Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Last Man and The Superman

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” frames human development as a struggle between two futures: the “last man,” who settles for comfort and consumption, and the “superman,” who overcomes himself through aspiration, risk, and self-creation. Zarathustra’s core mission—first to share his hard-won wisdom with humanity—collides with mass incomprehension, forcing him to redirect that mission toward a smaller circle capable of transformation. The stakes are cultural as well as personal: when values decay, people don’t just become unhappy; they actively defend a level of life that blocks growth.

After spending ten years in solitude on a mountain, Zarathustra rises at dawn and speaks to the Sun, declaring that his wisdom has become too heavy to carry alone. He decides to descend “into the depths” like the setting Sun, emptying his abundance into ordinary life. On the way down, an old man warns him that mankind will respond to such gifts with ridicule and hatred. Zarathustra ignores the warning and enters a town where a crowd has gathered for a tightrope performance. Seizing the moment, he teaches the crowd his central doctrine: “creative evolution.” Man is something to be overcome, not merely adapted; all life so far has created beyond itself, and the next step requires individuals to embrace aspiration as a force that drives development toward higher states.

That doctrine is set against Darwinian-style accident and adaptation, and—more sharply—against Christianity’s moral psychology. Zarathustra portrays the Church as repressing aspiration by labeling autonomy and self-interest as sin, while praising sacrifice and dependence on God as the highest good. In this telling, passion, pride, lust for power, and similar energies are treated as evils to be excised. The result is hostility to life itself: an attack on the roots of passion becomes an attack on the roots of vitality.

Zarathustra then announces the “superman,” but the crowd misreads him. They think he is the tightrope walker and demand to see the performance; when he continues, they laugh again. He uses the tightrope as a metaphor anyway: the human being is a rope stretched between animal and superman, suspended over an abyss. Becoming the superman requires living dangerously—taking risks, refusing stagnation, and pursuing self-transformation rather than settling into comfort.

The speech pivots to the counter-ideal, the “last man.” This figure specializes in consumption and treats technological luxury as happiness, yet harbors resentment and emptiness. Unable to justify the pain of self-overcoming, the last man seeks victims and pushes for equality through envy and ridicule, turning difference into madness. When the crowd demands the last man for themselves, Zarathustra recognizes the failure: the masses cannot grasp the meaning of his words.

He therefore changes course. Instead of offering love and wisdom to everyone, he seeks a select few with the potential to rise above the herd—people who want to follow themselves and go where he is going. As he departs, an omen appears: an eagle with a snake coiled around its neck. Rather than treating the snake as pure evil, Zarathustra reads the union as a psychological injunction—full self-development requires embracing both one’s highest possibilities and one’s shadow, including the capacity for wrongdoing. Growth pulls upward into light while roots dig downward into darkness, and the whole self must be owned to become something new.