Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.

There is a great deal of Nietzsche that I agree with, and hoards with which I vehemently do not. I've been accumulating quotes of his for five years now, quotes whose inherent lack of context made me like him more than I do now. I still love many of his phrases as much as I did before, but if we ever met, we would not like each other at all.

Despite that muddle, I am grateful that I came across his words while I was younger and in the full throes of depression, cynicism, and a frighteningly homicidal brand of solipsism. I didn't know the definition of that last word back then, but I was in desperate need of something show more both horribly dismal and blindingly bright, a joy that did not require avoidance of despair but looked it full in the face. The often contextualized and paraphrased Nietzsche with atheism, nihilism, and yet fierce and glorious fervor for the future seemed perfect back then.

To some extent, he's still perfect, but only in bits and pieces. The call for solitude and individualism is as refreshing as ever, the atheism is still in line with my sensibilities, and the breathtaking vaults and shuddering descents carried my heart along with them. However. While I did indeed run across his cry for the Superman, even going so far as to take to heart his 'Man is something that shall be over come,' I paid as much mind to his Superman as concerned my younger self's view of the world and the people in it as utterly worthless. Not until this reading did I fully realize Nietzsche's meaning; being as interested in social justice and, well, female as I am, there was little chance of me passing up all that elitism (and classism?) and condemnation of empathy and rapier dashes of virulent misogyny.

It's strange, though. Perhaps it is a sign of just how much time I spent mooning after Nietzsche, back when I took him in small doses, but I am especially conscious of the time period in which he wrote this. His decrying of the "mob" echoes my own views regarding oppressive ideologies, and I have to wonder how much of his rampant condemnation of popular mentality fell upon the people rather than the ideas they lived by. As for his abysmal portrayal of women, who knows what a healthy dose of feminism and exposure to such awesome thinkers as [a:Simone de Beauvoir|5548|Simone de Beauvoir|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1382722690p2/5548.jpg], [a:Hannah Arendt|12806|Hannah Arendt|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1222711954p2/12806.jpg], and so many others would have accomplished. Probably gotten rid of his 'creator's pregnancy' conceit (if you're going to slander, Nietzsche, back off from the ridiculously disproportionate appropriation please), if nothing else. Also, there is the matter of his one serious attempt at heterosexual love having been rejected right around the time of composition of this piece. It doesn't excuse him at all, but it does explain his vitriol some.

All of that above is wishful thinking, of course, but seeing as this is the enigmatic rhapsodizer on the subject of wishful thinking, it's more than merited. For all of Nietzsche's aggravating inegalitarianism, he captured the rapid fire oscillation between top of the world and descent into hell so perfectly, so utterly, and then crafted with it a raison d'être both deathly serious and blissfully rapturous. There's no small amount of nihilism in his dismissal of everything solid, everyone stationary, everything decrepit and outdated and finally after long last proved false, but there's a spitfire life to it that laughs at self-serving pandering and loves chaotic progress that I myself cannot forbear from adoring and making my own.

'This - is now my way: where is yours?' Thus I answered those who asked me 'the way'. For the way - does not exist!

I shall keep this in mind, Nietzsche, if nothing else. Not all of what your Zarathustra spoke rings true to me, but you are one of the few who favored freedom over advice. For that, I am in your debt.

I am of today and of the has-been (he said then); but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and of the day-after-tomorrow and of the shall-be.

P.S. This particular edition was great. I have no clue about the quality of the translation, but the introduction and endnotes, endnotes that included all those untranslateable bits with as much explanation as possible, were indispensable. show less

Friedrich Unchained

He was a very kind man. He loved people. He worked as an executioner.
Three times a week he chopped off heads of kings and madmen, nobles and common folk.
Every swing of his axe lit a warm smile on his face, brought a spark of joy into his heart.
He was happy not for himself, not for a perfectly executed job.
His joy was for the sake of those he forever cured from suffering.
The axe in his hands was a magic wand granting a gift of heaven.
It only took one proper swing...

He lifted heavy load off the shoulders of tormented people,
He released the tired souls breaking up the ugly cells that contained them.
Finding freedom each soul floated up, uncertain at first,
And then with an increasing confidence soared towards that show more obvious goal hidden from view by the sun.

There came a day when he realized how deeply deluded he was!
Shedding bitter tears, forgetting the joyful flight of the soul of a monarch decapitated just now,
He was looking at the people in the crowd,
People burning in the slow fires of hell and not knowing an easy way out,
People too numerous to pass through the narrow door that he had a power to open for them.

With an incredible dedication and a patience of an angel
He went on to perform his duty stepping off his trusted scaffold.
And in front of everyone he would swing open the doors of heaven,
And from each pair of shoulders he would lift a heavy burden,
And every inch of mournfully black soil he would paint a festive color of red. show less

I should preface this by saying I bought this book when I was sixteen, as Nietzsche is the prototypical philosopher for the kind of sixteen-year-old I was. The book was even marked with a yellow 'late slip' from high school. I was frequently late or absent from class and had a wealth of these very convenient bookmarks, and one ended up in the preface of this work because, you see, I didn't read this when I was sixteen (going on seventeen) as my mental state became too emotionally tumultuous for reading. In retrospect, this is entirely apt.

