Übermensch

How does Zarathustra introduce the Übermensch?

In the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra, after ten years on the mountain, comes down to share his wisdom. In the market place of the first town a crowd has gathered to watch a tightrope walker. Zarathustra tells them: "I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?"

Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr getan, ihn zu überwinden?

He continues with a comparison: "What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Übermensch." And he adds: "Man is a rope, tied between beast and Übermensch, a rope over an abyss." What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a going-over and a going-under. The crowd takes it all as talk about the tightrope walker and laughs.

Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknüpft zwischen Tier und Übermensch – ein Seil über einem Abgrunde.

Opposite the Übermensch Zarathustra sets the "last man": people who no longer long for anything, are content with small pleasures, comfort and health, and blink, "We have invented happiness." For Nietzsche two roads lay before humanity after the death of God: that of the last man, who gives up every height and settles in levelled comfort, and that of the Übermensch, who creates values himself.

What did Nietzsche not mean by it?

The word itself was not new with Nietzsche. It has a long history, from the ancient Greek hyperanthropos through medieval theology to the Earth Spirit mocking Faust as a "superman" in Goethe's Faust, Part One. Nietzsche gave the word no fixed definition, and misunderstanding followed from the start. In Ecce Homo (1888) he complained that the word had "almost everywhere, with complete innocence," been understood in the sense of precisely the values Zarathustra opposed, as an "idealistic" type of higher human being, half "saint", half "genius"; "other learned cattle", he wrote, had suspected him of Darwinism because of it.

ist fast überall mit voller Unschuld im Sinn derjenigen Werte verstanden worden, deren Gegensatz in der Figur Zarathustras zur Erscheinung gebracht worden ist

In the twentieth century a far more dangerous misreading spread. The Nazis presented the Übermensch as the ideal of an Aryan master race and coined its opposite, the inferior Untermensch, to dehumanise Jews and Slavs. Yet the word Untermensch appears nowhere in Nietzsche's works, and Nietzsche despised German nationalism and antisemitism. Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche played a large part in this appropriation: married to the antisemite Bernhard Förster and close to nationalist circles, she ran the Nietzsche Archive and refashioned her brother as a nationalist thinker. Scholars also point out, however, that Nietzsche's aristocratism, his anti-democratic views and some sentences about breeding and selection gave such appropriation a pretext.

Why write "위버멘쉬" rather than "초인" in Korean?

In Korean the translation 초인 ("superhuman") was long in use and is still widely known. But 초인 carries the everyday sense of a person with more-than-human abilities, and the English "superman" has the same problem. In January 1933 the Americans Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster published the story "The Reign of the Superman", the starting point of the comic-book hero Superman who appeared from 1938; that hero has nothing to do with Nietzsche's concept. Nietzsche's Übermensch is about an attitude that creates values, not about superpowers.

Korean Nietzsche scholarship and recent translations therefore mostly use 위버멘쉬, a transliteration of the German, and English-language writing often uses "overman" or the original Übermensch. Under the official Korean loanword rules the form would be 위버멘슈, but 위버멘쉬 has become established in scholarship and publishing, and this dictionary follows that usage.

How did Marxists read the Übermensch?

Nietzsche became a great fashion in Russia from the 1890s, and the young Maxim Gorky came under his influence. Gorky's tramps and outcasts were people pushed out of society yet portrayed as strong individuals who despised the world by their own will, so Russian critics repeatedly compared Gorky with Nietzsche. In 1900 the young Leon Trotsky, then in Siberian exile, took up the comparison in "Something about the Philosophy of the 'Superman'", serialised in the Irkutsk newspaper Vostochnoe Obozrenie just after Nietzsche's death.

Trotsky read the social axis of Nietzsche's philosophy through class. The ideal of the Übermensch, on his account, was the ideology of a group that lives by plundering society's funds without taking part in the organic process of production and distribution: financial speculators and adventurers. "In Nietzsche a group found its ideologist that also lives predatorily at society's expense, but in happier conditions than the wretched lumpenproletariat: it is the parasite proletariat of the highest calibre."

В Ницше нашла себе идеолога группа, тоже хищнически живущая на счет общества, но при более счастливых условиях, чем жалкий люмпен-пролетариат: это - паразитенпролетариат высшего калибра.

Yet the dream of a human being who surpasses the human also attracted socialists. The god-builders after the 1905 revolution developed the idea of a collective humanity creating itself, and Trotsky himself, at the end of Literature and Revolution (1923), wrote that under socialism the average human being would rise to the level of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. Marxists parted from Nietzsche in holding that the overcoming of man was a task open not to a few aristocratic individuals but to everyone in a classless society.