The Mask of Enlightenment; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Second Edition

This landmark study is a detailed textual and thematic analysis of one of Nietzsche's most important but least understood works. Stanley Rosen argues that inZarathustraNietzschelays the groundwork for philosophical and political revolution, proposing a change in humanity's condition that would be achieved by eliminating the decadent existing race and breeding a new race to take its place. Rosen discusses Nietzsche's systematically duplicitous rhetoric of esoteric messages inZarathustra,and he places the book in the contexts of Greek, Christian, Enlightenment, and postmodernist thought.

Stanley Rosen is Border Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at Boston University.