But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?
Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.
Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: ITS OWN will, willeth now the spirit; HIS OWN world winneth the world’s outcast.
The child is innocence, forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel and a holy Yea. The spirit now wills its own will and wins its own world.
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.
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?
What the critics said
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.