Love thy neighbour as thyself

Love thy neighbour as thyself is presented in Zarathustra’s discourse “Of Love of One’s Neighbour” as a familiar moral command whose apparent selflessness can conceal flight from the self. Zarathustra does not simply replace concern for others with private self-interest: he ranks love of the most distant and of future humanity above neighbourly attachment, asking his listeners to give themselves to possibilities not yet realized.

Place in the Discourses

The discourse belongs to a sequence of twenty-two addresses to Zarathustra’s followers, each organized around a subject in his teaching. Its subject is the relation between conventional morality and the values Zarathustra urges his listeners to create. In the sequence’s wider frame, the demand that humanity be overcome hangs over the discourses; this chapter makes that demand a question of whom one loves and what one serves.

The title names a recognizable moral injunction, but the address turns its reassuring familiarity into a problem. Zarathustra’s target is not merely the act of helping a neighbour. He questions the virtue people claim when they gather around one another and call that attachment love, shifting attention from the action’s public appearance to the self-relation it may conceal.

The Critique of Neighbourly Love

Zarathustra calls the love of one’s neighbour “your bad love of yourselves.” He accuses his audience of fleeing to the neighbour from themselves and then making a virtue of that flight. In this account, the command can reward conformity and provide shelter from the harder task of affirming and shaping one’s own life. The challenge is directed at the motive hidden beneath a socially approved name, not offered as a general claim that every act of care is fraudulent.

He sharpens the criticism by observing that “‘You’ is older than the ‘I’”: the second person has been consecrated, whereas the self has not. The claim connects the crowd’s orientation toward its neighbours to a moral inheritance that authorizes devotion to others before devotion to oneself. Neighbourly attachment is therefore not automatically a freely chosen generosity; it may express a convention that leaves the self unexamined.

Love of the Distant and the Future

Against the familiar neighbour, Zarathustra sets “love of the most distant.” He ranks love of the most distant person and the person of the future above love of one’s neighbour, and places love of causes and phantoms higher still. The comparison turns distance into a test of aspiration: the more demanding object of love is not the person already close at hand, but an unrealized human possibility or a cause that reaches beyond immediate social bonds.

Zarathustra gives that possibility the image of a phantom running behind the listener, fairer than the listener and awaiting embodiment. He asks why the listener does not give it flesh and bones, then identifies fear and the return to the neighbour as the obstacle. The closing contrast recasts the discourse’s moral choice: familiar attachment offers refuge, while love of a distant future requires the self to risk becoming part of what does not yet exist. In that sense, the chapter makes the command to love a question of direction—whether attachment remains among present companions or is spent on a future that calls for transformation.