The Three Metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra

he is talking about unspooking yourself. load up for the long haul, turn into a lion that kills the dragon, "thou shalt" (spooks), and then become a child (someone unspooked), from whic you can create your own values and not live by someone else's "thou shalts"

let me know if you still dont get it. dont read it word by word or you might find it harder to understand. i think nietzsche himself gives the metaphor of going "peak to peak"

>should be like a camel
it's not meant normatively, he describes either the maturity stages of a man, or different spiritual eras of mankind.
maybe both, like Stirner did in "a human life" chapter
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-ego-and-his-own#toc5

>this is my first book on philosophy.
start with the greeks

>>9751663
Don't read this first. Ideally, the Greeks, the Bible, philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer, and then the Safranski biography, Clark's Nietzsche on Truth, and then Nietzsche's BGE, GM (this much at least) + whatever secondary scholarship you need, then Z when you're ready.

>>9751663
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of the more complex books Nietzsche wrote, and therefore difficult to understand without context of Nietzsche's other works.

It would be easier to understand this book if you read one of Nietzsche's earlier works. I would suggest the following, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Birth of Tragedy, or Beyond Good and Evil.

dont listen to these retards who say you need to read other stuff, you dont need to understand everything perfectly on the first go-round

>>9751677
I guess I'm not understanding the strict aversion to "thou shalt"

Most thou shalt's are coming from a good place. You follow the spirit of what they are saying but you don't fully adopt their values.

Or is Nietzsche saying creating your own values is part of the process. Stripping that of someone and forcing them to conform to something is stripping them of necessary development?

I guess who is the bad guy? What would be a practical example of living this way?

>>9751780
here's a copypasta about stirner (who maybe you should start with), but it holds here; thou shalt=spook

how can so many people not understand stirner? it's not particularly complicated. motivations that come from outside of yourself are spooks. take family for an example. liking your dad and hanging out with him doesn't make you spooked. hanging out with your dad BECAUSE he is part of your family even though you hate him means you've been spooked by the idea of ‘family’, which comes from outside yourself. this isn't much more than basic criticism - he's pointing to society’s sources of values that tell you to do things and saying, “they’re all the same, all outside yourself, all as valid as 'commands' from a christian god.” what makes stirner unique is his solution. most critics dismiss one particular source of values and then replace it with something else that's also outside themselves; think of someone disparaging christian values, but replacing them with the just-as-spooky values of liberal humanism. stirner says the way to get back of spooks once and for all is to take motivation from only one place, from inside yourself: from the ego. nietzsche has a great description of how someone can start to live like this in thus spoke zarathustra when he describes the camel, lion and child.

>>9751663
pt. 1
What is the goal of the metamorphoses? In other words, what new abilities are unlocked, so to speak, with each transformation? What are the limitations of each stage? Well, to know the limitations of each stage, you'd have to know some kind of reference point. The camel is limited in his capacity to do what? What is it that even the lion can't do? What is it that the child finally achieves. What the child achieves is the whole point of the metamorphoses. The answer is: creation of values.

Each stage of the metamorphoses has to be judged with reference to this capacity. The camel has no capacity to create new values because his spirit is directed towards living up to the already existing values. In other words, the camel is one who is born in a society, recognizes what it means to be great in that society--what it means to be a hero to them--and loads himself up with the task of living up to those already existing values. He does not see beyond that society's values. This is captain America. He EMBODIES some values. He finds himself within a social game complete with certain norms, rules, goals, and he's achieved them.

He does not try to "overcome" those values IN HIMSELF. He does not second guess whether justice means what he's been taught it to mean. He merely attempts to make himself and the world just in accordance with that already existing norm. You're born in this society, and you notice that to be great here means to possess a certain set of virtues (i.e., characteristics which the society VALUES). That means you're kind, you're empathetic, you don't crave power for your own sake, you give to charity, etc. You are a hero! You have REVERENCE for your culture's values, hence you cannot overcome them.

Note that to overcome a norm, a set of values, means to no longer measure yourself or things in the world with them. Think of a norm as a scale. People have internalized their culture's scale, and they measure themselves and the world with it. To overcome value means to no longer abide by that scale.

On the way to creating new values (which as I've stated, is the whole point of the Metamorphoses), you can see why N starts with the Camel, as well as why the Camel can't create new values. He's a camel in the sense that he is loaded up with his culture's values. He does it willingly because he reveres those values. Such a spirit cannot create anything new.

>>9751787
this is fucking my brain. I have never thought of it that way. I know family was just an example, but it made me realize how conditioned we are to feel this way.

>>9751787
But Anon, God is inside yourself

>>9751816
pt. 2

On the Way to the Lion

The camel cannot create new values, and neither can the Lion. However, the lion is one step closer, because as the text says, he has attained the space within himself to be capable of creating values. The camel becomes the lion when it despairs at the values which it has been loaded up with by its home culture. Think of Buddha, or Jesus, and every other genuine creator of new values who grew dissatisfied with their culture. There is usually a part in their journey story in which they visit a desert, or the wilderness. The desert need not be understood literally. It just means a state of being in the world in which there is nothing around you to satisfy your innermost cravings. The scale which you've internalized and now measure the worth of things in the world finds nothing out there worth-while.

The Lion has purged himself of the old values with which he evaluated himself and the world. In other words, he does not have a way of ascertaining the worth of anything. Yet, he still lacks the ability to create new values himself.

What stands in his way?

