Jordan Sostrom (H02) Final Blog

Finding the Ubermensch

  "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?"

-Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue 3, Pg. 13.

Some call this being a "Beyond-man," "Superman," or even an "Overseer." To Nietzsche, it is simply declared by Zarathustra as the "Ubermensch." 

 

    During the time we gave our midterm presentations, I discussed some of the main ideas that Frederich Nietzsche wanted to get across. He is an interesting fellow, and I believe that he was way ahead of his time in his writing. His work speaks volumes, and nearly every sentence of his works has layers of meaning behind them that we can pull apart and interpret what he means behind those words. 

  

  Born in 1844 in Rocken, Germany, Nietzsche grew up with his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and his younger sister, Elizabeth. He had an outstanding university career and showed excellent promise. When he was twenty-four, he was given an opportunity to teach classical philology at Basel. At the time, he was one of the youngest to do so. It was at this time when he met William Wagner and started publishing articles and books. His work was best known for, as the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes, "a broadly naturalistic critique on of traditional morality and culture." It was throughout this time, and the rest of his life, that his health started deteriorating and he had to take multiple breaks at a time. This gave him time to write several of his famous works such as The Gay Science (1882), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Geanology of Morality (1887), and our focus of the blog, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). 

    The idea of the Ubermensch was not entirely original to Nietzsche. The german word has been used by several other writers, such as Johannes Muller, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Novalis, Heine, and Goethe in his writing of Faust. Even over in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of an Oversoul, a "beyond-man," and it was at the time of writing Zarathustra that Nietzsche knew about all of these people's works on the subject.

    Although the Ubermensch was only briefly mentioned in the prologue of Zarathustra, the idea of a person being more than what they believe to be is expressed throughout all of his works. But what exactly was Nietzsche's idea of an "overman?" One thing that must be kept certain, was that Nietzsche was not pointing the overman to being a nazi. Nearly thirty years after he died, Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth, had strong anti-semitic ideals and offered his writings to Hitler in 1934, in which Hitler used the idea as symbol of his "master race." Little did they know that Nietzsche was a strong anti-nationalist whilst living in Germany, and did not want anything to do with his country's anti-semitic population.

 He kept the description of the Ubermensch vague in his works, and this has led to several different interpretations on what he exactly meant by an overman. A popular interpretation of the Ubermensch is someone who is able to sacrifice everything for the improvement of the world and humanity. This is someone who can make their own decisions and establish their own beliefs independently of those that go through life without meaning or values, and an overman forms his own beliefs for the betterment of humanity. These beliefs would influence those who only live in the present, seeking day-to-day pleasure and happiness, and dominate those who blindly follow others. 

"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...

     "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves."

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, prologue 4, p. 15

    One could say that Nietzsche's idea of an overman is an idea of self-overcoming. In the same book, Nietzsche gives the answer to life in that it is suffering. With all the combined unhappiness and bad thing people have done, the idea of living your life unable to avoid similar tragedies can make people despaired and hopeless. Nietzsche believes that humans are forever bound to this kind of suffering, however he sees this take on life as a way to overcome the feelings of hopelessness. When mentioned in Zarathustra, his point was that an overman should take this view on life and find even a single moment that was meaningful. It would be from this moment that all other terrible moments are worth it. An overman would look at their life, acknowledge all the good and bad things they have done and move forward. They would face life knowing that the basic form of humanity will not change, but that he would go along with life and take it as is. It is from this view that people can be happy and content with life even when that very existence is questionable. 

Sources:

Nietzsche's Ubermensch: A Hero of our Time?

https://philosophynow.org/issues/93/Nietzsches_Ubermensch_A_Hero_of_Our_Time

Nietzsche's view of the overman and life from his point of view

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~pj97/Nietzsche.htm

PDF of Thus Spoke Zarathustra

https://www.nationalvanguard.org/books/Thus-Spoke-Zarathustra-by-F.-Nietzsche.pdf

The Perspectives of Nietzsche

https://www.theperspectivesofnietzsche.com/nietzsche/nuber.html

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Frederich Nietzsche

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

The Legacy of Frederich Nietzsche

https://newcriterion.com/issues/1991/9/the-legacy-of-friedrich-nietzsche

PDF of On a Certain Blindness of Human Beings

https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jcertain.html