Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

For August's meeting, we will continue our four-month exploration of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

We will be meeting at the Bayou Heights Biergarten and sitting inside (upstairs above the beer taproom). Our discussion will focus on the Second Part of Zarathustra, sections 1-5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18-20, and 22, but any section from parts one or two will be fair game for our conversation.

Below is a link to the reading followed by a brief description of the work (Nietzsche's text begins on pg. 5 of the PDF, as the file begins with editor's notes by Walter Kaufmann, who is also the translator):

CLICK HERE TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD THE READING

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 to authority, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free."