Nietzschean Self-Overcoming as Self-Annihilation: The Limits of Intelligibility in Bloodborne and Lovecraft

Abstract

This essay provides an interpretation of Bloodborne, with the aim of shedding light on an issue that late modernity is facing. The paper argues that Bloodborne exemplifies a tragic allegory of Nietzsche's philosophy within a Lovecraftian universe: the will to overcome the limits of intelligibility either leads to madness or self-annihilation. Through a careful examination of Lovecraftian horror via the notion of intelligibility, and drawing on insights from Western philosophers, the game is shown to exemplify a central Lovecraftian idea: that with greater knowledge comes the confrontation with the incomprehensible, and with it, the descent into madness. The Lovecraftian background is then combined with Nietzsche's philosophy to illuminate the themes of overcoming, greatness, and self-annihilation in Bloodborne. The article concludes with a key insight: the path to greatness inevitably requires thinking beyond the “I,” an insight particularly relevant to the contemporary world marked by the absence of intergenerational thinking.

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man? Friedrich Nietzsche (TSZ, 2003, Part I, Prologue, §3)

Introduction

Developed by FromSoftware and released in 2015, Bloodborne is an action role-playing game set in the city of Yharnam, where a blood-borne illness drives inhabitants to transform into grotesque creatures. The illness was caused by the misuse of the Old Blood, spreading a beastly scourge all over Yharnam. The player's character, referred to as a “hunter,” is a mysterious outsider drawn into Yharnam's nightmare. The hunter must navigate a collapsing and nightmarish world in search of the plague's source while hunting the beasts and ultimately encountering the cosmic horrors of the universe beyond human comprehension. The purpose of the present essay is to provide a philosophical interpretation of themes of self-overcoming, madness, and knowledge in Bloodborne by developing insights from Lovecraft and Nietzsche (and other Western thinkers), with the aim of showing that the game's central tension, namely the will to transcend one's limits at the cost of selfhood, speaks directly to a problem facing contemporary society. Bloodborne was selected as the relevant artwork precisely because the game's design itself embodies and enacts the aforementioned philosophical tension through its mechanics and narrative.

The paper argues that Bloodborne exemplifies a tragic allegory of the teachings of Nietzsche's Zarathustra within a Lovecraftian universe: the will to overcome the limits of intelligibility ¹ either leads to madness or self-annihilation. To clarify the concept of “limits of intelligibility” and its relation to madness and insight in Bloodborne, I will explore the ideas found in the works of H. P. Lovecraft while drawing on the insights of a key figure in Western philosophy. Consequently, a substantial portion of the article must be dedicated to making sense of Lovecraftian themes to build a rich background for interpreting the themes and mechanics found in Bloodborne. I will then bring Nietzschean insights to illuminate that the characters, including the hunter, are engaged in a relentless drive to overcome the Lovecraftian boundaries of intelligibility, even at the cost of selfhood.

The value of this investigation is threefold. First and foremost, by examining the relationship between intelligibility, self-overcoming, and madness, the essay provides a novel interpretation of Bloodborne. The existing literature on Bloodborne has explored themes such as the game's gothic aesthetics and Lovecraftian influences (Mukherjee, 2023), its relationship to ecological crisis and Anthropocene discourse (Skott et al., 2025), and the medicalization and dissemination of cosmic horror within its world (Fikejzová & Charvát, 2024). Only one article so far deals with themes similar to this article's, which is Aabir Sen's analysis of madness and “becoming god” in Bloodborne (Sen, 2023). Nevertheless, Sen's paper mostly focuses on the theme of madness and offers an interpretation of Bloodborne through the lens of Hegelian and Zizekian philosophy.

Second, the article contributes to Lovecraft scholarship by interpreting and examining his ideas within a medium where he is influential and adding depth to Lovecraftian ideas by bringing insights from the history of Western philosophy. There are a few scholars who have provided philosophical interpretations of Lovecraft's works. Most notably, S. T. Joshi, perhaps the most prominent editor of Lovecraft's works, has published a book that explicitly deals with philosophical themes found in Lovecraft's writings (Joshi, 1996), but this work mostly focuses on Lovecraft's cosmicism and material atheism, while this article introduces the concept of intelligibility to offer a novel interpretation of themes of madness and knowledge in Lovecraft's fiction. There is also a somewhat lesser-known book by Graham Harman called “Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy” (2012). His book focuses on Lovecraftian fiction's ontology, which, for Harman, is close to his own object-oriented ontology (Harman, 2012, p. 12). While the present article, too, provides an analysis of the “gap” (Harman, 2012, p. 9) between what humans perceive and the deeper reality which eludes human cognition, it shifts the primary focus from ontology to intelligibility: instead of speculative metaphysics, which is concerned with the nature of reality, the present article is more focused on how reality becomes meaningful to humans. On this reading, the primary focus is not on how Lovecraftian fiction reveals or states a reality beyond basic human access, but how the structures of human intelligibility are fractured within the Lovecraftian universe. The important difference is that what becomes salient in Lovecraftian horror is not merely the reality beyond human access, but how the structures that make human experience meaningful collapse upon encountering such reality.

