Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (REVIEW)

A Critic's Meta-Review: 4/5

Dun...dun...dun...DUN DUN

Dun...dun...dun...DA DUN

I really hope you guys picked up on that melody.

2001: A Space Odyssey, anyone?

Come on now, I know I can’t be that old.

Stanley Kubrick may have crystalized the name Zarathustra for all of us, and Richard Strauss may have done it for him, but it was Friedrich Nietzsche who put the name on the map, so to speak. But, of course, Zarathustra’s namesake - Zoroaster, founder of Zoroastrianism - had existed long before our boy Nietzsche sat on a rock in the Swiss Alps and came to the conclusion that we are all destined to repeat the same existence an infinite number of times, a concept which he would come to call “eternal recurrence” - which sounds, to me, an awful lot like the Hindu concept of samsara.

I am not accusing Nietzsche of plagiarism here, as I do not believe he intended eternal recurrence to be a literal restating of the tenets of samsara; in fact, rather than try to defeat samsara and attain moksha, nirvana, mukti, kaivalya, or whatever other flavour of liberation you end up going for (in this lifetime or the next), Nietzsche would suggest doing exactly the opposite. According to Nietzsche, one should learn to not just accept but love their predestined fate, in all its enigmatic and majestic glory.