"Thus spoke Zarathustra" is Friedrich
Nietzsche's incomprehensible magnum opus. Everyone's heard of it, few have read
it. I readily admit that I haven't read all of it myself either!
The work is a celebration of individualism, atheism, the zest for life, but also transformation through suffering. Zarathustra, acting as Nietzsche's mouthpiece, believes that man must be overcome in favour of the Superman. Soon, the Great Noontide will break upon the world, bringing the Superman with it.
What struck me when I tried to read "Also sprach Zarathustra", was the strongly religious tenor of this supposedly atheist work. Is it really a co-incidence that Nietzsche chose an ancient prophet as his mouthpiece? The Superman is a superhuman creator of new values, morals and law-tablets. A god, perhaps? Christians would see him as the Anti-Christ. And yet, it seems as if Nietzsche, somewhere deep inside, was longing for something divine. What is the "eternal return" if not re-incarnation, new heavens and a new Earth? Interestingly, the new religious movement of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky is to some extent inspired by both Nietzsche and Buddhism, although they seem to have lost the former's desperate enthusiasm for life.
And what are we to make of this dramatic poem, the high point of the entire work: "O Man! Attend! What does deep midnight's voice contend? I slept my sleep and now I awake at dreaming's end: the world is deep, deeper than day can comprehend. Deep is its woe, Joy - deeper than heart's agony: Woe says: Fade! Go! But all joy wants eternity, wants deep, deep, deep eternity!"
Nietzsche may have been the Anti-Christ, but he was an anti-christ crying for God.
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