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
Instead of peoples and herds, there are now states. Zarathustra calls these the coldest of monsters and liars. The state claims that it is “the people”—but really, it was creators who created peoples. Destroyers, on the other hand, set snares and call these the state.
Zarathustra opposes the state, meaning the government or the nation as a concept. He believes that the state overrides the people while pretending to act in their interest. It’s worth noting that Nietzsche himself was an officially stateless individual—he had his Prussian citizenship voluntarily annulled, meaning that he chose not to be an official citizen of any nation.
Themes
Zarathustra points out that every group of people has its own language of good and evil, its own customs and laws—but no matter what the language, the state lies. The confusion of the language of good and evil is a sign of the state: the state claims that there is nothing greater than itself, and it wants to use the virtues of the strong for its own purposes. It steals the accomplishments of inventors and of the wise and calls these “culture.”
The state uses the people’s values to shore up its own power and ensure that it’s on top. It tries to exploit the “strong,” or those who resist the herd, and it also appropriates the creations of individuals as its own.
Themes
Zarathustra urges free souls to flee the state and be solitary. Where the state ceases, the man who is not “superfluous,” the necessary man, can begin. Where the state ceases, that’s where the bridges to the Superman can be found.
The free person can never truly be at home within the confines of a nation—only the “superfluous,” or the herd, can submit to the state. The Superman can only be discovered outside of it, which is why Zarathustra encourages his followers to forgo society and live in solitude instead.
Themes
