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Of Self-Overcoming
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 describes seeing a sublime, solemn, repentant man—Zarathustra laughed at this man’s “ugliness.” Such a man, Zarathustra explains, doesn’t yet understand “laughter and beauty.” Only when the sublime man tires of sublimity and “turns away from himself” will he really experience beauty. Because the man has sat for too long in the shadows, the earth has become contemptuous to him.
“The sublime man” is akin to a philosopher or a preacher of death—categories of people who take themselves, the world, and objective “good and evil” seriously. To Nietzsche, the excessively solemn person doesn’t really understand beauty, because he is too weighed down by it and too focused on his inner life and spirituality. Someone who really understands beauty is able to embrace it, and it moves them to laughter.
Themes
For sublime men, standing relaxed and acting out of free will is the most difficult thing, the hardest overcoming of oneself. The secret of the soul is to abandon oneself—only then will the Superman approach.
A sublime man considers restraint of the will to be virtuous. For Nietzsche, however, a free and energetic will is the epitome of virtue and the key to the coming of the Superman.
Themes
