Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for Everyone and No One
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche’s most accessible and influential philosophical work, misquoted, misrepresented, brilliantly original and enormously influential, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is translated from the German by R.J. Hollingdale.
Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. Nietzsche’s utterance ‘God is dead’, his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found in purely human terms, and his doctrine of the Superman and the will to power were all later seized upon and unrecognisably twisted by, among others, Nazi intellectuals.
With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic, and free.
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Table of Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Part One
ZARATHUSTRA’S PROLOGUE
ZARATHUSTRA’S DISCOURSES
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Notes
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Paperback Edition
352 pages. Printed card cover.
ISBN: 9780140441185
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Press, reviews, endorsements
“Enigmatic, vatic, emphatic, passionate, often breathtakingly insightful, his works together make a unique statement in the literature of European ideas.”
A.C. Grayling
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About the Author
The late Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism—expressed in his observation that “God is dead”—in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, antisemitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance the very things he loathed. For further reading on the misappropriation of Nietzsche’s work, read here.
