《焚书》、《续焚书》两书成于明代晚期，彼时社会动荡不安，农民起义此起彼伏，阶级矛盾日益尖锐。李贽最痛恨维护封建礼教的假道学和那些满口仁义道德的卫道士、伪君子，批评他们“阳为道学，阴为富贵，被服儒雅，行若狗彘”（《续焚书·三教归儒说》）；同时，对统治阶级所极力推崇的孔孟之学也大加鞭挞，认为“耕稼陶渔之人即无不可取，则千圣万贤之善，独不可取乎？又何必专门学孔子而后为正脉也”（《焚书·答耿司寇》）；希望统治阶级上层能够出现“一个半个怜才者”，使“大力大贤 ”的有才之士“得以效用，彼必杀身图报，不肯忘恩”（《焚书·寒灯小话》）。对此有书评者如是论道：“这说明李贽并非要推翻封建统治，而是要维护它，表明了他的政治思想没有超出地主阶级思想与时代的限制，也不可能违背地主阶级的根本利益。”
湛若水和王阳明是相互欣赏的朋友也是论敌，但湛若水对中国哲学史的影响远不及王阳明，主要原因恐怕是两人走的哲学道路不同。
王阳明以他的“心外无物”、“格物致知”等理论将中国传统哲学中主观唯心主义哲学推向最高峰，因而在中国哲学史上占有重要地位。湛若水的哲学走集大成为道路，要就重大成果自然比专攻一家困难许多。湛若水企图调和各家之言，以他经常引用《中庸》的语句就可见一斑。湛若水的主要理论“随处体认天理”组合了前人的“随处”、“体认”、“天理”之说，亦是在调和基础上再创造。因此，在思想魅力方面，“随处体认天理”低于“心外无物”、“格物致知”。湛若水的哲学一方面取百家所长，另一方面因为难于贯通众多理论而显得庞杂。
无可否认“随处体认天理”的意义，但它远不能使湛若水成为哲学的集大成者。所谓哲学上的集大成者，都是一些承前启后、创造新概念为哲学发展开辟道路的伟大思想家，如以“绝对精神”集德国古典唯心主义大成的黑格尔，以“辩证唯物主义”集唯物主义与辩证法大成的马克思等。哲学的集大成者的出现必须有经济或科技重要发展、社会或时代有深刻变革的客观环境为条件。有这种环境，个人才会在思想上有大创造。事实上，“随处体认天理”就表达了人对“天理”的认识受“处” ——客观环境限制的观点。湛若水生活在封建社会走向衰落的后期，显然缺乏哲学集大成的环境。
集大成的哲学道路虽然没有使湛若水没能在中国哲学史留下厚重的一笔，但湛若水在某程度上总结了宋、明理学，为后人的研究提供了借鉴。正因为不偏不倚的集大成道路，他提出“自得”之说，批判当时人云亦云的风气同时启发了后人。结合了宋、明理学的某些精华，加上“中庸”的态度使他的哲学具有长经久不息的合理性。
王阳明以他的“心外无物”、“格物致知”等理论将中国传统哲学中主观唯心主义哲学推向最高峰，因而在中国哲学史上占有重要地位。湛若水的哲学走集大成为道路，要就重大成果自然比专攻一家困难许多。湛若水企图调和各家之言，以他经常引用《中庸》的语句就可见一斑。湛若水的主要理论“随处体认天理”组合了前人的“随处”、“体认”、“天理”之说，亦是在调和基础上再创造。因此，在思想魅力方面，“随处体认天理”低于“心外无物”、“格物致知”。湛若水的哲学一方面取百家所长，另一方面因为难于贯通众多理论而显得庞杂。
无可否认“随处体认天理”的意义，但它远不能使湛若水成为哲学的集大成者。所谓哲学上的集大成者，都是一些承前启后、创造新概念为哲学发展开辟道路的伟大思想家，如以“绝对精神”集德国古典唯心主义大成的黑格尔，以“辩证唯物主义”集唯物主义与辩证法大成的马克思等。哲学的集大成者的出现必须有经济或科技重要发展、社会或时代有深刻变革的客观环境为条件。有这种环境，个人才会在思想上有大创造。事实上，“随处体认天理”就表达了人对“天理”的认识受“处” ——客观环境限制的观点。湛若水生活在封建社会走向衰落的后期，显然缺乏哲学集大成的环境。
集大成的哲学道路虽然没有使湛若水没能在中国哲学史留下厚重的一笔，但湛若水在某程度上总结了宋、明理学，为后人的研究提供了借鉴。正因为不偏不倚的集大成道路，他提出“自得”之说，批判当时人云亦云的风气同时启发了后人。结合了宋、明理学的某些精华，加上“中庸”的态度使他的哲学具有长经久不息的合理性。
本书收录了赵林教授近年来关于西方文化的几篇学术讲座。这些讲座内容广阔、气势磅礴，从全球范围的文明冲突与文化融合历程，到旨趣迥异的中西文化比较，再到源远流长的西方文化演进，展现了讲演者高屋建瓴的研究视域、博大恢弘的历史情怀和深邃睿智的哲学反思。
本书堪称“波普教皇”安迪•沃霍尔的非正式自传。沃霍尔在此书中回顾了自己病态的少年晨夕，孤寂的青年时代，在纽约闯荡的岁月，初创“工厂”的奢华时光，以及他遭受枪击的创痛。英文版刊行于1975年，此后事迹自然无法呈现，但沃霍尔的人生精华已然浓缩于此。同时，这又一部拼贴而成的波普语录。爱，性，工作，艺术，名气，头衔，时间，死亡，美，成功……举凡时尚都市生活的各式困惑，此书都备有现成的骇世箴言任君挑选——中译本甚至做足工夫，将凡具警策潜力的句子都以加重的字体予以强调，并配上英文，免去摘引者核对原文的劳顿。三十余年过去，安迪•沃霍尔的波普呓语读来依旧新鲜时尚，或许，沃霍尔就是时尚本身。
尼采以透视主义认识论为主要武器，对西方传统形而上学展开了全面批判，并在此基础上提出了他对世界的新解释。本书是周国平当年的博士论文，是他花费巨大心血做了系统研究的成果，本书是他真正深入到尼采的问题思路之中，对他在本体论和认识论方面的思想给出了相当清晰的分析，证明他不只是一位关心人生问题的诗性哲人，那么在周国平的世界里，尼采究竟是如何的严格意义上的大哲学家呢？尼采究竟关心了什么……
在西方哲学史上，尼采向来是一个有争议的人物。尼采究竟是什么样的人？他在哲学上提出了一些什么新问题？他和现时代有什么关系....周国平在认真研究了尼采的生平和著作，经过自己独立的思考，提出了一些与过去习惯的说法颇为不同的见解。 周国平说：“尼采需要的不是辩护，而是理解。只有弱者才需要辩护，而尼采却不是弱者...” 尼采在世纪的转折点上是不是真的成为古老的传说？
本书是周国平首部“出行哲思录”，极其真实详尽地记录了每一次远离国民的日子中的所见所闻所思所忆，现了作者执著而超脱的灵魂之旅。无论花季还是老年，都能从他的文采和哲思中读取智慧和超然。
本书中周国平老师对平常生活的所思所感进行了记录，他把自己立于命运之外，淡淡地冷眼旁观着世间百态，却依然掩饰不住对生命的挚爱之情。通过对人生的哲学式感悟，对人、自然、孤独、情欲、爱情、婚姻的精辟见解，将他的睿智和诗性的哲学再次奉献给世人。周国平老师的作品，“绚烂之极归于平淡”。其实文章作平淡不难，不过，平淡而要有味，就很难了。平淡不但是一种文字的境界，更是一种胸怀，一种人生的境界。要达到这种境界实非易事。
有钱又有闲当然幸运，倘不能，退而求其次，我宁做有闲的穷人，不做有钱的忙人。我爱闲适胜于爱金钱。金钱终究是身外之物，闲适却使我感到自己是生命的主人。有人说：“有钱可以买时间。”这话当然不错。但是，如果大前提是“时间就是金钱”，买得的时间又追加为获取更多金钱的资本，则一生劳碌便永无终时。所以，应当改变大前提：时间不仅是金钱，更是生命，而生命的价值是金钱无法衡量的。
人是唯一能追问自身存在之意义的动物。这是人的伟大之处，也是人的悲壮之处。“人是万物的尺度。”人把自己当作尺度去衡量万物，寻求万物的意义。可是，当他寻找自身的意义时，用什么作尺度呢？仍然用人吗?尺度与对象同一，无法衡量。用人之外的事物吗?人又岂肯屈从他物，这本身就贬低了人的存在的意义。意义的寻求使人陷入二律背反。
《沉思录》原为古罗马皇帝奥勒留自我对话的记录，行文质朴，不尚雕琢，然而由于发诸内心，灵性内蕴，故充塞着一股浩然之气，令人高山仰止，有一种深沉的崇高之美。正因为它出诸内心，不加掩饰，所以我们方能窥见作者如何在忙碌的人生路上，以自己的经验为材料，沉思人生大义，领悟宇宙迷题，从中升华自己的智慧和心灵。哲学原来并非如后世的哲学教科书那般呆板枯燥，如一堆殿堂上的木偶，而是一潭活水，流泻在人生的小道之上、山水之间，由涉足其间的沉思者随手掬来，涤荡心胸。所以读《沉思录》，固然可以正襟危坐，条剖理析；也可以于闲暇之时，憩息之余，捡起来随意翻读。
这是一部理想的传统文化教育和思想道德教育普及读物，不仅适用于个人阅读，同时也可以作为企事业单位、社区等团体举办培训课程的教材，尤其适用于作为学校相关课程的辅助材料。寓言是生活与人性的提炼，本书则将寓言故事还原为人生哲学。寓言是一座智慧的矿藏。在各种旧的新的故事中，智慧的人，往往能解读出一些智慧的思考，并体会思考参与的快乐。
生命是一团欲望，欲望不能满足便痛苦，满足便无聊，人生就在痛苦和无聊之间摇摆。本书作者以现代最流行的穿越时空的写作手法走进了大师们的真实生活，与大师漫步人生。书中选取了哲学界具有代表性的人物的思想进行了阐述，如柏拉图的真善美的追求理念、孔子的“克已复礼”、孟子的“人性善”、尼采的“禽兽与超人之间”、萨特的“宿命和责任”等。大师们的思想不仅是他们那个时代的前导，而且在今天仍然深刻地影响着我们的人生选择。
