Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzche

One of the greatest works of philosophy since the Enlightenment, Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is at once lighthearted and dark, simple and endlessly complex, subtle and obvious. I offer no pretense that I understood 1/10 of what is most likely actually going on - Nietzche's subtitle hints at his works opacity: a book for all and none. Nietzche's work is often cloaked in the long history of religion and philosophy, at times he is clearly answering others while at other times thinking only on his own. That the work combines  the bare-bones approaches of many eastern philosophical tales with the highest longings of western philosophers does little to help the reader make sense of all that is going on.

Having said all that, the work is certainly a classic, infectiously easy to read and thoroughly thought-provoking and enjoyable. Set against our modern times Nietzsche is saying nothing terribly novel, set against his predecessors he is saying much indeed. Removing man's best spirit from the immortal world beyond - take that Plato - Nietzsche finds his greatest world all around him. Separating aspects of the spirit from the "I" (or transcendental ego) Zarathustra, the protagonist and subject of this bildungsroman, refuses to separate the good life from the world he inhabits. For him this means a retreat from the maddening crowd of the marketplace, to spaces of seclusion and thought. His goal is to find his own place within the eternal recurrence of time and truly understand the ensnaredness, the entangledness of all things. Zarathustra claims that, at least for him, this is impossible in society, as he is greatly weighed down by the leveling proclivities of men - what he calls gravity.

Much of what Zarathustra finds to be crucial to his happiness could read as a very eastern rebuttal to western philosophy.


"Everything goes, everything returns; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again, the year of being runs eternally."


This can be read in Zarathustra's constant searching, and the sense that the path itself, or the world, is really where the journey's value lies. While much of this may seem like half-baked philosophizing, the reason that such ideas gained a foothold in the western world is precisely because of Nietzche's work. In effect we are seeing the original upon which much of twentieth century western philosophy would build itself. Moving the world of western men away from lofty goals of another plane, and doing away with rigid ideologies that are meant to guide everyone without recourse to circumstance, Nietzche's thought, redefines our relationship to  the society around us. Have we truly grappled with the questions Nietzche posits? To what extent have we envisioned a philosophy for each of us?