Third, the philosophical insight drawn from the video game, namely that when the will to overcome oneself is pushed to its limits, it can demand self-annihilation, is used to shed light on a major problem of modernity. One of the many reasons why this specific video game was chosen is because it invites contemporary society to recognize that the will to greatness and overcoming requires, at some point, to realize our limits and to work for something greater than ourselves to come.

Eco's “Open Work” as a Methodological Background

Since interpretation is the central task of this essay, it is necessary to mention some brief remarks on the very act of interpreting artworks like Bloodborne. I follow Umberto Eco's concept of “open work” in my methodology. The notion of “open work” suggests that “every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance” (Eco, 1989, p. 21). This means that the interpretation of artworks need not be confined to the boundaries of what the creator of the artwork intended, and one should not think that there is a true or best interpretation of an artwork. As Eco writes, the author or the artist “offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed,” meaning that even the author “does not know the exact fashion in which his work will be concluded” (Eco, 1989, p. 19). However, this does not mean that any interpretation projected onto the artwork is thereby valid. Rather, valid interpretations must remain meaningful within the context and boundaries of the artwork, as also argued by Eco in The Limits of Interpretation. As he puts it, “notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that interpretation has no criteria” (Eco, 1990, p. 6) and “this means that the interpreted text imposes some constraints upon its interpreters” (Eco, 1990, p. 6). Not every interpretation has to be explicitly supported by the text, but it must emerge from the space of possibilities that the text itself generates. One of the noteworthy features of Bloodborne is that it leaves much of the work to be completed by the imagination of the players by staying ambiguous about important elements of the story, and this feature generates a rich space of possibilities for the interpreter. In light of this methodology, this article claims to offer only one of many possible interpretations of Bloodborne, grounded in philosophical analysis.

Lovecraft and Outside the Limits of Intelligibility

Cosmic Horror and the Breakdown of Intelligibility

In one of his non-fiction essays, H. P. Lovecraft writes:

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. (Lovecraft, 1995, p. 113)

The wish to “achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation” leads Lovecraft to “present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena” (Lovecraft, 1995, p. 115). Such an account gravitates towards horror as fear is the emotion that best “lends itself” (Lovecraft, 1995, p. 113) to encounters with such phenomena; or as Lovecraft puts it, “horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected” (Lovecraft, 1995, p. 113). These statements suggest that fear is the primary affective response of humans when confronted with the unknown. This idea underlies Lovecraft's well-known claim that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Lovecraft, 1973, p. 12). Lovecraft repeatedly invokes terms such as “incomprehensible” and “beyond human comprehension” to describe encounters with the realities of deep and indifferent cosmos. Here, incomprehensibility does not denote a temporary epistemic gap, but a structural inability to make sense—what might be termed a breakdown or transgression of the limits of intelligibility. Although Lovecraft himself does not explicitly employ the concept, the notion of intelligibility offers a deep and rich framework for understanding Lovecraftian horror. Before turning to how the concept plays out within Lovecraft's universe, it is worthwhile to turn to Western Philosophy, where the notion of limits of intelligibility (in Kantian terms, cognition) has been central since Immanuel Kant. Among post-Kantian philosophers, Martin Heidegger is the one who most fully develops the account of intelligibility, which makes him a good candidate through whom one can make sense of the concept.

Heidegger and Intelligibility

Heidegger shifts the Kantian focus from cognition to Being: instead of asking what conditions make knowledge of objects possible, he asks how objects show up as intelligible in the first place. In Being and Time, Heidegger (2008) introduces an ontological difference between Being and beings. Beings are entities such as humans, hammers, and trees. Being is “that which determines entities as entities” (Heidegger, 2008, p. 25). ² What is also important in Heidegger's philosophy is that Being is not uniform, meaning that entities do not always present themselves to us in the same way. How we make sense of entities depends not only on the nature of the entity in question, but also on us and how we uncover the entity. For Heidegger, humans are essentially the beings that disclose Being and make sense of entities. Entities become entities or become meaningful through the uncovering of humans. For example, if a scientist looks at a hammer in a lab to examine it, the object will present itself to the scientist in a presence-at-hand mode of Being, where it is decontextualized from our worldly activities and its physical and causal properties become conspicuous. On the other hand, we usually make sense of the hammer within our referential totality (RT) in the ready-to-hand mode of Being. “RT” describes the interconnected web of significance and meanings that define the world for humans. In such a web, entities are not isolated, but rather interconnected. Paradigmatic examples of ready-to-hand entities are tools and instruments, or generally, equipment. For instance, when we encounter a hammer within our daily tasks, we do not notice its individual properties, such as its specific length, shape, or size, but rather how it fits into the context of our activities and how it relates to other entities (e.g., hammer drives nails into objects in order to build houses, chairs, and other items). This suggests that there is always a part-whole relationship present in sense-making. We make sense of entities not in an isolated manner, but within a certain whole. This idea is also echoed in Heidegger's claim that we never encounter an entity as a mere thing. Regardless of how epistemologically ignorant we are of the entity and how it can be used, we always try to place it somewhere within our “RT” and practical engagement. As Heidegger writes, even when the equipmental character of an entity is “circumspectively undiscovered” (Heidegger, 2008, p. 112), it will be made sense of as something ready-to-hand. Thus, any entity that we encounter, regardless of our unfamiliarity with how it can be used, is meaningful to us within a certain whole.

