doctrine Good and evil are human creations that differ by people and age; breaking the old tables and writing new ones is the creator's task.
Long slept Zarathustra; and not only the rosy dawn passed over his head, but also the morning. At last, however, his eyes opened, and amazedly he gazed into the forest and the stillness, amazedly he gazed into himself.…
The good and just hate most the one who breaks their tables of values, who is the creator.
Read in the book →But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness. Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him,…
The dragon carries the values of a thousand years and claims all values are already created.
Read in the book →My brethren, wherefore is there need of the lion in the spirit? Why sufficeth not the beast of burden, which renounceth and is reverent? To create new values—that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create…
Claiming the right to new values is a predatory act against the reverent spirit.
Read in the book →When Zarathustra heard the wise man thus speak, he laughed in his heart: for thereby had a light dawned upon him. And thus spake he to his heart: A fool seemeth this wise man with his forty thoughts: but I believe he…
Zarathustra sees that the old teachers of virtue sought only good sleep, a value he rejects.
Read in the book →Even at present, to be sure, there are some like this preacher of virtue, and not always so honourable: but their time is past.
Zarathustra declares the era of the sleep-preaching academic virtue over.
Read in the book →To the despisers of the body will I speak a word. That they despise is caused by their esteem. What is it that created esteeming and despising and worth and will? The creating Self created for itself esteeming and…
Values of esteem and worth are traced to the creating body, not to the spirit.
Read in the book →“Enemy” shall ye say but not “villain,” “invalid” shall ye say but not “wretch,” “fool” shall ye say but not “sinner.”
Zarathustra replaces the moral vocabulary of blame and sin with plainer, non-condemning names.
Read in the book →What is this man? A mass of diseases that reach out into the world through the spirit; there they want to get their prey. What is this man? A coil of wild serpents that are seldom at peace among themselves—so they go…
What counts as evil changes with the age: once doubt and the will to self were evil.
Read in the book →But this will not enter your ears; it hurteth your good people, ye tell me. But what doth it matter to me about your good people! Many things in your good people cause me disgust, and verily, not their evil. I would…
Zarathustra would call such madness truth, fidelity or justice, not their petty virtue.
Read in the book →Noble thou feelest thyself still, and noble others also feel thee still, though they bear thee a grudge and cast evil looks. Know this, that to everybody a noble one standeth in the way. Also to the good, a noble one…
The noble man creates a new virtue while the good want the old conserved, so the good push the noble aside.
Read in the book →Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states. A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of…
Each people has its own language of good and evil, made by creators; the state's confused language is its mark.
Read in the book →Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: thus he discovered the good and bad of many peoples. No greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than good and bad. No people could live without first valuing; if a…
Good and bad differ from people to people, so values are shown to be relative human creations.
Read in the book →“Always shalt thou be the foremost and prominent above others: no one shall thy jealous soul love, except a friend”—that made the soul of a Greek thrill: thereby went he his way to greatness. “To speak truth, and be…
Concrete examples of different peoples' tables show how each people's 'good' served its own overcoming.
Read in the book →Verily, men have given unto themselves all their good and bad. Verily, they took it not, they found it not, it came not unto them as a voice from heaven. Values did man only assign to things in order to maintain…
Changing values means changing the creators, and the creator must destroy.
Read in the book →When Zarathustra once told this to his disciples they asked him: “And what, O Zarathustra, is the moral of thy story?” And Zarathustra answered them thus: The destroyer of morality, the good and just call me: my story…
Zarathustra accepts the name 'destroyer of morality' from the good and just and calls his story immoral.
Read in the book →When, however, ye have an enemy, then return him not good for evil: for that would abash him. But prove that he hath done something good to you. And rather be angry than abash any one! And when ye are cursed, it…
He reverses the Christian rule of returning good for evil and proposes a nobler, more human way to treat enemies and wrongs.
Read in the book →I do not like your cold justice; out of the eye of your judges there always glanceth the executioner and his cold steel. Tell me: where find we justice, which is love with seeing eyes? Devise me, then, the love which…
He rejects punitive, cold justice and asks for a justice that is love and acquits everyone except the judge.
Read in the book →Tell me: where find we justice, which is love with seeing eyes?
