Thus Spake Zarathustra : Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spake Zarathustra, became for me one of the books with whom I cannot avoid loving ever since I read it. It is the masterpiece of Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher (1844-1900), was appointed professor of classical philology at the university of Basel in 1869. Thus Spake Zarathustra is the title by which Nietzsche is popularly known, the work's literary genre has placed a considerable obstacles in the path of it's author's reception as a serious philosopher. However, in Nietzsche's case, to question whether his writings are artistic or philosophical is profoundly misleading.

In Thus spake Zarathustra Nietzsche rejects the Christian ideas of God in favour of the superior powers of the superman. This superman would be any man who throws off the shackles of religion (in this case Christianity, but relevant to any religion conforming society) and creates his own values. Only under heavy distortions allows it to appear to fit in with the ideals of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich movement. It may see a much purer model in the future, where the mass realisation - God is dead or more accurately never alive in the first place and man takes full control. Here man may use scientific knowledge such as genetics engineering combined with spiritual knowledge through meditative techniques to evolve to a vastly superior being.

Though Nietzsche once lamented that he wrote rather than sang, for most of his creative life there was never any rigid distinction between the literary and philosophical dimensions of thinking. In Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche allows his imagination full rein. To quibble about the philosophical or literary status of the text is foolish. What matters is the subject matter of the endeavour rather than its formal idiom. There is no doubt that Thus Spake Zarathustra was written by Nietzsche as if he were possessed by a tormented and tormenting muse.

He writes that when Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and went to the mountains for the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude. He came down ten years later and met and old man to whom he said, ' dont you know that the god is dead '. And from here starts the journey of Zarathustra where he meets many persons whom he discourses.

I would like to quote an elegant remark of AJ about Nietzsche, ' Nietzsche, for me draws very blur and thin line between reason and insanity. '

But Nietzsche, for me, was an unfortunate fellow. He knew everything about the superman but never became one. He filled his mind with so much questions but failed to find the answer. He lived the last ten years of life in a mental asylum and died in 1900 in a very desperate manner.

But he left his legacy in the shape of Thus spake Zarathustra.

This book, I love a lot.