Corpus · Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Where Do Our Values Come From?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Essential Reading Path · Reading 3 of 10
Read: Part I, “The Despisers of the Body” in full, stopping before “Joys and Passions”; then “The Thousand and One Goals” in full, stopping before “Neighbour-Love.”
Allow: About 60–80 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response.
Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche. Free alternative: The Despisers of the Body · The Thousand and One Goals (Thomas Common, Thus Spake Zarathustra).
Chapter names follow Common’s edition; see the edition guide for alternate titles. Its Roman numerals I–LXXX number chapters across the book, while the assignment above specifies parts and internal sections. If highlighting fails, locate the stated chapter and section. This guide uses overman where Common writes superman. The introduction and appended notes by other writers are distinct from Nietzsche’s text; the explanations below are this guide’s commentary.
Before you read
Imagine insisting that you value achievement simply because achievement is good. Perhaps your family admired it, your community rewarded it, and years of practice made its pursuit feel like the activity in which you were most yourself.
Would understanding those conditions discredit the value, or change your questions about it?
This example is ours. It introduces two dimensions of the speeches: valuing belongs to embodied lives, and standards emerge within histories of communities.
Reading 2 distinguished bearing, refusing, and creating. These speeches make the creator less like an isolated chooser who could invent a life without inherited conditions.
The main question: What changes when the values we call highest express the activities of bodies and the histories of peoples?
Read Part I, “The Despisers of the Body” and “The Thousand and One Goals.” Notice when Zarathustra describes, diagnoses, praises, or demands.
Three things to notice
- The difference between ego and self. What does Zarathustra’s bodily self do that the conscious voice calling itself I does not recognize?
- The ranking on each table. What makes a community call something good, holy, or the highest measure? Attend to needs, difficult achievements, and rivalry.
- The missing goal. Why does a speech about many created values finish by asking for a goal of humanity? What problem does plurality leave for Zarathustra?
A way to read the passages
A hostile speech challenges the detached mind
“The Despisers of the Body” begins with an aggressive address. Zarathustra tells his opponents to leave their bodies and fall silent. He does not initially offer them a patient exchange of arguments. The severity matters when we assess the diagnosis that follows. Part I, “The Despisers of the Body”
He contrasts a child’s ordinary distinction between body and soul with the knowing person’s declaration that everything about them belongs to the body. Soul names something within bodily life, rather than an independent substance exempt from it.
This is a strong philosophical claim, not merely a reminder that tiredness affects concentration. Zarathustra challenges the position of a separate, superior mind standing over an inferior body and determining its purposes from outside.
Yet the body he describes is not a simple lump of matter. It is a plurality with a direction, conflict and agreement, flock and shepherd. Its organization includes both the many activities and the relations through which they become a life.
The images resist a crude replacement of mind by one uniform impulse. War and peace belong together in the description. Unity is a feature of an organized multiplicity, rather than evidence that there is nothing complex to explain.
The body does what the ego announces
Zarathustra distinguishes the conscious ego from the self. The ego proudly declares its identity. The body enacts that identity through activities whose purposes may remain obscure to the speaker making the declaration.
The self looks through the senses and listens through thought. It compares, directs, masters, and destroys. Zarathustra calls it an unknown sage, then expressly identifies it with the body. It should not become a second, invisible person secretly seated inside the first.
Consider a musician whose attention catches a wrong note before they can explain what disturbed them. Training, hearing, posture, and expectation contribute to an intelligent response that outruns its verbal account. This is our illustration of embodied organization, not proof of Zarathustra’s whole account.
The comparison also leaves room for conscious reflection. The musician can analyze the passage and change how they practice. In the speech, thinking is an instrument within the larger organization. Calling it an instrument changes its claimed sovereignty without making it unreal or useless.
We should therefore distinguish two propositions: thought belongs within bodily life, and the body always knows what is best. Zarathustra’s praise of bodily wisdom does not establish that every immediate urge is trustworthy, or that reflection should surrender whenever an urge becomes strong.
Pleasure and pain recruit thought
Zarathustra stages the self commanding the ego to feel pain or pleasure. Pain sets thought to work seeking relief; pleasure prompts it to look for repetition. The little drama gives intellectual activity purposes it may not have chosen for itself.
Return to the pursuit of achievement. A person may reason carefully about the next distinction they hope to win while leaving its emotional importance unquestioned. Their reasoning can be skillful and still serve an attachment whose authority it has not investigated.