A compact statement of the ideal of justice that replaces judging and punishing.
Read in the book →Upward soareth our sense: thus is it a simile of our body, a simile of an elevation. Such similes of elevations are the names of the virtues. Thus goeth the body through history, a becomer and fighter. And the…
He announces a new good and evil, a new virtue of power.
Read in the book →better to have done evilly than to have thought pettily!
Evil is ranked below pettiness, reversing the common valuation.
Read in the book →And when they had passed, a pain attacked Zarathustra; but not long had he struggled with the pain, when he began to speak thus: It moveth my heart for those priests. They also go against my taste; but that is the…
False values and fatuous words are named the worst monsters, in whose fetters the priests are held.
Read in the book →With thunder and heavenly fireworks must one speak to indolent and somnolent senses. But beauty’s voice speaketh gently: it appealeth only to the most awakened souls. Gently vibrated and laughed unto me to-day my…
Zarathustra attacks the idea of reward and punishment buried in the foundations of morals and of the soul.
Read in the book →But Zarathustra came not to say unto all those liars and fools: “What do YE know of virtue! What COULD ye know of virtue!”— But that ye, my friends, might become weary of the old words which ye have learned from the…
Zarathustra strips his friends of old moral formulae so that new ones can come.
Read in the book →Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again and again surpass itself!
All value-names are weapons and signs made by men in their struggles.
Read in the book →“Will to Truth” do ye call it, ye wisest ones, that which impelleth you and maketh you ardent? Will for the thinkableness of all being: thus do _I_ call your will! All being would ye MAKE thinkable: for ye doubt with…
The popular valuations of good and evil, put on the river of becoming, also betray an old will to power.
Read in the book →Verily, I say unto you: good and evil which would be everlasting—it doth not exist! Of its own accord must it ever surpass itself anew. With your values and formulae of good and evil, ye exercise power, ye valuing ones:…
Good and evil cannot be everlasting; they must surpass themselves, and the creator in good and evil must first break values.
Read in the book →But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste is weight, scales and weigher at once, so valuing is the ongoing struggle of life itself.
Read in the book →And this is the account of Zarathustra’s interview with the fire-dog: The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called “man.” And another of these diseases is…
The world turns around the inventors of new values, not of new noise.
Read in the book →The greatest events—are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours.
Names the inventors of new values as the true centre of the world's turning.
Read in the book →This is, however, my third manly prudence: I am not put out of conceit with the WICKED by your timorousness. I am happy to see the marvels the warm sun hatcheth: tigers and palms and rattle-snakes. Also amongst men…
What is now called the worst wickedness is small; evil is not yet fully explored.
Read in the book →Companions did the creating one once seek, and children of HIS hope: and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he himself should first create them. Thus am I in the midst of my work, to my children…
The ideal companion is one who writes Zarathustra's will on his tables.
Read in the book →For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds. Verily, it is a blessing and not a…
Good and evil are reduced to fugitive shadows and passing clouds beneath the font of eternity.
Read in the book →And that I may do the like by day, and imitate and copy its best, now will I put the three worst things on the scales, and weigh them humanly well.— He who taught to bless taught also to curse: what are the three best…
Zarathustra re-weighs the three things most cursed hitherto, voluptuousness, passion for power and selfishness, to judge them 'humanly well'.
Read in the book →And then it happened also,—and verily, it happened for the first time!—that his word blessed SELFISHNESS, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:— —From the powerful soul, to which the…
Selfishness from the powerful soul is blessed, and the priests' praise of 'selflessness' is exposed as slavish.
Read in the book →He, however, hath discovered himself who saith: This is MY good and evil: therewith hath he silenced the mole and the dwarf, who say: “Good for all, evil for all.”
Self-discovery means owning one's own good and evil instead of a universal one.
Read in the book →With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss;— —To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light,…
'The way' does not exist; only one's own way and taste.
Read in the book →Here do I sit and wait, old broken tables around me and also new half-written tables. When cometh mine hour? —The hour of my descent, of my down-going: for once more will I go unto men. For that hour do I now wait: for…
The old tables lie broken and the new ones are only half-written, which sets the frame for the chapter.
