doctrine Man as something to be surpassed; a rope between beast and Superman. Zarathustra's first and central teaching, announced in the market-place.
When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth the forest, he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra spake…
The first public announcement of the Superman as the meaning of the earth, the one to whom man is a laughing-stock.
Read in the book →I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed.
The book's central teaching, stated in its first form.
Read in the book →Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spake thus: Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous…
Man is a rope between animal and Superman, and Zarathustra calls himself a herald of the lightning that is the Superman.
Read in the book →Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.
The book's best-known image of man's place between beast and Superman.
Read in the book →Then, however, something happened which made every mouth mute and every eye fixed. In the meantime, of course, the rope-dancer had commenced his performance: he had come out at a little door, and was going along the…
The rope-dancer, who made danger his calling, is honoured as a man who goes over the rope.
Read in the book →I go not your way, ye despisers of the body! Ye are no bridges for me to the Superman!—
Despisers of the body are refused as a path toward the Superman.
Read in the book →Man is something that hath to be surpassed: and therefore shalt thou love thy virtues,—for thou wilt succumb by them.—
The Superman teaching is recalled: man must be surpassed.
Read in the book →Ye do not mean to slay, ye judges and sacrificers, until the animal hath bowed its head? Lo! the pale criminal hath bowed his head: out of his eye speaketh the great contempt. “Mine ego is something which is to be…
The judges' sorrow is to become love for the Superman, which is how they justify their own survival.
Read in the book →Let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life! Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me—and it is this: man is something…
Zarathustra commands as the highest thought that man is something to be surpassed.
Read in the book →Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me—and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.
It restates the book's central teaching as a command to warriors.
Read in the book →There, where the state ceaseth—there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody. There, where the state CEASETH—pray look…
Beyond the state appear the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman.
Read in the book →Thou canst not adorn thyself fine enough for thy friend; for thou shalt be unto him an arrow and a longing for the Superman.
The friend is to be an arrow and a longing for the Superman, and man is something to be surpassed.
Read in the book →Thou canst not adorn thyself fine enough for thy friend; for thou shalt be unto him an arrow and a longing for the Superman.
Friendship's purpose is to point beyond man toward the Superman.
Read in the book →Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: no greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than the creations of the loving ones—“good” and “bad” are they called. Verily, a prodigy is this power of praising and…
The missing single goal for humanity points toward the aim Zarathustra teaches elsewhere.
Read in the book →But pray tell me, my brethren, if the goal of humanity be still lacking, is there not also still lacking—humanity itself?—
The closing question implies that humanity must still be formed by a goal.
Read in the book →Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman. I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must know how to be a…
The friend is a foretaste of the Superman, who is to be loved in him as the motive of today.
Read in the book →A plaything let woman be, pure and fine like the precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come. Let the beam of a star shine in your love! Let your hope say: “May I bear the Superman!” In your love…
Woman's hope is to be 'May I bear the Superman!'
Read in the book →Let your hope say: “May I bear the Superman!”
The Superman appears here as the aim of woman's hope.
Read in the book →Your love to woman, and woman’s love to man—ah, would that it were sympathy for suffering and veiled deities! But generally two animals alight on one another. But even your best love is only an enraptured simile and a…
Even the best love's bitterness awakens longing for the Superman and thirst in the creator.
Read in the book →Here paused Zarathustra awhile, and looked lovingly on his disciples. Then he continued to speak thus—and his voice had changed: Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing…
The lonesome of today are to become a chosen people, and from them the Superman.
Read in the book →And once again shall ye have become friends unto me, and children of one hope: then will I be with you for the third time, to celebrate the great noontide with you. And it is the great noontide, when man is in the…
The final will is that the Superman may live.
Read in the book →“DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE SUPERMAN TO LIVE.”—Let this be our final will at the great noontide!—
The Superman is set as the final will.
Read in the book →The figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and in falling the red skins of them break. A north wind am I to ripe figs. Thus, like figs, do these doctrines fall for you, my friends: imbibe now their juice and…
Where people once said God when looking out to sea, Zarathustra has taught his friends to say Superman.
