Nietzsche - simples!

I have definitely not found Nietzsche easy bed time literature, and I cannot say that I have enjoyed reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But what I can say is that through this intense week when my life seem to have been circulating and focusing on Nietzsche, and nothing else, I have started to realise that I begin to understand his ways of thinking and philosophising, his way of connecting one element in life with another to reach his final ideas... But he is still one very complicated man. And no matter what, I'm sure he always will be.

But, thankfully, my tutor Chris Horrie has simplified Nietzsche and his works for us in his blog, and if you have tried to read my previous blog posts and still cannot understand nothing; do have a quick read on his blog.

Thanks Chris!

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)

God is dead - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche abandoned religious believes at an early age, and replaced it with ‘freelancing philosophy’. His ideas were, as many philosophers, very complicated and revolved around common philosophical topics, such as whether the truth is actually discoverable, the different types of errors mankind goes through throughout their life and how they manage, or more likely not manage, to correct these errors. Nietzsche is a nihilist, just like Kierkegaard, which means that he believes that “life is without objective meaning, purpose or intrinsic value”. He was very fond of sexual relationships and over the years he seemed to have one too many humiliating affairs. Nietzsche explains fear as the feeling of abscence of power.

What is truth?

Meaning of life?

In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

Goethe once wrote an essay on Winckelmann, and this came to be kind of the motto of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "Zarathustra is the founder of of the ancient Persian religion" (p30) and his religion is basically built on conflicts between the Gods of good and light, and the Gods of darkness and evil. Even though the book is kind of loose with no real storyline as we are used to in novels written today, there is still something similar to a plot. Through the four different parts of this book his message about how man is something that must be overcome.

This is just a short summary of what the book is about, what I have managed to find out about it from reading the introduction, different reviews and blogs on the internet and also by talking and philosophising with friends about his ideas and work. I can't say I am more enlightened in the different topics being discussed in the book, but I do now have a better understanding of the various aspects of philosopy from a nihilists point of view - just like I got a wider understanding on architecture from reading From Bauhaus to Our House (see previous blog post) than I would have had about architecture if not reading it. The more time I spend reading works written by well known philosophers, the more knowledge I gain - but at the same time, I also seem to confuse myself even more, as new theories and ideas appear in my head.