4 - “The Three Metamorphoses”: A Genealogy of the Spirit

Summary

In this speech, Zarathustra describes the genealogy of the overman as we already know it from the foreword, where Zarathustra had established the lineages of plant, worm, monkey, man, and overman. Now he uses the images of the camel, the lion, and the child to designate the essential stages of the spiritual developmental process. “Three metamorphoses of the spirit I name for you: how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel a lion, and finally the lion a child” (Z I). It is the history of the spirit as it occurs gradually across three “materializations,” of which the first, the transformation into the camel, characterizes the self-understanding of the Western tradition. Zarathustra, as a critic of traditional values, stands at the second stage, that of the lion, and the third stage, that of the child, points to the overman as the transformation that is yet to occur.