That possibility does not establish that the resulting reasoning is false. A valid conclusion can arise within a motivated inquiry. The speech shifts attention toward why a certain question demands our intelligence and which ends its answer is made to serve.
Valuing belongs here too. The creating body produces esteem and contempt, joy and suffering, and develops spirit as an instrument of its willing. Values are activities through which a living organization expresses and directs itself.
This personified drama raises questions about what governs thought; it does not establish its psychological claims.
The contemptuous judgment turns back on its maker
The final movement applies the account to the body’s despisers. Their contempt must itself arise within the bodily life they disparage. They have not escaped the body by judging against it.
Zarathustra then makes a much harsher claim. Their selves can no longer fulfill what he calls their deepest desire: creating beyond themselves. He interprets their hostility to life and earth as the expression of a self that wants to perish, with unconscious envy within its contempt.
This is not a neutral description of illness or a demonstrated account of everyone who values a soul. It is Zarathustra’s diagnosis of the opponents addressed by his speech. He asserts knowledge of their hidden condition while also describing the self as an unknown sage.
That tension gives us a question for the speaker. What entitles him to know so decisively what another person’s contempt expresses? The fact that a judgment has bodily conditions does not by itself establish his particular story about those conditions.
He ends by refusing their path as a bridge to the overman. The criterion is creative transformation beyond the present self. Bodily life matters here through its capacity to generate further possibilities, not simply because bodily comfort is valuable.
Communities live through ranked achievements
“The Thousand and One Goals” changes the scale. Zarathustra’s travels supply the setting for contrasts among peoples who praise and condemn differently. Neighbors regard one another’s admired practices as delusion or wickedness. Part I, “The Thousand and One Goals”
The speech moves from observed disagreement to an explanation. A people must value to maintain itself, and its table of values expresses the achievements through which it distinguishes itself and prevails.
A table is an ordering, not just a collection of preferences. Difficult conduct earns praise; what is difficult and indispensable becomes good; what meets the most extreme need receives the rank of holy. Whatever enables ruling, conquest, and distinction can become the highest measure of other things.
Zarathustra calls this table the voice of a people’s will to power. In this passage, the phrase belongs to the relation between valued achievements and the community’s striving to maintain and surpass itself. Later speeches will develop the idea further.
The explanation is ambitious. Knowing a people’s needs, landscape, and neighbors is supposed to make its path of overcoming intelligible. Zarathustra’s travels frame that claim within his account; the chapter does not furnish a comparative history sufficient to establish it for every community.
The examples make the ranking concrete
The Greek example prizes being foremost and surpassing others, with friendship distinguished within competitive attachment. The people from whom Zarathustra takes his name value speaking truth and skill with the bow. Another table prizes obedience to parents; another, fidelity even through danger and disgrace.
These standards organize different forms of effort and belonging. Being faithful through a dangerous cause can look excellent under one ranking and badly mistaken under another. A shared word such as virtue can conceal different accounts of what should prevail.
Notice that the examples connect collective strength with costly individual commitments. Valuation shapes what people practice, endure, and regard as a reason for pride. The power of a table lies partly in the kinds of people it helps bring into being.
Imagine two schools praising discipline, one in pursuit of competitive distinction, another in service to an inherited practice. This is our illustration: the same admired trait serves different purposes.
Values are created, and creators change
Zarathustra insists that human beings gave themselves good and bad. Values were neither found ready-made nor received as a heavenly message. Things acquire human significance through acts of valuation; he treats valuing itself as creative.
This exceeds the observation that people happen to disagree. His claim concerns the source of value, including the values a community experiences as most authoritative. The dragon’s completed inheritance from Reading 2 now appears as the accumulated work of earlier creators.
Creation also involves destruction. A new ranking changes what may claim precedence. If a community places inquiry above unquestioning fidelity, it cannot preserve the old authority of fidelity unchanged merely by retaining the word.
The creators change as well. Zarathustra places peoples before individuals and describes the individual as a comparatively recent creation. The person now claiming independence has emerged through histories of shared valuation, rather than existing untouched before them.
Pause here: Explain why creating a value cannot simply mean announcing a personal preference. Use one detail about collective ranking and one about the history of the individual.
Love and obedience also create
The next claims complicate an easy story about selfish inventors manipulating everyone else. Zarathustra attributes the tables to love that wants to command and love that wants to obey. The wish to belong precedes the pleasure in a separate ego.
