Creating values › Companions without a finished solution

The final part brings the higher men into Zarathustra's company. Their gathering includes the episode of worship around an ass. The scene complicates any expectation that moving beyond an inherited belief automatically removes the wish to worship. The book continues to dramatize the difficulty of independence among people seeking a new orientation.

The “Drunken Song” also gives room to an affirmation voiced by the ugliest man. He speaks of being content, for the sake of that day, to have lived his whole life. The scene belongs to the narrative's exploration of affirmation. It is not evidence that a particular technique reliably produces such contentment in actual readers.

The teacher's need for companions therefore survives alongside his resistance to followers. Creating values is not fully explained by imagining an isolated person making declarations. Communication itself becomes part of the problem. What would it mean for another person to understand the challenge while judging independently?

For a first reading, follow that question through the prologue and the metamorphoses before turning to recurrence. Distinguish what Zarathustra says from what another speaker says about him. Return to the demand that the pupils leave their teacher. These comparisons make the book's resistance to becoming a simple doctrine more visible.

The question of creating values remains demanding because rejection is easier to identify than a defensible new beginning. Nietzsche's dramatic work gives the problem several forms without supplying a comfortable checklist for solving it. Reading it carefully means testing both the aspirations it awakens and the judgments through which it dismisses other forms of life.