思乃生命的游丝或触须，在风中试探，试试看能抓住什么。思乃对生命的执着和对死亡的抗拒。活着，就意味着思考。进一步，也可以说，思考的人是有尊严的人，人在思考时最能表现出他的特性。《若有所思》里的随感，大部分是从何怀宏教授过去十年的日记和一些笔记中选录出来的，按作者自己的说法，本书是他个人内心生活经历的某种供状。《若有所思》是一本为自己写的书，其中的大部分，在写的时候并没有想到发表。它也是何怀宏教授酝酿最久的书，时间跨度包括了从“十五有志于学”到“三十而立”之年，是其思想“原始的悸动”，也是青春悸动的产物，包含着对道德和社会的思考，爱情和婚姻的追问，读书与写作的乐趣，哲学与真理的追求，生与死的追问，等等。
本书是国外毛泽东研究译丛之一。作者试图回答的问题是：“一位旷世伟人究竟靠什么思想予以滋养？”
什么是人文？什么是人文精神？有很多人拥有自己的看法，但是结出的硕果却并不是很多，真正有独立的哲学思考，有生动的东西也并不是很多，但无疑周国平算是一位代表人文精神的学者，这位学者既是一位哲学家，也是一位诗人，他用散文的笔调写他的哲学思考，用哲学思考来贯穿他的文学写作。这本自选集将引领我们用更多的时间去阅读、思考。
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, by Michel Foucault, is an examination of the ideas, practices, institutions, art and literature relating to madness in Western history. It is the abridged English edition of Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, originally published in 1961 under the title Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. A full translation titled The History of Madness was published by Routledge in June 2006. This was Foucault's first major book, written while he was the Director of the Maison de France in Sweden.
Foucault begins his history in the Middle Ages, noting the social and physical exclusion of lepers. He argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy, madness came to occupy this excluded position. The ship of fools in the 15th century is a literary version of one such exclusionary practice, the practice of sending mad people away in ships. However, during the Renaissance, madness was regarded as an all-abundant phenomenon because humans could not come close to the Reason of God. As Cervantes' Don Quixote, all humans are weak to desires and dissimulation. Therefore, the insane, understood as those who had come too close to God's Reason, were accepted in the middle of society. It is not before the 17th century, in a movement which Foucault famously describes as the Great Confinement, that "unreasonable" members of the population systematically were locked away and institutionalized. In the 18th century, madness came to be seen as the obverse of Reason, that is, as having lost what made them human and become animal-like and therefore treated as such. It is not before 19th century that madness was regarded as a mental illness that should be cured, e.g. Philippe Pinel, Freud. A few professional historians have argued that the large increase in confinement did not happen in 17th but in the 19th century. Critics argue that this undermines the central argument of Foucault, notably the link between the Age of Enlightenment and the suppression of the insane.
However, Foucault scholars have shown that Foucault was not talking about medical institutions designed specifically for the insane but about the creation of houses of confinement for social outsiders, including not only the insane but also vagrants, unemployed, impoverished, and orphaned, and what effect those general houses of confinement had on the insane and perceptions of Madness in western society. Furthermore, Foucault goes to great lengths to demonstrate that while this "confinement" of social outcasts was a generally European phenomenon, it had a unique development in France and distinct developments in the other countries that the confinement took place in, such as Germany and England, disproving complaints that Foucault takes French events to generalize the history of madness in the West. A few of the historians critical of its historiography, such as Roy Porter, also began to concur with these refutations and discarded their own past criticisms to acknowledge the revolutionary nature of Foucault's book.