Where good conscience belongs to the herd, individual assertion can feel guilty. Shared standards can therefore operate through sincere devotion. Their history cannot be explained merely by uncovering a concealed calculation of private advantage.
Indeed, Zarathustra calls the crafty ego that seeks its own benefit through the many a cause of the herd’s dissolution, rather than its origin. His language remains critical of collective conformity, but his account recognizes creative love and wrath within the virtues.
The speeches connect embodied valuation with communal striving. How those dimensions interact remains work for the reader; their juxtaposition supplies no completed causal theory.
A thousand goals leave something missing
The ending refuses to rest in diversity. Zarathustra asks who can master the enormous power of praising and blaming, pictured as an animal with a thousand necks. He wants a binding direction where peoples have pursued separate goals.
Humanity lacks one goal, he says, then asks whether humanity itself is consequently still missing. The question does not deny the existence of human beings. It challenges whether they have become a shared undertaking rather than a collection of rival peoples.
The Prologue’s overman connects this demand with Zarathustra’s proposed future, but the chapter does not justify one goal governing everyone.
The binding image retains a difficult edge. Could a common direction connect different creators, or would it suppress their plurality? Zarathustra treats the lack as urgent. A reader who values competing goals must argue with that demand, rather than recast him as satisfied with each community choosing its own truth.
A difficulty to keep in view
Does explaining a value’s creation settle what it deserves?
A bodily purpose or communal history can alter a claim to authority. If a value presents itself as untouched by human need, an account of its development challenges that presentation.
Other questions remain. What does the practice make possible? What does it cost? Whose capacities does it develop or restrict? A practice can have human origins and still deserve a reasoned defense.
Neither speech therefore establishes that anything goes. Zarathustra himself ranks ways of living, rejects the despisers, praises creation, and seeks a common goal. The absence of values delivered from heaven does not make him indifferent among human possibilities.
His own standards must face the inquiry too. Why should creating beyond oneself carry the authority he grants it? What would justify binding many goals together? Explaining that his embodied life desires such a future would describe an attachment without giving everyone a reason to share it.
The challenge is to investigate our values without treating their ordinary origins as automatic disqualification, or our strongest desires as automatic justification. Zarathustra supplies forceful proposals and difficult questions; his confidence does not remove the burden of defending them.
Check your understanding
Try answering before opening each suggested response.
Why is the bodily self more than a single impulse?
Zarathustra describes a plurality organized through conflict and coordination. Sensing and thinking belong within it. The self is the body’s organization and activity, not a separate little ruler hidden inside it.
Does making thought an instrument make reasoning worthless?
No. Instruments can perform indispensable work. The speech questions thought’s claim to be an independent sovereign and asks which purposes recruit it. That does not by itself prove that its conclusions are false.
What does a people’s table of values express?
Its ranking of difficult, necessary, and distinguishing achievements. Zarathustra connects these rankings with needs, surroundings, and relations to neighbors. His general account requires more evidence than the speech’s examples alone supply.
Does Zarathustra explain collective values as a trick of selfish individuals?
No. He places collective creation before the emergence of the individual and attributes values to commanding and obedient love. The calculating ego pursuing advantage through the group appears as a force of dissolution, not its original founder.
Why does the last question prevent a simple celebration of diversity?
Zarathustra regards the absence of a common human goal as a problem and asks who can govern the power of valuation. He leaves the form and justification of such unity unsettled, but does not simply endorse every separate goal.
What should I write in my notes?
Return to the aspiration or inherited demand in your earlier notes. Write 200–300 words:
- Describe what gives it emotional force within your life, separating observation from conjecture.
- Identify a community that ranks it highly and one achievement that ranking encourages.
- Use each speech to explain what your first account of its authority overlooked.
- Give a reason to retain or revise it that goes beyond its origin or familiarity.
- Ask whether your revised value could contribute to a shared goal without requiring everyone to live alike.
A successful response distinguishes your evidence from Zarathustra’s diagnoses and tests his demand for a common goal rather than assuming it is justified.
Continue the reading
Reading 4: Can a Teacher Make You Free? →
The next session reads Part I, “The Way of the Creating One” and “The Bestowing Virtue,” §3. The creator’s independence becomes a problem of solitude and the relation to a teacher.
Carry this question forward: If I learned my standards from other people, what would distinguish finding my own direction from either obeying my teacher or merely opposing them?