But something about the experience bound up with that response led Nietzsche to push beyond, to what we might call a 'posthistoricist' position, a mode of individual experience emptied of genuinely historical consciousness. The first, accenting the scope for will, creativity, and radical historical questioning, proved congruent with a radical historicism.

That effort ultimately led Nietzsche in two innovative directions. Especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche sought to envision redemption from the weight of 'it was,' the unwilled past. Our present and we ourselves seem to have resulted from a past that is not freely chosen-that has, in fact, the freakish, capricious consistency of 'dreadful accident.' Yet its weight is overpowering. His ideas were appropriated by the Fascists, who turned his theories into social realities that he had never intended.With the reduction to history, we initially experience our connectedness with the past as a limitation and burden. Known for saying that 'god is dead,' Nietzsche propounded his metaphysical construct of the superiority of the disciplined individual (superman) living in the present over traditional values derived from Christianity and its emphasis on heavenly rewards. He never recovered from a nervous breakdown in 1889 and died eleven years later. In 1869 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, where he taught until 1879 when poor health forced him to retire.

After the death of his father, a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche was raised from the age of five by his mother in a household of women. About the Author: The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Thus spoke zarathustra kaufmann