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Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ) is often reported to be Friedrich Nietzsche's popular and most read book, but the fact that the book is so unusual and often hermetic has made for wildly different sorts of reception. In traditional philosophical terms, Nietzsche stresses that one can start going wrong when they become captured by the picture of revealing reality, the truth, beneath appearances, in mere opinions. Zarathustra leaves his cave to revisit the human world because he wants both to prophesy and help hasten the advent of something like a new attempt on the part of mankind, a post beyond or over the human aspiration. TSZ is somehow to be addressed to the source of whatever longing, striving, desire gives life a direction, inspires sacrifice and dedication. Zarathustra stresses that good and evil, any life-orienting normative distinctions, are hardly everlasting; rather they must overcome themselves out of themselves again and again.
Aristotle was Plato's student for two decades before founding his own school. Plato, like nearly every other thinker in and well after antiquity, associated teleology with conscious purpose. To make the world a purposive structure just is to posit an intelligent mind as its cause. In positing a detached and self-absorbed god, one who is above any inclination to intervene in our world, Aristotle sounds surprisingly similar to Epicurus. The goal of life, as Plato's followers expressed his idea, is 'to become as like god as possible'. This chapter describes how Aristotle's treatment of plants as inverted human beings has its origin in Plato's elevation of human beings to the status of inverted plants. It considers two areas in which Aristotle's teleology seems to me to reflect his Platonic beginnings. One is the role of the craft model; the other is global teleology.
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