October the 15th is the birthday of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He was born in the Prussian village of Röcken on this day in 1844. Yet another example of how everything important in the 21st century has it roots in the 19th. He was a philosopher who loved literature, and he experimented with different literary styles to express his philosophy. His most famous book, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), describes a prophet who comes down from the mountains to teach people about the coming of a new kind of superman, but the people he speaks to only ridicule and laugh at him. Hes perhaps best known for claiming that God is dead, but he is being misquoted. Most people forget that he actually said, God is dead ... and we have killed him! Despite the implications suggested by the previous misquote, he did not revel in God’s death. Rather he thought that the absence of God from the world was a tragedy, but felt that people had to accept that tragedy and move on. He wrote that God was like a star whose light we can see, even though the star died long ago. Much of his philosophy is about how people might live in a world without God and without absolute and externally imposed morality. Much like Zarathustra, at the time of his death on August 25, 1900, almost no one had heard of him, but after his work was republished, it had a huge impact on the philosophers of the 20th century. He said: We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 10:51:11 +0000
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