Drawing on Heidegger, one can think that how entities present themselves to humans is not entirely a product of the object itself. The human mind, historical period, and culture (i.e., particularly explored by Late Heidegger), conceptual frameworks, and worldly activities also play an essential role in how we make sense of entities. Heidegger's philosophy suggests that there are certain features and structures of human intelligibility, of the human way of making sense of entities. In this context, the issue that motivates Lovecraftian horror is the possible encounter of humans with entities that they cannot make intelligible. Entities which are so unintelligible that they seem absolutely alien to the human mind. This, in turn, raises a more general question: what are the features of intelligibility that Lovecraft presupposes in his fiction and ultimately fractures?

Transgressions of Intelligibility in Lovecraft

The answer to the aforementioned question is already gestured at in Lovecraft's own words, where he speaks of a momentary “suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law” [emphasis added in original]. ³ What is particularly interesting about these three components is that while time and space are seen as a priori structures within Kant's (2007) and other philosophers’ works, natural law is rarely discussed as a structure of reason or intelligibility in the literature of Western philosophy. What I take Lovecraft to mean by “galling limitations of natural law” is that there is a certain way the universe functions according to the conceptual and scientific frameworks through which humans render the cosmos intelligible. When a phenomenon does not obey these laws, we are confronted with confusion—not merely about how such things happen, but more radically, how could such things happen. An example that is useful in interpreting the aforementioned Lovecraftian notion is provided by William Blattner to illustrate Heidegger's Being. Blattner puts it this way:

I think I see a man in my backyard and do a double-take. On the second look, I realize that there is no man in my backyard. Is it possible that there was a man in the backyard, but that he existed for just a split-second and vanished? No, that is not possible, because our conception of being a physical thing requires that the thing endure through time and obey very basic principles of regularity. (Blattner, 2007, p. 17)

Contrary to the common assumption that natural laws—such as endurance of physical things through time—are independent of human intelligibility, both Lovecraft and Heidegger think that how objects behave, and what it means for something to exist as a particular kind of entity, is bound up with our structures of sense-making. This does not imply that objects behave in a certain way because we think so, but rather that we approach a particular kind of entity with certain “categorical standards” (Wrathall, 2025) that it needs to satisfy in order to be an entity at all. When we are faced with a phenomenon that violates these categorical standards, it appears to us as unintelligible. In fact, a common response to such phenomena is to assume hallucination, illusion, or error—that nothing was really there, and it merely seemed so to us.

In addition to natural law, ⁴ Lovecraft identifies space as another component along which the limits of human sense-making may be transgressed. In Lovecraftian fiction, the object is still structured by space, as one would expect under a Kantian framework, but the geometry of space behaves in an incomprehensible way. One example of a transgression of the limits of human spatial comprehension appears in The Call of Cthulhu. More specifically, a character named Henry Anthony Wilcox, who experiences horrific dreams of alien landscapes and cyclopean cities, describes the geometry in these dreams as “all wrong” (Lovecraft, 2016a, p. 158). The notion of geometry being “wrong” is both conceptually strange and philosophically puzzling. Geometry, like other branches of mathematics, yields necessary truths derived from accepted axioms. Mathematical truths are one of the paradigmatic examples of necessary truths, and we are often unable to imagine how truths of mathematics can be false. For instance, it is inconceivable for us that “2 + 2” could equal anything other than “4.” Thus, invoking mathematical truth as a limit of human comprehension is an appropriate choice on Lovecraft's part. Furthermore, mathematics is often regarded as a universal language for describing the structure of reality. More specifically, geometry plays a cardinal role in physics and in how we model and understand the universe. For geometry to be all wrong is for us to be unable to make the universe intelligible. Moreover, we rarely apply the word “wrong” to direct experiences. We do not ordinarily say that a tree is “wrong,” or that object's behavior is “wrong.” Wrongness is often a property of statements or propositions, and true propositions about the world are often constructed based on what we encounter through our experience. Thus, describing an encounter as “wrong”—especially in the case of geometry, a subject grounded in necessity—aptly articulates Wilcox's inability to make sense of the world he saw. If he said that geometry was different and then went on to describe the strange geometry, it would no longer be something that lay outside his intelligibility. However, one can argue that human sense-making can adapt, evolve, and change through time, so there is no need to think that such geometry will always be incomprehensible. For instance, we can imagine that upon certain revisions in scientific understanding, physical objects turn out to pop in and pop out of existence under certain conditions. The problem with this objection is that we can never imagine under what condition “2 + 2 = 4” can be false. A possible reply is that the necessity of basic arithmetic truths differs from that of geometrical truths. In geometry, some truths are only necessary because they follow necessarily from some accepted axioms. If these axioms are altered, different and contrary geometrical truths may arise. A well-known example is the transition from Euclidean to Riemannian geometry, a form of non-Euclidean space.

