Spoke Zarathustra By Nietzsche

The phrase “Ignorance is bliss” is faulty. Especially when it comes to Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and the egregious accounts from the Holocaust. This book follows a young boy and his trials as he faces pain, terror, hunger, and death during the German attacks in World War Two. He and his family, his father, his mother and his three sisters, were taken from their home and sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. Before this however, they live in a small village called Sighet.

When the Nuremberg Laws were issued the Jewish people were stripped of their citizenship and their rights (“11 Facts About the Holocaust”). Elie Wiesel is a survivor from the Holocaust, and was sent to Auschwitz, where over 6 million Jews were killed. For a 10 year period Elie stayed quiet about what had happened during the Holocaust until everyone started to forget what had happened. He wrote Night to help people remember what a horrible period of time it was so people would remember and hope for anything like the Holocaust to never happen again. Ethos is the ethical point of view in the writing. Pathos draws us to having emotion to what it says. Logos is facts that are stated. Elie Wiesel wrote the novella Night from his experience of surviving

From the book “The Giver”, I have noticed an important message that the author wanted to tell us – The importance of freedom.

The concept of transformation and self overcoming are potent topics, the likes of which, are and have been heavily debated by the best academics known to humanity. It is substantially evident that challenging events, especially when supported by others, allow an individual to grow in personality, spirit, and resilience. The latter can be achieved by turning to the right support and resources in order to vanquish one’s negative circumstances, overcome the pressures of society, and develop a unique and personal set of values. These concepts are explored in “The Story of Tom Brennan” by J. C. Burke, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. The characters, Tom and Zarathustra, deal with similar ideas in their respective stories. Tom

Father talks about freedom. Freedom to us is the ability to do whatever we want when we want. Our definition of freedom doesn’t compare to what father is trying to teach us. He says freedom must be used wisely to reach our supernatural end. We say that virtue and morality are the limits of our freedom.

Jim Morrison has once said, “The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.” We as human being are free from birth. We are given the ability to choose. This freedom makes us who we are as human being. Each individual make choices and learn through consequences. Through the consequences, we learn and the learning becomes experience. Through experience we slowly shape into who we want to be as human. This is the reason why we as humans are so special. Each individual is unique from others. Each of us has different ethical moral rights and wrong. Each of us has something we like and dislike. Each of us are different. Therefore,

"Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say" (Wiesel 23). Questions were very common during the Holocaust (Shoah). They expressed the frustration the Jews had towards God. The same frustration Elie Wiesel had in the book The Night Trilogy. The author uses the exposition of these questions, (i.e. Where is God? How can he abandon us?), to show the large impact the Holocaust had on Jewish faith and to make the reader dwell deeper on God's purpose in his/her life the same way Elie Wiesel did.

What do I mean by this? Well, firstly I need to be entirely clear about what I mean by freedom. The Oxford English Dictionary defines freedom as “the state or fact of being free from servitude, constraint, inhibition, etc.; liberty.” This is true; however, any reasonable person can determine that that does not even begin to cover what “freedom” really means. There is emotional value in the word that simply cannot be captured by such a clinical definition. When I say freedom, what I really mean is the reasonable ability to make choices about one’s own actions and one’s own life. This does not have to be free from consequence, but it has to be a reasonable possibility on a de facto level.

Imagine that one day you are walking home and these weird looking women stop you to tell you your future. They start naming accomplishments that are happening now in your life, that are about to happen in your life, and that are going to happen in the future. A little skeptical aren’t you? Well, Macbeth, by William Shakespeare is a play about how one thing that is said can be interpreted in many ways. When I said before that you would want to tell everyone, especially your friends and loved ones about your accomplishments, that is what Macbeth did.

In the short story, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, the main character Gregor Samsa wakes up to see that he has become a giant bug, and he and his family have to adjust to the changes that this has brought about. Kafka weaves several images and symbols through out the story, so many that writing a paper on all of them would be incredibly long. However, the thing I will concentrate on is the use and symbols of food that Kafka has placed in the tale. Just what do these symbols mean? Why are they there and what do they show about Gregor and his family and their relationship? I will prove in my paper that a piece of bread and bowl of milk can be much more than just a meal. The food in this story shows how life has changed for Gregor, and also that in some of the scenes, that it even has references to passages from the Bible itself.

Nietzsche shares a similar view of man. The important thing in man is his potential; man is striving but for something different, Ubermensch or superman. It represents man constantly striving to overcome himself and become a man whose values are independent from societal conceptions of good and evil. Ubermensch must be willing and able to reject what he is now to become something different and never become content with present values. Similar to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche sees life as a series of stages that take man from the herd to Ubermensch. The first step for man to achieve Ubermensch is to overcome a collective herd view of values because they are not bridges to Ubermensch. Once this herd is overcome, man can begin to concentrate on overcoming himself.

If I was sitting down at a coffee shop, and a person came up to me and asked what was the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra was about. I only read up to part IV. The passages in the book are about Zarathustra, a prophet who left people around him, man’s laws, and only took the clothes on his back, to live in solitude in the mountains for ten year. In his ten years solitude, Zarathustra reached an initiative or a state of prefect nirvana. Finally, coming down and preaching there is no such thing as “Good” or “Evil”, everyone should reach a state called “overman”. A overman is a person who is fully aware, that he is not govern by man’s laws but only the law he gives himself, or other words morals. He also states no human has reached this state of overman

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (Gay Science, 126) This harsh statement remains among Friedrich Nietzsche’s most powerful and disturbing quotes, spoken by a proclaimed Madman to a crowd of disbelievers. After making this claim, the Madman becomes horrified by his audience’s ignorance, noting that “This tremendous event is still on its way.” This has an effect of suspending the Madman’s message in time, expanding its audience infinitely, for the event of God’s death could still be on its way. Therefore, nearly 150 years after these words were written, we must ask ourselves, does God remain dead, and has our modern society killed him? This is a haunting and disturbing question, but in many ways our society does resemble Nietzsche’s masses. However, it also resembles the Madman himself, due to its inherent individualism.

Despite many of the Whites not even seeing or interacting with Indians, they still thought all Indians were nothing more than drunks or killers.  It was a common view of the American public, at the time, to think that the  Native Americans were uncivilized savages who were merely blocking the way to improve and expand the growing nation. Because the Natives lived off the land, they didn’t have any paper money, and were seen as beggars. Since most, if not all, of the American public had been Christian at the time they would see the Natives’ as heathens, and think that they just needed to change and “become civilized.” The movie Dances With Wolves forever changed the way the American public viewed Native Americans because it showed that not all Indians were thieves or killers, in addition also showed that Indians were not a “poor” people, and it also showed that the Natives were both civilized and respectful.

Wake up. Feet on the floor by 5:30 AM. Walk a mile. Eat breakfast. Do push-ups, jumping jacks, then push-ups again. Run. Go to class. Smoke break, coffee break. Back to class. Have lunch. Learn about safety. Eat dinner. Sleep. Repeat.