Is there any preemptive reading I need to do before reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra?
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Is there any preemptive reading I need to do before reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra?
Basically all of Nietzsche.
Any particular order?
I think this should be decent:
1. Genealogy of Morals
2. Beyond Good and Evil
3. The Gay Science
4. The Anti-Christ
5. Twilight of the Idols
6. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This is, of course, assuming you want to get the absolute most out of it.
Alright thanks 🙂
You're welcome.
>no Birth of Tragedy
ngmi
You forgot Daybreak, bro :^)
But, yeah, Tragedy might be like 3 or 4
Tragedy should be #1 (not including his prior academic works). If you're not reading chronologically you flit back and forth between Nietzsche's own philosophical development to the detriment of your own.
what if i don’t want to get the most out of it? is there any point in rawdogging thus spoke?
>is there any point in rawdogging thus spoke?
No, you will literally just get filtered so hard that it won't even be funny.
yes because the other anon is literally moronic and Zarathustra is meant to bei a poetic introduction to Nietzsches ideas that is by far his easiest book
Why not just read the works in order of departure?
1. Twilight of the Idols
2. The Birth of Tragedy
3. Beyond Good and Evil
4. The Genealogy of Morals
5. The Antichrist
6. Zarathustra
Philosophy in the Tragic Era of the Greeks might also be interesting just before or after the Birth of Tragedy, it's really short and straightforward for a Nietzschean work but it also provides a nice and direct view to how he views things
Countersignaling Lord Solbrah? Really? I don't think so, expect us.
I know I'm supposed to eject my hubris but in speaking to most people it is obvious that a majority do not have any kind of inner world, no critical thinking, no imagination, no 'soul', and probably belong in working a suicide net factory. I don't say this as an elitist or reproachfully, just as point of fact. I truly believe most people are born geniuses and the world beats it out of them.
Where the frick do you live ? I don't really get that impression at all, but I also don't hang around morons or plebs very often so I can't say if you're correct.
>Where the frick do you live ?
I live in Providence. It's partly a college city and has one of the '''best''' art schools in the world, but some of the students there have absolutely no grasp of things like form and function. Even among artist and other creative types their passion and what they usually have to say is really vaccus. I've met very few people here I felt stimulated with or felt their passion to be infectious.
Ooof. I have an IRL IQfy buddy who used to live in Providence. I feel your pain.
To be fair though, "art schools" are some of the most pointless, soul-killing, worse-than-useless institutions on the planet. They've been irredeemably corrupted by postmodernism to the point where they now actually make you DUMBER instead of smarter.
So your idea that "most people are born geniuses and the world beats it out of them" is TOTALLY understandable if you were forced to spend any amount of time around RISD or Brown. Personally, I'd suggest traveling elsewhere to restore your faith in humanity. Even just as a little vacation. I've honestly learned more about writing from fricking TvTropes than any actual writing course.
What most people think is completely different to what they say.
No, I don't buy that. And if it were true, and you don't have the desire skill or wherewithal to express what's inside you are functionally that stupid and empty. It's just a very roundabout way of saying 'smart but lazy' or unrealized potential. Unrealized potential is worthless if the rubber does not meet the road. Means very little to be the smartest most talented person in the world if it's all inside your skull.
>And if it were true, and you don't have the desire skill or wherewithal to express what's inside you are functionally that stupid and empty.
Then we disagree on how the tought process of most people work when talking to others. Why do you think that everyone wants to open up and express their feelings to you? We are living in a very individualistic society right now, where you get criticized or looked down for expressing emotions. I believe a lot of men just hide their emotions and toughts to themselves and their very close relationships, lying or giving short answers to others just to get over with the conversation and ending up giving a good image. Or at least that's my case and what I interpret from other people being so "plain" on a superficial level.
Maybe I've been reflecting on others, but I feel like most men are (naturally) stoic.
Most people aren’t going to pour their inner world out or even show it. People probably think you are devoid of an inner world as well.
Oh but they do show it. You ever listen to someone assert some book or movie is their absolute all time favorite and have very little of substance to say? I don't think that's an some epistemological problem, that's just the breadth and depth of their cognizance. Even if someone doesn't have a massive vocabulary you can still sense passion and earnestness. I know people who are dumb as bricks and still have a rich inner world and I've met highly skilled people who can do nothing with that skill because they have nothing to express outside perfunctory gestures.
Maybe they don’t feel motivated to elaborate on it. If I’m preoccupied or focused on something else and someone asks me my favorite whatever I’m probably going to just give the title, especially if I don’t know the person well or particularly care about connecting with them. My favorites are my favorites for a reason and I don’t feel the need to justify them to anyone. Solipsism is a b***h
He's kinda right, most normies are shallow and dont bother with anything deep, maybe except some interesting conspiracy theories
But many normies also read deep stuff, and become gay pseuds like you and the guy you replied to
It's not a question of being 'deep' there's nothing wrong with applying yourself towards the ordinary and mundane. Just having eidetic knowledge of obscure esoteric traditions doesn't mean you are in any way smart of wise.
