Friedrich Nietzsch, triangles and fetuses on toast

In 'The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music' (1872) by Freiedrick Nietzsche he reference Immanuel Kant believing that all people were equal and that we all have a moral compass in the sense that we all can tell right from wrong, and that even though we may do a bad thing, we are fully aware that it is bad at the time of doing it. Kant also believed that the 10 commandments are eternally true (Thou shall not kill etc)Nietzsche rejects this idea as he believes that some people have a much stronger sense of right and wrong. He also believed that there are very few 'super people' in the world and that the world should be run by these people. One of these people was Napoleon and Nietzsche said that it would be worth killing the whole population of France for one napoleon. He also said that William Shakespeare was a 'super person from the future'. These people aren't 'super human' is a biological way though. Nietzsche believed that in a noumenal world normal people have a moral compass but the 'super people' do not because they make their own rules.

Nietzsche also discussed Arthur Schopenhauerr, who said that the cause of pain is desire and if you can suppress all desire then you will be calm. Futhermore Neitzsche wrote about the greeks believing that what we believe to be silence is actually the music of the spheres. He also wrote about music being the most abstract of all the arts and that no-one really knows what music is or how it affects us. Nietzsche also raised the idea of music being a portal to the noumenal world. He also references to Pythagoreanism. This was a religion circa 300 B.C. in Greece where believers worshipped triangles and never ate beans because they believed them to be fetuses! (fetuses on toast, pictured left) They also belived that you should never leave your impression in the bed as this would mean that you would be cursed. The fact that they worshipped triangles is interesting as the amount of things that are organised as three is amazing, for example, a degree, gold, silver & bronze, the rule of thirds, subject - verb - object, the holy trinity and countless other things. You would think that perhaps most things would be organised as two and we as humans are generally symmetrical but it's not. The Pythagorean's could have been on to something with their worship of the three sided shape.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) Nietzsche wrote about Zarathustra. He was the founder of Zoroastrianism, this was a religion where fire was worshipped. This was because they believed that fire cleanses and they also believed that fire is love and vice versa. Leonard Cohen was the most famous advocate of this religion.

Nietzsche's sister was a Nazi and after his death she tried to breed 'super people' inspired by her brother in South America.

Nietzsche took a lot of schopenhauerr's system, especially the importasnce of will in self-creation but rejected Schopenhauerr's pessimism that life is only misery. He sees the only ways out of this as madness, suicide and intoxication. I would say that this is relevant in today's society because people who left school and didn't go to college or university to study further and went straight in to a full-time dead-end job become slaves to the system. This makes them very miserable and they often (in my experience, with reference to my school friends) go out and get drunk, or intoxicated if you will, every weekend to forget about their pain of existence. However none of my old school friends have committed suicide of gone mad however (yet!)