Plot twist: in this entry I will search out points of agreement instead of points of contention. Taking a break from being a bossy know-it-all today.
I like Nietzsche’s narrative format in The Gay Science. I agree that story is a good way to get a philosophical point across. Story is great because it naturally and expressively creates all sorts of impressions about the author. For instance, authors generally identify with their protagonist. In the case of The Gay Science, that would mean that Nietzsche identifies with the Madman, which is telling and sadly ironic due to his own mysterious mental breakdown at the premature end of his life.
I appreciated that the Madman offered many word pictures about the impossibility of killing God. He compared murdering God to "drinking up the sea," "wiping away the horizon with a sponge," and "unchaining the earth from the sun." Although, I suppose Nietzsche meant it sarcastically. Most likely he thought that God was not all-powerful to begin with, so there would be nothing impossible about murdering God.
Another telling aspect of Nietzsche’s narrative was when the Madman talked about God decomposing. Decomposition an organic function; so basically, God is considered to be on the level of organisms--like people. I'd venture that Nietzsche further meant that God is below man, because he seems to describe God as a construct of man's own design, like a Frankenstein's monster in a castle on a cloud.
Thus Spake Zarathustra is another of Nietzsche's essays which is similar to The Gay Science in that he speaks his mind through a fictitious, unappreciated prophet. Zarathustra talks about the meaning of the earth, how to be faithful to be the earth, and how to sin against the earth. He talks about how the greatest wrong a person can commit is to will against the meaning of the world. I sympathize with this principle even though I disagree in with the particulars. I think it's important to order my life in accordance with the meaning of life (not that I do that well, or consistently, but I digress).
The passages about stars were evocative. They’re rather pretty, stirring. Zarathustra riddles, “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in himself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” The phrase “I say unto you,” is reminiscent of Jesus' teachings in the New Testament. Upon hearing this initially, I didn’t see why having chaos inside or giving birth to a star would be good things, but they made more sense after the description of the Last Man. Zarathustra said that the Last Man asks what love, creation, longing, and stars are, then blinks. The Last Man is clueless and passive towards anything resembling adventure, curiosity, and passion. In that way, I think that to be a Last Man is to be dead to humanity. A person cannot qualify as a whole or complete person without a capacity for wonder.
I also agree with the idea of working while there’s still time and resources. Zarathustra eludes to this principle when he talks about how the “time has come for man to set himself a goal,” now, before conditions become too poor to work.
My final points of agreement are that destroying passion and craving is merely a preventative measure (and a poor one at that), and that virtue often involves a quest for personal change and that often it involves conforming to the image of something or someone else. After that, it’s all disagreement. I’m tempted to rewrite this entire post and say what I really think about Nietzsche’s ideas, but that’s the nature of trying something new, isn’t it? Maybe this experiment is quashing my true impulse, or maybe I'm allowing myself to the possibility of learning from differences. I'll let you know how it goes.
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