Read in the book →When I came unto men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men. An old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he…
Only the creator determines what is good and bad, so Zarathustra urged men to overturn their moralists and their old infatuation.
Read in the book →It is he, however, who createth man’s goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only EFFECTETH it THAT aught is good or bad.
Good and bad exist only through the creator's act.
Read in the book →To be true—that CAN few be! And he who can, will not! Least of all, however, can the good be true. Oh, those good ones! GOOD MEN NEVER SPEAK THE TRUTH. For the spirit, thus to be good, is a malady. They yield, those…
Truth requires what the good call evil, so the old tables must be broken.
Read in the book →When the water hath planks, when gangways and railings o’erspan the stream, verily, he is not believed who then saith: “All is in flux.” But even the simpletons contradict him. “What?” say the simpletons, “all in flux?…
When the railings of good and evil fall into the stream, the fixed values are shown to be unstable.
Read in the book →There is an old illusion—it is called good and evil. Around soothsayers and astrologers hath hitherto revolved the orbit of this illusion. Once did one BELIEVE in soothsayers and astrologers; and THEREFORE did one…
Good and evil are an old illusion tied to fate and freedom, and the holy precepts contradict life.
Read in the book →And him whom ye do not teach to fly, teach I pray you—TO FALL FASTER!—
He wants to hasten the fall of everything of today.
Read in the book →O my brethren! With whom lieth the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and just?— —As those who say and feel in their hearts: “We already know what is good and just, we possess it also;…
The good and just hate the creator who breaks old tables and writes new values, and so crucify the human future.
Read in the book →The good MUST crucify him who deviseth his own virtue! That IS the truth!
The good necessarily persecute whoever creates his own virtue.
Read in the book →Ye flee from me? Ye are frightened? Ye tremble at this word? O my brethren, when I enjoined you to break up the good, and the tables of the good, then only did I embark man on his high seas. And now only cometh unto him…
Breaking the tables of the good sets man on the high sea, with its great terror and nausea.
Read in the book →Then did Life answer me thus, and kept thereby her fine ears closed: “O Zarathustra! Crack not so terribly with thy whip! Thou knowest surely that noise killeth thought,—and just now there came to me such delicate…
Life says the two of them found their island and green meadow beyond good and evil, so they need not hold grudges.
Read in the book →If ever my wrath hath burst graves, shifted landmarks, or rolled old shattered tables into precipitous depths: If ever my scorn hath scattered mouldered words to the winds, and if I have come like a besom to…
He recalls shifting landmarks and rolling old tables into the depths as part of his task.
Read in the book →If ever I have drunk a full draught of the foaming spice- and confection-bowl in which all things are well mixed: If ever my hand hath mingled the furthest with the nearest, fire with spirit, joy with sorrow, and the…
A salt that unites good with evil dissolves the old division between them.
Read in the book →“Thou old pope,” said here Zarathustra interposing, “hast thou seen THAT with thine eyes? It could well have happened in that way: in that way, AND also otherwise. When Gods die they always die many kinds of death.…
The alternative he names is to set up destiny on one's own account, even to be God oneself.
Read in the book →It is no longer true that the poor are blessed.
An old Christian valuation is declared void by the beggar's experience.
Read in the book →“Forgive me,” answered the shadow, “that it is I; and if I please thee not—well, O Zarathustra! therein do I admire thee and thy good taste. A wanderer am I, who have walked long at thy heels; always on the way, but…
He recounts overthrowing boundary-stones, words and great names, and losing faith in the good.
Read in the book →Brandes says that Nietzsche began as Schopenhauer's disciple, freed himself, and concentrated step by step on a single question, the value of moral values, culminating in the planned Transvaluation of all Values, left unfinished when his illness struck.
Places the revaluation of values as the goal toward which Nietzsche's whole development converged.
Brandes says that war service hardened Nietzsche against softness and turned him from Schopenhauer's pity and Wagner's romanticism, and that his long illness freed him from piety and pessimism ('a sufferer has no right to pessimism'), made him a philosopher who questioned every value, and issued in a convalescent's passionate joy in life and creation.
Illness drove him to ask whether what passes for good is not rather evil.
