Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

Chapter 107: Chapter XXXIV. Self-Surpassing.

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About This Book

A prophetic teacher named Zarathustra delivers a series of poetic discourses and parables in four parts that explore the death of God, the will to power, the ideal of the overman, eternal recurrence, and the transvaluation of moral values. Mixing lyrical sermon, aphorism, and allegory, the text stages encounters, speeches, and symbolic episodes that critique Christian morality, celebrate self-overcoming, and insist on creative reevaluation of life’s aims. Recurring motifs such as solitude, the three metamorphoses, teaching and rejection, and paradoxical humor bind the fragments into a visionary call to invent new, life-affirming values.

Chapter XXXIV. Self-Surpassing.

In this discourse we get the best exposition in the whole book of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Will to Power. I go into this question thoroughly in the Note on Chapter LVII.

Nietzsche was not an iconoclast from choice. Those who hastily class him with the anarchists (or the Progressivists of the last century) fail to understand the high esteem in which he always held both law and discipline. In verse 41 of this most decisive discourse he truly explains his position when he says: “...he who hath to be a creator in good and evil—verily he hath first to be a destroyer, and break values in pieces.” This teaching in regard to self-control is evidence enough of his reverence for law.