What strikes me about Nietzsche's fame in the canon of Western philosophy is that he's such an anomaly. This is not a book of Reason. This is not a book of Logic. There is nothing Rational here. Of show more course, that is what's best about it. It's the thing that draws those sixteen-year-olds in to Nietszche in particular. For him, there's no separation between intellect and passion. They derive from the same source, his intellectual reactions are also aesthetic and emotional and spiritual. (So spiritual. I definitely would not have understood at sixteen that Nietzsche could be so anti-athiestical. I would have been too dedicated to my own atheism to make sense of it.) But the notion that an idea can be repulsive or an experience of intense pleasure, the way he feels ideas, so strongly, his hypersensitivity to this-- there's still something for me in that.

My teenage self wouldn't have hesitated to give this book five stars, because it's an Important Book and Nietzsche deserves No Less and I probably would have missed everything except that thing about cunning sails upon dreadful seas. My two-star rating is mostly because this book didn't stir me the way I had imagined, because it doesn't change me, because I have no quick desire to read it again. show less

"I am a railing beside the stream: he who can grasp me, let him grasp me! I am not, however, your crutch. Thus spoke Zarathustra." (pg. 67)

This is my first real encounter with Nietzsche (after a slight collection of his aphorisms a few years ago), and a strange but compelling one. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a peculiar mix of philosophy and narrative and poetry, and the reader tries to grasp it like wild horses. You don't know which hat to put on: Your rational one to deal with the philosophy? Your literary one to deal with the narrative? Or do you just open up and see what concepts rest with your poetic soul?

Regardless of which approach you take as you try to navigate this mercurial book, you soon find that Nietzsche's ideas are worth show more contending with. He's unfairly maligned nowadays; in part for his eccentric and animated writing, which stands in contrast to the more sober conventions of philosophy, and in part for his perceived baggage. His concepts of nihilism, the Ubermensch and the 'will to power' were all corrupted by the Nazis, a fact which is particularly unfortunate when you consider that Nietzsche personally opposed the sort of anti-Semitism and militarism that they used to leech onto his ideas.

Nevertheless, this is dangerous thought, and when reading it you can easily see where and how the Nazis appropriated and corrupted it. But, with an open and honest read, you can also just as easily see how superior and distinct Nietzsche's real ideas were. Not only in some telling specifics ("the state is the coldest of all cold monsters" (pg. 75)), but in the general warp and weft of the text. He acknowledges the danger in the philosophy as essentially the danger in man: "Now it is with men as with this tree. The more it wants to rise into the heights and the light, the more determinedly do its roots strive earthwards, downwards, into the darkness, into the depths – into evil" (pg. 69). His famous diagnosis of the death of God is expanded upon in this book, and his remedy is the eventual rise of an Ubermensch, a hyper-individualistic 'overman' or 'superman', who will break the ossified order of societal values and create his own. If this seems too romantic or bombastic to a cynical modern reader, it must be qualified that Nietzsche sees it as a torrid struggle of ego-death and rebirth ("man is a bridge and not a goal" (pg. 215)) rather than a glorious charge.

Regardless of whether you come to agree with them, Nietzsche's ideas here are spectacular and stimulating. Sometimes you don't necessarily want to wrangle these wild horses, but just watch them buck majestically. But even more than its ideas, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is provocative in its writing. The book is a forceful jeremiad, aping the tones of the Bible to produce a genuinely entertaining display of thought. In contrast to the sober conventional philosophy I mentioned above, Nietzsche is surprisingly readable. Lines such as "we have made weary fire itself. All our wells have dried up, even the sea has receded" (pg. 156) carry power on a poetic level, even if the reader's philosophical thoughts may stray.

It does get a bit overblown at times, and the ending didn't convince me of Nietzsche's goal. I lost the thread of argument, and Zarathustra's final revelatory change seemed abrupt. But by that point, it didn't matter; I was enjoying Nietzsche's singular blend of philosophised storytelling too much. It's a novel approach to getting one's ideas across, and it's a shame we don't seem to have a place for writing like this anymore.

Nietzsche's 'death of God' diagnosis of the modern world was on the nose, but in doing so he also diagnosed his own eclipse. "Everything speaks, everything is unheard. One may ring in one's wisdom with bells – the shopkeeper in the market-place will out-ring it with pennies... Nothing falls any longer into deep wells" (pp203-4). We're not approaching a Nietzschean overman anymore (if indeed we ever were). Instead, writers this bold have been driven to extinction. There are higher mountains buried under ocean than Everest or any other to be found on land. But when Nietzsche writes that Zarathustra is sitting upon "high masts of knowledge", "a little light, to be sure, but yet a great comfort to castaway sailors and the shipwrecked" (pg. 213), there may be some consolation to be drawn. The petty sea will swallow many, but perhaps some readers will continue to land on these shores. show less

I can never make up my mind about Nietzsche. Is he a genius or a nitwit? Is he even, in the end, anything that can reasonably be called a "philosopher"?

