Much has been written, much thought, and
much else believed about Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch, culminating in
what is perhaps the notion’s most inappropriate, because malapropic
contemporary translation: ‘It’s a bird…It’s a plane… It’s Superman.’ In this
contemporary adaptation it just seems so irresistibly easy to imagine Superman
arriving on the scene of some human drama and pronouncing in the mellifluous
intonations of the very-French, love-crazed skunk of cartoondom, Pépé le Pew: “I am ze
Übermensch.”
 |
| Ubermensch, from Nerfnow.com |
In
order to talk about Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch, we must first needs
restore Seneca’s aphorism to “quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est”
(“What was philosophy is now become philology”), which, in his 1869 inauguration
address on ‘Homer and Classical Philology’ at the
University of Basel, the new professor of philology inverted to mean, “What was
philology is now become philosophy.” Because it would seem that mainstream
opinions about Nietzsche’s Übermensch are more
concerned with the possible meanings of the word, Übermensch, than in the philosophico-psychological
concept the word is intended to hold up.
The
Übermensch idea remains elusive at least in part due to the prepositional
prefix –über (over, beyond, and super (if dragged
kicking and screaming through a layer of Latin)) attached to the word –mensch (person), and it has been translated
into English diversely—as ‘Beyond-Man’, ‘Superman’, and ‘Overman’. None of
these are particularly happy translations, however, because they remain
burdened by the compulsion for a one-word for one-word literalism that
sometimes, actually many times, just does not work between languages.
§ THE ZEITGEIST OF THE
19TH CENTURY
Nietzsche’s Übermensch
is conceived in an 18th-19th century thought-world [Gedankenwelt]
defined by the two influences of Hebraism,
which is to say the Judeo-Christian religious heritage of western civilization,
and Hellenism, or the vigorous
resurgence of Greek cultural ideas through Anglo-German poetry and scholarship.
Matthew Arnold published Culture and
Anarchy (1869) in the UK to mixed or mostly negative reviews. And
yet the framing of that book not only anticipates, but resembles comme deux gouttes d’eau the framing of
Nietzsche’s own thinking: the same motifs familiar to readers of Matthew Arnold
will inform Nietzsche’s thinking, from the works of his youth, such as Die Kindheit der Völker
(1861), which Nietzsche composed as a 15-year old student, through his first
scholarly book, The Birth of Tragedy
(1872), and the Genealogy of Morality
(1887), which goes to show that the “framing” of his ideas will remain
significant to Nietzsche throughout his thinking and writing life.
The
title of perhaps the most famous chapter in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy is “Hebraism and Hellenism,” which suggests a
certain opposition of ideas. In a review published recently in The
Weekly Standard, a noted American historian calls this antithesis
unambiguous:
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience. The uppermost idea with
Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism
is conduct and obedience. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is
that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is that they
hinder right acting. Hellenism is comfortable in the “pursuit or attainment of
perfection”; Hebraism, obsessed with sin, sees only “the difficulties which
oppose themselves” to perfection.
Both Arnold and Nietzsche are ‘prophets
of culture’ who are working within very similar zeitgeistige framings. Yet Arnold and Nietzsche draw strikingly
dissimilar conclusions from their thinking. For Arnold, “The two [principles of
Hebraism and Hellenism] are not so much opposed, … as “divergent,” animated by
“different principles” but having the “same goal” and “aiming at a like final
result.” Both are “contributions to
human development—august contributions, invaluable contributions.” Both “arise
out of the wants of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying those
wants.”
For
Nietzsche, on the other hand, as the Genealogy
of Morality makes unambiguously clear, the creation of ‘Morality’ is an
anti-life evolution of thought, a nihilism that kills the naturally ‘Good’
wherever it comes into existence. For Arnold, it is truly “Hebraism and
Hellenism,” whereas for Nietzsche it is “Hebraism vs.
Hellenism.” So there are many similarities clearly showing that Matthew Arnold
and Friedrich Nietzsche come from the same thought-world, which suggests a more
general philosophical arena for these framings and these thoughts. However,
there is absolutely no traceable, direct contact between these two thinkers.
