A Little Nietzsche to Cure What Ails Ya
1 Comments Published by Michael on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 at 3:37 PM.
The blog world has been pretty quiet lately in my circle of reading, and my mind has been a bit mush as well, so I thought I would awaken some thought today by picking up Thus Spake Zarathustra from my library shelf and beginning it again. I read it during my undergrad, and admittedly it was above my head at the time, but I read a few chapters today and loved it.
Chapter 2 is pretty interesting. Zarathustra has come down from his mountain home for the first time in 30 years in order to "empty his cup" of knowledge to those beneath him, when he meets a saint in the wilderness. I won't go into the whole of the discussion, but when Zarathustra claims to have come down out of love for man the saint says,
"Why did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved man all-too-much? Now I love God; man I love not. Man is for me too imperfect a thing. Love of man would kill me."He later says,
"I make songs and sing them; and when I make songs, I laugh, cry, and hum: thus I praise God. With singing, crying, laughing, and humming, I praise the god who is my god."I don't claim to be a Nietzsche scholar, but I do find his words challenging to my faith. I believe him to be in this scene confronting what I can term as the modern Christian who hides in the "forest" of their personal beliefs, unwilling to engage the world. It is the love of the world that has caused us to flee from it, and so we have alienated men. We are content to sing our songs, but cannot love men, really love them, for fear of being corrupted by them. I am reminded of how silly this appears to those who, though atheistic, truly care for people, and choose to invest in them, whereas we only pretend to do the same.
I have never read your blog before. When I saw the words "little Nietzsche" in Google search results I wanted to see what it is about.
There is a series of paintings by a New York artist called The Little Nietzsche. In this series Playmobil action figures act out Zarathustra's apothegms. I think the paintings are clever.
You may see them here:
http://littlenietzsche.blogspot.com