Nietzsche Summary Outline

- Zarathustra is the main character in Nietzsche’s novel who’s a philosopher that descended from
the mountains and decided to share his profound knowledge on how to live life.
- Superman – the idea of “self-overcoming,” which means exploring the extremes of being a
mortal creature
 Declared to be the meaning of Earth
 a man that no longer seeks the meaning of life but instead a man who lives life
itself and accepts it as it is
- man is described to be as material and overcome being merely a man(material), he must be
improved through experiencing life to do so; he must satisfy both his metaphysical and physical
needs of his existence; in simple words, he must think and feel to create a rational balance that
will control his desire and make right of his will
- great health is something to be worked upon to be achieved as it is not a stable or permanent
condition that requires effort to maintain
- he is a dancer and musician of life who explored everything that he could experience by saying
yes
- cosmos exists and has two forces that drive its purpose, the good and the evil, of creation and
destruction
- removing the philosophy of good and evil leads to self-overcoming that unveils the true nature
of morality which he referred “to become human again”
- good and evil is defined by who created it; one’s action is a basis for his will and purpose
- Zarathustra was in constant battle of purpose of the good and the evil which led to the creation
of Übermensch (overman/superman); to overcome the metaphysics of man and be a man that
lives life
- lack of freedom is the inability of will to relieve itself from time in both the metaphysical and
physical worlds which man exists; as the will of man becomes entrapped with time, his past
becomes defined by his future acts.
- “to live life, and to learn how to love it, requires that we touch it” means to not just think of life
and dwell on its ideals but to live it and experience it from all the matters that exist with it.
- Knowledge is set free when it is not bounded by the bad conscience of not being able to give
back to a promise
- People complain about the things that they do not need to worry about when they focus on the
wellness of themselves and not wellness in the thought of good and not good
- God’s death was when people had tied themselves to the values that have voided from the idea
of God, which is said to be the redemption of freedom, specifically intellectual freedom
- He compared a man to a lake that refuses to flow and becomes a dam as his water rises a
metaphor for a man’s resistance to being reliant on the idea of God, which will bring him better
knowledge of himself
- We must not live by idealizing and moralizing reality as the extremes of life does not favor what
isn’t physically true to it
- Ascetic ideal – the practice of strict self-denial in which man has no meaning relating to Earth as
he is subjected to suffering and vulnerability of the ways of Earth.
- “Willing something is an inescapable fact of human existence and ascetic ideals”; man is driven
by his wills in living his life it is a product and basis of his future actions to shape himself to the
idea of man he wants to become
- Man is dependent to time and memory which challenges his being to think that he can
transcend among other creatures if he is able to overcome it
- “even in self-destruction, we invent a wound that compels us to live”; our failures or errors
become honors for our willingness to survive.
- Nietzsche objects to ascetic ideals as it imposes dishonesty
- Religions lead people to deny themselves from negative emotions
- Christian-moral hypothesis – gave man comparable value to the universe, gave the idea to
perfection to object from evil and suffering, and restricted man from despising himself
- Nature and the world have meaning and purpose but when their extremes are put together, it
becomes devoid of its meaning
- The strongest are those who can acknowledge the good and evil they experience as something
that balances their lives, like healthy people who are not afraid of sickness as they know that
they can withstand it as a natural struggle and not an end to their health
- The good gives feelings of power while the bad gives feelings pf weakness
- Nietzsche’s philosophy is problematic as it seeks to overcome metaphysics through resolving
instead of dissolving.