Brandes sets out Nietzsche's view that morality's value lies in prolonged constraint and obedience addressed to peoples, not individuals; that universal precepts like Kant's imperative fail because every act is unique; that we must create new tables of values; and that the exceptional man gives style to his character and becomes his own lawgiver, while the dissatisfied avenge themselves with virtuous precepts.
Moral valuations have a history in instinct and must be refined into new, self-created tables of values.
Brandes sets out Nietzsche's theory, built on Rée's evidence, that 'good' first meant noble and powerful, opposed to 'bad' as low, while the oppressed out of hatred and revenge created the opposition good–evil in which the former good become the evil; Brandes illustrates it with the Vikings' 'eagle ideal' and their victims' ideal of the lamb.
Good–bad and good–evil are rival valuations created by different castes.
Brandes summarises Nietzsche's contrast: noble morality is continual yea-saying, slave morality a continual 'Thou shalt not'.
Slave morality inverts noble values by negation.
Brandes reports that Nietzsche traces false modern morality to spite, envy and rancune, which renamed impotence as goodness, baseness as humility, submission as obedience, and hatred as the hope for God's kingdom and the victory of righteousness.
Slave morality is a revaluation by the impotent.
Brandes reports that for Nietzsche there is no right or wrong in itself, since life is essentially exploitation aimed at power, and that he replaces Schopenhauer's will to life and Darwin's struggle for existence with the will to power, life seeking self-increase rather than preservation; Brandes objects that there is no difference of principle, since the struggle for existence necessarily becomes a fight for power.
Justice is only an exceptional limitation of life's desire for power, not right in itself.
Brandes paraphrases maxims of Zarathustra's new tables: spare not thy neighbour, there is no requital, beware of the good who never speak the truth, a new nobility that loves its children's land and so redeems the past, trial marriages, push what is falling, reserve oneself for worthier foes, and the creators are hard.
Gives a compact digest of the new tables against the old precepts.
Förster-Nietzsche argues that 'rearing the Superman' means transforming man by new, higher values that must replace the Christian valuations born of the resentment of the weak; the Superman is not a remote fancy or a new Darwinian species but a possibility present men could realise by adopting the new values, just as Christianity once transvalued Graeco-Roman values within a short time.
Ties the Superman to the transvaluation of values, summarised as 'all that proceeds from power is good, all that springs from weakness is bad'.
Förster-Nietzsche quotes Nietzsche explaining that he chose Zarathustra because the Persian prophet created the error of morality, making good and evil the wheel of things, and so must be the first to perceive it; being the most truthful thinker, his name stands for the self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness.
Zarathustra as creator of the moral interpretation of the world who must now undo it.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche's works of 1878-1882 were purely destructive preparation, showing that moral ideas are vulnerable, that the Christian ideal of humility weakens mankind, and that all notions of good and evil are mutable, so that the ground was cleared for a reconstruction.
Presents the demonstration that good and evil are mutable as the preparatory, destructive phase that precedes the new tables of Zarathustra.
Mencken argues, citing Zarathustra's account of the tables of many peoples, that every moral code is a changing expression of a people's expediency and will to power, that a people's god merely reflects its current ideas, and that the Ten Commandments are no more immutable than acts of Parliament.
Reads the doctrine that men made all their good and bad as proof that morality is mere group expediency.
Mencken argues that because morality is relative it is the antithesis of truth, and that Nietzsche therefore rejected all fixed moral codes and all gods, priests and rulers, holding that a man should replace 'good and evil' with his own valuations of good and bad, judging every act by its effect on his own welfare and that of his children.
Glosses the substitution of personal 'good and bad' for inherited 'good and evil' as individual expedience.
Mencken explains, quoting Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy, that Nietzsche held all life to be at bottom exploitation and will to power, so that injury and annihilation cannot in themselves be wrong and the rights of others are only compromises for the benefit of the mass.
Draws the consequence that acts of injury cannot be called evil in themselves.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche called himself an immoralist because progress depends on truth, and pictures the ideal immoralist, the 'blond beast', as guided by instinct and intelligence rather than god and commandments, free of sin and hell, and thus a powerful force for truth against superstition.
Portrays the immoralist who knows only 'good' and 'bad', not 'virtue' and 'sin'.
