Nietzsche Went on This Hike Every Day | Zarathustra Explained

Nietzsche wrote the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra while hiking daily between the coast near Nice and the mountaintop village of Èze in the mid-1880s, and this episode uses that physical trail as a lens to understand his ideas about self-overcoming, the pathos of distance, and his controversial defense of slavery.

• Nietzsche described the landscape of Nice as consecrated by unforgettable moments, and said the decisive chapter “Of Old and New Tablets” was composed during the most painful climb from the station to Èze.
• He claimed his muscular agility was greatest when his creative power flowed most abundantly, often walking 7–8 hours without tiredness, sleeping well, laughing a lot, and being perfectly vigorous and patient.
• The episode argues that Nietzsche’s sensitivity was not only intellectual and spiritual but also deeply bodily, and that he collapsed the distinction between soul and body by essentially ignoring the soul.

The vertical movement of climbing up and down mountains is the central structural and philosophical motif of Zarathustra, especially the third part written on this trail.

• Zarathustra is a prophet who goes to the mountains at age 30, comes down to teach, retreats again, and repeats this cycle; the third book opens with him reflecting on all the mountains and summits he has climbed.
• He says, “I do not love the plains and it seems that I cannot sit still for long,” establishing a key distinction: plains represent egalitarian leveling, while mountains represent hierarchy, rank, and vertical aspiration.
• The ultimate summit Zarathustra seeks is a kind of self-overcoming—looking down upon himself and even his stars.

Self-overcoming is contrasted with self-improvement, which Nietzsche would despise as petty, incremental, utilitarian, and bourgeois.

• Self-improvement is illustrated by trivial gains like increasing deep sleep from 73% to 79% or reading 100 books instead of 103—small optimizations that miss the point.
• Self-overcoming is revolutionary and binary: it involves killing an aspect of oneself and being reborn, not accumulating marginal utility.
• Nietzsche mocks the British utilitarians: “Man does not seek happiness. Only the Englishman does.”

The content of self-overcoming is a transformation from external, God-given morality (“thou shalt not”) to self-willed values (“I will”).

• This is dramatized in the chapter “Of Old and Old Tablets,” where Zarathustra comes down the mountain with broken old tablets (a reference to Moses and the Ten Commandments) and new tablets of his own making.
• The old morality is objective and imposed; the new morality is created by the individual’s will.

The motor of self-overcoming is loneliness and suffering, symbolized by descending into the sea before climbing to the highest mountain.

• Nietzsche wrote while looking at the sea: “It is from the deepest that the highest must come to its height.”
• Zarathustra must descend deeper into pain, into its “blackest flood,” before reaching his highest summit.
• This descent is not only observing the lowliness of others but confronting one’s own pathetic, slavish, decadent impulses.

The pathos of distance is Nietzsche’s concept that moral and existential rank differences between people are necessary for greatness, and it is best understood through the mountain/plane metaphor.

• A modern egalitarian value system (“all bodies are equal”) is the plane—a flattening of values that Nietzsche rejects.
• A natural, inegalitarian value system ranks people vertically: the Olympic lifter as godlike, the casual lifter as lesser, the obese as worse, the disabled as worthless.
• This hierarchy provides the dual motor of self-overcoming: being pulled upward by higher ideals and pushed by disgust at lower examples.

Nietzsche’s infamous justification of slavery is reinterpreted through the pathos of distance and is both better and worse than commonly assumed.

• It is better because Nietzsche is not recommending institutionalized legal slavery (buying and selling people); even legal slavery might not produce a sufficient pathos of distance.
• It is worse because Nietzsche recommends viewing lowly human types as slavish even when they are not legally slaves—for example, the “wage slave” (a first-year investment banker worked like a dog, dependent on employers, with petty desires shaped by social media).
• The pathos of distance requires viewing such people as worthless to preserve the rank and hierarchy necessary for self-overcoming.

The pathos of distance must also be applied internally: one must feel disgust toward one’s own slavish, decadent, bourgeois impulses.

• This self-directed disgust is a kind of positive negation—a will to kill part of oneself in order to engender something better.
• It is categorically different from the resentment of slaves because it is life-affirming rather than life-denying.
• Nietzsche connects this negation with light-heartedness, laughter, and fundamental affirmation of life, not gloom or nay-saying.

The ideal Nietzsche points to is an aristocratic affirmation: looking down not from anger or cynicism but from genuine elevation.

• “You look upward when you desire uplifting, and I look downward because I am uplifted.”
• “Whoever climbs the highest mountains laughs about all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.”
• Wisdom is a woman who loves only a warrior—courageous, untroubled, mocking, violent.

The episode was filmed walking down the mountain from Èze to the coast, mirroring Zarathustra’s descent to preach to the masses, and ends at the bottom of the trail.