Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical novel which mostly deals with ideas such as the
eternal recurrence of the same the parable on the death of God and the prophecy of the
Übermensch. The book talks about the old wise man who descends from his mountain among the
people out of a desire to learn something from them and to donate his wisdom to people. He
encounters a variety of people and learns their secrets and reveals that he is actually looking
for a man equal to himself. Many do not understand his philosophy and ridicule him but there
are those who admire him. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher cultural
critic poet and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on
Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Before turning to philosophy he began his
career as a classical philologist and worked at the Department of Classical Philology at the
University of Basel but he had to retire due to health problems. Nietzsche's body of writing
spanned philosophical polemics poetry cultural criticism and fiction and drew widely on art
philology history religion and science. His writing displayed a fondness for aphorism and
irony while engaging with a wide range of subjects including morality aesthetics tragedy
epistemology atheism and consciousness. Along with Soren Kierkegaard he is considered to be
one of the founders of existentialism.