I mean maybe. But if you don't feel motivated to share anything about your inner world or your imagination or life then what does that really say about your inner world and life then?
My inner world is mine and mine alone. I’ll share it with people I deem worthy and connect with. Besides, often putting something into words or elaborating doesn’t do it justice. What is felt deeply will always lose power when it rises to the surface. For example, my favorite books speak to me or I feel they have soul. Putting something like that into words cheapens it. If you don’t think everyone has dreams, fears, yearnings, embarrassments, secrets, and all of the stuff that makes up an inner world then perhaps you aren’t as perceptive as you thought
This is all still a function of sharing what's inside you though. More to my central point most people do not have the breadth and width of cognizance to express what you just did. It's not that they don't have the right poetry or prose to express the ideas you just did, it's just they have nothing like that to express. Vaccus.
Most people will only let down their guard with people they feel comfortable with. Who we connect with has no rhyme or reason. I’m not going to just start telling anyone the deepest parts of me and my beliefs, and if I do I have to feel motivated to. The inner world has a separate function than person to person interaction. Most of the time the inner world bubbles up at best, and gives people a feel for who you are. You can’t put it into words but the soul knows. It will never depend on specific words said to know who we love or trust, for example. And what exactly is an inner world anyway? A schizoid who has imaginary dialogues and interactions in their imagination? Maybe they will have a vivid inner world but it will never show because they are poor socially. One doesn’t need to be pondering Kantian philosophy or Newtonian physics to be concerned with the questions of life. Life is so vast they take infinite shapes and forms. I’m always curious for those that say most people don’t have a rich inner world, do these people who say that have vibrant social lives? It seems like they don’t have much experience and they cope by believing they have something that others don’t have
Well some things can't be articulated, or they might just not care to elaborate as other poster said.
I think pretentiousness has to do with what you said too, both in the sense of the hipster who pretends to love The Aeneid which he slogged through years ago because he thinks it makes him look cultured and unique but also in the sense of that person who doesn't want to appear pretentious by spouting out something from their idiosyncratic world which can't probably won't be internalized by other person or responded to in any kind of way.
I realized that the reason why the majority of people talk about nothing most of the time is because nothing is the perfect topic for the other person to feel comfortable- it is devoid of qualities and connected to an infinite number of other nothings so the other guy, so long as you don't hit the ball out of bounds, can respond and the conversation goes on.
Take a friend to a museum and see how he reacts to paintings. Most people don't have anything to say except "beautiful" or "not beautiful", "I like it" or "I don't like it." Not saying you need to spout off a 500 word essay for every painting you see but it does tell you how far their capabilities and sensibilities go.
I consider myself a fairly curious and sensitive person who enjoys art etc. but then one day I read a paragraph by Schopenhauer where he spends a whole page analyzing a portrait of some noblewoman, linking it to his philosophy, pointing out small details and in such clear language too, and I looked up the painting in question and to me it just looked like one of the dozens of portraits you'll find in any given museum in a big city.
some people just have different eyes, just like how a biologist can distinguish one leaf from another while to other people they're just leaves, barely distinguishable from one another
there's definitely levels to it.
You know what I'm getting at for the most part. It's not what people say, or what they are interested in, or how eloquent they are. There's something beyond all that. People call it 'soul' and you absolutely know it when you see it.
I think a lot of it has to do with how far you're willing to think about things. Like you can see a Roman ruin and there are multiple levels of thinking about it.
>the aesthetic quality of the Roman ruin as it is now
>imagining how it would've been fully realized 2000 years ago
>thinking about the rise and fall of civilizations, what motivates men to build structures like these
>how it relates to us today, what will our ruins look like? will people in the future even care?
>general thoughts about the passage of time and the fact that everything gets lost and forgotten at some point
>what that means for your own short life on this planet
I'm just improvising here but a LOT of people simply get stuck at "wow crazy that pillar is still here after 2000 years" and that's it.
An intellect like Schopenhauer sees (what is to me) a totally average painting of some no-name Renaissance artist and he is moved to write an entire paragraph on how portrait painting captures the singular essence of a particular instance of the Will and how it relates to his entire philosophy. And someone else just walks past it, paying it no heed.
To be fair it probably takes a while to conjure that up
yeah that xkcd comic is clever but not accurate. it's a romantic idea that actually everyone is concerned with the big questions of life but everyone just hides it from each other but actually, fricking no, most people don't give a shit. and a good litmus test is to see how interested they are in art, history, philosophy, religion, that kind of stuff.
You can read it first, you can read it as a standalone, to truly get the most out of it reading it last is usually recommended. How much Nietzsche you want to read before reading Zarathustra is entirely up to you but Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morality, Anti-christ, and Gay Science are all going to help tremendously, Ecce Homo, Daybreak, Birth of Tragedy, twighlight of the idols, and his various essays and commentaries on Greek philosophy are all nice to read as well but not quite as essential. Everything else is probably overkill.