Interestingly, the very term “non-Euclidean” is used to describe the alien landscapes later in The Call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft, 2016a, p. 166). If Wilcox experienced non-Euclidean geometry, a form of geometry recognized and developed by humans, calling it “all wrong” would seem to be perplexing, aligning with the possible objection raised above. After all, non-Euclidean geometry underpins much of modern scientific understanding of space, so what would be wrong or unintelligible about it? Perhaps what Lovecraft had in mind is that Euclidean geometry constitutes the framework through which humans make sense of geometry in the first-person experience. The underlying assumption may be that while we are capable of symbolizing and describing non-Euclidean space, we do not experience space as such. For instance, we are unable to make sense of how the shortest path between two points is not a straight line but a geodesic, a central result of Riemannian geometry. Though we can employ terms like “curved space” to describe such a conception of geometry, we struggle to comprehend what the concept means experientially, as we never perceive space in a curved way. Even when we can act upon these geometrical truths—for example, in the context of space travel—they do not necessarily alter our perception of space; our intuition that the shortest path between two points is a straight line will persist despite what abstract mathematics tells us. This can invite us to posit a distinction: the geometry independent of our first-person perceptual experience and the geometry of our first-person perceptual experience. What Wilcox seems to convey through describing the geometry of alien spaces as “wrong” or “non-Euclidean” is that it was fundamentally different from the geometry of human experience, hence Wilcox's inability to render it intelligible. This interpretation is further supported by the fact that Lovecraft's examples of suspension or violation of sense-making consistently relate to our embodied and perceptual experience of the world, rather than detached abstract descriptions and symbolic manipulations. A similar distinction is present in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as in the works of Heidegger. As noted by Steven L. Bindeman, “He [Merleau-Ponty] identified the two distinct types of space we are concerned with as ‘lived space’ and ‘objective space’” (Bindeman, 2017, p. 59). While the objective space is the third-person mathematical representation of space in an abstract grid, the lived space is the space our bodies inhabit. To extend Merleau-Ponty's point through the Lovecraftian lens, one can say that our embodied experience of space gives us a particular geometrical image, which, if distorted, can lead to madness.

Language and the Limits of Sense-Making

Having examined how Lovecraft linguistically signals the breakdown of spatial and mathematical sense-making (i.e., the “wrongness” of geometry), we must now turn to another element that is consistently implicated in moments of transgression of intelligibility in Lovecraftian fiction: language, a medium that plays a similarly critical role in Bloodborne's universe. Language plays a double role in Lovecraft's stories: it marks the outer limit of human intelligibility, and it serves as the medium through which the breakdown of intelligibility is articulated.

To begin with, the first Lovecraftian characters often encounter unintelligible language. For instance, in The Shadow out of Time (2003), the protagonist, upon waking up, speaks in a language comprising “both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast” (Lovecraft, 2003, p. 10). In the story, the Great Race, a species vastly predating and surpassing humanity, is associated with using a language that is unfamiliar, inhuman, and incomprehensible. Similar examples appear across the Cthulhu Mythos, including The Call of Cthulhu (2016a), The Shadow Over Innsmouth (2016c), and others. Unintelligible letters and alphabet (e.g., “Ph’ nglui mglw’ nafh Cthulhu R’ lyeh wg’ nagl fhtagn” in The Call of Cthulhu) are often mentioned to highlight incomprehensible language of the Great Old Ones, as well as the growing madness of the characters who start muttering this language (e.g., the protagonist who displays growing madness at the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth).

An analogue to this Lovecraftian theme is found in Bloodborne. As a direct parallel to the Lovecraftian world, Bloodborne's universe contains extradimensional and powerful gods, who are often called the Great Ones. The Great Ones in Bloodborne also possess an unintelligible language. This is articulated through the game's Caryll Runes. According to the in-game description of these runes, “Runesmith Caryll, student of Byrgenwerth, transcribed the inhuman utterings of the Great Ones into what are now called Caryll Runes” (FromSoftware, 2015). Caryll is blessed with a mysterious and unknown capacity to hear the utterings of the Great Ones, so she embarks on a path of transcribing these utterings into the runes that would come to be known as Caryll Runes. That said, the transcriptions remained cryptic, and the meaning of these utterances remained unknown to the people of Yharnam.

The second role of language pertains to marking the fact that the limits of human intelligibility are reached or transgressed in the stories. When Lovecraftian characters encounter an unintelligible entity, they often fail to describe the entity, as if the language fails to express what they encounter. This is philosophically profound as language is often at the center of sense-making. To make an entity intelligible, we assign names, use appropriate adjectives and verbs, and employ other linguistic tools. In fact, at some point in The Color out of Space, to express the incomprehensibility of the entities encountered, Lovecraft says that “in her raving, there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns” (Lovecraft, 2016b, p. 181). Pronouns are often void of content as they do not describe the nature of the entity and merely signal its presence, and verbs mostly signal the motion and behavior of the entity in question, which is still not enough to render the entity intelligible. On the other hand, nouns are often useful in categorizing and specifying the nature of an entity and making the entity meaningful. Therefore, the absence of nouns and the presence of only verbs and pronouns in the description of the unintelligible entity is an apt choice to articulate the limits of sense-making. To sum up, we can infer from the Lovecraftian fiction that to reach the limits of the language signals reaching the limits of intelligibility, an idea that is echoed in Wittgenstein's dictum that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1998, 5.6) and Heidegger's remark that “language is the house of Being” (Heidegger, 1997, p. 193).