My personal answer to the first question is (as you might have predicted) "both!" and to the second question ... well ... I am not even competent to answer this for myself, because my reading in philosophy has been somewhere between desultory and selective. My impression is that if you toss Nietzsche from the philosophical canon, you'd have to toss Kierkegaard as well, but that's based on very minimal experience with the great Dane.

The present book will not clear up either question for anyone -- I don't think, anyway. Even the translator admits that, in the end, Nietzsche really does go show more on and on and ... and one of the confusing things for me is that his ideas, such as they are, are pretty easy to summarize -- it's easy to give a capsule response to the question "what is the Overman," so one wonders why all these things, all these parables and stories that range from interesting to incredibly annoying, are necessary.

I don't think they are. I'm not going to condemn Nietzsche as a valueless writer, but I do think he's been over-rated. I think of him as more of a creative artist than as a rigorous thinker (I think of someone like Derrida, who in most ways couldn't be more different from Nietzsche, in the same way) ... a sort of cultural critic on steroids.

I can only take this book in snips and snaps. Reading much of it at once just makes me shift in my seat and anxious to go watch my cat be a loaf ... because I ultimately learn more from watching my cat be a loaf.

Your mileage, OF COURSE, may vary. show less

Zarathustra, regarded as a moralist more than he would the Zoroastrian, sees the folly in his defining of 'good' and 'evil' and comes to the understanding that the invocation of such (general) terms has been reductive in the seeking of a meaningful world. Redefining for himself (and for those who care to listen) the old world's mistakes in virtue, he teaches the importance of living true to one's will and to be critical of all will (including one's own!), never silent. He identifies the missteps of man and those who have lain the uneven ground to cause such missteps (including himself forevermore, "as that is how [his] will would have it"). The book is split into four parts, beginning with the "going-down." The going-down is his process show more of stating/observing 'well-intentioned' and observed/understood beliefs and breaking them apart. In the ascent to his peak once more, he tests his own will, breaking himself apart likewise. Part four was a perfect conclusion to the whole piece, personifying the flaws of his will and reconciling with them.

It is a greatly humorous story, though the humor is found in his own contradiction (which is rewarding for the reader, whereupon they see him confronted with these contradictions in part four, or all at once). Contradictions they may be, Nietzsche speaks a real wisdom through the character(s), that these contradictions may be Zarathustra's contradictions as much as they would be ours. I'm sure much more of the humor is found in the German book, as I'm sure the translation misses the mark on every clever jest. If you can read in German, I'd suggest doing that, as even the English version carries much wordplay (lots of allegory).

One might be adverse to consider Nietzsche's ire for moralism, but Zarathustra and his seeking of the 'will to power' in people of the world is more thoughtful than the mere 'disregard of moral tact' that you'd likely gather from a quick skim of an overview. Define your own goodness, not one writ in law or ancient tenets. Of The Spirit of Heaviness in part three is a good one.

I had never defined my philosophical views in any vast way, nor was I content to consign myself to one. I read some Camus and Sartre, but not much more than them, and if I did, it left no lasting impression. This was my first look into Nietzsche, while I am now told that this was a poorly-researched first choice. I didn't have a reason for reading it, I guess I was just drawn to the name of the book. Truthfully, it was an inspirational read. I wrote this review because I have been thinking about this book for the past year, and while it was nothing profound, it affirmed something to me that I always thought (and continues to change).

The only 'good' and 'evil' that exists comes from our own personal 'goods' and 'evils' in the present. Love and be loved. Do not revere nor fear death. Save your fight for the worthier enemy. Become as children not for a heaven up there, but a heaven down here. Many more lessons all throughout. Considering the importance he places on divining one's own goodness (through your own self), I'm sure many can interpret plenty of different goods out of it- since it's coming from you. Do your good and condemn your evils worth condemning- thunderously, if you could! Live for your self selflessly! show less

Regardless of one's opinion of Nietzsche or his philosophical system (if he truly can be said to have one; at least a coherent one), this is a great piece of literature. As translator R. J. Hollingdale says in his introduction, Nietzsche "feels his thoughts" (12). This inseparable coupling of emotion and intellect (chaos?) give birth to the "dancing star" that is Nietzsche's writing. I remember when I went from reading Plato and Aristotle and Hume and Reid and Kant to reading my first bit of Nietzsche--I was floored that philosophy could be written in such a dazzling way, even if I cannot totally get on board with all the iconoclasticism present in his works. In this book as in others, one gets a sense of the intensity and urgency with show more which Nietzsche wants to take humanity beyond its hitherto perceived limits. He takes pains to trace our values and beliefs back to, "simply," a will to power. And then he beckons is to hardness this innate will to power and march into the metamorphosis of the Übermensch (translated as Superman in this edition). show less