Nietzsche, the Romantics, and Becoming Yourself

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche sketches a strange, but powerful map of personal transformation using three animals: the camel, the lion, and the child. These aren’t just metaphors—they’re stages in becoming who you are. And they echo the Romantic longing for imagination, freedom, and self-creation.

Honoré Daumier – The Burden (c. 1850)

The Camel: Bearing the World

“The camel says: ‘I will bear the load you place upon me.’”

The camel is obedient. It carries the burdens handed down by society, religion, duty—without questioning. It’s the phase of discipline and conformity, but also inner strength. Most people stay here. It's safe.

Théodore Géricault – The Wounded Cuirassier (1814)

The Lion: Saying No

“The lion must still do some fighting... he must still become strong to be able to say no.”

The lion rebels. It challenges inherited truths, slays old dragons, and begins to assert its own will. But the lion can only destroy—it can’t yet create. It’s the crucial phase of detachment from false gods.

Marc Chagall – Blue Circus (1950

The Child: Creating Anew

“Finally, the spirit becomes a child: a child is innocence, forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a sacred ‘Yes.’”

The child is the breakthrough. It creates values rather than inherits them. It plays. It dreams. It doesn’t just destroy old systems—it imagines better ones. This is where Nietzsche meets Novalis.

Where the Romantics Come In

“The blue flower is a symbol of the poet’s striving toward the infinite…” – Novalis

Philipp Otto Runge – The Hülsenbeck Children (1805–06)

The Romantics, like Nietzsche, weren’t interested in obedience. They saw the self as a project—not a finished product. Novalis’s blue flower is the same impulse that drives Nietzsche’s child: the desire to transcend, to become, to dream a new world into being.

“The poet stands alone, yet he is surrounded by the spirit of the world.”

— Novalis, (Heinrich von Ofterdingen)

This solitude isn’t isolation—it’s freedom. The Romantic poet, like Nietzsche’s lion and child, must walk through the fire of separation to arrive at the sacred Yes.

Takeaway: Become Yourself by Reimagining the World

Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses chart a path: carry the world, confront it, then create anew. The Romantics understood this too: the self isn’t found—it’s made. And to make it, you need imagination, resistance, and the courage to begin again.

The blue flower lives in the child’s hand.