Foucault begins his history in the Middle Ages, noting the social and physical exclusion of lepers. He argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy, madness came to occupy this excluded position. The ship of fools in the 15th century is a literary version of one such exclusionary practice, the practice of sending mad people away in ships. However, during the Renaissance, madness was regarded as an all-abundant phenomenon because humans could not come close to the Reason of God. As Cervantes' Don Quixote, all humans are weak to desires and dissimulation. Therefore, the insane, understood as those who had come too close to God's Reason, were accepted in the middle of society. It is not before the 17th century, in a movement which Foucault famously describes as the Great Confinement, that "unreasonable" members of the population systematically were locked away and institutionalized. In the 18th century, madness came to be seen as the obverse of Reason, that is, as having lost what made them human and become animal-like and therefore treated as such. It is not before 19th century that madness was regarded as a mental illness that should be cured, e.g. Philippe Pinel, Freud. A few professional historians have argued that the large increase in confinement did not happen in 17th but in the 19th century. Critics argue that this undermines the central argument of Foucault, notably the link between the Age of Enlightenment and the suppression of the insane.
However, Foucault scholars have shown that Foucault was not talking about medical institutions designed specifically for the insane but about the creation of houses of confinement for social outsiders, including not only the insane but also vagrants, unemployed, impoverished, and orphaned, and what effect those general houses of confinement had on the insane and perceptions of Madness in western society. Furthermore, Foucault goes to great lengths to demonstrate that while this "confinement" of social outcasts was a generally European phenomenon, it had a unique development in France and distinct developments in the other countries that the confinement took place in, such as Germany and England, disproving complaints that Foucault takes French events to generalize the history of madness in the West. A few of the historians critical of its historiography, such as Roy Porter, also began to concur with these refutations and discarded their own past criticisms to acknowledge the revolutionary nature of Foucault's book.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an examination of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It focuses on historical documents from France, but the issues it examines are relevant to every modern western society. It is considered a seminal work, and has influenced many theorists and artists.
Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that led to the prison's dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power. Prison is a form used by the "disciplines", a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schools, hospitals, military barracks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.
Torture
Foucault begins the book by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens who was convicted of attempted regicide in the late 18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th century prison. These examples provide a picture of just how profound the change in western penal systems were after less than a century. Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?
To answer this question, he begins by examining public torture itself. He argues that the public spectacle of torture was a theatrical forum that served several intended and unintended purposes for society. The intended purposes were:
* Reflecting the violence of the original crime onto the convict's body for all to see.
* Enacting the revenge upon the convict's body, which the sovereign seeks for having been injured by the crime. Foucault argues that the law was considered an extension of the sovereign's body, and so the revenge must take the form of harming the convict's body.
Some unintended consequences were:
* Providing a forum for the convict's body to become a focus of sympathy and admiration.
* Creating a site of conflict between the masses and the sovereign at the convict's body. Foucault notes that public executions often led to riots in support of the prisoner.
Thus, he argues, the public execution was ultimately an ineffective use of the body, qualified as non-economical. As well, it was applied non-uniformly and haphazardly. Hence, its political cost was too high. It was the antithesis of the more modern concerns of the state: order and generalization.
Punishment
The switch to prison was not immediate. There was a more graded change, though it ran its course rapidly. Prison was preceded by a different form of public spectacle. The theater of public torture gave way to public chain gangs. Punishment became "gentle", though not for humanitarian reasons, Foucault suggests. He argues that reformists were unhappy with the unpredictable, unevenly distributed nature of the violence the sovereign would inflict on the convict. The sovereign's right to punish was so disproportionate that it was ineffective and uncontrolled. Reformists felt the power to punish and judge should become more evenly distributed, the state's power must be a form of public power. This, according to Foucault, was of more concern to reformists than humanitarian arguments.
Out of this movement towards generalized punishment, a thousand "mini-theatres" of punishment would have been created wherein the convicts' bodies would have been put on display in a more ubiquitous, controlled, and effective spectacle. Prisoners would have been forced to do work that reflected their crime, thus repaying society for their infractions. This would have allowed the public to see the convicts' bodies enacting their punishment, and thus to reflect on the crime. But these experiments lasted less than twenty years.
Foucault argues that this theory of "gentle" punishment represented the first step away from the excessive force of the sovereign, and towards more generalized and controlled means of punishment. But he suggests that the shift towards prison that followed was the result of a new "technology" and ontology for the body being developed in the 18th century, the "technology" of discipline, and the ontology of "man as machine."
Discipline
The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every crime grew out of the development of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to Foucault. He looks at the development of highly refined forms of discipline, of discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's body. Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for bodies. Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated according to their tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. Therefore, he argues, discipline created a whole new form of individuality for bodies, which enabled them to perform their duty within the new forms of economic, political, and military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.
The individuality that discipline constructs (for the bodies it controls) has four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:
* Cellular—determining the spatial distribution of the bodies
* Organic—ensuring that the activities required of the bodies are "natural" for them
* Genetic—controlling the evolution over time of the activities of the bodies
* Combinatory—allowing for the combination of the force of many bodies into a single massive force
Foucault suggests this individuality can be implemented in systems that are officially egalitarian, but use discipline to construct non-egalitarian power relations:
Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. (222)
Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age—bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control, b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, which Foucault argues, was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which was never actually built.
The Panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. It allowed for constant observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant possibility of observation. Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether s/he was being observed. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disciplinary individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. This means one is less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not. Thus, prison, and specifically those that follow the model of the Panopticon, provide the ideal form of modern punishment. Foucault argues that this is why the generalized, "gentle" punishment of public work gangs gave way to the prison. It was the ideal modernization of punishment, so its eventual dominance was natural.
Having laid out the emergence of the prison as the dominant form of punishment, Foucault devotes the rest of the book to examining its precise form and function in our society, to lay bare the reasons for its continued use, and question the assumed results of its use.
Prison
In examining the construction of the prison as the central means of criminal punishment, Foucault builds a case for the idea that prison became part of a larger “carceral system” that has become an all-encompassing sovereign institution in modern society. Prison is one part of a vast network, including schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. This system creates “disciplinary careers” (Discipline and Punish, 300) for those locked within its corridors. It is operated under the scientific authority of medicine, psychology, and criminology. Moreover, it operates according to principles that ensure that it “cannot fail to produce delinquents.” (Discipline and Punish, 266). Delinquency, indeed, is produced when social petty crime (such as taking wood in the lord's lands) is no longer tolerated, creating a class of specialized "delinquents" acting as the police's proxy in surveillance of society.
The structures Foucault chooses to use as his starting positions help highlight his conclusions. In particular, his choice as a perfect prison of the penal institution at Mettray helps personify the carceral system. Within it is included the Prison, the School, the Church, and the work-house (industry)—all of which feature heavily in his argument. The prisons at Neufchatel, Mettray, and Mettray Netherlands were perfect examples for Foucault, because they, even in their original state, began to show the traits Foucault was searching for. They showed the body of knowledge being developed about the prisoners, the creation of the 'delinquent' class, and the disciplinary careers emerging.
Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that led to the prison's dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power. Prison is a form used by the "disciplines", a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schools, hospitals, military barracks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.
Torture
Foucault begins the book by contrasting two forms of penalty: the violent and chaotic public torture of Robert-François Damiens who was convicted of attempted regicide in the late 18th century, and the highly regimented daily schedule for inmates from an early 19th century prison. These examples provide a picture of just how profound the change in western penal systems were after less than a century. Foucault wants the reader to consider what led to these changes. How did western culture shift so radically?
To answer this question, he begins by examining public torture itself. He argues that the public spectacle of torture was a theatrical forum that served several intended and unintended purposes for society. The intended purposes were:
* Reflecting the violence of the original crime onto the convict's body for all to see.
* Enacting the revenge upon the convict's body, which the sovereign seeks for having been injured by the crime. Foucault argues that the law was considered an extension of the sovereign's body, and so the revenge must take the form of harming the convict's body.
Some unintended consequences were:
* Providing a forum for the convict's body to become a focus of sympathy and admiration.
* Creating a site of conflict between the masses and the sovereign at the convict's body. Foucault notes that public executions often led to riots in support of the prisoner.
Thus, he argues, the public execution was ultimately an ineffective use of the body, qualified as non-economical. As well, it was applied non-uniformly and haphazardly. Hence, its political cost was too high. It was the antithesis of the more modern concerns of the state: order and generalization.
Punishment
The switch to prison was not immediate. There was a more graded change, though it ran its course rapidly. Prison was preceded by a different form of public spectacle. The theater of public torture gave way to public chain gangs. Punishment became "gentle", though not for humanitarian reasons, Foucault suggests. He argues that reformists were unhappy with the unpredictable, unevenly distributed nature of the violence the sovereign would inflict on the convict. The sovereign's right to punish was so disproportionate that it was ineffective and uncontrolled. Reformists felt the power to punish and judge should become more evenly distributed, the state's power must be a form of public power. This, according to Foucault, was of more concern to reformists than humanitarian arguments.
Out of this movement towards generalized punishment, a thousand "mini-theatres" of punishment would have been created wherein the convicts' bodies would have been put on display in a more ubiquitous, controlled, and effective spectacle. Prisoners would have been forced to do work that reflected their crime, thus repaying society for their infractions. This would have allowed the public to see the convicts' bodies enacting their punishment, and thus to reflect on the crime. But these experiments lasted less than twenty years.
Foucault argues that this theory of "gentle" punishment represented the first step away from the excessive force of the sovereign, and towards more generalized and controlled means of punishment. But he suggests that the shift towards prison that followed was the result of a new "technology" and ontology for the body being developed in the 18th century, the "technology" of discipline, and the ontology of "man as machine."
Discipline
The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for every crime grew out of the development of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to Foucault. He looks at the development of highly refined forms of discipline, of discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's body. Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for bodies. Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated according to their tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. Therefore, he argues, discipline created a whole new form of individuality for bodies, which enabled them to perform their duty within the new forms of economic, political, and military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.
The individuality that discipline constructs (for the bodies it controls) has four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:
* Cellular—determining the spatial distribution of the bodies
* Organic—ensuring that the activities required of the bodies are "natural" for them
* Genetic—controlling the evolution over time of the activities of the bodies
* Combinatory—allowing for the combination of the force of many bodies into a single massive force
Foucault suggests this individuality can be implemented in systems that are officially egalitarian, but use discipline to construct non-egalitarian power relations:
Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. (222)
Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age—bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control, b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, which Foucault argues, was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which was never actually built.
The Panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. It allowed for constant observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant possibility of observation. Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether s/he was being observed. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disciplinary individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. This means one is less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not. Thus, prison, and specifically those that follow the model of the Panopticon, provide the ideal form of modern punishment. Foucault argues that this is why the generalized, "gentle" punishment of public work gangs gave way to the prison. It was the ideal modernization of punishment, so its eventual dominance was natural.
Having laid out the emergence of the prison as the dominant form of punishment, Foucault devotes the rest of the book to examining its precise form and function in our society, to lay bare the reasons for its continued use, and question the assumed results of its use.
Prison
In examining the construction of the prison as the central means of criminal punishment, Foucault builds a case for the idea that prison became part of a larger “carceral system” that has become an all-encompassing sovereign institution in modern society. Prison is one part of a vast network, including schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. This system creates “disciplinary careers” (Discipline and Punish, 300) for those locked within its corridors. It is operated under the scientific authority of medicine, psychology, and criminology. Moreover, it operates according to principles that ensure that it “cannot fail to produce delinquents.” (Discipline and Punish, 266). Delinquency, indeed, is produced when social petty crime (such as taking wood in the lord's lands) is no longer tolerated, creating a class of specialized "delinquents" acting as the police's proxy in surveillance of society.
The structures Foucault chooses to use as his starting positions help highlight his conclusions. In particular, his choice as a perfect prison of the penal institution at Mettray helps personify the carceral system. Within it is included the Prison, the School, the Church, and the work-house (industry)—all of which feature heavily in his argument. The prisons at Neufchatel, Mettray, and Mettray Netherlands were perfect examples for Foucault, because they, even in their original state, began to show the traits Foucault was searching for. They showed the body of knowledge being developed about the prisoners, the creation of the 'delinquent' class, and the disciplinary careers emerging.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy" of the Overman, which were first introduced in The Gay Science.
Described by Nietzsche himself as "the deepest ever written," the book is a dense and esoteric treatise on philosophy and morality, featuring as protagonist a fictionalized prophet descending from his recluse to mankind, Zarathustra. A central irony of the text is that Nietzsche mimics the style of the Bible in order to present ideas which fundamentally oppose Christian and Jewish morality and tradition.
Genesis
Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived while Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science; he made a small note, reading "6,000 feet beyond man and time," as evidence of this. More specifically, this note related to the concept of the Eternal Recurrence, which is, by Nietzsche's admission, the central idea of Zarathustra; this idea occurred to him by a "pyramidal block of stone" on the shores of Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine, a high alpine region whose valley floor is at 6,000 ft. Nietzsche planned to write the book in three parts over several years. He wrote that the ideas for Zarathustra first came to him while walking on two roads surrounding Rapallo, according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in the introduction of Thomas Common's early translation of the book.
While developing the general outlook of the book, he subsequently decided to write an additional three parts; ultimately, however, he composed only the fourth part, which is viewed to constitute an intermezzo.
Nietzsche commented in Ecce Homo that for the completion of each part: "Ten days sufficed; in no case, neither for the first nor for the third and last, did I require more" (trans. Kaufmann). The first three parts were first published separately, and were subsequently published in a single volume in 1887. The fourth part remained private after Nietzsche wrote it in 1885; a scant forty copies were all that were printed, apart from seven others that were distributed to Nietzsche's close friends. In March 1892, the four parts were finally reprinted as a single volume. Since then, the version most commonly produced has included all four parts.
The original text contains a great deal of word-play. An example of this exists in the use of the words "over" or "super" and the words "down" or "abyss/abysmal"; some examples include "superman" or "overman", "overgoing", "downgoing" and "self-overcoming".