Read in the book →God is a conjecture: but I do not wish your conjecturing to reach beyond your creating will. Could ye CREATE a God?—Then, I pray you, be silent about all Gods! But ye could well create the Superman. Not perhaps ye…
Men cannot create a God, but they can become fathers and forefathers of the Superman.
Read in the book →Away from God and Gods did this will allure me; what would there be to create if there were—Gods! But to man doth it ever impel me anew, my fervent creative will; thus impelleth it the hammer to the stone. Ah, ye men,…
The beauty of the Superman comes to him as a shadow and makes the gods irrelevant.
Read in the book →Sultry heart and cold head; where these meet, there ariseth the blusterer, the “Saviour.” Greater ones, verily, have there been, and higher-born ones, than those whom the people call Saviours, those rapturous…
No Superman has yet existed: even the greatest man is all-too-human.
Read in the book →Never yet hath there been a Superman.
A blunt statement that the Superman is still to come.
Read in the book →Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws! The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful—but…
The 'superhero' that comes when the hero abandons the soul echoes the beyond-man theme.
Read in the book →Ah, whither shall I now ascend with my longing! From all mountains do I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But a home have I found nowhere: unsettled am I in all cities, and decamping at all gates. Alien to me,…
His love is for the undiscovered land of future children, to be found only by sailing on and on.
Read in the book →And especially ABOVE the heavens: for all Gods are poet-symbolisations, poet-sophistications!
Even 'Supermen' are named among the light puppets, a warning against merely poetic versions of the idea.
Read in the book →Not the height, it is the declivity that is terrible! The declivity, where the gaze shooteth DOWNWARDS, and the hand graspeth UPWARDS. There doth the heart become giddy through its double will. Ah, friends, do ye divine…
Zarathustra's double will, bound to man yet pulled upward toward the Superman, is the root of his 'prudence'.
Read in the book →This, this is MY declivity and my danger, that my gaze shooteth towards the summit, and my hand would fain clutch and lean—on the depth!
States in one line the tension between the summit he aims at and the depth of man that he leans on.
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…
The Superman needs a worthy superdragon, so there must be a future for evil too.
Read in the book →And verily, ye good and just! In you there is much to be laughed at, and especially your fear of what hath hitherto been called “the devil!” So alien are ye in your souls to what is great, that to you the Superman would…
The good, just and wise would find the Superman frightful and call him a devil.
Read in the book →There was it also where I picked up from the path the word “Superman,” and that man is something that must be surpassed. —That man is a bridge and not a goal—rejoicing over his noontides and evenings, as advances to new…
Man is a bridge and not a goal, and the word 'Superman' was picked up on the way.
Read in the book →What must one day come and may not pass by? Our great Hazar, that is to say, our great, remote human-kingdom, the Zarathustra-kingdom of a thousand years— How remote may such “remoteness” be? What doth it concern me?…
The remote human-kingdom he awaits points to his long-range hope for mankind.
Read in the book →“How poor indeed is man,” thought he in his heart, “how ugly, how wheezy, how full of hidden shame! They tell me that man loveth himself. Ah, how great must that self-love be! How much contempt is opposed to it! Even…
He closes by returning to the thought that man is something to be surpassed.
Read in the book →I love the great despisers. Man is something that hath to be surpassed.”—
Zarathustra links reverence for self-despisers to the overcoming of man.
Read in the book →LAUGHING LIONS must come!
He awaits stronger, merrier, squarely built ones, his children and new beautiful race, rather than these guests.
Read in the book →God hath died: now do WE desire—the Superman to live.
The consequence drawn from God's death is the common desire that the Superman live.
Read in the book →The most careful ask to-day: “How is man to be maintained?” Zarathustra however asketh, as the first and only one: “How is man to be SURPASSED?” The Superman, I have at heart; THAT is the first and only thing to me—and…
Zarathustra asks not how man is to be maintained but how he is to be surpassed.