Madness in Lovecraft

What follows from the failure of language and sense-making in Lovecraftian fiction is not silence—as one could expect within the framework of Early Wittgenstein—but madness. A recurring theme in Lovecraft's stories is that characters who confront the incomprehensible ultimately descend into madness. While fear is the immediate and primary affective response to an encounter with what lies outside intelligibility, madness is the eventual consequence. For instance, in The Color Out of Space (2016b), prolonged exposure to the abnormalities caused by the fallen meteorite gradually drives each member of the Gardner family insane. In the story, madness generally manifests through symptoms such as paranoia, incoherent speech, sensory disturbances (i.e., hearing, feeling, and seeing unnatural things), bodily decay (e.g., greying), dissolution of identity (i.e., losing sense of self and others), and a loss of grip on reality. It should be noted that, in Lovecraftian fiction, madness does not emerge abruptly; rather, it unfolds gradually, developing as characters’ sense-making is increasingly challenged. A notable feature of the gradual breakdown is that those who go mad are typically committed realists. The protagonists of The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Shadow out of Time lucidly exemplify this pattern. Those who succumb to madness are frequently characters who, at the outset, reject the supernatural or strictly non-scientific explanations until they are confronted with what they can no longer make intelligible. This makes their descent into madness all the more striking: rational individuals reach the limits of their sense-making and ability to provide rational explanations. In short, madness—or, in Bloodborne's terms, frenzy—is the inevitable consequence of confronting the unintelligible.

The Tragedy of Self-Overcoming

Insight and Frenzy in Bloodborne

Bloodborne articulates the Lovecraftian descent into madness through the interplay of insight and frenzy. Frenzy is a status effect with a dedicated meter in Bloodborne that increases when the hunter is exposed to certain environments and attacks that induce madness. When the meter fully fills up, a significant portion of the hunter's health is reduced. Although frenzy is not synonymous with madness, it is reasonable to interpret frenzy in the context of Bloodborne as insanity or madness. ⁵ On the other hand, insight represents the hunter's awareness of cosmic and hidden truths of the game's world. The maximum level of insight that can be reached is ninety-nine, and the hunter increases the level of insight by consuming madman's knowledge, defeating bosses, and discovering new areas. Notably, with more insight, enemies display new forms of attack, and previously concealed entities become visible. For instance, upon reaching level fifteen insight, the lanterns of Church Servants (ones with a cane and a lantern) are covered in eyes. Importantly, there is a fundamental connection between frenzy and insight in Bloodborne: as the hunter's insight increases, they become more likely to experience frenzy. More specifically, at a higher level of insight, the frenzy status effect builds much faster and triggers more frequently.

In light of the Lovecraftian ideas sketched above, we can interpret the connection between these mechanics as follows: the hunter becomes more susceptible to frenzy as insight increases because such a level of insight pushes the hunter to the limits—or beyond the limits—of intelligibility. As in the Lovecraftian universe, the price paid for the transgression of intelligibility is madness. However, what remains unclear is why does more insight bring one closer to the limits of sense-making. Why is it that in Bloodborne, the incomprehensible reveals itself only when a particular level of insight is reached? The answer to this question also lies in Lovecraftian fiction. In several of Lovecraft's stories, characters confront incomprehensible and hidden truths of the universe through seeking more knowledge and understanding. Lovecraft gestures towards this in the beginning lines of The Call of Cthulhu:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Lovecraft, 2016a, p. 139)

The idea that synthesizing accumulated knowledge can unconceal hidden and horrifying truths about the cosmos is echoed in Bloodborne. In the game, insight is described as “level of insight, or depth of inhuman knowledge” (FromSoftware, 2015). “Inhuman knowledge” in Bloodborne is also sometimes referred to as eldritch truths. It is a term coined to refer to the knowledge of the Great Ones—beings who exist on a higher plane of existence than humans and “can be called gods” (FromSoftware, 2015). In this sense, Bloodborne's mechanics express a central theme of the game: the more one understands, the closer one comes to encountering what exceeds the limits of intelligibility.

