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 addresses whose who despise the body. He says that while a child sees himself as body and soul, an enlightened person sees himself as entirely body; that is, even the soul is part of the body. The body is a “multiplicity” that includes intellect, which is just a tool of the “great intelligence,” or instincts. Intellect and instincts try to persuade the body that they are ultimate, but the Self lies behind these and uses them as instruments, prompting a person to feel pain and joy.
With his theory of the relationship between the mind and the body, Zarathustra anticipates the theory of the “will to power,” which he will later discuss. Here, he elevates the body as the primary aspect of a human being: it contains the intellect and instincts, with the latter being superior to the former. Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas about the Self are abstract, but a big part of his point is that the intellect isn’t the ultimate part of a person—a person is fundamentally his or her body.
Themes
Zarathustra tells the despisers of the body that the Self creates esteem and disesteem, including disesteem for the body. The Self wants to create beyond itself, but it can no longer do so; therefore, it wants to perish. Such selves become despisers of the body, angry with life on Earth. Despisers of the body are “not bridges to the Superman.”
Among the despisers of the body—those who teach something beyond the Self—the Self creates hatred for its own body. It wants to create something beyond itself, but lacks the ability to do this, so it turns against the body and the earth. Because these “despisers” reject the truth of what humanity is, they cannot progress to the Superman.
Themes
