• Is there a necessary connection between destruction and creativity, as Nietzsche suggests? Does great art require suffering?
• What does Zarathustra mean when he says that “The overman is the meaning of the earth? What are the ways you see people “blaspheme against the earth?”

Zarathustra is a character made to play as the counterpart of Christ or Socrates, coming down with great wisdom that no one wants to take part in. No one is listening to his Dionysian way of thinking, and prefer to stick to the Apollisean way that they are used to. He thinks to himself often that he is “not the mouth for [their] ears,” as nothing he brings up can be accepted by the majority of people in the square.

He goes on about mainly how God, or any God, is dead, and that is is our responsibility to save ourselves rather than to wait for him to save us in death. This is an inflammatory statement and idea to say the least, as the common people are not used to anyone not believing in a god or that we must be saved for the afterlife. Zarathustra argues that we (his readers and the audience in the story) should be the new meaning of the earth, or the ubermensch. The Ubermensche, loosely translated as the Overman, is a would be God who is true to the physical earth, as he sets his own rules for how he lives so long as no one is purposely hurt. Sadly, though this thought of anyone being godlike appeals to people, it is not something that the ‘normal people’ are happy or willing to hear.

Going off of his Dionysian thinking, I can say that creation and destruction are hand in hand. You cannot create something without breaking it in, or making it out of multiple things you take from the earth. Dionysian ways of thinking involves an awareness of the darker side of life, and focuses on the darkness as vital to truly living. It sounds depressing, like you’d only be sad all the time, or like you focus on things that make you unhappy. When you take this into account with the fact that life is half and half good and bad, ignoring half of it seems like a delusion. It makes it out to be less focused on half of life that matters just as much as the happy half.

With creativity, I do believe that good art makes you feel something deep within, and that sad art has an amazing way of making evoking emotions from you by just existing as art. Good art can evoke the same emotions, but the more powerful ones come from the sadder art. Great art is enhanced by suffering inside of it, or being a product of suffering, but not all great art is great because of the sadness it carries.

When Zarathustra saws that “the overman is the meaning of the earth,” he means it in the sense that god is gone and has passed the earth down to us. We now need to take the responsibility of the earth and the physical world. I see that people blaspheme the earth by acting like nothing they do can hurt the earth, as if we don’t live on earth and directly affect it. No one else is here but us to care for it, but the way we decide against caring for it speaks volumes about how disconnected we are from where we live.

Word Count: 586