Übermensch
Based on Wikipedia: Übermensch
The Most Misunderstood Word in Philosophy
Here's an irony that would have made Friedrich Nietzsche either laugh or weep. The philosopher who despised nationalism and once said he would "have all anti-semites shot" had his most famous concept hijacked by Nazis. The man who proclaimed "God is dead" as a diagnosis, not a celebration, watched from beyond the grave as his sister rewrote his legacy. And the German word he coined to describe humanity's potential for self-overcoming became, in English, the name of a comic book character in a red cape.
We're talking about the Übermensch.
The word itself poses immediate translation problems. German speakers will tell you that "über" carries connotations of beyondness, transcendence, sometimes excess or intensity. "Mensch" simply means human being—not man specifically, despite what you might assume. So "Übermensch" suggests something like "beyond-human" or "over-human."
The first English translator, Alexander Tille, rendered it as "Beyond-Man" in 1896. That's pretty good, actually. But then in 1909, Thomas Common chose "Superman," borrowing from George Bernard Shaw's play "Man and Superman." This stuck. And according to the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who spent decades trying to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation in the English-speaking world, this was a disaster.
Not because "super" is wrong—in Latin, "super" literally means "above" or "beyond." The problem was what came later: a fictional alien from Krypton who fights crime in tights. Once that Superman entered popular consciousness, Nietzsche's Übermensch became almost impossible to discuss seriously. Kaufmann preferred "overman." Some scholars now just leave the German word untranslated, which at least prevents false associations.
What Zarathustra Actually Said
Nietzsche introduced the Übermensch in his 1883 book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," a strange and poetic work in which a fictional prophet named Zarathustra descends from a mountain to teach humanity. The name itself comes from Zoroaster, the ancient Persian religious reformer—Nietzsche chose it deliberately, repurposing a religious founder for an anti-religious message.
The core idea is this: Christianity, in Nietzsche's view, had taught people to devalue earthly life. It promised rewards in heaven, encouraged mortification of the body, invented the concept of an immortal soul separate from flesh. All of this, Nietzsche argued, was life-denying. It taught people to say "no" to this world in hopes of a better one.
But now God was dead.
Nietzsche didn't mean this literally, of course. He meant that belief in the Christian God had become culturally untenable. Science, rationalism, and modernity had slowly eroded the foundations of faith. And this created a problem. If God had been the source of meaning and values for centuries, what would replace Him?
Enter the Übermensch.
Zarathustra proposes the Übermensch as a goal humanity can set for itself—a way of creating meaning after the death of God. Instead of looking to heaven for purpose, humans would find purpose in their own potential for growth and self-overcoming. The Übermensch represents someone who has mastered themselves, who creates their own values rather than inheriting them from tradition, who says "yes" to life on Earth rather than hoping for escape to another realm.
The Body, The Soul, and The Earth
One of Nietzsche's most radical moves was connecting the Übermensch to the physical body. Traditional Christianity, he argued, had split humans into two parts: a noble, eternal soul trapped in a corrupt, mortal body. This dualism led naturally to asceticism—the denial of bodily pleasures as a path to spiritual purity. Monks fasted. Mystics flagellated themselves. The body was the enemy.
Zarathustra flips this completely. The soul, he suggests, is not separate from the body but rather an aspect of it. We are not ghosts piloting meat machines. We are unified creatures, and our highest aspirations emerge from our physical, earthly existence.
This has profound implications. If the body is not a prison to escape, then earthly life is not a waiting room for heaven. This world—the only world we actually experience—becomes the arena for meaning and achievement. The Übermensch doesn't transcend humanity by leaving Earth behind; the Übermensch transcends by fully inhabiting human potential here and now.
The Reevaluation of Values
Nietzsche diagnosed Christianity's value system as fundamentally reactive. In his view, Christian morality didn't arise from strength and affirmation but from resentment. The weak, unable to defeat the strong, invented a moral framework in which weakness became virtue and strength became sin. Meekness was blessed. Pride was damnable. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
This was clever, Nietzsche admitted. But it was also, in his view, a kind of revenge fantasy. And it produced what he called "slave morality"—a system of values designed to constrain the powerful rather than to celebrate life.
The Übermensch would engage in what Nietzsche called a "reevaluation of all values." This doesn't mean simply inverting Christian morality, becoming cruel because Christianity praised kindness. That would still be reactive, still defined by the old system. Instead, the Übermensch would create new values from scratch, motivated by love of life rather than resentment of the powerful.
What would these new values look like? Nietzsche is deliberately vague here. The whole point is that the Übermensch creates values rather than receiving them. Any specific prescription would undermine the concept.
The Last Man: What We Must Not Become
To clarify what the Übermensch represents, Nietzsche contrasts it with its opposite: the "last man." This figure appears only in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and represents everything the Übermensch is not.
The last man seeks comfort above all. He wants security, predictability, and the elimination of suffering. He asks: "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" And then he blinks.
That blinking is significant. The last man has no fire, no aspiration, no willingness to risk anything for greatness. He has solved the problem of suffering by eliminating the possibility of greatness. Everyone is equal, everyone is comfortable, everyone is... small.
Nietzsche presents this as egalitarian modernity taken to its logical extreme. Democracy, socialism, utilitarianism—all philosophies that prioritize the comfort of the many over the excellence of the few—risk producing the last man. Not through malice but through the gradual smoothing of all rough edges, the filing down of all peaks to create a level plain.
It's a dark vision, and an unfair one in some ways. Nietzsche wasn't exactly generous to movements he disagreed with. But the contrast is useful for understanding the Übermensch. The Übermensch aspires, struggles, creates. The last man merely survives.
