Thursday 18 November 2010

HCJ - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

After being told there are some questionable blogs and suspicions of plagiarism I have decided to re-write my recent HCJ seminar blogs to avoid any errors or mistakes I may or may not have made. I will attach any sources I use as references at the bottom of the blog.

This is my new blog on Frederick Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"........

Frederick Nietzsche was one of the most inspiring philosophers of the 19th century. His works had a huge impact and largely widespread in the 20th century. However, understanding his writings is rather complex.

Nietzsche believed in the time of modern movements, people begun to break away from the former social boundaries. Before hand society had been under severe difficulties from the Church, and hence Nietzsche along with other major modernists believed society to be weak. Nietzsche firmly believed the only way to become greater was to look into your own being and develop yourself.

Nietzsche hated his peers and one who were superior to him because they had something which he did not. He believed Christianity gave people a lie. The lie being that the belief in their book would not give them any kind of reward. Yet, to the majority, the religion was simply a way of being involved in something that they believed would benefit them before the end.

Nietzsche creates a Zarathustra who changes traditional values and morality. He says Zarathustra is the first immoralist, or in fact he himself is the first immoralist but uses Zarathustra as a reason to express his own ideas.
He believes that all values come from our own creations and we are, in turn, responsible for creating the high-values and, more importantly, living up to them.

The book itself begins with Zarathustra coming down from the mountains after 10 years away from society. He wants to teach society about the overman and that the overman is the meaning of the world, and that society is nothing more than just a mere connection between animals and the overman. He goes on to say the overman is someone who creates his own values and lives up to them, linking back to the point I made earlier in this blog. Hardly anybody listens to Zarathustra apart from a tightrope walker who has fallen. The walker eventually dies and after his first day Zarathustra is disappointed by his failure to change, what he calls, the “herd of people”.

In the book, Zarathustra climbed a mountain. I believe that Zarathustra himself sees himself as some kind of overman because it could be argued the path to the overman is similar to climbing a mountain, a mountain in which Zarathustra had occupied for 10 years. Nietzsche believes the path to the superman is a struggle and one of the desires to complete this path is to offer a lot of sacrifice. This is one of the key themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Zarathustra also encourages the famous phrase, one which Nietzsche was keen on – “God is dead”

Zarathustra lectures about the overman, a figure who has moved past the good and evil. He has embraced the doctrine, which is the eternal recurrence. Referring back to my earlier comment about Zarathustra becoming an overman, this is not really true until the end when Zarathustra embraces the doctrine himself.

Nietzsche is very critical of Christianity in the book. He compares the Christian values to the successes of the overman, and says that what the overman has accomplished is always better than the values of the religion. Zarathustra believes anybody who is strong enough to become an overman will struggle in life, and sacrifice a lot. However, those who are not strong enough will turn to religion, nationalism or other means of belief.

The doctrine of eternal recurrence is important in the book because Zarathustra teaches new men on the path to the overman because he cannot deal with the idea of there being a world with no improvement or development. He believes after his time passes, new teachers will evolve and his work will not go unnoticed upon the world.

The overman (in a nutshell) is mankind’s main aim. The overman is somebody who only follows the values he sets himself, and even though Zarathustra could be seen as an overman, he believes we have not yet created one, and that the creation of an overman would give substance to the society we inhabit.

Relevant Sources
http://praxeology.net/zara.htm
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra

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