The Mask of Enlightenment

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