And man shal1 be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth , and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!
Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. One must battle with fear, love, truth, death, confusion, thirst for knowledge, and all of the other aspects of human existence.
The camel embraces these challenges in the name of duty and nobility. Put another way, the camel does not run from life or distract itself from it. It greets life head-on and embraces the difficulties that it presents out of a sense of duty. In doing so, the camel is humbled and strengthened. Only through suffering these challenges does the camel gain the strength and resilience necessary to attain the next spiritual metamorphosis.
The lonely desert metaphor can be interpreted as follows: The camel has sought out and invited the struggles that life has to offer. In doing so, it has become alienated to a certain extent. It has become different from others and from the society that produced it; it finds itself questioning everything, both its worth and the value of its pursuits. The desert can be seen as a place of existential crisis, where the camel ponders whether or not any universal laws or virtues exist to guide it and give it purpose.
For Nietzsche, such universal virtues and absolute purpose do not exist. The camel is forced to confront this possibility, and thus, the camel must become a lion. Nietzsche writes:. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he wants to fight with the great dragon. Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god?
Why is not the beast of burden, which renounces and is reverent, enough? To create new values—that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation—that is within the power of the lion. To assume the right to new values—that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much. When the camel discovers that universal truth and virtue may be non-existent , it has two choices: it can reject life as meaningless and probably commit suicide, or it can claim its own freedom and create its own meaning and virtue.
To become Overman, the camel must obviously do the latter; it must ascend. To do this, the camel must destroy the largest barrier to true freedom: the duty and virtue imposed by tradition and society. The camel must reject this dragon of tradition and commands, but it cannot in its current, duty-loving form. Thus, it must become a lion. Its trials have allowed it to attain enough strength to become a lion. The lion symbolizes courage, tenacity, disillusionment, and even rage. Everything imposed by other individuals, society, churches, governments, families, and all forms of propaganda must be denied in an empowered roar.
Nietzsche had not come up with the concept of the overman until his later period in life. The free spirit challenges the conventional ways of living and promotes the growth of society. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the overman is linked with the final metamorphosis of the child. Nietzsche tells us that there are three metamorphoses for self-overcoming: the camel, the lion and the child.
Not everyone, however, can become a camel. In other words, Nietzsche suggests that when we feel proud of ourselves, we are to take on even more weight to show that we are not that great after all, we need to humble ourselves. The final transformation, characterised by play and creativity, is the child. The overman is the ultimate form of man, it is one who overcomes nihilism by creating his own values and focusing on this life, not the afterlife.
He puts all his faith in himself as an autonomous creator and relies on nothing else. He is the pinnacle of self-overcoming, to rise above the human norm and above all difficulties, embracing whatever life throws at you. He is one who overcomes mediocrity and is not afraid to live dangerously. To be master of oneself is the hardest of all tasks and requires the greatest increase in power over oneself, not over others. This is tied with his concept of the will to power, symbolising self-overcoming.
Happiness is the feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome. The overman will thus be the happiest man and, as such, the meaning and justification of existence. Nietzsche, in fact, mentions it once in an aphorism of The Gay Science:. The overmen of this aphorism seem to be the gods, the demigods, and heroes of the ancient Greeks.
To Nietzsche these overmen appear as symbols of the repudiation of any conformity to a single norm: antitheses to mediocrity and stagnation. This aphorism is significant because it contains one of the few references to the overman before Thus Spoke Zarathustra and was written just before that work.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the overman makes his most important public appearance — together with the eternal recurrence and the will to power, which had not been fully developed either before Zarathustra expounded them. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people:. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the beasts rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. Behold, I teach you the overman.
The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The overman shall be the meaning of the earth! Where is the madness, with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this madness! The people, however, fail to understand him and burst out in laughter. They incorrectly assume that he is the tightrope walker that they have all gathered around to see and tell him that he should get to work.
But the tightrope walker, who thought that the words applied to him, set to work. A dangerous going-across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. The original text in German of Thus Spoke Zarathustra contains a great deal of wordplay which is lost in translation. The overman cannot be dissociated from the conception of overcoming. The crowd still do not understand him, they just laugh at him. Those who strive for conformity, those who are all alike and enjoy mediocrity, afraid of doing anything too dangerous.
They are perfectly happy to be virtually the same as everyone else.
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