Synopsis
The book chronicles the fictitious travels and pedagogy of Zarathustra. The name of this character is taken from the ancient prophet usually known in English as Zoroaster (Avestan: Zaraθuštra), the Persian founder of Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche is clearly portraying a "new" or "different" Zarathustra, one who turns traditional morality on its head. He goes on to characterize "what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist:"
[F]or what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. […] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. […] His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist” who flees from reality […]—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.
– Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny", §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann
Zarathustra has a simple characterisation and plot, narrated sporadically throughout the text. It possesses a unique experimental style, one that is, for instance, evident in newly invented "dithyrambs" narrated or sung by Zarathustra. Likewise, the separate Dithyrambs of Dionysus was written in autumn 1888, and printed with the full volume in 1892, as the corollaries of Zarathustra's "abundance".
Some speculate that Nietzsche intended to write about final acts of creation and destruction brought about by Zarathustra. However, the book lacks a finale to match that description; its actual ending focuses more on Zarathustra recognizing that his legacy is beginning to perpetuate, and consequently choosing to leave the higher men to their own devices in carrying his legacy forth.
Zarathustra also contains the famous dictum "God is dead", which had appeared earlier in The Gay Science. In his autobiographical work Ecce Homo, Nietzsche states that the book's underlying concept is discussed within "the penultimate section of the fourth book" of The Gay Science (Ecce Homo, Kaufmann). It is the Eternal recurrence of the same events.
This concept first occurred to Nietzsche while he was walking in Switzerland through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana (close to Surlei); he was inspired by the sight of a gigantic, towering, pyramidal rock. Before Zarathustra, Nietzsche had mentioned the concept in the fourth book of The Gay Science (e.g., sect. 341); this was the first public proclamation of the notion by him. Apart from its salient presence in Zarathustra, it is also echoed throughout Nietzsche's work. At any rate, it is by Zarathustra's transfiguration that he embraces eternity, that he at last ascertains "the supreme will to power". This inspiration finds its expression with Zarathustra's Roundelay, featured twice in the book, once near the story's close:
“ O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
"I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:—
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity." ”
Another singular feature of Zarathustra, first presented in the prologue, is the designation of human beings as a transition between apes and the "Übermensch" (in English, either the "overman" or "superman"; or, superhuman or overhuman. English translators Thomas Common and R. J. Hollingdale use superman, while Kaufmann uses overman, and Parkes uses overhuman). The Übermensch is one of the many interconnecting, interdependent themes of the story, and is represented through several different metaphors. Examples include: the lightning that is portended by the silence and raindrops of a travelling storm cloud; or the sun's rise and culmination at its midday zenith; or a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch.
The symbol of the Übermensch also alludes to Nietzsche's notions of "self-mastery", "self-cultivation", "self-direction", and "self-overcoming". Expostulating these concepts, Zarathustra declares:
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
"All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.
"Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants?
"Behold, I teach you the overman! The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go!"
– Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann
The book embodies a number of innovative poetical and rhetorical methods of expression. It serves as a parallel and supplement to the various philosophical ideas present in Nietzsche's body of work. He has, however, said that "among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself" (Ecce Homo, Preface, sec. 4, Kaufmann). Emphasizing its centrality and its status as his magnum opus, it is stated by Nietzsche that:
With [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights—the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance—it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness.
– Ecce Homo, Preface, §4, trans. Walter Kaufmann
Since, as stated, many of the book's ideas are also present in his other works, Zarathustra is seen to have served as a precursor to his later philosophical thought. With the book, Nietzsche embraced a distinct aesthetic assiduity. He later reformulated many of his ideas, in his book Beyond Good and Evil and various other writings that he composed thereafter. He continued to emphasize his philosophical concerns; generally, his intention was to show an alternative to repressive moral codes and to avert "nihilism" in all of its varied forms.
Other aspects of Thus Spoke Zarathustra relate to Nietzsche's proposed "Transvaluation of All Values". This incomplete project began with The Antichrist.
Themes
Nietzsche injects myriad ideas into the book, but there are a few recurring themes. The overman (Übermensch), a self-mastered individual who has achieved his full power, is an almost omnipresent idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Man as a race is merely a bridge between animals and the overman. Nietzsche also makes a point that the overman is not an end result for a person, but more the journey toward self-mastery.
The eternal recurrence, found elsewhere in Nietzsche's writing, is also mentioned. The eternal recurrence is the idea that all events that have happened will happen again, infinitely many times. Such a reality can serve as the litmus test for an overman. Faced with the knowledge that he would repeat every action that he has taken, an overman would be elated as he has no regrets and loves life.
The will to power is the fundamental component of human nature. Everything we do is an expression of the will to power. The will to power is a psychological analysis of all human action and is accentuated by self-overcoming and self-enhancement. Contrasted with living for procreation, pleasure, or happiness, the will to power is the summary of all man's struggle against his surrounding environment as well as his reason for living in it.
Copious criticisms of Christianity can be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in particular Christian values of good and evil and its belief in an afterlife. Nietzsche sees the complacency of Christian values as fetters to the achievement of overman as well as on the human spirit.
Style
Harold Bloom calls Thus Spoke Zarathustra a "gorgeous disaster", adding that its rhapsodic fiction is "now unreadable".
Noteworthy for its format, the book comprises a philosophical work of fiction whose style often lightheartedly imitates that of the New Testament and of the Platonic dialogues, at times resembling pre-Socratic works in tone and in its use of natural phenomena as rhetorical and explanatory devices. It also features frequent references to the Western literary and philosophical traditions, implicitly offering an interpretation of these traditions and of their problems. Nietzsche achieves all of this through the character of Zarathustra (referring to the traditional prophet of Zoroastrianism), who makes speeches on philosophic topics as he moves along a loose plotline marking his development and the reception of his ideas. One can view this characteristic (following the genre of the bildungsroman) as an inline commentary on Zarathustra's (and Nietzsche's) philosophy. All this, along with the book's ambiguity and paradoxical nature, has helped its eventual enthusiastic reception by the reading public, but has frustrated academic attempts at analysis (as Nietzsche may have intended). Thus Spoke Zarathustra remained unpopular as a topic for scholars (especially those in the Anglo-American analytic tradition) until the second half of the twentieth century brought widespread interest in Nietzsche and his unconventional style that does not distinguish between philosophy and literature. It offers formulations of eternal recurrence, and Nietzsche for the first time speaks of the Übermensch: themes that would dominate his books from this point onwards.
A vulnerability of Nietzsche's style is that his nuances and shades of meaning are very easily lost — and all too easily gained — in translation. The Übermensch is particularly problematic: the equivalent "Superman" found in dictionaries and in the translations by Thomas Common and R.J. Hollingdale may create an unfortunate association with the heroic comic-character "Superman", while simultaneously detracting from Nietzsche's repeated play on "über" as well as losing the gender-neutrality of the German.
