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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Rethinking Morality
The Superman and the Will to Power
Death of God and Christianity
Eternal Recurrence
Summary
Analysis
Zarathustra addresses the subject of the will: he says that what urges his disciples on is the desire for all being to “bend and accommodate itself to you.” This is called the will to power—a will that wants to create a world worth submitting to. The masses are like a river down which a boat, carrying value judgments, floats. What the masses believe to be “good and evil” actually shows “an ancient will to power.” The wise, in contrast, put their own “passengers” in the boat by means of their will. The will to power is the “unexhausted, procreating life-will.”
Zarathustra discusses the will to power, a central idea in Nietzsche’s philosophy, in greater detail. The will to power is an unrestrained, all-embracing will to creatively exert one’s power in the world. The will to power is what creates values—and the masses, composed of weaker individuals, generally accept the values imposed on them through others’ will to power. Stronger individuals, capable of exerting their will, do not accept these.
Themes
Zarathustra shares his teaching about life and the nature of living creatures. First, he explains that all living creatures are first “obeying” creatures. Second, the creature who cannot “obey himself will be commanded.” Finally, commanding is harder than obeying. This is because the one who commands “bears the burden of all who obey.” This is even true when a person commands themselves, as they must be both the judge and the judged under their own law.
All creatures obey someone, but the stronger individual is not content to be commanded by others. This type of person obeys only themselves. But the stronger not only command themselves—they command others. Any command, whether of oneself or others, places one in the position of judge, which is much more difficult than obeying.
Themes
Every living creature possesses will to power; even a servant wills to be master. Every weaker person’s will persuades them to serve the stronger, while they master those weaker than themselves. Meanwhile, the weaker always desire to steal the power of the stronger.
Those who lack will to power resent those who possess it—and in their envy, they try to wrest power from the more powerful.
Themes
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Zarathustra says that life told him its secret—it is “that which must overcome itself again and again.” Life would rather die than renounce this; and when life dies, it sacrifices itself for power’s sake. Even an enlightened person is an expression of life’s self-overcoming.
The purpose of life, in Zarathustra’s view, is self-overcoming for the sake of ever more power. Such life spends and renews itself again and again.
Themes
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Zarathustra tells his followers that good and evil do not exist; these things must overcome themselves again and again. Doctrines of good and evil are just exertions of power. Someone who wants to be a creator in good and evil must first be a destroyer of values.
Zarathustra doesn’t claim that traditional notions of good and evil are necessarily bad; their objectivity is just illusory, expressions of others’ power. This is why the superior person, in Zarathustra’s view, will use their power to create new values of good and evil.
Themes
