Is it really necessary to read a large portion of his works before starting with pic? Is it harder to understand...

Is it really necessary to read a large portion of his works before starting with pic? Is it harder to understand? I read Twilight of the Idols and also have a general idea of his philosophy from other sources.

try

You can try to do Zarathustra but chances are you will give up around book 2 having only kind of understood what he was saying, or if you have the Kauffman translation, you'll understand his interpretation but be unable to really come up with or justify your own. Even all of Nietzsche is often insufficient to really get Zarathustra.

Nietzsche + cursory knowledge of Kant + solid understanding of Plato + solid understanding of the Bible in particular and Christian theology in general + good understanding of enlightenment thought + good knowledge of the history and culture of 19th century Germany in particular and Europe in general.

It's just so dense, there's so much going on in every scene. It's really best described as the German Ulysses at least in terms of obscure literary and cultural memes per page. I'm usually the kind of guy who shits on the 'you need X for Y' simplifications, but a work like Zarathustra actually does justify it.

I can't even imagine the number of people who went into that book and got hopelessly lost and memed on, it was, according to the N-God himself, not written to be easily understood. He did it intentionally, throughout his work, so that readers who weren't very careful wouldn't get him. He said that he wanted his readers to be like cattle and ruminate his works. A proper reading of Zarathustra requires more than any of his other works.

>In The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom criticized Thus Spoke Zarathustra, calling the book "a gorgeous disaster" and "unreadable".

It's a fucking bible parody. Unsurprisingly that is not the optimal medium to communicate philosophical ideas.

harold bloom is a goddamn retard

TSZ is an amazing book but the worst to start with.
I went GoM, TotI, Ecce Homo, Antichrist, BoT, now reading TSZ and loving it.

He is very repetitive, I won't read any other book by him (maybe Will to Power, probably no need but whatever I love Nietzky). I consider GoM the most important work, but also the best place to start.

I'm >A proper reading of Zarathustra requires more than any of his other works.
For sure it needs his works, but I don't know yet if it requires others' works. I dived into Nietzsche having mostly wikipedia/stanford tier knowledge of most of philosophy. This was only a problem with BoT, because I don't know about Attic Tragedy etc.

The real question is why would you read this meme-tier """philosopher""" at all

Philosophy starts with Heraclitus and ends with Nietzky, friend.

I tried to read TSZ on a whim without knowing what I was getting into.

I've never felt so fucking stupid in my life, it left me feeling so miserable that I didn't pick up a single book for 6 months after.

Wanted to read some philosophy from Nietzsche so I went to the library and grabbed whatever they had. Thus Spake Zarathustra was all they had and I read that he considered it his greatest work so I thought "fuck it". Never read any of his stuff before and before some introductory research only had the vaguest idea of him as a nihilist and the "Nazi Inspirer".

I'm on book 2 and is right. I feel as if I've understood only a small portion of what he's said and that both encourages and disappoints me. I'm well aware to fully understand every point he's describing I would have to reread it.

Despite this, I've enjoyed it. Its interestingly written. Not all his points are too hard to grasp and by reading it slowly and pondering each section its gotten me to think. Plus looking up an analysis on a section that was particularly confusing and then reading it again yielded a decent understanding. I can safely say I have a better grasp of Nietzsche's philosophy than I did prior to starting the book.

Yeah I'm sure I have no idea what every detail means and that I've probably misinterpreted parts but who the fuck cares? I'd go for it, definitely worthwhile.

>ends with Aquinas
fix

iirc I read it for the first time when I was 16. Didn't get much of it except
>muh ubermensch
I haven't read it since, though I studied some Nietzsche in college (philosophy major).

I haven't picked it up since because of my love/hate relationship with Nietzsche. I find his claims about the book hard to take seriously, e.g: My book surpassed all former literature, In the future entire school will be founded to study Zarathustra, etc.

I respect many points of his philosophy, but he often exaggerated not only his skill as a writer but also as a philosopher. I have read Nietzsche's essays, and I have serious doubt about what can Zarathustra tell me that is not to be found in the essays.

I haven't found anyone who takes Nietzsche's Zarathustra too seriously, with the exception of the Vienna Circle. This is not to say that it is a bad book per se, but the academia consider it by large irrelevant of philosophical study.

Understanding Zarathustra as a work of literature is hardcore, it will require everything you listen, but extracting Nietzsche's philosophy from within in using a reading guide - it is, in fact, the most efficient way to understand him, making all his other texts crystal clear when you get to them. Of course, you will mostly only get what others have interpreted from TSZ, but you need a massive amount of reading to have your own reading of pretty much any thinker.

I advocate the opposite approach. For my first reading of Zarathustra, I got drunk and read the work in the original German, despite not speaking German myself. In this way, I was able to appreciate minute details that would have been lost if the words had been translated or comprehended.
For example, beginning with the table of contents, all of the chapter titles in the first part begin with a lyrical sequence of Von and Vom; in the second and third parts, Der, Die, and Das are introduced, with thudding Auf to punctuate the rhythm; by the fourth part, the Vons and Voms are almost entirely eclipsed by the reverberating Der, Die, and Das, joined by a cacophony of longer words beginning chapter titles.
I have yet to find an English translator that faithfully captured the symphonic elements of Zarathustra's table of contents.

>he thinks Nietzsche is fully serious when he's making those grandiose meme claims

He thought Zarathustra was certainly his masterwork but most of that shit was just him joking in his typical deadpan manner. Read Ecce Homo for more of this, almost the entire book is written this way. Rather than writing seriously and dropping in dry sarcasm he writes in dry sarcasm and occasionally drops an extremely serious point in.