The Will to Transcendence in Bloodborne

By uncovering the eldritch truths, humans strive to transcend to a higher level of existence. In fact, the pursuit of enlightenment serves as the central motivation of Master Willem, the head of the Byrgenwerth College in Bloodborne. Willem believed that elevating human existence to the plane of the gods required the augmentation of insight. One method of increasing the insight is by consuming Madman's Knowledge, which has the following in-game description:

Skull of a madman touched by the wisdom of the Great One; Use to gain Insight. Making contact with eldritch wisdom is a blessing, for even if it drives one mad, it allows one to serve a grander purpose, for posterity. (FromSoftware, 2015)

Consuming the wisdom of the Great Ones can enable humans to transcend to a higher plane of being, but as evident from the in-game description, such transcendence comes at the cost of madness. This method of transcendence is rejected by a former student of the Byrgenwerth college, Laurence. He believed that the right path lay in the use of Old Blood, which Willem deemed dangerous. The disagreement led Laurence to found the Healing Church, whose misuse of the Old Blood caused the plague in Yharnam. Despite their dispute, both Willem and Laurence sought to transcend to the level of the Great Ones—one through the mind, the other through the body. The transcendence is reflected in gameplay, particularly through the unconcealment in the world surrounding the hunter. For instance, at one insight, the Doll in Hunter's Dream comes to life. At forty insight, the previously concealed Amygdala clinging to a building in the Cathedral Ward becomes visible. This is one of the most powerful expressions of the interplay between frenzy and insight in the game. A building that the player had traversed a couple of times is suddenly revealed to have had an enormous being attached to it all along. This being, which lies beyond the limits of the hunter's intelligibility, is unconcealed because of the increased insight. One can be left wondering what is unintelligible about the being we see on the screen; after all, it is just an enormous creature, which, at best, looks frightening. To reply to this objection, it should be underscored that Bloodborne is a video game, and because of its nature, it portrays the unintelligible partly through visual means. Since it is impossible for a video game to portray something unintelligible through visual representation, the game makes us imagine that the unconcealed entities are beyond the limits of human comprehension. Furthermore, at sixty insight, the crying of the nightmare newborn, Mergo, is heard. In short, previously imperceptible entities are unconcealed as the hunter's insight is increased. What were only present to the Great Ones now reveal themselves to humans as well. The only caveat is that these hidden entities lie beyond the limits of human intelligibility, thereby driving humans to frenzy. This is why the in-game description of the Madman's Knowledge notes that “for even if it drives one mad, it allows one to serve a grander purpose, for posterity” (FromSoftware, 2015). The Lovecraftian point articulated by Bloodborne is that the newly unconcealed entities are incomprehensible to the human mind, and therefore, the human mind descends into madness when the limits of sense-making are transgressed. Besides the increasing vulnerability of the player's character to frenzy, the game also encompasses the tragic fate of NPCs (non-playable characters) who sought transcendence. For instance, the scholars of the School of Mensis performed a ritual to contact the Great One Mergo, only for it to backfire in a horrifying manner. As the in-game description of the Umbilical Cord puts it, “this Cord granted Mensis audience with Mergo, but resulted in the stillbirth of their brains” (FromSoftware, 2015). I interpret “stillbirth of their brains” as meaning that the brains of these scholars stopped functioning upon encountering the unintelligible. Micolash, the founder of the School of Mensis within the Healing Church, is encountered as a boss in the game. When we kill him, his last words are as follows:

Ahh, Kos, or some say Kosm … Do you hear our prayers? As you once did for the vacuous Rom, Grant us eyes, grant us eyes. Plant eyes on our brains, to cleanse our beastly idiocy. The grand lake of mud, hidden now, from sight. The cosmos, of course! Let us sit about, and speak feverishly. Chatting into the wee hours of … New ideas, of the higher plane! (FromSoftware, 2015)

Even though Micolash succeeds in contacting a Great One, he does so at the expense of losing his sanity, as these incoherent ramblings suggest. In general, the Great Ones are beings that lie beyond the bounds of human intelligibility, and they only become perceptible once a certain level of insight is reached. The Great Ones possess alien qualities, which partly explains why encountering them engenders madness. For instance, Oedon, one of the most revered of the Great Ones, is formless. As the in-game description puts it, “the Great One Oedon, lacking form, exists only in voice, and is symbolized by this rune” (FromSoftware, 2015). Even more strangely, this being, who “exists only in voice,” impregnates women (e.g., Arianna) despite lacking corporeal form. How such a thing is possible is incomprehensible to the human mind. Additionally, Rom, the Vacuous Spider, is called “vacuous” because, in her pursuit of gaining more insight—evidenced by the multitude of eyes ⁶ covering her body (see the quote by Micolash)—she lost her mind. She, too, symbolizes the price one must pay to ascend to the level of the Great Ones.

But madness is not always the result of the will to become greater in Bloodborne. This is what Bloodborne's third and secret ending seems to articulate. This ending can only be triggered if the hunter consumes three Umbilical Cords, which grant the hunter more insight. With enough insight, the hunter encounters and defeats the Moon Presence, a Great One, thus transcending to a higher level of existence and becoming an infant Great One. There are two ways one can interpret the connection between the hunter and the infant Great One that comes into existence: either the infant Great One is psychologically continuous with the hunter's selfhood, thus preserving the personal identity, or the hunter sacrifices their personal identity and selfhood in order to ascend to a higher plane of existence. I follow the latter interpretation not only because I think that the former interpretation would require a difficult philosophical explanation of how an infant can retain the psychological continuity, but also because the latter interpretation leads to a more tragic and a more profound picture of a hunter who sacrifices his selfhood for evolution into something greater.

