Thus spoke me…

Like a child who was recently turned on to the profound paradoxes of Eastern religions (as in the Taoist “the master travels all day without leaving home.”) or modern spiritualists (like U2’s “If you wanna kiss the sky better learn how to kneel”), Frederich Nietzsche filled an entire volume with wannabe profundities in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Unfortunately for the reader of his fiction, Nietzsche’s wealth of quips throughout “Zarathustra” aren’t paradoxes (which are seeming contradictions that are actually true), they are just regular old contradictions.

Love is hate. War is peace. And bad is good. Nietzsche’s prose is chalk full of them and to an untrained reader, the read may be interesting. After all, as historian Durant wrote, it’s easy to be interesting when you have no consideration for morality. And that’s exactly what we are presented with in “Zarathustra.” In fact it is the central preoccupation of the book’s protagonist: before the supposed good (will to power) can take root on Earth, the superman (ubermensch) must destroy morality.

But what are we left with after accepting such a philosophy? We are left with the ultimate contradiction in society: moral relativism. Nietzsche says it is so many words, there is no single universal path. Except for the path of moral relativism, perhaps? It is the classic logical error that thinkers have fallen in to (probably since Nietzsche himself), that it is right that there is no right and wrong? What’s the point in uttering a truth if there is no truth?

Of course, Nietzsche couldn’t come to grips with his own contradictions and succumbed to the inevitable result of such a stressful mentality: he went nuts. There is always room for exploring different ideas like Nietzsche’s, but an ardent follower of the nineteenth century German thinker must risk a similar fate. We’ve already seen what happens when a great orator and politically powerful man (Hitler) did filled with Nietzsche’s ideas. My only hope is that Zarathustra’s influence fades with the smoke from a smoldering European continent after the war that was the embodiment of such a self-destructive philosophy.