the text on two levels: 1) as a radical philosophical search for origins that breaks with classical antiquity and 2) against the backdrop of the growing scholarship on Indo-Iranian philology and the Avesta. New ways of rethinking the rhetorical, classical concept of advocacy [Fürsprache] can help us disentangle some of the thorny issues of representation in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that have thus far been overlooked in the Nietzsche scholarship. Part one of this paper situates Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the late-nineteenth-century scholarly discourses of philology and Orientalism, while part two examines the way Zarathustra’s role as advocate reframes broader questions of appropriation and representation raised by the traditions of rhetoric and postcolonial theory.
