The solution, [Nietzsche] believed, was a new individualistic morality system in which the strongest, bravest men would become their own masters and creators, and in turn would become philosopher kings and oligarchs of the spirit. This new man was to be embodied in his infamous, hypothetical Übermensch, or Superman (as Über means above and beyond in German, Nietzsche’s word used to be also translated as the Beyond-Man or Overman, but today is usually not translated at all. The Übermensch goes above and beyond.)
The arch-individual, non-conformist Superman rises above the morality of the herd and harnesses all of his internal energies, all the energy within – his ‘will to power’, which consists of his sexual drive, survival drive, pleasure drive and other non-rational forces – to embrace life fearlessly, and with nobility and courage. The ultimate task of the Übermensch is to face life and live it as if he had lived it an infinite number of times in the past, and will do so an infinite number of times in the future. In so doing he will accept all of life’s horrors and sufferings in a kind of neverending Groundhog Day. Nietzsche ostensibly took this ‘eternal recurrence’ to be literally true, not just a metaphor.
All of these thoughts were developed by Nietzsche in the third stage of his writing. The first stage, from 1872 to 1878, was marked by a preoccupation with the pre-Socratic Ancient Greeks, and how they used art and theatre to make sense of human existence and all its capricious cruelties. The second stage, encompassing the books Human, All Too Human (1878), The Dawn (1881) and The Joyful Science (1883), was marked by experimental and doubtful musings on the notion of truth. While his third and final stage, taking us up to January 1889, when he was struck down by madness, is characterised chiefly by the question of morality, and how his idealised Übermensch would confront and overcome nihilism.
Patrick West, “Nietzsche and the struggle against nihilism”, Spiked, 2018-08-03.
August 23, 2018
QotD: Nietzsche’s idealised Übermensch
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