Detaching what is the literary equivalent of funposting from what he's 100% serious about is probably the single most daunting task for a reader of Nietzsche.

lmao i startesd my nietzsche with him and honestly it isn't so hard to get if u know generally what his philosophy is

they dont want you to succeed

>Ends with Hegel
fixed you guys again

kek

well, just try

its not impossible to understand a bunch of his views, and in particular, some of his spirit, from it without reading anything else

the writing is somewhat excessive and strong, so I always found it fun to read even when it was very hard to understand.

there are some simple things in the beginning, too; who can't somewhat understand the parts about the last men or that tightrope walker bit?

>philosophy
>ends with Hegel
Confirmed for not reading either Schopenhauer the lame, Kierkegaard the macho or Nietzsche the ubermensch.
Though, I will admit, Hegel is a pretty solid choice for such an arbitrary measure.

Zarathustra shouldn't be read for philosophy but for style. It's a just for fun book. Nietzsche would furiously disagree but TGS, BGE and GM pretty much cover 90% of what is in Zarathustra which is why people in philosophy departments don't pay it any heed.

But you need Nietzsche in your life because he is basically the one who most plainly identifies the following concepts: the death of God (and why namby pamby feel good Humanism is not a sufficient replacement for God as previous heralds of God's death had envisioned), nihilism (and why it also fails to replace God), and provides the basis of basically all moral relativism and sophistry in the modern west through his spillover into Foucault. He was also a dank memer, good writer, and all around enjoyable fellow who would have hated literally every single person he ever influenced.

He starts off slow but about midway through book one he starts really letting the memes take the wheel. If I were to assemble a reader for people who just wanted his ideas, I'd include the first few pages of book one and probably nothing else of Zarathustra except in reference to aphorisms from his other work. I'd use it as the introduction to his work.

>Zarathustra shouldn't be read for philosophy but for style. It's a just for fun book. Nietzsche would furiously disagree but TGS, BGE and GM pretty much cover 90% of what is in Zarathustra which is why people in philosophy departments don't pay it any heed.
>But you need Nietzsche in your life because he is basically the one who most plainly identifies the following concepts: the death of God (and why namby pamby feel good Humanism is not a sufficient replacement for God as previous heralds of God's death had envisioned), nihilism (and why it also fails to replace God), and provides the basis of basically all moral relativism and sophistry in the modern west through his spillover into Foucault. He was also a dank memer, good writer, and all around enjoyable fellow who would have hated literally every single person he ever influenced.
Damn user, you actually got Nietzsche right. I think I have fallen in love with you.

If Hegel finished philosophy, Nietzsche said good riddance, locked the door on it and threw away the key. He was an anti-philosopher.

All philosophy since the great wars has been people looking for the fucking key so they can go back to Plato's hugbox.

The actual reqs for reading Nietzsche are simply a few Plato and a few of the greek tragedies, which you could easily bang out in an afternoon or two.

Zarathustra needs a solid grounding in Nietzsche's other ideas to be comprehensible, and I think OP will be fine if he reads it at this level, but like another user above wrote, it really is packed with references to the entire philosophical tradition leading up to him and few books are more rewarding on second or third readings.

TLDR: read now, read again later

>All philosophy since the great wars has been people looking for the fucking key so they can go back to Plato's hugbox.
I have always pictured "modern" philosophy like a convoluted maze in which the philosophers are trying to find some ulterior meaning, while trying to return to philosophy as it was before German idealism, even if everything has been said before. Which is almost the same as you said, the return to Plato's hugbox. However, existentialism just fucked them really hard many years before they were even born, and they can't find whatever they are searching for.
It's like you say, Hegel laid the coffin, and Nietzsche put the nails in said coffin.
Call me whatever you want, but in said mental picture, Wittgenstein is the only one to have found the exit, while Russell stops some yards before reaching the exit, saying, "I am comfy searching for the Plato's happy pillbox from here, good luck Ludwig!"
After that, Wittgenstein becomes bored of having been outside the maze, even if only a few minutes have elapsed, so he sits outside it and goes on emulating whatever he was doing before getting out of the maze, guarding its door. Whoever comes near the maze's exit is greeted by Wittgenstein, telling him, "Please pal, you shouldn't be talking about bullshit which doesn't exist and that you shouldn't be pursuing. Just remain quiet and outside the maze, it's not worth it." Despite Wittgenstein's warning, some fools still enter it to find whatever is supposed to be inside it.

It's necessary to not be a complete shut-in with a lack of advanced education and travel / life experience. Otherwise, you won't know what you're reading. You'll think he's an obscurantist and esotericist, and that TSZ is poetry and mere parody at best.

Nietzsche wrote TSZ with just a week in between each part. He wrote it in a very short amount of time. In a sense, TSZ is like a month's worth of philosophical stream-of-consciousness from Nietzsche. But it is pure philosophy and it is direct and demanding.

nah it ends with Wittgenstein

I'm kind of a hermit and to me it felt like that greatly helped in my understanding of it, especially since he really gets solitude and illustrates the theme throughout. I'm sure some life experiences would help in getting a grasp on it, but he himself was quite the shut-in and it's pretty obvious that his target audience (everyone and no one) was as well. Being well read, however, would be very important given how much stuff he draws from.

underrated post

honestly I think his grandiose meme claims like "I divide history into before me and after me" are actually serious but he's aware of how pompous they sound so he's both joking and meaning exactly what he says

to add: it's like with caesar and the pirates

It actually ends with pic related (don't listen to that Karl Schmidt guy).