Become what you are!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra“Become what you are!” turns selfhood into a command: what one is must also be reached, rather than merely accepted as already complete. A nearby passage describes human society as an experiment of searching, failure, learning, and renewed trial; read beside the expression, that account suggests becoming as a process rather than a settled condition.
The Imperative
The phrase’s force lies in its tension between being and becoming. It does not simply describe an identity; it directs its addressee toward a task. The wording leaves the means of fulfilling that task open, making the command less a fixed prescription than a demand for development.
Experiment and Becoming
The related passage rejects the idea that human society is a contract and instead calls it an experiment. It emphasizes prolonged searching, succeeding and failing, learning, and experimenting anew, while asking who can command and who can obey. This language gives the expression a suggestive context: becoming may be understood as active and unsettled, shaped through trials rather than secured by a prior agreement. The passage does not explicitly define the expression, so this connection is an interpretive affinity, not a stated equivalence.
Scope
The expression does not, by itself, specify what a person is or prescribe a single route toward becoming it. The experimental account likewise stresses searching rather than offering a guaranteed outcome. Together they leave the work of becoming open-ended, while resisting the reduction of human development to a settled formula.
