The three evils

The three evils are sensual pleasure, lust for power, and selfishness, three forces Zarathustra takes from the category of the cursed and weighs again as possible expressions of life. His judgment is neither a blanket defense of appetite nor a simple reversal of conventional morality. Each force has different forms and effects: pleasure can be free or degrading, power can break what is hollow, and selfishness can name the health of a powerful soul. The weighing asks what these impulses do, and what kind of life they serve.

The Revaluation

The inquiry follows a morning dream that has made the world seem good and human—not so enigmatic as to frighten away human love, nor so explicit as to put human wisdom to sleep. Zarathustra wants to carry the dream’s way of weighing into the day. He names the three most-cursed things and sets them on the scales, proposing to examine them humanly rather than accept their inherited condemnation. The image makes judgment a deliberate act: the things are not absolved before they are considered, but neither are they dismissed by reputation alone.

The setting gives this test a public, elemental quality. At his headland, Zarathustra holds the scales over the rolling sea and chooses a broad-arched, fragrant tree as witness. He says the scales stand level and still after three weighty questions have been answered by three weighty responses. The balance does not erase distinctions among the evils. Instead, the repeated weighing opens each one to competing descriptions, so that its value depends on its character and consequences rather than its name.

Sensual Pleasure

Sensual pleasure is first presented through the hostility it provokes. Those who despise the body and those oriented toward Afterworlds condemn it as worldly; yet its very force mocks teachers of confusion and error. The passage also shows why pleasure can be degraded: for the rabble it becomes a slow fire, and for what is worm-eaten or already in tatters, an ever-ready stew of lust. These images do not describe pleasure as intrinsically corrupt. They locate corruption in the condition and use of those who consume it.

Against that debased appetite, Zarathustra sets pleasure that is innocent and free for free hearts: a garden-joy of the earth, an overflowing of gratitude from the future toward the present. The contrast shifts the question from whether bodily pleasure should be condemned to whether it expresses freedom, health, and affirmation. The garden image also marks a boundary. Zarathustra fences in his thoughts and words against intrusion by swine and hot fanatics, refusing both vulgar reduction of pleasure to lust and zealotry that would condemn it outright.

Lust for Power

Lust for power appears with a more violent register. It is the scourge of the hardest-hearted and a cruel torment that the cruel reserve for themselves, figured as the dark flame of living bonfires. Power here is not made harmless: its heat can become self-punishment, and its presence on vain peoples resembles a wicked fly. It mocks uncertain virtue and rides on pride, exposing how claims to virtue may be unstable or entangled with the desire to prevail.

Yet power also has a destructive, clearing force. It is an earthquake that breaks open what is decayed and hollow, a growling destroyer of whitewashed sepulchres. It flashes like a question mark beside answers reached too soon. These images connect power with rupture and challenge: it can expose concealed emptiness and disturb premature certainty. The passage therefore refuses to equate every exercise of power with moral worth, while also refusing to treat disruption itself as proof of evil. Its significance lies in what it breaks open and whether the apparent order it unsettles was alive or merely hollow.

Selfishness and Bestowing Virtue

The revaluation reaches its most explicit formulation in selfishness. Zarathustra says that his teaching has, for the first time, glorified selfishness—but specifies sound, healthy selfishness issuing from a mighty soul. The qualification matters: the subject is not selfishness indiscriminately, but a form rooted in strength and health. Its image is an exalted, beautiful, victorious, refreshing body, around which everything becomes a mirror. The body is supple and persuasive, like a dancer; its self-rejoicing soul gives the body’s condition the name of virtue.

This self-affirmation does not end in sealed isolation. The surrounding passage describes a longing for the solitary height not always to remain sufficient to itself: the mountain may descend to the valley, and the wind of the heights reach the lowlands. Zarathustra calls this movement Bestowing virtue. The connection gives the revalued selfishness a direction: strength first takes shape in a flourishing self, then can move outward as a gift. The three evils thus become a test of moral discernment. Their inherited curse conceals distinctions between degrading appetite and free pleasure, punitive or vain power and power that breaks decay, and mere self-interest and a healthy self-rejoicing that can give.