Creation and revaluation of values

Creation and revaluation of values is the making and remaking of the standards by which people call things good or evil. It turns morality from a set of rules passively received into a human act of evaluation: peoples fashion values to sustain themselves, and creators who would establish new values must also break old tables. In Zarathustra’s teaching, this process is an expression of the Will to power and a condition of future creation, not simply a change in opinion.

The Table as a People’s Self-Definition

A table of values hangs over every people, but it is not a universal measure shared unchanged across cultures. Zarathustra has seen many lands and peoples, and finds that their judgments differ: what one people regards as good may appear shameful to another, while what is condemned in one place may receive purple honours elsewhere. Neighbours therefore encounter not only different rules but different understandings of what deserves admiration, obedience, or blame.

These tables arise from the demands and aspirations of a particular people. What it finds hard, it calls praiseworthy; what it considers indispensable and difficult, it calls good; what relieves its greatest need, especially when it is rare and hard to attain, it calls holy. A people also elevates whatever enables it to rule, conquer, and shine before its neighbours. Its moral hierarchy thus reveals what it has struggled to overcome and what it seeks to become: the table is both its code of judgment and the voice of its Will to power.

The examples of filial duty and loyalty show how different prescriptions can serve this work. One people makes honouring father and mother, even from the roots of the soul, its governing standard; another prizes loyalty so highly that it risks honour and blood even in dangerous causes. In each case, the teaching disciplines its adherents. The second people, through mastering itself by loyalty, becomes pregnant with great hopes. Values are not merely labels applied after the fact; they organize conduct and help shape a people’s capacity and future.

Human Evaluation and the Creation of Meaning

The account rejects the idea that good and evil descended from heaven or were simply found waiting in things. Human beings gave themselves their good and evil. In the beginning, they implanted values into things to maintain themselves, thereby creating meaning that was human rather than divinely supplied. To call humanity the evaluator is to identify this activity as constitutive: without evaluation, existence would be hollow of the meanings by which it becomes livable and intelligible.

Evaluation is therefore creative, not merely a report about an independent moral order. The value of a standard lies partly in the valuing that brings it into being and gives it force. This claim does not make all peoples’ values identical: their tables differ precisely because their needs, aspirations, and acts of self-mastery differ. Nor does it imply that values are inconsequential inventions. A table can maintain a people, orient its conduct, and establish what it treats as holy; the fact that human beings create such meanings makes their responsibility for them more, not less, significant.

Destruction, Renewal, and the Creator

A change in values means a change in the creators of values. Peoples were the first creators, but individuals became creators later, and even the individual is described as a late creation. This history makes revaluation more than a substitution of one rule for another: the authority to establish a table shifts, and the kind of person or community able to evaluate shifts with it. Earlier tables were made through the combined forces of the love that wants to rule and the love that wants to obey.

That shift brings conflict. Those who call themselves good and just, or faithful to the true faith, hate the breaker of their tables; Zarathustra identifies the hated breaker as the creator. The established order may describe such a figure as a robber, because luring people away from the herd threatens the standards that hold the herd together. Yet the creator’s aim is not to gather corpses, herds, or passive believers. The creator seeks companions and fellow-creators, people able to inscribe new values on new tables. Destruction is thus not an end in itself: it clears inherited authority so that creation can begin again.

Self-Overcoming and the Significance of Revaluation

The image of the table connects collective morality to life’s repeated self-overcoming. Life is presented as something that must overcome itself again and again; even perishing and the falling of leaves become forms of sacrifice for the sake of power. What a living creature values above life itself can disclose the force of this process: its evaluations express the Will to power moving through its commitments, rather than a simple instinct to preserve existence at any cost.

In the call for the Superman to live at the great noontide, revaluation takes on a forward-looking stake. The inherited table is not secure merely because it governs a people; a creator must be able to break it, and those who would make a new one must become more than its obedient subjects. The concept therefore joins cultural difference, human responsibility for meaning, and the danger of creation. Values sustain forms of life, but their makers can also overturn them—and any renewal depends on people willing to take up that work themselves.