This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Curious to learn about Nietzsche’s virtue philosophy? What does he believe about human morality?
In the 1880s, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra to share his views on life, virtue, and philosophy in general. In the book, Nietzsche offers his perspective on cultivating your strengths as virtues.
Read on to learn about Nietzsche’s views on virtue, according to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nietzsche on Virtue
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra consists of monologues from a fictitious character, Zarathustra, that are delivered to disciples. Eventually, Zarathustra sends his disciples away, after which he continues to monologue, talking to himself, his animals, and people whom he encounters near his home. In the book, Nietzsche presents his views on virtue and morality through Zarathustra, claiming that unique individuals contribute the most to human progress. We can infer that this is based on Darwin’s theory that a combination of natural selection and random variation drives evolutionary progress: The more variation there is in a population, the more natural selection will favor the superior individuals and the more rapidly the species will evolve. Zarathustra never discusses this mechanism explicitly, but he does repeatedly assert that uniformity—especially compulsory conformity to social norms—hinders the evolution of humans into superhumans.
This leads Zarathustra to a kind of relative morality: As a unique individual, what’s good for someone else may not be good for you and vice versa. Through Zarathustra, Nietzsche reveals his views on virtues, revealing that he denounces any objective distinction between good and evil as a concept that humans invented for the purpose of controlling others, usually in ways that promote conformity and thereby hinder progress.
Individual Virtues
On individual virtues, Nietzsche argues in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that stealing and murder cannot be objectively wrong because animals kill each other and take things from each other all the time. He asks rhetorically why practices that are commonplace in nature should be forbidden to humans.
Zarathustra doesn’t teach that you can arbitrarily decide what’s right and wrong for you, as some proponents of moral relativism do. Instead, he teaches that you should identify and cultivate your personal virtues: your innate strengths and passions. Pursuing these is good—even if other people try to label your passions as vices.
He cautions that suppressing your passions leads to lust and hypocrisy, which are bad: If you have an innate passion for something, but you call it a vice and try to abstain from it, then you’ll be lustful because you desire something that you think is wrong. And sooner or later, your lust will get the better of you and you’ll end up doing what you’ve said is wrong, which is hypocrisy. According to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche argues that, if you take ownership of your passion, calling it a virtue instead of a vice, then you can avoid this problem.
| Cultivating Your Strengths as Virtues While Nietzsche exhorts you to cultivate your unique strengths and passions (calling them your virtues) for the grand cause of advancing human evolution, self-help author Tom Rath offers similar advice for a different purpose: advancing your career and leading a more fulfilling life. And Rath’s explanation of why this works in the workplace sheds additional light on Zarathustra’s principles, as their respective goals both involve competition. Advancing your career involves leveraging competitive advantages in the workplace while advancing human evolution relies on survival of the fittest. In Strengths Finder 2.0, Rath argues that the greatest weakness of most self-help books today is that they focus too much on fixing weaknesses instead of cultivating strengths. This is counter-productive because you can make a bigger overall improvement in your life by improving in areas you’re naturally good at than areas you’re naturally bad at. Trying to fix your weaknesses is also an unachievable goal because you will always have weaknesses no matter how hard you try to fix them. What’s more, not following your true professional interests could lead you to become unhappy, as Zarathustra indicates. For him, suppressing passions leads to lust and hypocrisy, which, in a professional context, we can conceive of as dissatisfaction and resentment. For example, if you suppress your love of and natural abilities in writing and try to pursue a career in science because it’s more lucrative, you might spend your days wishing you could be writing rather than running experiments, and you might resent your current employer as a result. Rath also points out that many traits can be either strengths or weaknesses, depending on the situation. For example, maybe you’re detail-oriented. In some jobs, your attention to detail would slow you down and hinder your performance, but in others, like engineering or accounting, it’s a strength. This parallels Nietzsche’s assertion that everyone has different “virtues” and illustrates how it works. The key is to put yourself in a situation where you can put your “virtues”—your strengths and passions—to good use. Due to his belief in relative morality, Nietzsche applies this principle more broadly than Rath does. For example, if you have a natural talent for stealing things, Nietzsche would tell you to cultivate it as one of your virtues, since he believes there’s no objective difference between right and wrong. But Rath would probably advise you to analyze the more general skills that make up your talent for stealing (like maybe agility, attention to detail, or the ability to work under stress) and find a more socially acceptable way to apply those skills rather than steering you toward a career in crime. |
Exercise: Apply Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Virtue
We discussed Nietzsche’s philosophy of virtue from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this exercise, you’ll think about how you could practice Nietzsche’s virtues in your own life, based on Zarathustra’s teachings.
- Zarathustra says different people have different virtues, which he defines as your unique strengths and passions. What do you see as your greatest strengths and passions right now?
- Zarathustra encourages you to cultivate your unique virtues. What could you do this week to further develop at least one of the virtues you listed above?
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- Friedrich Nietzsche's views about life and philosophy
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