An old prejudice which he has not yet overcome. This is the great dragon that says "Thou Shalt." By the way, you should check out BGE 199 in which Nietzsche speaks of "formal conscience," which incidentally also says "thou shalt." BGE 199 explains this portion of Zarathustra fairly well, but I'll tell you what the dragon is and why the lion needs to slay him in order to be able to create values in pt. 3.

File: TSZdragon.jpg (233KB, 785x775px) Image search: [Google]

233KB, 785x775px

>>9751663
>That translation

>>9751839
pt. 3

Why the Lion Needs to Slay the Dragon

Pay attention now, because this part is tricky. The dragon is the inner STANDARD FOR LEGITIMATE VALUE in the mind of the lion. The lion cannot create value because deep down he still believes that old truth of the herd, viz., that a command (imperative, a norm, a value...in other words) is legitimate only if it comes from a shepherd. If a value is discovered to have been created by the herd itself, then it is no longer legitimate. This is the prejudice of the slave herd type. A norm MUST be from a beyond, from God, or the forms, from the very fabric of nature, or whatever. Point is, it cannot come from human taste. If a value is merely the taste of some group, or worse off, the mere opinion/taste of some one guy which became accepted by everyone, then that value is no longer legitimate.

To make this point clear, I usually point to the recent phenomenon with fatties protesting beauty standards in the west. Fatties discovered that beauty standards are not objective, i.e., that they do not have their origin out there, beyond the human. No, they're merely a social construct, which just means that human beings came up with them. This fact alone is sufficient to convince the slavish type that that standard is no longer legitimate, and that is, according to Nietzsche, because the slave cannot accept human creation as legitimate.

Hence, in the mind of the slave, he hears "thou shalt," whenever he considers a value legitimate. Only values which come from a beyond (the human) are considered legitimate, and these values from beyond sound like "Thou shalt." If Homer is the vessel of God, and through Homer we find out what's right and wrong because they come from God, then Homer hears a "Thou shalt," in his mind. He understands himself as a mere servant of a higher law, not its originator. If he had thought of himself as their originator, then his slavish mind would not have allowed him to consider them legitimate.

A lion is still beholden to this old prejudice. He does not consider the values which he creates as legitimate. He can only consider those values which he gets from a beyond, those values which come down as the orders from out there in the form of "thou shalt," as legitimate. Hence, the lion cannot create values until he slays his own prejudice, what I called in the first line his own inner "standard for legitimate values." It is only after the lion is capable of overcomign that limitation, once he can recognize that some values are HIS invention, based on his will--his "I will,", AND THAT THEY ARE PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE even though that's all that they're grounded upon that he can create new values.

>>9751877
pt. 4

The Child

I've mentioned this before in my Nietzsche AMAs, but here goes. In one of the poems which Nietzsche starts the Gay Science with, called "The Pious One Speaks," Nietzsche says the following.

>God loves us because he created us!
>"Man created God!"--respond the Jaded
>And yet should not love what he created?
>Should even deny it BECAUSE he made it?
>Such cloven logic is limping and baited.

His point in this poem is to chastize the ones speaking in the second line, those who embody the Lion's prejudice, which says that only the creation of a god is legitimate. Whatever human beings create is illegitimate, and not worth anything. All value, and whether anything has value at all or not, comes from above.

Nietzsche's point is that we need to possess the same attitude towards our creations (of value) that God takes towards his creations, i.e., he loves them even though he recognizes that they are the products of himself, his own will. This however is not a job for the slavish type who can only accept an order as legitimate if it comes from above. It's a job only for the masters who see their own judgment as legitimate. Who see their own will as lending authority without having to deceive themselves as someone like Plato or Homer or Moses or Mohamed did. All of these guys created a new set of moral norms, but they couldn't tolerate the thought that they were their own invention, otherwise they wouldn't think much of them. They had to deceive themselves, and convince themselves that they got those norms from above...that they got them from a "thou shalt," from above, and that they are not founded and justified merely by their own "I will."

THIS is what the child accomplishes by overcoming the limitations of the lion. He can create value because he can consider his own taste, his own judgment, his own set of values as legitimate without needing to convince himself that those values are not his own, that they come from a beyond, and that he is a mere servant of a higher law.

There. That's what the Metamorphoses is about.

See also BGE 211 and Nietzsche's Late Notebooks, notebook 38, section 13.

>>9751937
really appreciate this. so much to think about. i dont know how i will get throught this book lol

>>9751995
I started reading it when I was 19. I'm almost 30 now and I still only sort of know what it's about. Treat it like a backburner kind of book. A book of puzzles that'll take years to solve.

People don't respect genius enough. They treat the fruit of labor of unparalleled minds as something they can get through in a weekend. Their pride also gets in the way, and most feel embarrassed to humble themselves before these people...end up talking about them like they're neighbors. Fucking Kant, man! What an asshole!

Gotta be a camel first, and for a long time. That means reverence for greatness, and that means first recognizing greatness.

>>9751663
>not blindly following duty
He blindly follows duty, but it is his own. The freedom of the lion is to embrace, what he is king of kings.
>not to let the past
Not against the past, but yet not repeating it.
Nietzsche is trying to overcome all the paradoxes and the/his nihilism and therefore love the endless freedom and "burden" that rests on you. He kind of thinks you can't really "create" new values, but you can in away bring them into the world by finding them (something bigger than you in order to overcome yourself). The Superman is a person, who wants, what humans can't want and does what they can't do. In a way it's the inversion of the New Testament(therefore the imitation of its style), he shows you (not leads) you away not to follow somebody else and the interpretations of others, but to interpret it own your own and become somebody, who others follow. I doubt that you can fully translate it and read it in any other language, than German.