Read in the book →“Man is evil”—so said to me for consolation, all the wisest ones. Ah, if only it be still true to-day! For the evil is man’s best force. “Man must become better and eviler”—so do _I_ teach. The evilest is necessary for…
The evil in man is called his best force and a necessity for the Superman's best.
Read in the book →Courage, however, and adventure, and delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted—COURAGE seemeth to me the entire primitive history of man.
Man became man by envying and robbing the beasts of their virtues, which implies a further overcoming.
Read in the book →Brandes argues that Nietzsche, loving struggle for its own sake, counts as progress only the rearing of a higher, stronger species, the Superman, even at the sacrifice of masses, and that this vision so resembles Renan's half-jesting dream of a manufactory of gods that Renan's influence can scarcely be doubted, though Nietzsche turned it into dogma and never credited him.
Reads the Superman as a breeding programme of a higher species, derived from Renan.
Brandes calls Zarathustra Nietzsche's doctrine in the form of religion, a book of edification for free spirits; he disputes Nietzsche's ranking of it highest, finding its imagination insufficiently inventive and its typological manner monotonous, but praises its powerful style and pure mountain mood and calls it a good, deep book for the few practised in great contempt and great love of man.
Its contempt of man springs from a vision of a higher, braver humanity to be reared.
Brandes restates Zarathustra's teaching that the State is the coldest of monsters whose lie is that it is the people, whereas creators made peoples; the State is for the many-too-many, and only where it ceases does the man who is a bridge to the Superman begin.
Where the State ends begins the bridge to the Superman.
Förster-Nietzsche argues that the Superman ideal was already present in Nietzsche's writings of 1873–75 as the hope of rearing great individuals, the youthful view that mankind's object lies in its highest specimens; in Zarathustra this ideal is placed in the future and veiled in becoming, beyond even the Saviour, since 'never yet hath there been a Superman'.
Traces the Superman back to Nietzsche's early ideal of rearing exceptional individuals, as with the Greeks.
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.
Defines the Superman as a type reachable by present men through new valuations, explicitly not a Darwinian species.
Förster-Nietzsche reports that Nietzsche's notes use 'Superman' for the most thoroughly well-constituted type as opposed to modern man, that he treated Zarathustra himself as an example of it, and that in Ecce Homo he named 'great healthiness', described in Gay Science 382, as the physiological condition of this type.
Identifies Zarathustra himself as an example of the Superman and links the type to great health and a spirit that plays with everything held holy.
Mencken says that the superman, the idea most associated with Nietzsche, is the natural child of The Birth of Tragedy and binds his whole work into one consistent whole, and records that Parts I-II appeared in 1883, Part III in 1884, Part IV circulated privately in 1885 and was published only in 1892, the book being conceived in the Engadine and written in Genoa, Sils Maria, Nice and Mentone.
Claims the superman is the unifying idea of Nietzsche's entire oeuvre, rooted in The Birth of Tragedy.
Mencken says that critics mocked Nietzsche as an iconoclast who destroyed without rebuilding, and that Zarathustra (from April 1883) was his answer: the superman, to whom man is a bridge from the ape, the meaning of the earth to which men must stay faithful instead of seeking rewards beyond the stars.
Presents the superman as the positive goal answering the charge of mere destruction.
Mencken argues that the superman will be perfect in body and mind, delight in combat, say yes to life's pleasures and ills, be scornful, merciless and free of fear of gods and laws, owe nothing to his neighbours and sacrifice himself only for generations unborn; he will distinguish instinct from passion and renounce from expediency, as Zarathustra's sayings to the brethren and to the higher men are taken to show.
Draws a materialist, combative portrait of the superman as supremely fit and unmoral.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche never gave a definite picture of the superman and that commentators who take him as a 'blond beast' brute are wrong, as the three metamorphoses show: the camel is man bearing morality, the lion is the higher man who casts it off and frees the will to power, and the child, innocent and ideally adapted, is the superman.
