Not All Can Metamorphosize: The Exclusivity of Self-Knowledge in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

With my tears go into you loneliness, my brother. I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes. -On the Way of the Creator

He who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world. -On the Three Metamorphoses

Who are you? One may answer with a given name or some qualities they think they have: ‘I am kind, virtuous, religious,’ etc. Yet none of these answers are in a strict sense, right. Nobody is what someone else told them they are, including these above inherited abstract concepts. How can one answer this question autonomously, without reference to the claims, values, or categories of others? In Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the title character offers us a guide for becoming who we are; and thus a way to honestly and autonomously explain who we are. This essay is chiefly focused on interpreting that guide, as described in On the Three Metamorphoses. It concludes by asking: who has the ability to metamorphosize? And claims that for the Metamorphoses to be for all, an additional stage in the Metamorphoses is needed.

Towards Loneliness

On the Three Metamorphoses takes the form of a speech. It opens:

Of the three changes of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes the camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child. There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands. What is difficult? Asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded.

To undergo the three metamorphoses in the first place, Zarathustra implies that a spirit must possess the willingness and the strength to “bear much.” Without such willingness and strength, the spirit cannot become “well loaded” like a camel. The signature feature of a camel is its ability to carry burdensome loads across the desert, embodied by the hump on its back. Just as a camel, the spirit will too “kneel down” and bear “the most difficult” things. Zarathuasta prods us to consider what those things might be:

What is most difficult, O heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength? It is not humbling oneself to wound one’s haughtiness? Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom? Or is it this: parting from our cause when it triumphs? Climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter? Or is it this: feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and, for the sake of truth, suffering hunger in one’s soul?...

Zarathustra provides examples of each of these difficult things in the form of questions. The question format reveals another identity of the camel; a student. The camel asks “what is most difficult, O heroes,” and then guesses what it might be. This is essentially what all students do, pose a question and then experiment with how to answer it. The camel’s question is “what is most difficult?” Importantly, the heroes whom the question is addressed to do not answer. What is most difficult for them, might well be not as difficult for the camel. Trial and error are required for the camel to find the most difficult. It ‘burdens’ itself with its above hypothesis of the most difficult thing. This likely means that the camel does try some if not all of these things. Zarathustra suggests that an inevitable consequence of this experimentation is finding the most difficult thing, loneliness. “Like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds into its desert.”

A separate, important detail is that Zarathustra does not say that the spirit becomes a camel. The episode is structured like a metaphor: “[the spirit] kneels down like a camel that would be well loaded.” And at the end of the episode, “like the camel that… thus the spirit speeds into its desert.”

Sovereign

In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphosis occurs: here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. 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? “Thou shalt” is the name of the great dragon.”

For the spirit to face the final burden of the great loneliness it must first become completely alone. Here in the desert, the camel may appear to be completely alone, but he is not. A great dragon gradually appears in its midst, a challenger to this loneliness the spirit desires. The dragon is the “Thou shalt,” echoing the familiar beginning each of Moses’s Ten Commandments. Despite the direct reference to the Tanakh, Zarathustra is thinking more generally than Jewish law; the dragon could easily represent anything that commands an individual, any master. Zarathustra says that “values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales.” These scales could be: morality, God, religion, laws of state, and broadly common conscience. All of these weigh so greatly on our thoughts and actions that they tame us, like only the “mightiest of all dragons” could. The dragon says as much: “‘All value has long been created, and I am all created value. Verily, there shall be no more, ‘I will.’” The dragon of values strips our individual will of agency, controlling us. That is why the camel must become a lion. It must acquire the claws and fangs, the strength and ferocity it needs to destroy the dragon. In this sense the metamorphosis of the camel into the lion is one from burden-bearer into warrior; into a creature equipped for destruction, or as Zarathustra puts it, a being that can articulate a “sacred No.”

Despite its ferocity, a lion seems little match for a great dragon. Why didn’t Zarathustra choose something comparable for this metamorphosis, such as a hydra or chimera? The inequality subtly illustrates the long odds and the great challenge the lion must face. “To assume the right to new values – that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much.” In other words, to assume that even the lion even has the right or the ability to challenge the dragon requires an irrational amount of courage. For the lion to say, as Zarathustra later puts it in On the Way of the Creator, “‘I no longer have a common conscience with you’ [is a] lament and an agony.” (62)

Zarathustra does not directly describe the destruction of the dragon, but instead hints at how its end is possible. He briefly describes the psychology of one who would overcome the dragon:

Verily, to him [the lion] it is a preying, and a matter for a beast of prey. He once loved “thou shalt” as a most sacred: now he finds illusion and caprice even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey: the lion is needed for such prey.

