Friedrich Nietzsche's most accessible and influential philosophical
work, misquoted, misrepresented, brilliantly original and enormously
influential
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.
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