The Italian Renaissance and the Artist-Tyrant
What did Nietzsche actually imagine when he thought of the Übermensch? The philosopher Rüdiger Safranski argues that the Italian Renaissance embodied Nietzsche's ideal. Figures like Cesare Borgia combined ruthless warrior pride with artistic brilliance. They were not "good" in any conventional sense—Borgia was famously treacherous—but they were powerful, creative, and fully alive.
In his autobiographical work "Ecce Homo," Nietzsche explicitly rejected humanitarian interpretations of his concept:
The word Übermensch designates a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, 'good' men, Christians, and other nihilists... When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears.
Parsifal, for context, is the holy fool of Arthurian legend, the pure knight who achieves the Holy Grail through innocence. Wagner wrote an opera about him that Nietzsche initially loved and later despised. Borgia represents the opposite: worldly, cunning, creative, unbound by conventional morality.
This is uncomfortable for many readers. Nietzsche seems to be celebrating amoral power. And to some extent, he is. But the full picture is more complex. The Übermensch isn't merely powerful; the Übermensch creates. The artist-tyrant produces new beauty, new values, new possibilities for human existence. Pure destruction wouldn't qualify.
The Eternal Recurrence: A Test
The Übermensch shares thematic space in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" with another of Nietzsche's key concepts: the eternal recurrence. This is the idea that time moves in a vast cycle, and everything that happens will happen again, exactly the same way, for eternity.
Nietzsche presents this as a thought experiment and a test. Imagine a demon appeared and told you that you would have to live your exact life over and over forever—every joy, every suffering, every moment of boredom. Would you react with horror? Or would you embrace it?
The Übermensch, presumably, would embrace it. This is the ultimate affirmation of life: wanting not just to live once, but to live eternally, exactly as you are. No regrets, no wishes for escape, no longing for a different existence.
Some scholars, like Laurence Lampert, argue that the eternal recurrence eventually replaces the Übermensch as the object of serious aspiration in Nietzsche's thought. The Übermensch might be a distant goal for humanity; the eternal recurrence is a test anyone can apply to themselves right now. Can you affirm your life so completely that you would will its eternal repetition?
The Nazi Catastrophe
Now we must address the dark chapter. A racial version of the Übermensch became part of the philosophical foundation for Nazi ideology. The concept was twisted into the idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic "master race" destined to rule over "inferior humans" (Untermenschen).
This differs profoundly from Nietzsche's original concept, and notably, neither Hitler nor Nazi propaganda explicitly used the term "Übermensch." The concept of the master race led to the notion of inferior humans who should be dominated and enslaved—a term and idea that did not originate with Nietzsche at all.
In fact, Nietzsche was vehemently opposed to both antisemitism and German nationalism. In his letters, he expressed contempt for his sister Elisabeth's marriage to Bernhard Förster, a prominent antisemite who founded the German People's League in 1881. After Nietzsche's mental collapse in 1889, Elisabeth gained control of his literary estate and systematically edited his unpublished work to align with her own nationalist and antisemitic views.
In his final years, already suffering from severe mental illness, Nietzsche began claiming he was Polish, not German:
I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood.
He claimed that he and Germany were great only because of "Polish blood in their veins." And he expressed his desire to "have all anti-semites shot."
The gap between Nietzsche's actual views and the Nazi appropriation of his work is enormous. But the damage was done. For decades, Nietzsche was associated with fascism, and scholars like Walter Kaufmann spent careers trying to rescue his reputation.
The Anarchist Reading
Here's something rarely mentioned in popular discussions of the Übermensch: anarchists loved Nietzsche. This might seem paradoxical—didn't Nietzsche reject democracy and egalitarianism? Didn't he celebrate aristocratic values?
Yes, but anarchists found other things to admire. Spencer Sunshine explains:
There were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of 'herds'; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'overman'—that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave; his praise of the ecstatic and creative self, with the artist as his prototype.
The influential American anarchist Emma Goldman defended Nietzsche against charges that he hated the weak:
It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Übermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.
This is a crucial point. Goldman reads the Übermensch not as a justification for oppressing the weak but as a call for a society that doesn't produce weakness in the first place. The goal isn't to dominate others but to create conditions where everyone can strive for greatness.
Murray Bookchin, the anarchist philosopher, saw worker self-management as a Nietzschean project:
Workers must see themselves as human beings, not as class beings; as creative personalities, not as 'proletarians'; as self-affirming individuals, not as 'masses'... the economic component must be humanized precisely by bringing an 'affinity of friendship' to the work process.
This is far from Nazi readings of Nietzsche. It's also far from the aristocratic readings. The anarchist tradition found in the Übermensch a vision of human flourishing that transcended both domination and submission.
What Are We to Make of It?
The Übermensch remains controversial, slippery, and fascinating. Nietzsche himself offered few concrete examples, preferring evocative imagery to systematic definition. Perhaps this was deliberate. A prescribed ideal would defeat the purpose. The whole point is that the Übermensch creates rather than follows.
What we can say is this: the Übermensch represents Nietzsche's answer to nihilism. If God is dead and traditional values have lost their authority, humans face a choice. We can sink into comfortable meaninglessness—become the last man, blinking. Or we can create new values, affirm life on Earth, and strive for something beyond what we currently are.
The concept has been abused, misunderstood, and weaponized. It will continue to be. Powerful ideas always are. But stripped of its accretions—the Nazi distortions, the comic book associations, the straw-man versions—the Übermensch poses a genuine challenge.
What would it mean to fully affirm your existence? To create values rather than inherit them? To say yes to life so completely that you would will its eternal repetition?
These remain open questions, over a century after Nietzsche asked them.