ABSTRACT
Self-overcoming is the impossible precept at the heart of Nietzsche's romantic ethics of perfectionism. Like Coleridge's ideal poet who 'brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity', Nietzsche's ideal free spirit will, through discipline and cultivation, construct an order of rank within his soul and so overcome himself and his fate. Zarathustra signally fails to overcome his decadent past, and the single unequivocal cause of his failure is psychological determinism. Nietzsche, like Zarathustra, is an ambitious artist and within the tragic terms of his artist's metaphysics, self-overcoming is simply an affectation of style. There is no overcoming; Zarathustra knows it, Nietzsche knows it, and anyone with a modicum of intellectual integrity knows it. Nietzsche's philosophy stands or falls with the efficacy of self-overcoming.
