"Thus Spake Zarathustra" (1883 - 1885) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Multiple things in the past two years led me to Nietzsche - Wagner, for example - so I felt obliged to read his works. It was, however, a big mistake on my part to start with the famous "Also sprach Zarathustra". It is not necessarily the philosophical ideas that are difficult to comprehend. In fact, I prepared myself by reading discussions on Nietzsche before and alongside reading this book, without doing which this book was basically unreadable. There are multiple reasons why this book is not suitable as an entry point to Nietzsche or, for that matter, any philosophy. Being a "philosophical fiction", it is not a systematic or logical discussion on anything, but a series of entirely allegorical stories musing on the moon, volcanoes and tarantulas, preached by this fictional hermit Zarathustra. Nietzsche was famously critical of Christianity, almost all the values and morality that go with it, and everyone who practises it, yet he uses the same strategy as Christian preachers to spread these ideas, which makes it unclear if the text is meant to be a parody or not, or if it is meant to be read in one way or another. The bulk of the book is basically Zarathustra directly attacking every facet of morality as we know it. All the German poetries, wordplays and symphonic qualities that supposedly make this work "a masterpiece" are lost in the English translation anyway, so all that was left was a lengthy, repetitive, questionable and one-sided polemic text that does not serve as a good basis for any constructive discourse (and anyone who attempts is destined to end up with some messy arguments). As philosophy discussions generally do, it leaves more questions than answers - Was he a nihilist? Was he just anti-Christianity (Zarathustra seems to like ideas from the Orient) or an outright atheist? Is the notion of the übermensch meant to be a practical resolution to any of the "problems" he identified, that men basically need to surpass oneself by being as selfish as possible? As a scientist, it is interesting to compare these ideas against implications from statistical mechanics and the theory of evolution, but that's a discussion for another day. Let's see if the essays are more readable.