The "Übermensch" is the being that overcomes the "great nausea" associated with nihilism; that overcomes that most "abysmal" realization of the eternal return. He is the being that "sails over morality", and that dances over gravity (the "spirit of gravity" is Zarathustra's devil and archenemy). He is a "harvester" and a "celebrant" who endlessly affirms his existence, thereby becoming the transfigurer of his consciousness and life, aesthetically. He is initially a destructive force, excising and annihilating the insidious "truths" of the herd, and consequently reclaiming the chaos from which pure creativity is born. It is this creative force exemplified by the Übermensch that justifies suffering without displacing it in some "afterworld".
Translations
The English translations of Zarathustra differ according to the sentiments of the translators. The Thomas Common translation favors a classic English approach, in the style of Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible. Common's poetic interpretation of the text, which renders the title Thus Spake Zarathustra, received wide acclaim for its lambent portrayal. Common reasoned that because the original German was written in a pseudo-Luther-Biblical style, a pseudo-King-James-Biblical style would be fitting in the English translation.
The Common translation, which improved on Alexander Tille's earlier attempt, remained widely accepted until the more critical translations, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra, separately by R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, which are considered to convey more accurately the German text than the Common version. Kaufmann's introduction to his own translation included a blistering critique of Common's version; he notes that in one instance, Common has taken the German "most evil" and rendered it "baddest", a particularly unfortunate error not merely for his having coined the term "baddest", but also because Nietzsche dedicated a third of The Genealogy of Morals to the difference between "bad" and "evil". This and other errors led Kaufmann to wondering if Common "had little German and less English". The translations of Kaufmann and Hollingdale render the text in a far more familiar, less archaic, style of language, than that of Common.
Clancy Martin's 2005 translation opens with criticism and praise for these three seminal translators, Common, Hollingdale, and Kaufmann. He notes that the German text available to Common was considerably flawed, and that the German text from which Hollingdale and Kaufmann worked was itself untrue to Nietzsche's own work in some ways. Martin criticizes Kaufmann for changing punctuation, altering literal and philosophical meanings, and dampening some of Nietzsche's more controversial metaphors. Kaufmann's version, which has become the most widely available, features a translator's note suggesting that Nietzsche's text would have benefited from an editor; Martin suggests that Kaufmann "took it upon himself to become his editor".
Graham Parkes describes his own 2005 translation as trying "above all to convey the musicality of the text (which was not a priority for Walter Kaufmann or R.J. Hollingdale, authors of the best English translations so far)."
Musical adaptation
The book inspired Richard Strauss to compose the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which he designated "freely based on Friedrich Nietzsche." Zarathustra's Roundelay is set as part of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony (1895-6), originally under the title What Man Tells Me, or alternatively What the Night tells me (of Man). Frederick Delius based his major choral-orchestral work A Mass of Life (1904-5) on texts from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work ends with a setting of Zarathustra's Roundelay which Delius had composed earlier, in 1898, as a separate work. Carl Orff also composed a three-movement setting of part of Nietzsche's text as a teenager, but this work remains unpublished.
Editions of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* 1st - 1909 - (limited to 2,000)
* 2nd - 1911 - (limited to 1,500)
* 3rd - 1914 - (limited to 2,000)
* 4th - 1916 - (limited to 2,000) of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None translated by Thomas Common, published by the MacMillan Company in 1916, printed in Great Britain by The Darwien Press of Edinburgh.
* Also sprach Zarathustra, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (study edition of the standard German Nietzsche edition)
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House; reprinted in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: The Viking Press, 1954 and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Graham Parkes, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2005
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Adrian del Caro and edited by Robert Pippin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Commentaries on Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Gustav Naumann 1899-1901 Zarathustra-Commentar, 4 volumes. Leipzig : Haessel
* Higgins, Kathleen. 1990. Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
* Lampert, Laurence. 1989. Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Rosen, Stanley. 2004. The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Seung, T. K. 2005. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Rüdiger Schmidt Nietzsche für Anfänger: Also sprach Zarathustra - Eine Lese-Einführung (introduction in German to the work)
Essay collections on Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Essays on Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise, edited by James Luchte, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. ISBN 1847062210
Described by Nietzsche himself as "the deepest ever written," the book is a dense and esoteric treatise on philosophy and morality, featuring as protagonist a fictionalized prophet descending from his recluse to mankind, Zarathustra. A central irony of the text is that Nietzsche mimics the style of the Bible in order to present ideas which fundamentally oppose Christian and Jewish morality and tradition.
Genesis
Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived while Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science; he made a small note, reading "6,000 feet beyond man and time," as evidence of this. More specifically, this note related to the concept of the Eternal Recurrence, which is, by Nietzsche's admission, the central idea of Zarathustra; this idea occurred to him by a "pyramidal block of stone" on the shores of Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine, a high alpine region whose valley floor is at 6,000 ft. Nietzsche planned to write the book in three parts over several years. He wrote that the ideas for Zarathustra first came to him while walking on two roads surrounding Rapallo, according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in the introduction of Thomas Common's early translation of the book.
While developing the general outlook of the book, he subsequently decided to write an additional three parts; ultimately, however, he composed only the fourth part, which is viewed to constitute an intermezzo.
Nietzsche commented in Ecce Homo that for the completion of each part: "Ten days sufficed; in no case, neither for the first nor for the third and last, did I require more" (trans. Kaufmann). The first three parts were first published separately, and were subsequently published in a single volume in 1887. The fourth part remained private after Nietzsche wrote it in 1885; a scant forty copies were all that were printed, apart from seven others that were distributed to Nietzsche's close friends. In March 1892, the four parts were finally reprinted as a single volume. Since then, the version most commonly produced has included all four parts.
The original text contains a great deal of word-play. An example of this exists in the use of the words "over" or "super" and the words "down" or "abyss/abysmal"; some examples include "superman" or "overman", "overgoing", "downgoing" and "self-overcoming".
Synopsis
The book chronicles the fictitious travels and pedagogy of Zarathustra. The name of this character is taken from the ancient prophet usually known in English as Zoroaster (Avestan: Zaraθuštra), the Persian founder of Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche is clearly portraying a "new" or "different" Zarathustra, one who turns traditional morality on its head. He goes on to characterize "what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist:"
[F]or what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. […] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. […] His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist” who flees from reality […]—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.
– Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny", §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann
Zarathustra has a simple characterisation and plot, narrated sporadically throughout the text. It possesses a unique experimental style, one that is, for instance, evident in newly invented "dithyrambs" narrated or sung by Zarathustra. Likewise, the separate Dithyrambs of Dionysus was written in autumn 1888, and printed with the full volume in 1892, as the corollaries of Zarathustra's "abundance".
Some speculate that Nietzsche intended to write about final acts of creation and destruction brought about by Zarathustra. However, the book lacks a finale to match that description; its actual ending focuses more on Zarathustra recognizing that his legacy is beginning to perpetuate, and consequently choosing to leave the higher men to their own devices in carrying his legacy forth.