Mencken says that Nietzsche's immoralism needed a standard and a goal, and that Nietzsche supplied the standard by defining good as all that heightens the feeling of power and bad as all that proceeds from weakness, happiness being the feeling that power increases and resistance is overcome.
Gives the new definitions of good and bad that replace the old moral standard.
Mencken argues that for Nietzsche instinct and experiment reveal one's power, that happiness lies in unrestrained yielding to the will to power through constant contest, citing Zarathustra's 'not to peace, but to victory' and casting dice with death, and that this means a crusade against ethics of self-sacrifice for inferiors and a transvaluation that frees the will to power from infamy.
Identifies the transvaluation of values with emancipating the will to power from slave-morality.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche's 'I am a dionysian! I am an immoralist!' means an ideal of facing life's horrors unafraid, slaying great enemies and bearing one's own burdens, and that this individualism appears in the homely sayings of every vigorous people.
Equates the immoralist with individualism and moral anarchy against servility.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche's chief service was not historical or dogmatic criticism but his answer to the claim that Christianity made the world better: Nietzsche held it made the world worse, being cruel, degrading and the most dangerous system of slave-morality, which bans the fundamental instincts of the highest type of man.
Christianity is charged with turning the strong man's instincts into sins, an inversion of values Nietzsche seeks to reverse.
Mencken answers Nordau's charge that Nietzsche tore down without building up, asserting that no man left a more comprehensive system of ethics and that his fundamental principles stayed clear and substantially unchanged, while reform is in any case the work of many men in series.
Defends Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality as constructive, not merely destructive.
Mencken argues, following Nietzsche, that there is no 'natural morality' engraved on the human heart; brotherly love is merely the moral fashion of the age, and Nietzsche showed that the 'good' of one race and age is the 'bad' of another, so no innate instinct for self-sacrifice bars his philosophy.
Moral codes are presented as temporal, varying by people and age, and hence revisable.
Mencken argues that critics err in assuming Nietzsche wanted all men to abandon Christian morality; he addressed only the commanding minority, wished to restore Hume's dualism by dignifying self-interest against sympathy, and was content for the masses to keep their narcotic morality, envisioning only supermen at the top.
The transvaluation of values is meant for the masters only.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche's philosophy was wholly aristocratic: he sought to free superior men from false notions of duty and sin, to 'make man innocent', but meant by man only the higher man of tomorrow, holding the masses in contempt and writing 'for the lords of the earth'.
Breaking false notions of duty, responsibility and sin is aimed at liberating the higher type.
Ludovici explains that Nietzsche is a moral relativist for whom good and evil are expedients by which each species or type gains power, that Christian values protect a low type of man, and that history is a war between the master-morality of the strong and the slave-morality of the weak.
Values differ by species and class because each adopts what furthers its own supremacy.
Ludovici explains that for Nietzsche master-morality is active and creative, calling good whatever springs from strength and bad whatever springs from weakness, while slave-morality is passive and defensive, prizing pity, patience and humility and fearing the strong; Nietzsche advocated the former because it leads to the ascent of life and the latter to degeneration.
Contrasts the 'good and bad' of the noble with the 'good and evil' of the oppressed.
Ludovici reads the three metamorphoses as the development of every creator of new values, ending in a second childhood, and argues that it disowns anarchy: only by first bearing the existing law like the camel does the free spirit gain the strength to master the dragon 'Thou shalt' and promulgate new law.
New values can only be set from a height reached through the existing law.
Ludovici says that 'The Thousand and One Goals' opens Zarathustra's doctrine of moral relativity, declaring all morality a means to power, with verses on the Greeks, Persians, Jews and Germans, and that its close diagnoses the root of modern nihilism: man has no goal.
Each people's table of values is relative to its own struggle.
Ludovici calls 'Self-Surpassing' the best exposition of the will to power in the book, and argues that Nietzsche was no iconoclast by choice: the saying that the creator in good and evil must first be a destroyer shows his esteem for law and self-discipline.
The creator of values must first break values in pieces.
Ludovici argues that Zarathustra's interview with the fire-dog, easily dismissed as fantasy, is important because it confronts the spirit of revolution that Nietzsche most loathed, and shows that for him the world turns inaudibly around inventors of new values, not of new noise.
True great events are new values, not revolutionary upheavals.