Nietzsche does not seem to know about Matthew Arnold, nor are there any of
Arnold’s writings in Nietzsche’s personal library.
§ UNDERMEN AS OVERMEN –
A “HISTORY” OF FALSE STARTS
 |
| Nietzsche as Superman, from Metal Gear |
Famous, but alas all too typical of the
Übermensch idea in normal parlance, is the “Leopold and Loeb” case in Chicago
of the 1920s. In the Wiki-telling:
L&L are two students who, becoming friends at the University of Chicago and
having a shared interest in committing the ‘perfect crime’, dusted off their
portable Nietzsche and convinced themselves that they were Übermensch “— transcendent individuals, possessing extraordinary and
unusual capabilities, whose superior intellects allowed them to rise above the
laws and rules that bound the unimportant, average populace. …[B]y [Leopold’s] interpretation
of Nietzsche's doctrines, he was not bound by any of society's normal ethics or
rules. Before long he had convinced Loeb that he, too, was an Übermensch. In a
letter to Loeb, Leopold wrote, "A superman ... is, on account of certain
superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which
govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do."
L&L
did not succeed in committing the perfect crime; so Clarence
Darrow, of Scopes Monkey Trial fame (1925) and otherwise champion of
scientifically minded rationalism, was engaged to defend the two men. In the defense of his two clients Darrow
succeeded in accomplishing two things. First, it would seem that he probably
saved Leopold and Loeb from being executed by the state of Illinois for their
murder of Robert Franks, because both were only sentenced to life imprisonment,
which seemed to buck the trend at the time. Second, Darrow succeeded in transforming
Nietzsche and his notion of the Übermensch into the stooge for human arrogance,
a sense of social entitlement and superiority, and evil intent. In Darrow’s
version of the facts-and-only-the-facts, L&L were just two normal lads who
turned bad because they had had the misfortune of too much philosophy, of reading
too much Nietzsche in their youth. It remains undecided whether philosophy in
America has ever really shaken this guilt by association.
Some, such as a writer for Philosophy Now, see some kind of
connection between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the Over-soul of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the American transcendentalist, who published “The Over-soul” as Essay
IX in his Essays: First Series in
1841. In PN’s article, entitled “Nietzsche’s
Übermensch: A Hero of Our Time?,” we read that
The term Übermensch, often translated as Superman or Overman, was not invented by
Nietzsche. The concept of hyperanthropos can be
found in the ancient writings of Lucian. In German, the word had already been
used by Müller, Herder, Novalis, Heine, and most importantly by Goethe in
relation to Faust (in Faust, Part I, line
490). In America Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the Oversoul, and, perhaps with
the exception of Goethe’s Faust, his aristocratic, self-reliant ‘Beyond-man’
was probably the greatest contributor to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch.
It is indisputable that Emerson greatly
impressed Nietzsche, an interest and an affinity that spanned Nietzsche’s
entire life. Unfortunately, while there does seem to be a demonstrable
connection between Carlyle, Goethe, Emerson, and Nietzsche on the notion of the
Great Man, that connection does not in any way contribute to or inform our
interpretation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
The
PN author also draws upon a Fordham
University article, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Parodic Style: On Lucian’s Hyperanthropos and Nietzsche’s Übermensch, to
establish some kind of philologists’ “must-have-been” connection between Nietzsche’s
Übermensch and the Greek term coined by the 2nd century AD satirist, Lucian of
Samosata. Unfortunately, while it is certainly accurate to say that the term hyper-anthropos is found in the writings
of Lucian, it is equally accurate to say that any reference to Lucian in
Nietzsche’s corpus is entirely tangential, as opposed to substantial, and that hyperanthropos never occurs in his work.
Furthermore,
the hapax usage of hyperanthropos in
Lucian (in The Downward Journey, sec.
