Table of values

The Table of values is Zarathustra’s image for the moral judgments that organize a people’s life: its account of good and evil, its commands, and its picture of what deserves honor. The table is neither a neutral inventory nor a set of truths waiting to be found. It expresses the history and striving of those who made it. Its central tension is that values can give a community shape, yet inherited values can also obstruct the creators who would remake them.

What the Table Expresses

Zarathustra declares, “A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power.” The table makes a people’s evaluations legible: what it finds difficult it praises, what it regards as indispensable it calls good, and what relieves its greatest need it may glorify as holy. Its highest standards thus disclose not only what a community says it believes, but what it has struggled to achieve and what it needs in order to endure.

The account does not treat values as universally shared. Zarathustra has seen many lands and peoples and finds that one people may call good what another regards as shameful or evil. Neighbors fail to understand one another because each judges through its own standards. A people that wishes to maintain itself cannot simply evaluate as its neighbor does: its table belongs to its particular history and way of life. The variety of moral judgments is therefore evidence of differing acts of evaluation, not proof that one common table has been discovered and merely applied in different places.

Peoples, Power, and the Making of Morality

The table is also an instrument of collective formation. The explanatory commentary describes morality as a set of self-imposed commands that can turn a herd or rabble into a nation: primitive aggression is directed back upon itself and sublimated into self-control. In Zarathustra’s account, peoples were the first creators of values; only later did individuals become creators, and the individual is itself a comparatively late creation. Tables arise through the combined movement of love that wants to rule and love that wants to obey, binding a people through shared evaluations even as those evaluations reflect its struggles for power.

That binding power is formidable. Zarathustra calls the force of praise and blame a monster and imagines a thousand necks awaiting fetters. There have been a thousand goals because there have been a thousand peoples, but a single goal for humanity is still lacking. The image opens a problem rather than supplying an easy solution: shared moral standards can hold a people together, yet the multiplicity of peoples has not produced a common human future. The unanswered question of what could unite humanity is inseparable from the question of who has the authority and capacity to create its values.

Creators and the Breaking of Old Tables

Zarathustra’s criticism falls especially on those who present their own moral standards as already settled. When he visited people, he found them resting in the conviction that they had long known what was good and evil. Virtue seemed to them an old, weary matter, and familiar judgments offered the comfort of certainty. His teaching unsettles that comfort: nobody yet knows what is good and evil unless that person is a creator. The claim shifts moral authority away from inherited assurance and toward the difficult work of evaluation.

“Evaluation is creation,” Zarathustra tells creative people. Since value exists through evaluation, changing values means changing the creators of values. A creator cannot simply add a new rule while leaving the authority of the old table untouched: whoever has to create must also destroy. This is why the good and just hate the breaker who smashes their tables, though the breaker is also the creator. Zarathustra distinguishes such a creator from a robber of people: the creator seeks companions and fellow-creators, not corpses, herds, or believers who merely accept another person’s commands. The hoped-for response is the inscription of new values on new tables.

Self-Overcoming and the Superman

The Table of values connects social morality to the formation of an individual. In the commentary’s psychological interpretation, fear can be understood as the feeling of an absence of power; behind apparently distinctively human qualities, the account identifies the will to power as a driving principle. Sublimated will to power then serves as a route out of nihilism: self-command redirects unruly drives rather than requiring recourse to a supernatural source of meaning. When a person imposes commands upon himself and obeys them, the commentary compares the transformation to a rabble becoming a nation. The person who masters himself is identified with the Superman.

This interpretation makes self-overcoming central to the table’s significance. Self-mastery is presented as an especially demanding achievement and therefore as an increase in power. The commentary connects that increase to joy: resistance is overcome, life is affirmed, and even a life containing pain can be loved as a whole. The Superman’s capacity to will life again and again is accordingly linked to the project of creating him. The table is not merely a code for judging other people; it names a structure of valuation through which a person may shape and command himself.

Shattered and Half-Written Tables

The image returns in an unfinished, literal-looking arrangement of thought: Zarathustra sits among old shattered law-tables and new, half-written ones, waiting for his hour. The juxtaposition gives the act of revaluation both a destructive and a prospective form. The old tables have been broken, but the new ones are not complete; the gap between them is not filled by a ready-made route. Zarathustra says that his way is his own and that there is no pre-existing way for those who ask him for theirs.

The expression therefore holds together the need for order and the danger of treating any order as final. A table records the values by which a people has sustained and overcome itself, but those values remain the work of creators, open to challenge and replacement. The warning is particularly sharp when people claim that they already possess the good and just and condemn those still searching: even the good, Zarathustra says, can do grave harm. The shattered and half-written tables leave the future unsettled, insisting that a new human goal cannot be inherited as though it were already known.