A person (or perhaps spirit) begins life under the control of and loves the dragon. He “loved the thou shalt.” But eventually he finds the dragon illusory and no longer loves it. This withdrawal weakens the dragon, eventually turning it into prey. In this sense it seems as though the dragon’s might diminishes when one no longer loves it. Thus it could be that a once-mighty dragon may be hunted and even slain by a mere lion. The audacity of merely conceiving of rebellion, in the face of overwhelming danger, actually diminishes and even neutralizes that danger.

One wonders, though, what inspired that initial conception of rebellion? Zarathustra simply assumes that the lion would have a sense of skepticism towards the dragon. Perhaps it is a natural consequence of the loading that the camel undergoes; that a burdened journey into the desert, willingly undertaken, makes one fall out of love with the dragon and its values. Now the camel-turned-lion stands over the carcass of the dragon.

The Individual Individuates

But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game; a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

Connecting this third metamorphosis to the first two is the most challenging of connections. How does facing your loneliness by becoming more alone lead to the freedom of the baby? This question requires a re-consideration of the previous orientation towards loneliness. Loneliness was posed as the greatest difficulty; the camel “who would bear much” went singularly into the desert to face loneliness as the last difficulty, and had to become a lion was required to completely destroy it. There is no mention of a final conquering of loneliness in the final metamorphoses. This would suggest that complete loneliness is not a great difficulty to be overcome, but to a state to be reached. The camel and lion could be viewed as necessary steps in order to isolate oneself from the world, and to transcend all external dictates about what to do or be. Likely a more accurate name for what the spirit wants is not ‘loneliness,’ but independence. Once reached, this state can be viewed as the fullest embrace of yourself, and allow you to be who you are in the truest sense.

How does reaching this condition of complete independence lead to the “game of creation”? In other words, why would a now-alone lion want to create? Examining the next metamorphosis, a child, provides an answer.

The child is characterized by two things: forgetting and freedom. The forgetting is required because the great battle between lion and dragon was terrifying and cataclysmic. But in order to be truly free from the dragon, the spirit must forget the battle entirely. Like how the children of revolutionaries, who have no memory of the war, know a freedom that is great and innocent in comparison with the hard-won freedom of their parents, the spirit must forget in order to have this radical freedom. In this way, the child hasn’t experienced its will being bent; hasn’t ever been subjected to “thou shalt;” hasn’t ever had to risk its life against the dragon.

Great freedom comes from forgetting. Zarathustra describes it in ways that may first appear disconnected; but in fact are united in representing this radical freedom.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game; a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.”

When a child plays a game it does so with abandon. knowing no rules, it can’t adhere to any. A self-propelled wheel is similarly free from any external forces. It needs nothing to set it in motion. Such a thing operates outside of all laws of physics. The first movement also is free from all things. It has no cause, no history, no context. It is something genuinely novel, responding to nothing in the universe.

But what is the relationship between being unburdened and wanting to create? Why is the child who utters a “sacred Yes”? The answer involves a digression into two possible interpretations, the second stronger than the first. The first is, that the will to create has been continually held by the spirit throughout the three metamorphoses; аnd the second, that the will to create emerges only in the last stage, as an inevitable consequence of the child’s radical freedom.

The first view implies continuity. Does anything about the spirit stay the same throughout the metamorphoses? A quote from On the Way of the Creator indicates that nothing stays the same. “You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!” (64) The spirit at the start of the metamorphoses only wishes to “bear much,” not to create. The spirit, through this metamorphosis then, does not know who he will be at the end. In turning to a different person, how could you know you would want the same thing as what you will become? From this perspective, the will to create does not appear to be continuous throughout the metamorphoses.

The second possibility, that the will to create is a consequence of the radical freedom of the baby, is more convincing. Zarathustra describes this act: “For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.” Creation is characterized as a ‘game,’ rather than work. Children naturally play games, but do not naturally work. The will to create in this sense does not appear to be a conscious drive, or something the baby ‘wills’ at all, but a byproduct of an instinctual (one could say bodily) urge to play or have fun. Whereas the sacred “no” is shouted, fiercely and defiantly, the sacred “yes” is uttered playfully, irrepressibly, unbidden. This also provides a reasoning as to why the child is necessary. The lion, whose wrathful urge is destructive, would not be one to play around and make games for himself. This interpretation also makes more sense considering the state of loneliness that the spirit was previously in. By the spirit creating something for itself, it exits the Babylonic state of isolation to which it had previously submitted. By creating something, the spirit now is surrounded by its own creations, and no longer alone.

