Mentally disorientated and unselfish

Nietzsche’s philosophy builds upon equality and people being unselfish and true to one another. He says that philosophers serves people’s superstitious ideas, and not the truth, which seems to annoy him a bit since the truth, for him, seems to be one of the most important building parts to get the society to work. I do agree with this, look at a relationship between man and women, a work place – boss and employee, a family – parents and kids; if the opposites in these relationships are not true to each other it will not work out in the long run and chaos will develop from something that should be a base in your life.

An action is good when it is unselfish. (p119)

Nietzsche’s theories criticise many parts of the human’s life and also the ways human beings choose to live their lives. He says, for example, that religion – Christianity – is something people use to comfort themselves, so he did not actually criticise Christ but the believers and the beliefs. He also criticised the different morals people seemed to base on an abstraction. Nietzsche was a person hard to please; he found negative angels too many aspects of society and his fellow citizens and their ways of believing and moralising their children. But in all honesty I agree with his theories, to some extent. Society is still today not perfect, and will never be, but I think that if higher authorities together with the citizens in their country could cooperate in a friendly, more equal (as in power etcetera) way, less people would probably suffer from less wealthy conditions and starvation – but on the other side of the coin, the wealthy people ruling and deciding over our nations, would probably lose out on quite a bit of their fortune and fame – and I am not sure they would be willing to do this... People with power and money are, in my opinion, far too greedy and selfish. As Nietzsche believes; human civilisation can destroy itself.

Towards the end of Nietzsche’s life, he suffered from mental illnesses, and he died in 1900. Many philosophers have unfortunately ended up suffering from mental problems, whether this is from the philosophy in itself or due to other reasons, I do not know – but I can imagine myself ending up mentally disturbed if I kept philosophising for too long. I better just stick to the facts and build up a boring life based on knowledge and existing facts that I can feel, touch, see and eat.

More information about Nietzsche, his life and his literature can be found here - do pay a visit, it is actually quite interesting and it makes things a bit easier to understand!

Zarathustra has once again spoken

Zarathustra lived on his own for ten years in the mountains where he listened to the trees and learnt the ways of the nature. When leaving to get back to the civilization again, he meets saints on the way and they recall who Zarathustra once was, and who he has changed to become during the years in exile. During this time Zarathustra came to believe in his own ‘God’, which he called Superman – as he did believe that God, as we know him from Christianity, is dead. But Superman is the purpose of the world, the meaning of life and the reason why we are all alive.

‘I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman’ (p45)

We follow Zarathustra’s journey as he travels from village to village to spread his ideas and theories about everything you can ever imagine – and a few of them does not make sense at all to me as they are very much expressed in a philosophical way, which to me equals confused and complicated. He expresses a lot of thoughts on how the body and the soul are not necessarily connected, instead the soul is just a separate part inside your body but the two of them do not cooperate in the way we might think they do. Further on, Zarathustra speaks of the Ego – the great contempt of man – and how it rules our Self through our different senses, through passion and joy, through love and hate and so on.

‘There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness’ (p68)

Zarathustra speaks of the state as the coldest of all cold monsters, and how it seems to turn everything into sickness and tragedy that it touches. He speaks about your neighbours as poisonous flies. He speaks of the filthiness that exists at the bottom of a man’s soul – because the only thing they seem to find satisfying here on earth is sex with a woman. He believes that a slave, a tyrant and neither a woman can be a man’s friend for the reasons that a slave cannot be a friend, a tyrant cannot have a friend and a woman can do nothing else than love, not be a friend.

‘If I wanted to shake this tree with my hands I should be unable to do it. But the wind, which we cannot see, torments it and bends it where it wishes. It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst’ (p69)