Following the latter interpretation, we can say that the hunter, by being able to evolve, realizes the dream that drove others to madness or failure, yet what is tragic is that this successful transcendence and evolution, too, comes at a price: the death of the hunter's selfhood. The infant Great One is a new evolved being with a new identity—the hunter, as once known, no longer exists. Aabir Sen, in his discussion of madness in Bloodborne, says that, “therefore, in the world of Bloodborne, the cosmic price for both knowledge and transcendence is a form of madness, an expulsion from the very realm of being, an erasure of identity itself” (Sen, 2023, p. 423). Erasure of one's identity is equal to one's death. What is important to realize is that one's death does not require the body to perish; after all, an individual is not identical to his body. Who one is as an individual encompasses many other factors, such as one's memories, one's distinct psychological characteristics, and more. When these are erased, one's personal identity vanishes, so one's life is actually over. This is what happens in the hunter's case as his selfhood is erased and a more evolved being with a distinct personal identity emerges.

Overall, the paradox Bloodborne presents us with is that the striving towards transcendence results in annihilation of the self one way or another. Through this lens, the hunter can be seen as desiring a form of death. In fact, the very concept of “transcendence” gestures towards death. After all, what does it mean to completely transcend oneself? It means to go beyond oneself, and when one is completely beyond oneself, it can be interpreted as the dissolution of one's identity. The consequences of both transcendence and madness lead to the same end: loss of oneself.

Bloodborne as the Allegory of Nietzschean Philosophy

The drive to transcendence and evolution in Bloodborne finds a potent analogue in Nietzsche's conception of the will to power and overcoming. For Nietzsche, the fundamental biological drive of all living things is the will to power. He says that “A living being wants above all else to release its strength; life itself is the will to power (BGE, 2009 §13). Moreover, he thinks that this drive must be affirmed, and ultimately, even goodness and happiness are reduced to this core drive within his philosophy. This is evident when he says, “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself … What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome” (A, 1977, §2). For Nietzsche, the highest form of life affirms itself not by clinging to the familiar, but by striving to overcome itself. In this sense, the characters found in the universe of Bloodborne can be seen as embodying and actualizing Nietzschean philosophy by attempting to overcome the resistance they encounter within their Lovecraftian universe, ⁷ namely, the limits of their intelligibility. It is even more noteworthy from a Nietzschean perspective that these characters are attempting this self-overcoming at the price of becoming mad. Part of “living dangerously” (GS, 1974, §283), for Nietzsche, is exactly about not staying in one's comfort zone and attempting to take risks so as to become greater. As young Nietzsche noted, “I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible” (HL, 1988a, §9). Nietzsche well understood and emphasized that greatness does not come easy; the path to greatness is filled with dangers, suffering, and pain. And the great individuals are those who can affirm and embrace this suffering in order to become greater.

Moreover, self-overcoming in Nietzsche is often understood individually. Put differently, it is about the individual striving to overcome their current self and become greater. This invites the question of whether the interpretation of the secret ending offered above is Nietzschean in this regard, since it is not exactly the individual hunter who becomes greater. As it has been interpreted, the individuality of the hunter disappears, and a new being with new individuality is born. If self-overcoming involves self-annihilation, in what sense is it really self-overcoming? Is not Nietzsche's point about the individual persisting through the phases of overcoming rather than being annihilated, and instead bringing to the world a different, albeit more evolved and greater, individual? In this sense, the question is whether the hunter is really making a Nietzschean decision in the secret ending by choosing to self-annihilate so as to turn their existence into a more evolved being as a different individual? I argue that not only the hunter is making a Nietzschean decision, but also that this decision sheds light on a not-so-discussed aspect of Nietzschean will to greatness.

The drive to greatness does not always merely involve the individual becoming greater in Nietzschean philosophy. In the very beginnings of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra claims that “man is something that should be overcome” and “all creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves” (TSZ, 2003, Part I, Prologue, §3). For Nietzsche, humanity is a bridge (one can say a transitional phase) between apes and “Übermensch” (see TSZ, 2003, Part I, Prologue, §4), and just as apes evolved into humans, humans must evolve into something superior. This evolution does not merely involve individuals overcoming themselves, which is an essential aspect of it, but also contributing to the coming of higher beings beyond humanity. This is clear when Nietzsche's Zarathustra says that “I love him who works and invents that he may build a house for the Superman and prepare earth, animals, and plants for him: for thus he wills his own downfall” (TSZ, 2003, Part I, Prologue, §4). Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, expresses his admiration for those who attempt to establish and cultivate the conditions, such as revaluating all values and going beyond good and evil, engaging in creative work, and cultivating appropriate socio-political structures that impose the right pathos of distance, that enable the overcoming of humanity and allow the emergence of higher individuals. Such people will their downfall, for they accept their role as transitional and work to bring beings higher than themselves. ⁸ The idea of bringing something as greater than yourself is also echoed in Zarathustra's discussion of marriage. For Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the purpose of marriage is to reproduce something greater than oneself. As he says, “marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it” (TSZ, 2003, Part I, On Marriage and Children). Just as parents are supposed to bring about children who are greater than them, Zarathustra's overall task for humanity is to cultivate the conditions and bring about superior types. These passages show that, as much as for Nietzsche, it is important to overcome oneself, it is also important to attempt to bring about or enable the conditions of something greater to come.