Zarathustra also contains the famous dictum "God is dead", which had appeared earlier in The Gay Science. In his autobiographical work Ecce Homo, Nietzsche states that the book's underlying concept is discussed within "the penultimate section of the fourth book" of The Gay Science (Ecce Homo, Kaufmann). It is the Eternal recurrence of the same events.
This concept first occurred to Nietzsche while he was walking in Switzerland through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana (close to Surlei); he was inspired by the sight of a gigantic, towering, pyramidal rock. Before Zarathustra, Nietzsche had mentioned the concept in the fourth book of The Gay Science (e.g., sect. 341); this was the first public proclamation of the notion by him. Apart from its salient presence in Zarathustra, it is also echoed throughout Nietzsche's work. At any rate, it is by Zarathustra's transfiguration that he embraces eternity, that he at last ascertains "the supreme will to power". This inspiration finds its expression with Zarathustra's Roundelay, featured twice in the book, once near the story's close:
“ O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
"I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:—
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity." ”
Another singular feature of Zarathustra, first presented in the prologue, is the designation of human beings as a transition between apes and the "Übermensch" (in English, either the "overman" or "superman"; or, superhuman or overhuman. English translators Thomas Common and R. J. Hollingdale use superman, while Kaufmann uses overman, and Parkes uses overhuman). The Übermensch is one of the many interconnecting, interdependent themes of the story, and is represented through several different metaphors. Examples include: the lightning that is portended by the silence and raindrops of a travelling storm cloud; or the sun's rise and culmination at its midday zenith; or a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch.
The symbol of the Übermensch also alludes to Nietzsche's notions of "self-mastery", "self-cultivation", "self-direction", and "self-overcoming". Expostulating these concepts, Zarathustra declares:
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
"All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.
"Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants?
"Behold, I teach you the overman! The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go!"
– Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann
The book embodies a number of innovative poetical and rhetorical methods of expression. It serves as a parallel and supplement to the various philosophical ideas present in Nietzsche's body of work. He has, however, said that "among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself" (Ecce Homo, Preface, sec. 4, Kaufmann). Emphasizing its centrality and its status as his magnum opus, it is stated by Nietzsche that:
With [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights—the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance—it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness.
– Ecce Homo, Preface, §4, trans. Walter Kaufmann
Since, as stated, many of the book's ideas are also present in his other works, Zarathustra is seen to have served as a precursor to his later philosophical thought. With the book, Nietzsche embraced a distinct aesthetic assiduity. He later reformulated many of his ideas, in his book Beyond Good and Evil and various other writings that he composed thereafter. He continued to emphasize his philosophical concerns; generally, his intention was to show an alternative to repressive moral codes and to avert "nihilism" in all of its varied forms.
Other aspects of Thus Spoke Zarathustra relate to Nietzsche's proposed "Transvaluation of All Values". This incomplete project began with The Antichrist.
Themes
Nietzsche injects myriad ideas into the book, but there are a few recurring themes. The overman (Übermensch), a self-mastered individual who has achieved his full power, is an almost omnipresent idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Man as a race is merely a bridge between animals and the overman. Nietzsche also makes a point that the overman is not an end result for a person, but more the journey toward self-mastery.
The eternal recurrence, found elsewhere in Nietzsche's writing, is also mentioned. The eternal recurrence is the idea that all events that have happened will happen again, infinitely many times. Such a reality can serve as the litmus test for an overman. Faced with the knowledge that he would repeat every action that he has taken, an overman would be elated as he has no regrets and loves life.
The will to power is the fundamental component of human nature. Everything we do is an expression of the will to power. The will to power is a psychological analysis of all human action and is accentuated by self-overcoming and self-enhancement. Contrasted with living for procreation, pleasure, or happiness, the will to power is the summary of all man's struggle against his surrounding environment as well as his reason for living in it.
Copious criticisms of Christianity can be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in particular Christian values of good and evil and its belief in an afterlife. Nietzsche sees the complacency of Christian values as fetters to the achievement of overman as well as on the human spirit.
Style
Harold Bloom calls Thus Spoke Zarathustra a "gorgeous disaster", adding that its rhapsodic fiction is "now unreadable".
Noteworthy for its format, the book comprises a philosophical work of fiction whose style often lightheartedly imitates that of the New Testament and of the Platonic dialogues, at times resembling pre-Socratic works in tone and in its use of natural phenomena as rhetorical and explanatory devices. It also features frequent references to the Western literary and philosophical traditions, implicitly offering an interpretation of these traditions and of their problems. Nietzsche achieves all of this through the character of Zarathustra (referring to the traditional prophet of Zoroastrianism), who makes speeches on philosophic topics as he moves along a loose plotline marking his development and the reception of his ideas. One can view this characteristic (following the genre of the bildungsroman) as an inline commentary on Zarathustra's (and Nietzsche's) philosophy. All this, along with the book's ambiguity and paradoxical nature, has helped its eventual enthusiastic reception by the reading public, but has frustrated academic attempts at analysis (as Nietzsche may have intended). Thus Spoke Zarathustra remained unpopular as a topic for scholars (especially those in the Anglo-American analytic tradition) until the second half of the twentieth century brought widespread interest in Nietzsche and his unconventional style that does not distinguish between philosophy and literature. It offers formulations of eternal recurrence, and Nietzsche for the first time speaks of the Übermensch: themes that would dominate his books from this point onwards.
A vulnerability of Nietzsche's style is that his nuances and shades of meaning are very easily lost — and all too easily gained — in translation. The Übermensch is particularly problematic: the equivalent "Superman" found in dictionaries and in the translations by Thomas Common and R.J. Hollingdale may create an unfortunate association with the heroic comic-character "Superman", while simultaneously detracting from Nietzsche's repeated play on "über" as well as losing the gender-neutrality of the German.
The "Übermensch" is the being that overcomes the "great nausea" associated with nihilism; that overcomes that most "abysmal" realization of the eternal return. He is the being that "sails over morality", and that dances over gravity (the "spirit of gravity" is Zarathustra's devil and archenemy). He is a "harvester" and a "celebrant" who endlessly affirms his existence, thereby becoming the transfigurer of his consciousness and life, aesthetically. He is initially a destructive force, excising and annihilating the insidious "truths" of the herd, and consequently reclaiming the chaos from which pure creativity is born. It is this creative force exemplified by the Übermensch that justifies suffering without displacing it in some "afterworld".
Translations
The English translations of Zarathustra differ according to the sentiments of the translators. The Thomas Common translation favors a classic English approach, in the style of Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible. Common's poetic interpretation of the text, which renders the title Thus Spake Zarathustra, received wide acclaim for its lambent portrayal. Common reasoned that because the original German was written in a pseudo-Luther-Biblical style, a pseudo-King-James-Biblical style would be fitting in the English translation.
The Common translation, which improved on Alexander Tille's earlier attempt, remained widely accepted until the more critical translations, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra, separately by R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, which are considered to convey more accurately the German text than the Common version. Kaufmann's introduction to his own translation included a blistering critique of Common's version; he notes that in one instance, Common has taken the German "most evil" and rendered it "baddest", a particularly unfortunate error not merely for his having coined the term "baddest", but also because Nietzsche dedicated a third of The Genealogy of Morals to the difference between "bad" and "evil". This and other errors led Kaufmann to wondering if Common "had little German and less English". The translations of Kaufmann and Hollingdale render the text in a far more familiar, less archaic, style of language, than that of Common.
