Was that—life Very well! Once more!

“Was that—life? Very well! Once more!” is an expression of hard-won affirmation spoken by the Ugliest Man near midnight in Part Four of Zarathustra. After a day with Zarathustra has taught him to love the earth, he addresses death with a question that no longer expresses disgust or regret: whatever life has been, he is ready to affirm it and meet it again. The line gives a personal, dramatic voice to the work’s concluding affirmation of eternal recurrence.

Form and Dramatic Setting

The expression appears in the closing movement of Part Four, when Zarathustra leads the Ugliest Man outside to see the moon and the waterfalls beside the cave. The two stand with the other Higher Men in silence, comforted by their earthly surroundings. In this quiet aftermath, the Ugliest Man breaks the silence with a clear question that moves the listeners. His speech gives the phrase its setting: it is not an abstract maxim delivered at a distance from experience, but the culmination of a day that has altered his relation to life.

The wording turns on a reversal. “Was that – life?” looks back over a life as though testing whether it could deserve affirmation; “Very well! Once more!” answers by accepting its repetition. The passage makes the question itself an act of welcome rather than a request for reassurance. The Ugliest Man first says he is content, for the first time, to have lived his whole life; he then insists that a single festival with Zarathustra has taught him to love the earth. The phrase carries both claims into his imagined address to death.

The Ugliest Man’s Affirmation

The Ugliest Man presents the day with Zarathustra as enough to change how he understands his entire past. His testimony does not claim that his life has been painless or that every part of it was good. Instead, he says that the experience has made him content to have lived it. The weight of “Once more!” lies in this willingness to affirm a life as a whole, not merely to preserve one agreeable moment.

He first speaks of saying the words to death himself, then turns the thought into a question for his assembled friends, asking whether they too will answer death in the same way. That change makes the phrase more than a private declaration: it invites the Higher Men to share an affirmation of earthly life. The response is immediate. They become conscious of their transformation and recovery, recognize Zarathustra as the one who gave them these things, and approach him with thanks and affection. The old prophet dances, having renounced his weariness; reports that the ass also danced are presented with an explicit qualification, while the account insists that stranger marvels occurred regardless.

Relation to the Superman and Eternal Recurrence

The phrase echoes the larger movement of Zarathustra’s teaching: creatures have created something beyond themselves, and humanity, too, is presented as something to be overcome rather than a final destination. In the early address at The Market-place, Zarathustra contrasts the ape as a laughing-stock or embarrassment to human beings with the way humanity may appear to the Superman. The contrast places human beings between what they have been and what they might become. In Part Four, the Ugliest Man’s affirmation gives that forward movement a complementary form: the past life, too, can be accepted rather than merely rejected.

The commentary on Part Four identifies eternal recurrence as a theme that remains in the background but emerges at the conclusion in its most sonorous and ecstatic affirmation. The Ugliest Man’s proposed answer to death makes that affirmation intimate and dramatic. Instead of discussing recurrence as a doctrine, he tests it in the first person of lived experience: if life is to return, he is prepared to say yes to it again. The line’s force comes from joining the possibility of repetition to the newly discovered worth of earthly life.

Nietzsche’s Use of Zarathustra

The expression also belongs to a work whose name Nietzsche explained through a reversal of moral history. Friedrich Nietzsche describes the historical Zarathustra as the first to make the struggle between good and evil the governing principle of things, thereby making morality a metaphysical order. Because Zarathustra created what Nietzsche calls this fateful error, Nietzsche says, he must also be the first to recognize it; truthfulness becomes the means by which morality overcomes itself.

That account sharpens the significance of the closing affirmation. The Ugliest Man’s response to death does not restore an otherworldly judgment of life; it declares the earth worth living on. In the surrounding scene, this recognition changes the Higher Men’s bearing: they discover that they have recovered and been transformed, and their response to Zarathustra is bodily as well as verbal. The phrase therefore closes its arc not as a detached slogan but as an utterance that helps turn a gathering of weary figures toward renewed affirmation.