Keeping in mind these ideas, the hunter's pursuit of greatness, culminating in becoming an evolved species (i.e., an infant Great One), is a metaphorical epitome of Nietzschean philosophy. The hunter actively chooses to evolve and become greater, even if this comes at the cost of selfhood. To put it in Zarathustra's terms, the hunter wills his own downfall by erasing their identity in order to ascend to a greater being, and undoubtedly, this makes the hunter the object of love of Zarathustra. The image Bloodborne presents is even more tragic because the downfall is not about willing and working for a higher type to come, but rather sacrificing oneself so that such a thing becomes possible.

What Bloodborne teaches us through a Nietzschean lens is that if one truly wishes to elevate humanity ⁹ on the plane of existence, one has to be willing even to die. When the attempt to create something greater than oneself is pushed to its very limits, we may be required to sacrifice ourselves so that something even greater comes into being. This reminds us that contributing to life is not just about focusing on oneself, but also about thinking beyond oneself and, if necessary, sacrificing oneself. As important as it is to work on oneself and become greater, at some point, one must realize that there is a limit to how much self-overcoming one can accomplish, and that one should instead contribute to the emergence of individuals better than oneself. Just as a parent hopes for their child to become better than them, humanity must be willing to allow greater individuals than itself to emerge. This insight is especially important in today's world, where individuals, particularly those who hold power, often fail to think beyond themselves. Some are not even willing to forgo simple pleasures and privileges for the sake of intergenerational prosperity, let alone die so that humanity transforms into something greater. The hunter's self-annihilation serves as a reminder of what is lacking in modern culture: we are not working toward creating something greater than ourselves. For much of humanity, intergenerational thinking is nearly absent. How many of us truly consider the state of the world after we are gone, let alone actively work toward transforming humanity into something greater? It is not even certain that we will leave the world to those who come after us in as good a condition as we found it. Bloodborne confronts us with our limits and forces us to realize that perhaps the only path toward transcendence and greatness is the ability to think beyond oneself. It is also not without irony that the most radical self-overcoming in the universe of the game can only be achieved through the acceptance of one's own self-annihilation. It is as if the game tells us that if one is not willing to think beyond oneself, one cannot help humanity transform into something greater.

A pivotal question that remains at this point is why being elevated into a Great One can be considered seeking greatness. Why should humanity be concerned with ascending to a higher plane of existence, where they can attain, for instance, more powerful cognitive capacities? What one should take from Bloodborne is not the content of greatness but rather its form, and how that form structurally requires thinking beyond the self. In the universe of Bloodborne, greatness can be understood as achieving a higher level of cognition and attaining eldritch truths, while for Nietzsche it involves bringing forth greater individuals who can fully affirm life, be creative and free spirits, create their own values, and remain independent of the herd and its morality. For the contemporary world, the content of greatness may be different. Perhaps what matters is not higher cognition or exceptional individuals but something that improves humanity collectively rather than individually. What one should take away from Bloodborne through a Nietzschean lens is that structurally, any genuine pursuit of greatness requires finite human beings to think beyond themselves toward the future prosperity of humanity—regardless of what that prosperity consists in. This is not to sidestep the question of what counts as greatness, which remains a cardinal philosophical question worth pursuing. The aim here is more limited: to show that whatever answer one gives to that question, the capacity to think and act beyond the boundaries of the individual self is its necessary condition. And it is this necessary condition of greatness that this article seeks to make salient through Bloodborne and Nietzsche.

Conclusion

Bloodborne's philosophical depth does not merely lie in its gothic atmosphere or intricate mechanics, but in the way it compels the players to grapple with unresolved questions which the game renders salient and existential. It stands alongside great works of contemporary art and literature, inviting those who engage with it to reflect on existential dimensions of the human condition. That a video game can stage such a rich interplay of philosophical ideas through its mechanics and narrative is a testament to the philosophical potential of video games as artworks.

In particular, the game invites us to inhabit a perspective where the will to truth and transcendence—something that is often idealized in Western philosophy—is a double-edged sword. The Faustian ¹⁰ spirit descends into madness or annihilation of selfhood in its pursuit of transcendence. In short, Bloodborne offers a video game counterpart to the classic tragic archetype: a noble seeker whose will to transcendence and truth requires a hefty price. The price to be paid in Bloodborne, quite paradoxically, is losing the self that sought the truth.

While paying the ultimate price for transforming something human into something even greater, the game ends up teaching us that the path to greatness inevitably requires thinking beyond the “I.” Even Nietzsche, the great champion of individual greatness, who once wrote that “mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men—that and nothing else is its task” (SE, 1988b, §6), understood that humanity is not the endpoint on the ladder of greatness: for one thing, no such endpoint exists, and for another, much about humanity still remains to be overcome. And since human beings have finite existence, their task must include preparing the ground for even greater individuals to come. And even if we disagree with Nietzsche on what counts as greatness or whether the greatness of individuals equals the greatness of humanity, we must grant him the point that humans must think about and do something for the state of humanity after they pass away. At this point, one cannot help but be reminded of a presumably apocryphal old Greek proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”