Clancy Martin's 2005 translation opens with criticism and praise for these three seminal translators, Common, Hollingdale, and Kaufmann. He notes that the German text available to Common was considerably flawed, and that the German text from which Hollingdale and Kaufmann worked was itself untrue to Nietzsche's own work in some ways. Martin criticizes Kaufmann for changing punctuation, altering literal and philosophical meanings, and dampening some of Nietzsche's more controversial metaphors. Kaufmann's version, which has become the most widely available, features a translator's note suggesting that Nietzsche's text would have benefited from an editor; Martin suggests that Kaufmann "took it upon himself to become his editor".
Graham Parkes describes his own 2005 translation as trying "above all to convey the musicality of the text (which was not a priority for Walter Kaufmann or R.J. Hollingdale, authors of the best English translations so far)."
Musical adaptation
The book inspired Richard Strauss to compose the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which he designated "freely based on Friedrich Nietzsche." Zarathustra's Roundelay is set as part of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony (1895-6), originally under the title What Man Tells Me, or alternatively What the Night tells me (of Man). Frederick Delius based his major choral-orchestral work A Mass of Life (1904-5) on texts from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work ends with a setting of Zarathustra's Roundelay which Delius had composed earlier, in 1898, as a separate work. Carl Orff also composed a three-movement setting of part of Nietzsche's text as a teenager, but this work remains unpublished.
Editions of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* 1st - 1909 - (limited to 2,000)
* 2nd - 1911 - (limited to 1,500)
* 3rd - 1914 - (limited to 2,000)
* 4th - 1916 - (limited to 2,000) of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None translated by Thomas Common, published by the MacMillan Company in 1916, printed in Great Britain by The Darwien Press of Edinburgh.
* Also sprach Zarathustra, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (study edition of the standard German Nietzsche edition)
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House; reprinted in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: The Viking Press, 1954 and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Graham Parkes, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2005
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Adrian del Caro and edited by Robert Pippin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Commentaries on Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Gustav Naumann 1899-1901 Zarathustra-Commentar, 4 volumes. Leipzig : Haessel
* Higgins, Kathleen. 1990. Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
* Lampert, Laurence. 1989. Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Rosen, Stanley. 2004. The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Seung, T. K. 2005. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Rüdiger Schmidt Nietzsche für Anfänger: Also sprach Zarathustra - Eine Lese-Einführung (introduction in German to the work)
Essay collections on Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Essays on Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise, edited by James Luchte, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. ISBN 1847062210
1789年生于但泽(Danzig)的叔本华从小孤僻，傲慢，喜怒无常，并带点神经质。叔本华早年在英国和法国接受教育，能够流利使用英语、意大利语、西班牙语等多种欧洲语言和拉丁语等古代语言。他最初被迫选择经商以继承父业，在父亲死后他才得以进入大学。1809年他进入哥廷根大学攻读医学，但把兴趣转移到了哲学，并在1811年于柏林学习一段时间。在那里他对费希特和施莱艾尔马赫产生了浓厚的兴趣。他以《论充足理由律的四重根》获得了博士学位。歌德对此文非常赞赏，同时发现了叔本华的悲观主义倾向，告诫说：如果你爱自己的价值，那就给世界更多的价值吧。他称柏拉图为神明般的，康德为奇迹般的，对这两人的思想相当崇敬。但厌恶后来费希特，黑格尔代表的思辨哲学。
他对自己的哲学也极为自负，声称是一种全新的哲学方法，会震撼整个欧洲思想界。然而他的著作却常常受人冷落。在柏林大学任教时，他试图和黑格尔在讲台上一决高低，结果黑格尔的讲座常常爆满，而听他讲课的学生却从来没有超出过三人。于是叔本华带着一种愤遭的心情离开了大学的讲坛。叔本华与黑格尔的对抗实际上是两种哲学倾向之间的较量。他失败了。因为他不属于那个时代。用叔本华自己的话说，他的书是为后人写的。事实也是如此：到了晚年，时代才和他走到了一起，他终于享受到了期待了一生的荣誉。
他对自己的哲学也极为自负，声称是一种全新的哲学方法，会震撼整个欧洲思想界。然而他的著作却常常受人冷落。在柏林大学任教时，他试图和黑格尔在讲台上一决高低，结果黑格尔的讲座常常爆满，而听他讲课的学生却从来没有超出过三人。于是叔本华带着一种愤遭的心情离开了大学的讲坛。叔本华与黑格尔的对抗实际上是两种哲学倾向之间的较量。他失败了。因为他不属于那个时代。用叔本华自己的话说，他的书是为后人写的。事实也是如此：到了晚年，时代才和他走到了一起，他终于享受到了期待了一生的荣誉。
林猹 主编
编者前言
后改革中国与商鞅（序言）
天将降大任于斯人（代跋）
卷一 交锋后的中国
>>第一章 历史赋予的机遇
>>第二章 重提商鞅
卷二 再现革命之精神
>>第三章 回首一望，遍地鲜花
>>第四章 大方略
>>第五章 奠基百年
卷三 为了中华之崛起
>>第六章 未来之路
天将降大任于斯人（代跋）
返回上页
编者前言
后改革中国与商鞅（序言）
天将降大任于斯人（代跋）
卷一 交锋后的中国
>>第一章 历史赋予的机遇
>>第二章 重提商鞅
卷二 再现革命之精神
>>第三章 回首一望，遍地鲜花
>>第四章 大方略
>>第五章 奠基百年
卷三 为了中华之崛起
>>第六章 未来之路
天将降大任于斯人（代跋）
返回上页
《智慧书--永恒的处世经典》这本书谈的是知人观事、判断、行动的策略--使人在这个世界上功成名就且臻于完美的策略。全书由三百则箴言警句构成，这些箴言警句滋味绝佳而不可不与友朋同事分享共赏，又鞭辟入里而不能不蒙敌人对手于鼓里。
巴尔塔沙·葛拉西安（1601一1658），一个满怀入世热忱的那稣会教士，对人类的愚行深恶痛绝。但《智慧书 --永恒的处世经典》全书极言人有臻于完美的可能，并云只要佐以技巧，善必胜恶。在《智慧书--永恒的处世经典》中，完美并不靠宗教上的启示（全书罕言上帝），而取决于人的资源与勤奋：警觉、自制、有自知之明及其余明慎之道。
巴尔塔沙·葛拉西安（1601一1658），一个满怀入世热忱的那稣会教士，对人类的愚行深恶痛绝。但《智慧书 --永恒的处世经典》全书极言人有臻于完美的可能，并云只要佐以技巧，善必胜恶。在《智慧书--永恒的处世经典》中，完美并不靠宗教上的启示（全书罕言上帝），而取决于人的资源与勤奋：警觉、自制、有自知之明及其余明慎之道。