Friedrich Nietzsche
Così parlò Zarathustra

THE REVIEW

Preamble.

My cousin M., a few years older than me, recently got engaged to a certain B., a university student of philosophy. When I met and got to know B., asking him if he would recommend I enroll in philosophy one day to become a philosopher (I'm fascinated by hermeneutics that the teacher explained in class), he told me, with a bit of condescension: "To understand it, you must first read Zarathustra by Nietzsche." Oh. I thought a university brochure and a bit of initiative wandering around the internet, along with the passion I put into all things, would suffice.

The author.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher (1844-1900). Son of a Protestant pastor with whom he had turbulent relations, he initially approached classical studies - a must for the Germans, who have a sort of love/hate relationship with us Latins - and then developed his own personal philosophical recipe a bit too complex to be described by a high school student, it must be said.

In attempted summary, the great Chaos that is the world cannot be understood rationally but rather intuited, overcoming the barriers of tradition and becoming Overmen (and, I imagine, Overwomen). When one becomes such, besides understanding that "God is dead" (more than Nomadi!), one also goes beyond good and evil (more than my guilt towards T.!!) and becomes somewhat a child of Dionysus (like the band from X Factor!!!).

It's a somewhat confused message, Nietzsche's, who, struck by syphilis, certainly wasn't shining for mental clarity in the last years of his life (from Wikipedia), so much so that he embraced an injured horse in the heart of Turin, and not for animalism but for a strange form of fraternity. So confused, his thought, that after his death, with his sister's involvement, a sort of "marketing operation" was carried out, selling his thought to everyone: from Nazis, to anarchists, to libertarians, to postmodernists, and not least to... Zucchero "Sugar" Adelmo Fornaciari.

From the summer of 2002, when I was eight years old, I perfectly remember the lyrics of "Baila Morena" by the aforementioned singer from Emilia: "I set my eyes on you... and you know/that you must have chaos inside you/to make a dancing star bloom". This phrase is more or less taken from Nietzsche!!!!

The work.

Written in aphorisms and short narrative flashes, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None" describes the journey of a prophet in the mysterious East, bringing his wisdom to the world, like the sun which, setting, descends upon the earth and dissolves in it. There is a sort of dissolution of knowledge into the world that recalls certain myths, not necessarily classical ones like Isis and Osiris, but also esoteric rituals of formation and acquisition of knowledge. There's no real plot, mostly various thoughts and philosophical experiences inside.

Martina's Decalogue.

To put it in German, "so und so." It's not that I liked this work so much, so much so that preliminarily, I have to be honest with you: I haven't even finished it. I hope you'll help me understand it more, by refuting the ten reasons why I didn't like it and abandoned it (not halfway, because I read it in bits and pieces). So:

1. perhaps unintentionally, but it's a clever book, more smoke than substance. For everyone and no one, indeed. Lots of form, even writing skill, but little to gain from it;
2. it's a book that, in the long run, bores and does not captivate the reader (see what happened to a still willing person like me), who gets lost in a kind of labyrinth, ending up with a headache. A minimum of clarity in plot development would have been appropriate;
3. I don't find much historical and philosophical rigor in it. It seems to go against tradition, mixing many different traditions, but without the conceptual tools to make a serious critique of and surpass traditional models;
4. it's a book that doesn't bring eager young people closer to philosophy, but only those looking in this branch of human knowledge for suggestions, and thus more than philosophers, they're clever posers (like B., it seems to me). Maybe I have an Apollonian character, and for Dionysian things more than books, you can use other more or less lawful tools, but...
5. it's a book that contributes to discrediting the figure of the philosopher in civil society. Philosopher as a man with his head in the clouds, or fallen into a well, while the philosopher should apply his knowledge to reality, change it and not sublimate it into abstract and abstruse theories;
6. writing in aphorisms is a great commercial trick: somehow it captures the listener, especially a naive and unclear one, like poetry or certain rock music, but unlike poetry and rock music, as a philosopher, you should explain your thought, and here, in fact, you don't. You seduce and that's it, you don't explain as your role would require;
7. the obscure language allows everyone to construct their own interpretation of Nietzsche, and that's probably why this philosopher (it must be said: after death) had a great commercial success (I believe to his sister's pockets!). Everyone can buy it (even Zucchero) and make it say what they like. Like Ikea furniture, it matches everything, you just need to know how to assemble it! But doesn't it possibly lose the depth and uniqueness of thought this way? Tell me;
8. an easy game also talking like a messiah. It's certainly fun to destroy, like my little brother G. who breaks everything when he plays, but maturity requires the ability to build and replace a model we don't like with one we like better (like old skirts with mini skirts). And I don't think we need a philosopher who, all in all, invites us, if I understand correctly, to a sort of perpetual immaturity, and, pass me the aphorism this time, "destroying an outfit we don't like to go around naked." New clothes are needed, and new mental outfits, if anything;
9. feverish writing paradoxically becomes a mask for one's... amateurism. An amateur is someone who delights, not a beginner as some thesauruses report. The author, in my opinion, delighted in writing, all the more since this work seems more a mockery of fake philosophers than true philosophy. But mocking your readers isn't too commendable, it's - it is - a fake!;
10. the very idea of the Overman unsettles me, really masks an aristocratic and almost certainly anti-democratic, anti-humanistic conception of knowledge and life. To be truly an Overman, you must be an individual, even in good faith, who knows more than others, who feels more than others, who intuits the whole more than others, but it's clear that such an objective isn't preachable in large mass societies like ours. Such a theory would be fine for ancient Greece, where the aristoi live off the work of slaves, but not in a society of average individuals who demand respect for social rights and need more immediate and concrete responses from others and society. In short, less Overmen and more average men, maybe things would go better.

The rating.

  Here too I abstain, like with Manzoni. It would be a zero but I won't give it to avoid being criticized as presumptuous. Of course here, more than other times, I would appreciate reasoned opinions and refutations from readers, rather than criticisms of my person and my presumed "falsity."

In any case, instead of this book:

?       if you like simple philosophy and aphorisms, but not clever philosophy, I recommend Ermanno Bencivenga, "Philosophy in Forty-Two Fables," or Aesop of which I recently translated in class the fable of the scorpion and the frog;

?       if you don't like philosophy, but only feverish writing, J. Kerouac, "On the Road," which I hear is nice, or also H.S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," equally sympathetic.

Having said that, poor my cousin! This B. leaves me perplexed.