Denies that the superman is a mere brute, identifying him with the child's peace and adaptation.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche made the improvement of the body the first step of progress, that the superman's freed will to live will be refined by natural selection into an accurate instinct, summed up in Zarathustra's 'Be hard!', and that unlike Schopenhauer, Comte and the humanitarians Nietzsche held man to be of the earth, rising only after casting off transcendental morality.
Construes the superman as the evolutionary product of a perfected instinct to live.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche offered eternal recurrence to answer what follows the superman: the universe moves in cosmic cycles in which man rises to superman and beyond, then dissolves into the elements, and the whole process begins again.
Places recurrence as the sequel to the superman in Nietzsche's system.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche turned recurrence into a device for exalting the superman, who knows his struggles will repeat endlessly yet, immune to pleasure and pain, faces and affirms it as part of life ('let us love it!'); Mencken accepts Vernon Lee's comparison with stoicism but rejects her likening it to Christian Science's denial of pain.
Defines the superman by his fearless acceptance of endless repetition.
Mencken argues that recurrence makes the superman heroic, saying yes to life, and that Nietzsche's epistemology was a thorough-going empiricism: the superman is a materialist who knows mind only as a function of body, trusts instinct and senses, seeks knowledge of how rather than why, and is in the highest sense a utilitarian.
Pictures the superman as an empiricist with heightened senses and exact practical knowledge.
Mencken reads Nietzsche as seeing that Christian self-sacrifice defies natural selection and weakens the race, that mankind survives only because almost no one practises Christianity absolutely, and that abandoning self-sacrifice would yield a race of supermen who say 'yes' to the world.
The superman is presented as the outcome of submitting humanity to natural selection.
Mencken states that for Nietzsche abandoning self-sacrifice would produce a race of supermen, dionysians who say yes to the world.
Gives Mencken's evolutionary picture of the superman as a breed fitted to earthly life.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche distinguished present from eternal truth and believed the will to power in higher men is an instinct for truth that grows more accurate over time, so that errors diminish until, with truth supreme, the superman would walk the earth.
The superman is linked to an end-state in which error has been eliminated.
Mencken says Nietzsche held that the superman would appear once truth reigned and errors were gone.
Ties the arrival of the superman to the triumph of truth.
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 superman is read as an aristocratic minority, not a transformation of all mankind.
Mencken asserts that Nietzsche envisioned supermen only at the top of society, not all mankind converted.
A crisp statement of Mencken's aristocratic reading of the superman.
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'.
The man of tomorrow, a race not yet existing, is the true addressee.
Ludovici says that Nietzsche accepted the theory of evolution but denied that man is its final product: since man's spiritual development has no evident limit, his ideal should be to surpass himself and reach the Superman, as the Prologue teaches.
Reads the Superman as the continuation of evolution in man's mental and spiritual attributes.
Ludovici says that in 'In the Happy Isles' Nietzsche overcomes the pessimism that godlessness brings by pointing to creating as salvation from suffering, the Superman supplying the cheerfulness to face a world without God.
The Superman gives the aim that overcomes the apparent aimlessness of a godless world.
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, through the madman, that the killing of God may require us to become Gods ourselves merely to seem worthy of the deed.
Points toward a humanity that must surpass itself to bear God's death.
Nietzsche says that Zarathustra stands alone, born of superabundant strength, his concept 'Dionysian' become the highest deed; in it man is constantly overcome, the Superman becomes the greatest reality, all contradictions are bound into a new unity in this most yea-saying spirit, and Zarathustra defines the highest of all living things as the soul with the longest ladder.
In the book 'man is overcome' at every moment and the Superman becomes the greatest reality.
Nietzsche says that for Zarathustra man is neither an object of love nor of pity but raw material, an ugly stone for the sculptor's chisel, quoting the passage where the creative will drives the hammer against the stone to free the Superman's image; a Dionysian task needs the hardness of the hammer and the joy even of destruction, 'all creators are hard'.
The Superman's beauty is the image sleeping in the stone of man.
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 Superman is defined as one who sees reality as it is and embodies its terrible character.