Thus creation emerges as a natural, inevitable, instinctual act of a spirit that has forgotten all and is therefore completely alone and completely free. The will to create is not a continuous drive that the spirit had throughout the metamorphoses; nor is the spirit actively motivated to create for some instrumental purpose or end.

Zarathustra concludes with a comment on the speech as a whole:

The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

To conclude, the three metamorphoses provide a blueprint to realize who you are, and seize control of yourself which the world once controlled. One question remains for hopefuls who want to undergo this process: who does Zarathustra think can undergo the three metamorphoses?

For All and None

There are few contextual clues for Zarathustra’s speech, but with a few details it can largely be surmised. The speech ends with the narrator (Nietzsche himself?), specifying that this previous speech occurred in “the town that is called the Motley Cow.” While speaking in this town, he addresses “my brothers” twice throughout the course of his speech. Both are instances in which he provides some interpretation or further elucidates what he was saying. The stage is set: in a town to a group of men, or “my brothers.”

From these details, one might assume that Zarathustra believes his speech is intended for all the townspeople or brothers who listen. Why would he bother delivering this speech to all those people unless he believed that they had the capacity to metamorphosize? However, several details in his speech suggest that metamorphosis is not for everyone; that Zarathustra overestimates his audience.

For instance, the camel asks, “what is difficult?” and wants to bear much. To become a camel, a remarkable resilience and willingness to do what is difficult is required. Most people do not want to do what is difficult; rather they want to do the opposite, what is easy. Moreover, in the second metamorphosis to lion, Zarathustra says that “to assume the right to new values–that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much.” Articulated more forcefully, in On the Way of the Creator, Zarathustra asks: “Can you compel the very stars around you?” (63) If few embrace what is difficult, fewer still can compel the stars. It seems clear that not everyone would decide to go through metamorphosis, and even more likely that some who want to metamorphosize do not have the strength to do so.

Zarathustra becomes more aware of this fact several speeches later in On the Way of the Creator. Instead of addressing a crowd or “my brothers” this speech–which is in effect an elaboration and re-articulation of the Three Metamorphoses–is addressed to a single “brother.” This reflects a change in Zarathustra’s character. Having explored humanity, perhaps by the time of On the Way of the Creator, he has taken a different, somewhat more pessimistic stance. He now seems to think that only a small minority of men are capable of metamorphosis. In other words, as Zarathustra explores the world, he realizes that not everyone is capable of becoming who they are. That right is most likely reserved for great or ‘high’ men; ones that have the strength to do so. Zarathustra’s speeches in Book Four for instance, are almost entirely addressed to ‘high men.’

Zarathustra’s eventual elitism, this tendency towards shifting his message to an elite few, draws immediate parallels to the Bible. Consider the chosen people, the Hebrews, or the blessed that Jesus says can believe without seeing (Genesis, Gospel of John). Zarathustra’s message, however, stands apart from Scripture in the sense that the high men who are the target of his speeches have not become who they are because of God’s grace. Rather Zarathustra’s ‘high men’ became worthy of Zarathustra’s message through action of their own. Some of the ‘high men’ in Book Four previously listened to Zarathustra’s earlier speeches, and attempted to do as he suggested. The problem with the majority of common people, or those in the marketplace, is that they will not – perhaps cannot – listen to Zarathustra. In On the Higher Man he recounts his sojourn to the Town from Book One. “I stood in the marketplace. And as I spoke to all, I spoke to none.” (286) This bleak remark recalls the subtitle to Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Everyone has the capacity to become ‘higher’ and thus have the capacity to metamorphosize; but most will not. Will you or I listen?

Zarathustra provides a roadmap to discover yourself in On the Three Metamorphoses. This roadmap demands much, and most will not undertake it. Zarathustra did not realize this when he first gave his speech to the townspeople (when the Three Metamorphoses is set). He overestimated his audience's capabilities. Zarathustra comes to realize this, and indicates later on that metamorphosing is for the ‘high men’ (exemplified in Zarathustra’s shift towards addressing crowds in Book One, to addressing ‘high men’ in Book Four). In this sense, if Zarathustra wants this process to be for all, he should have added a stage in the metamorphoses before the camel. This stage would address how one can become a ‘high man,’ that is, strong enough to embark on metamorphosis in the first place. Despite this seeming missing step, Zarathustra may not be ultimately concerned with the lower men at all. Would he have the common people ascend to such height, and does he even think it is possible for the lowest to become high? We are left to wonder. We also wonder, who are the high ones in our midst today, if any? And finally, are you or I strong enough to metamorphosize?