16; Loeb, vol. 2, 1999) is employed by a neighbor of the tyrant Megapenthes,
whose name is Micyllus, and who says that the tyrant,
appeared to me a super-man, thrice-blessed, better
looking and a full royal cubit taller
than almost anyone else ; for he was
uplifted by his good fortune, walked with a
majestic gait, carried his head high and dazzled all he met. But when he
was dead, not only did he cut an utterly ridiculous figure in my eyes on being stripped
of his pomp, but I laughed at myself even more than at him because I had
marveled at such a worthless creature, inferring his happiness from the savour
of his kitchen and counting him lucky because of his purple derived from the
blood of mussels in the Laconian
Sea.
As a satiric description attached to the somewhat
ludicrous, I-wish-I-weren’t-dead tyrant Megapenthes, who is attempting to
negotiate his way out of Hades, this irony-laden connection seems an
obscurantist and erudite non-starter as far as the history of Nietzsche’s idea
might be concerned.
Other ‘literature’ on the question of the
Übermensch is polyphonic and both predictably and unhelpfully inconclusive,
although the populist consensus seems determined to associate the concept with
eugenics and the creation of a higher biological type. Some, such as Safranski
(Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography,
p. 365), arguing a variation on the biologism theme, think that, “Nietzsche
intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve as a
Machiavellian bogeyman of the modern Western middle class and its pseudo-Christian
egalitarian value system.” This interpretative trend was certainly also evident
in Nazi thought, which used Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch to articulate
a particular national version of the Aryan master race.
Popular
culture, as well, has certainly had a wonderful time fussing with Übermensch-type characters, from Siegel’s first villainesque
Superman, to G.B. Shaw, and James Joyce. In more philosophically interesting treatments, of course, there are
always Ayn Rand’s transmogrifications of the Übermensch into her radically individualistic
and supra-moral Supra-Men. Likewise, in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, a four-act drama
written in 1903, there is the famous act called Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), which is often produced as a
stand-alone piece. It consists of a dream-act debate concerning the advantages
of Hell, which, in quintessentially übermenschlicher
style reminiscent of Faust’s Mephistopheles, include art
and beauty and love and pleasure, whereas Heaven will only celebrate rational
discourse and the dissemination of the Life Force. The Devil defends such hedonistic
amenities, whereas Juan wants none of them and heads for a thinker's Heaven. There
is a theater review here, and a YouTube version of Don Juan in Hell here.
§ I THOUGHT I SAW AN ÜBERMENSCH… I DID, I DID.
 |
| Tweety & Sylverster |
There is every sort and variety of opinion
‘out there’ about the Übermensch; and they occupy whatever thought-terrain is
fertile enough to sustain them. However, all the above opinions about Nietzsche’s Übermensch are simply wrong
and wrong-headed—they have nothing to do with Nietzsche’s thinking. So who is, or can be, an Übermensch? Who
exactly are ‘those who have gone beyond’? And, if this is indeed a
philosophical model of some sort, or a political model, or a heroic model, what
is the exact profile?
There are some Nietzsche scholars who are
actually subtle enough in their thinking to understand that Übermensch is not a
state of ontology, but rather a state of mind. Nietzsche is not proposing an
Antichrist, or a Führer, or a Carlylean Great Man; rather, he is proposing to
his readers something much more akin to a philosophico-psychological adjustment
such as taught by Epictetus in the Enchiridion:
e.g., “Of things that can happen
to us in a lifetime, there are some that we can control [are dependent upon
us], and some that we cannot control [are not dependent upon us].” Corrections
of this type in our thinking, says Nietzsche, will transform us into freie Denker, free thinkers, and
ultimately, free minds.
There
is evidence that some contemporary scholars are reading Nietzsche
psychologically, such as in the essay entitled ‘Nietzsche and the Greeks’
published recently (2013) in the The
Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. There we read that, “Nietzsche was generally
more interested in the psychological consequences of philosophical doctrines
than in their content.” There is also a 2010 book, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, which challenges “various
traditional views of Nietzsche, taking him at his word when he says that his
writing can best be understood as a kind of psychology.”
