The Zarathustra Project

Last semester we studied substantial excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Our professor suggested that a good way of getting an understanding of the book is to read one of its 80 or so short chapters a day and think about it for a half hour or so. I kind of liked the idea, hence this project. I plan to do a post on this blog on every chapter after reading it and thinking about it a bit.

I have not read a lot of Nietzsche first hand, but have read some of Walter Kaufman's book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ. I have also read Stephen Hicks's short little book, Nietzsche and the Nazis. I have just started reading George P. Grant's Time as History which are his Nietzsche lectures. There is a further essay on Nietzsche in his book, Technology and Justice.

I own two different translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra - the Kaufman translation and the R.J. Hollingdale translation. In our readings last semester I went back and forth between the two and found the Hollingdale translation to be the more lucid of the two. There is also the public domain translation by Thomas Common available at Project Gutenberg. Because it is public domain, I will copy and paste each relevant chapter as a preview to each discussion.

I am not sure when I will get started on the project (beyond this introduction) nor if I will actually do a chapter a day as suggested by my prof. It depends on time constraints and other commitments as well as my inclinations.

In any event, I reviewed Hicks's book on my political blog, The Jolly Libertarian, a while back. The first half of the review went over Hicks's discussion of Nazism. The second half dealt with Nietzsche's philosophy itself.

Kaufman, Hicks and Grant have greatly varying views of Nietzsche. Kaufman thinks he's the cat's meow, a solitary genius who was misread and misrepresented by the Nazis whose ideology, Kaufman avers, Nietzsche would have rejected.

Grant, while deeply immersing himself in Nietzsche's thought, had ambivalent feelings about the man. He admired Nietzsche for the clarity of his thought, for epitomizing the end point of modernity, which Grant distrusted. Grant was a Platonist as well as a Christian theologian.

Near the end of William Christian's Introduction to Time as History he writes,

• Nietzsche's thought is worthy of study because of the clarity with which he enucleated modernity. Yet Grant declared that he reacted to Nietzsche's philosophy with  a 'limitless repugnance' which he had never felt so strongly as during that year's course. 'Nothing could be more repugnant than the doctrine of human beings as creative - indeed of philosophy itself as creative'. Creativity, for Grant, always remained the unique prerogative of the Creator God.

Later Christian quotes from one of Grant's notebooks: "If I were not afraid of being taken as an innocent dogmatist, I would have written that one should teach Nietzsche within the understanding that he is a teacher of evil."

Hicks offers a balanced view, noting Nietzsche's strengths and weaknesses, the source of his great appeal as well as areas in which his views were, in fact, in sync with the Nazis, if not explicitly leading to Nazism. The opening of my review of Hicks's book discusses some of Kaufman's views and second half looks at Hicks's take on Nietzsche. You can find the review linked below:

• Book Review: Nietzsche and the Nazis

My analyses will be based directly on Zarathustra itself.  I hope you enjoy them. Comments are welcome.