Ludovici reads the shepherd as the man of today, the choking snake as the paralysing social values that threaten humanity, and 'Bite!' as Nietzsche's cry to mankind to change its values before it is too late.
The biting-off of the snake is read as the urgent overturning of current values.
Ludovici argues that in weighing voluptuousness, lust of power and selfishness Nietzsche sought to give healthy men back innocence and a clean conscience in their desires, not to license the vulgar or the weak, and that his teaching is esoteric, meant to save higher men from compromising their genius with traditional values.
Reinstates three calumniated forces in their former places of honour.
Ludovici restates Nietzsche's teaching that nothing is stable, not even good and evil: values stand like foot-bridges over the stream of life, seemingly firm in winter, until the thaw-wind sweeps them away, a state Nietzsche thinks has now been reached.
Good and evil are impermanent structures swept away when everything is in flux.
Ludovici presents paragraph 10 of 'Old and New Tables' as a protest against reading a moral order into life, citing Nietzsche that life is essentially immoral and is will to power, appropriation and conquest, while Spencer's adaptation is only a secondary re-activity.
Denies any moral order in life.
Ludovici argues that depriving a higher man of his so-called wickedness may do violence to the greatest in him, and that the noblest wickedness, that of courage and determination, is vanishing under slave-moralities, which is why Nietzsche cried that man's baddest is so small and that to be brave is good.
What slave-morality calls wickedness may be the highest part of the higher man.
This is an experiment in interactive reading, and in using AI to help you grow. Thus Spake Zarathustra is notoriously difficult for a modern reader; yet taken as a set of mental exercises, it is guaranteed to transform your thinking by the time you reach the end. Along the way you will have help from the companion, who is always beside the book.
Do you accept the challenge?
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that the death of God, the Christian God becoming unworthy of belief, will bring the collapse of everything built on that belief, including all European morality, though most have not yet heard of it; yet for free spirits the news feels not like gloom but like a new dawn, opening the sea again to every hazard of the discerner.
With the old faith gone, European morality must collapse and the horizon lies open for new venturing.
Nietzsche says that the type Zarathustra rests on 'great healthiness', a health constantly sacrificed and regained, and quotes Joyful Wisdom 382 on the ideal of a spirit who out of superabundant power plays with everything hitherto called holy and good, a humanly superhuman well-being that parodies all past solemnity and with which great earnestness and tragedy begin.
The new ideal treats all that was holy and inviolable as danger or decay, playing with it from overflowing power.
Nietzsche says that his name will recall an unprecedented crisis of conscience and a sentence passed on all that was hallowed; he is no founder of religion and wants no believers, would rather be a clown than a saint, and names the transvaluation of all values as mankind's greatest step toward coming to its senses, a contradiction that is nonetheless the reverse of a negative spirit.
The transvaluation of all values is declared Nietzsche's formula and destiny.
Nietzsche says that he is not a man but dynamite.
Self-image of the explosive force that shatters old values.
Nietzsche says that the formula for his destiny is found in Zarathustra's words that whoever would create in good and evil must first be a destroyer and break values, and that his Dionysian nature cannot separate the negative deed from saying Yea; as the first immoralist he is essentially the annihilator.
Breaking old values is the precondition of creating new ones.
Nietzsche says that he chose the Persian Zarathustra because he was the first to see the struggle of good and evil as the wheel of things and so created the error of morality; being the most truthful of thinkers, who upheld truthfulness as the highest virtue, he must also be the first to expose it, so that the name means morality's self-overcoming through truthfulness.
The creator of the moral world-order must be the one to undo it.
Nietzsche says that as immoralist he denies both the 'good' man and Christian morality; the good exist through falsehood, refusing to see reality and treating distress as an objection, and Zarathustra therefore calls them the last men and the beginning of the end, who crucify the writer of new values and are the most detrimental of men.
The good and just crucify the creator of new tables and sacrifice the future.
Nietzsche says that Zarathustra, as the first psychologist of the good, is the friend of the evil man, since where the herd animal is virtuous the exceptional man is branded evil; the good and just would call his Superman the devil, and the Superman is the man strong enough to see reality as it is and to be that reality himself.
The strong exception is degraded to 'evil' by herd morality.