Creating values › Will to power and self-overcoming

In “Self-Overcoming,” Zarathustra claims to find will to power wherever he finds living things. His language includes command and obedience. He also describes life as something that must repeatedly overcome itself. The speech proposes a way of understanding life, not an experimentally established law of biology.

It would be misleading to translate this vocabulary entirely into benign personal growth. Power over others is among the relations the speech describes. It would also be too narrow to identify power only with holding political office. The argument reaches into how living activity forms and transforms itself.

Zarathustra connects creation with the breaking of established values. The old standard cannot always remain intact when a new valuation takes shape. But a claim about changing standards is not itself a justification of any particular act of destruction. The relation between creation and harm requires further judgment.

Self-overcoming consequently raises a question about the person doing the judging. One can challenge an inherited demand while remaining dependent on resentment against it. A wholly reactive orientation would still be organized by what it opposes. The metamorphoses give a reason to distinguish that condition from the affirmative beginning associated with the child.