Chapter 2 - Philosophy As a Way of Life in Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Summary

Building on Pierre Hadot’s influential reminder that thinkers in the ancient world used to practice philosophy as a total way of life, they show that Nietzsche was inspired by these precursors to craft TSZ as a narrative exemplification and personification of this ideal. In their view, Nietzsche presents his performative book as a crucial intervention in an age when professionalized philosophy has become a merely theoretical and contemplative exercise that is textually propagated by university-dwelling scholarly specialists who have little interest in the kind of commitment to knowledge and wisdom that would transform them and their lives. Nietzsche knew that the philosophical texts he wrote in his own voice could be easily assimilated into this bloodless academic culture, so he deliberately designed a new kind of philosophical text that would resist any such assimilation. Instead of just arguing that philosophy should be practiced as a way of life, Nietzsche writes a new kind of philosophy book that dramatically models this practice and hopes to provoke a radical spiritual conversion in its readers.