It
might be helpful to recall our intellectual history—that psychology as a
discipline is only a very young blossom on the western vine of knowledge, and
only began separating itself from philosophy after the 1850s. So it would seem
reasonable, given the time frame, that Nietzsche should in fact consider
himself a psychologist; and in fact, the self-identification as psychologist
permeates Nietzsche’s writing, and especially the Twilight of the Idols [1888]:
·
Beyond Good and Evil [1886: 76, 20]:
“Der neue Psycholog bereitet dem Aberglauben ein Ende, der bisher um die
Seelen-Vorstellung wuchterte.”
·
Twilight of the Idols [77, 343]: “Aus
meinen Schriften redet ein Psychologe.”
·
Twilight of the Idols [77, 405]: “Es gab
vor mir noch gar keine Psychologie.”
Finally, among his aphorisms from Idols is number 35: “Es giebt Fälle, wo
wir wie Pferde sind, wir Psychologen, und in Unruhe gerathen: wir sehen unsren
eignen Schatten vor uns auf und niederschwanken. Der Psychologe muss von sich
absehn, um überhaupt zu sehn.”
Nietzsche the psychologist, then, reminds
us that it is the wrong question to ask for models of what the Übermensch can
be… It is not about some particular model of a more-than-human, but rather the mental
context of an übermenschlich state of
mind.
As a psychological moment, the Übermensch-realization is actually a
fusion of two distinct insight-events. Aristotle, in his Poetics [1452a&b], refers to the first insight-event as a discovery
[anagnorisis], as the recognition of
the moment of “seeing” something, of grasping the truth about something, of the
ah-ha moment when we ‘get it’. It is that very private moment in the life of
our mind when, finally, the light bulb goes on and we realize that… for
example, our partner does not love us, or that someone has been cheating on us,
or that our boss has been defrauding the company, or, or, or…
Obviously,
there are untold examples of this insight-event in literature, but it is
important for Nietzsche that these moments should be psychologically correct,
that they should correspond to the actually lived human condition of mind, and that
they should take us beyond ourselves into a different sphere of knowing.
Aristotle himself thinks that Sophocles’
depiction of this moment in the life of Oedipus is superb—the moment when
Oedipus, cast down under the weight of his misery and shame, stabs out his eyes,
finally realizing that blind, he would see no worse than with his eyes wide
open.
There
are also other great and moving insight-events in literature, such as when Ajax
falls upon his sword after finally realizing that Athena has deceived him and blinded
him through folly; or when Viktor Frankenstein realizes that the creature he
has made is no man, but a monster; or when Milton’s Satan [Book 9; lns.
458-466], standing before Eve and contemplating even then the enormity of the
evil he was going to bring into her life in Paradise, is struck dumb before her
loveliness.
Her
heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge:
However humanly touching these
illustrations may be, none of these particular insight-events actually captures
what Nietzsche intends with his Übermensch-realization, which is an
insight-event actually quite limited in scope. In addition to the insight-event
as a psychological event, Nietzsche’s Übermensch-realization is also about a very
specific type of realization. It is about the insight that dawns on us when we
finally grasp that Everything we
have “believed” about Value, about morality and moral thinking, about right and
wrong and good and evil, and about human destiny, is philosophical misdirection.
It is a layer of fiction applied to a
world of fact—an unhappy because antagonistic joining if ever there was.
Through
his Zarathustra, Nietzsche has undertaken the task of radically rethinking the
foundations of morality, and of imagining the psychological and emotional
consequences of that rethinking in the normal course of a life. Just imagine
the psychic wreckage and emotional damage! Just imagine the courage needed, the
daring, to overcome; and the innocence and willingness to throw ourselves, body
and soul, into a life that is to be newly created and defined each and every
day, entirely by us.
Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra is the story of such a mental and emotional journey, which has
three quite distinct segments. As the journey begins, (and we have to remember
that this is a journey possible to each one of us through the imagination),
Zarathustra has to imagine first that he is a camel. The camel is the perfect Beast of Burden; it is an animal
that carries, almost as if by second nature, burdens that are not his own. The
first leg of Zarathustra’s journey, then, is to become aware that he also, like
the camel, carries a burden that is not properly his own—the burden of ideas
and values and beliefs that are inherited through the mother milk, which grow up
inside us as we grow up, almost as a second skeleton, which becomes so
fundamental to our psyche that it organizes all the spaces of our minds into
our own private character.
