When Friedrich Nietzsche published THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA in 1883, his readers did not know exactly what to make of it. It seemed to be a hybrid of philosophy and literature, both of which were presented in a further hybrid of prose fiction, biblical parody, and even poetry. It did not sell well--at least at first, but before too many years had passed his readers acknowledged it as his masterpiece. Its influence on future writers and intellectuals--like Shaw, Mencken, Dreiser, London, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Derrida and others--has been unmistakable. Its basic plot--if one may call it that--relates to a man called Zarathustra who has spent the last ten years in seclusion meditating atop a mountain. He descends so that he may impart his accumulated wisdom to the world of ordinary folk. It is the content and mode of his interactions with his listeners that form the structure of the book.
In the book's four sections, Nietzsche through Zarathustra discusses, relates, and enlarges upon such diverse topics as the death of God, the Will to Power, the Ubermensch ("Superman" or Overman), the revaluation of values, and the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In Nietzsche's mind, these topics are not so divergent at all. At various points they merge, overlap, and interweave into a tapestry that forms the basis of Nietzsche's essential world view that for far too long the human species has been running downhill since the classical Greeks and Romans. Humanity as he saw it then was badly in the need to regenerate itself into a higher order of being--the Ubermensch. THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA is the working out of this transition between homo sapiens and homo superior.
When Zarathustra descends from the mountain top to begin Part I, he declares that God is dead. But he does not mean that he is expressing some new form of atheism. Rather, he suggests that whatever God may have been in the past or what kind of support He may have once provided, man now must not rely on any hope of divine intervention. Thus, the only salvation that man can expect must be from within himself. Man himself is presented as a species in progress. The future man which Zarathustra calls the Overman is one that must purposefully be bred into existence. The Overman is the hope of present day man: "I teach you the overman," Zarathustra exclaims. "Man is something that shall be overcome."
In Part II, Nietzsche elaborates on the will to power. This "will" is a direct result of man's realization that with the death of God and the resulting requirement that man must look only within himself for support that man must exercise his will over himself. There is an unfortunate current belief that Nietzsche meant "will" only in the context of dominion over others, but for him, the ability of the Overman to control his own base passions was the key distinction between the exalted self of the future Ubermensch and the lowly rabble that he despised.
The third part introduces a full explanation of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche believed that this universe was one marked by an inbuilt lack of order, structure, and design, thus positing that man himself is neither good nor evil. In fact man is doomed or fated to relive each moment of existence in a cycle with no beginning or ending. And what keeps getting repeated is everything--matters of the highest import, of the lowest and all else in between. It then becomes incumbent for all human beings to act as if they are worthy to relive each moment of repeated life. It follows that this entire theory implies that humanity thereby affirms the worth of its collective existence.
The fourth and final part emphasizes Nietzsche's belief in the wholeness of his entire philosophy. One cannot accept this part or that part and reject some other part. For man even to hope to make the transition from his current lowly state of bovine existence to the higher realm of the Overman, he must prove worthy by acknowledging that the death of God is a brutal necessity to spur him on to bravery, independence, and unyielding will. The very end of the book is a stark reminder that in the symbol of the donkey god man no longer needs the falsely comforting illusion that he needs an omnipotent deity to control his destiny. The Nietzsche of popular culture may believe in the need for a dominant and superior mind as charged, but the Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi is simply unwarranted.
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Described as “like new” when it’s being sold as used for the second time
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2020
Honestly feels like a scam because I paid more than the original price marked on the back of the book while it’s clearly being sold for the second time as used judging from the tags. Condition okay but definitely not “like new” as described.
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2020
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