The
lion characterizes the second
segment of Zarathustra’s journey of the mind. This segment of the journey,
which demands all the courage of the lion, happens only in the solitary wastelands
of the mind, where we give battle to the fiction of inherited morality, where
we finally push it away from our minds and dare to stand alone in human
history, finally.
The
child embodies the third and final
segment of Zarathustra’s journey of the imagination. What happens to us,
emotionally, when we finally dare to step out of an abusive or horrible situation?
There is a sense of relief, certainly; but there is also a sense of being
overwhelmed because we have to start all over again. So, says Nietzsche, we
have to put on the mind of the child – to accept in all innocence the
new-Beginning of the world that stands before us; and we have to go on to
create anew our life, not just physically, but also and especially psychically.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
§ ETERNALLY RETURNING – WINDMILLS IN YOUR MIND.
 |
| Psychological Time |
According to Nietzsche, a fundamental
element of the Übermensch life of the mind is the
recognition of the Eternal Return of the Same, or Eternal Recurrence. As an
idea, this certainly brings back to mind the Noel Harrison tube, “The Windmills
of Your Mind,” that was such a smash in the late 1960s.
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
[…]
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
[…]
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of
its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!
Nietzsche’s thinking about the Übermensch
is framed in the zeitgeist of his century, which tended to separate time into
sacred or divine history [e.g., Hebraism; Heilsgeschichte]
and human empirical time [Hellenism; Geschichte].
This is a distinction that will also be much and usefully exploited by the
philosopher and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade.
First
in Nietzsche’s thinking about the eternal return, is the idea that divine or
Christian history is a linear conception. This is to say that we humans enter
into the sacred flowing at some point, and the current takes us
unidirectionally toward the culmination of time in the Parousia of God. This
linear notion of history, or divine history, reasons Nietzsche, usurped at some
remote time the Greek or natural pagan notion of history, which saw time as a
series of recurring revolutions or cycles in the ‘great clock of being’ (Zarathustra). For Nietzsche, the Übermensch
stands before a choice—to live out his life through unidirectional divine time,
which is the destruction of fully human time and, thus, a nihilism, or to cast
himself into the multi-faceted organization of the world’s, and so into man’s, natural
time: “…it is the world which redeems our contingent existence, reintegrating
the Christian ego into the order of cosmic necessity, i.e., into the eternal
recurrence of the same” [Gay Savoir §
341-342, under “the heaviest burden” and “the death of God” § 343]. Clifford
Geertz, the American anthropologist, will translate this idea into the
following: ‘One
of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with
the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end
having lived one.’
Natural
cyclical time, where we enter and re-enter into the full stream of a fully
human experience and creation of time, is an ancient concept found not only in
the philosophies of India and Egypt, but also in Greek antiquity, and notably
among the Stoics and Pythagoreans. Nietzsche encapsulates this idea in a very
Epictetan or Stoic value: Amor fati, a Latin expression about ‘embracing one’s
fate’ because it is one’s own. In his book Meaning in History, Karl Löwith reminds us on this point (p. 216)
that Nietzsche introduces this idea, “not as a metaphysical doctrine but as an
ethical imperative: to live as if “the eternal hourglass of existence” will
continually be turned, in order to impress on each of our actions the weight of
an inescapable responsibility.”
Among
the Greeks the notion of Eternal Recurrence was
normative, and included living a life “in harmony with nature” (Plato’s Philebus); the idea of circularity (of lives,
the process of generation and creation, orbit of planets, etc.) – Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato (cf. esp. Timaeus,
The Statesman, and The Republic), Aristotle, Eudemos of
Rhodes, the Stoics, and the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus, who will
contribute the idea of the equinox precession (the slow spin of the earth) to
Plato’s Great Year, which idea will recur later in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.
Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find in
The windmills of your mind!
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find in
The windmills of your mind!
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