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Übermensch

concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
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Übermensch is a word which has been translated as Overman, Overhuman, Beyond-man, Above-Human, Superman, and Super-human. It refers to concepts originating in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, most prominently in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as a goal for humans to strive towards as creators of new values, and as a solution to the problems of the "death of God" (or the death of belief in God as a motive force), those of "herd mentalities", and those of nihilism. There have been extreme differences in interpretations of what Nietzsche meant by the term, many of which have had attributes extremely contrary to those he clearly enunciated, especially many of those promoted in the late 19th century, and in the era of Nazi Germany.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

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As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges. ~ Sri Aurobindo

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  • W. B. Yeats was an instinctive "aristocrat"; he was also more deeply influenced by Nietzsche‎‎ than any other English language writer. Yet although he was attracted to Nietzsche's elitism in general, Yeats differed from most of the other English-language writers involved in this story in that he remained critical of Nietzsche's central myth, that of the superman. … The clash between Yeats's moral self and aesthetic anti-self is exemplified in his attitude towards the superman. There is, of course, a very close parallel between his heroic ideal and that of Nietzsche, between the Yeatsian hero and the Nietzschean superman. Yeats's hero is more truly akin to Nietzsche's ideal than are the more obviously and superficially Nietzschean superman-types of writers like Jack London. Yeats and Nietzsche both tend to reject "the real world" and its vulgar, democratic ideals; they believe rather in a natural aristocracy of men whose ideals are "not of this world". Both believe in what Nietzsche calls "the eternal second coming" and insist that the heroic personality must respond to tragic knowledge with joy. But although Yeats accepted the idea that the great individual is the protagonist in the drama of history, he remained critical of Nietzsche's superman as such; he saw man through Blake's eyes rather than Nietzsche's, as something to be restored to his former estate rather than "surpassed". Though he deeply admired spiritual heroism of the type represented for him by Nietzsche, and shared Nietzsche‎‎'s ideal of "nobility" … he rejected the arrogance of the superman.
    • Patrick Bridgwater, in "English Writers and Nietzsche‎‎" (1972), in Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought : A Collection of Essays (1978), edited by Malcolm Pasley, p. 248
  • If Bernard Shaw anglicized the Übermensch, it was H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats and Edwin Muir who arguably took him most seriously. Other writers, it is true, flirted with the idea without taking it or themselves at all seriously; thus James Joyce, being rather in the doldrums of 1903/4, found it satisfying to think of himself as "James Overman" (as he ironically signed himself) … Yeats, Wells and Muir were all fascinated by the idea, but rejected it for moral (Yeats) or political (Wells) reasons, or for a mixture of both (Muir). In short, the superman-idea filled a short-term emotional need; the events of 1914-18 destroyed not only Nietzsche‎‎'s reputation in this country, but the world of which his myths had been a part.
    • Patrick Bridgwater, in "English Writers and Nietzsche‎‎" (1972), in Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought : A Collection of Essays (1978), edited by Malcolm Pasley, p. 254

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They might have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. ~ G. K. Chesterton
  • It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.
  • The following is an attempt to systematize alike the data of mysticism and the results of comparative religion.
    The skeptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true.
    Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding.

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We'll know homo superior when he comes — by definition. He'll be the one we won't be able to euth.
 
Here I am saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us.
  • He grew up in this way. He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect; the most original philosopher of the last century. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward the superman. He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them; a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. He wrote on the will to power. Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.
At seventeen, at sixteen, at eighteen, while healthy boys were playing baseball or working on the farm, or doing odd jobs, Babe was reading Nietzsche, a boy who never should have seen it, at that early age.
  • In formulating a superman he is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men. He is not liable for anything he may do, whereas others would be, except for the one crime that it is possible for him to commit, to make a mistake.
    • Clarence Darrow Closing Argument The State of Illinois v. Nathan Leopold & Richard Loeb Delivered by Clarence Darrow Chicago, Illinois, August 22, 1924
  • "We were always afraid a mutant with superior intellectual powers would come along," Baines said reflectively. "A deeve who would be to us what we are to the great apes. Something with a bulging cranium, telepathic ability, a perfect semantic system, ultimate powers of symbolization and calculation. A development along our own path. A better human being."
  • Here I am saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as where we would wind up going. It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't.

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The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman. ~ Philip José Farmer
  • I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.

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  • Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.
  • In 1903, George Bernard Shaw published his Man and Superman, a comedy based on the Don Juan legend and expanding upon Shaw's conception of social evolution; that is the earliest citation we have for the English compound superman. Shaw's use of the term is clearly in allusion to Nietzsche's conception, and immediately thereafter superman became the translation of choice for Ubermensch, gradually, however, acquiring the looser, more generalized denotation of "any man with extraordinary powers or abilities."
    • David B. Guralnik, in "Superstar, Supermom, Super Glue, Superdooper, Superman" in Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend (1987) edited by Dennis Dooley, ‎Gary D. Engle, p. 104

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  • To be able to fall down in such a way that in the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian – that only the knight of faith can do – this is the one and only prodigy.

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  • Napoleon was mesmerized by the august feats of his hero Alexander the Great and his hero-worship was instrumental in the Little Corsican's attack on Egypt. The battle made no political or economic sense to anyone but the man who fashioned himself the reincarnation of Alexander. In a similar manner the madman Hitler envisioned himself a Nietzschean Superman, as did Picasso. To some degree they were all deluded but their delusions were catalysts to their success.
    • Gene Landrum, in The Superman Syndrome — the Magic of Myth in the Pursuit of Power (2005), p. 18

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I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
 
I will make company with creators, with harvesters, with rejoicers: I will show them the rainbow and the stairway to the Superman. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
 
Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed. And especially above the heavens: for all gods are poets' parables, poets' prevarications. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
 
There, where the state ceaseth — pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • 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? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth... 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.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra's Prologue, part 3 - 4
    • Variant translations:
    • I teach you beyond Man. Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?
    • What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.
  • A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves — and who want to go where I want to go.
    A light has dawned for me: Zarathustra shall not speak to the people but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be herdsman and dog to the herd! To lure many away from the herd — that is why I have come. The people and the herd shall be angry with me: the herdsmen shall call Zarathustra a robber. I will not be herdsmen or gravedigger. I will not speak again to the people: I have spoken to a dead man for the last time.
    I will make company with creators, with harvesters, with rejoicers: I will show them the rainbow and the stairway to the Superman.
  • Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed. And especially above the heavens: for all gods are poets' parables, poets' prevarications. Verily, it always lifts us higher — specifically, to the realm of the clouds: upon these we place our motley bastards and call them gods and overmen. For they are just light enough for these chairs — all these gods and overmen. Ah, how weary I am of all the imperfection which must at all costs become event! Ah, how weary I am of poets!
  • O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future — verily, not to a nobility that you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers' gold: for whatever has its price has little value. Not whence you came shall henceforth constitute your honor, but whither you are going! Your will and your foot which has a will to go over and beyond yourselves — that shall constitute your new honor.
  • O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children's land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility — the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. This new tablet I place over you.
  • Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of tranquil seas.
    Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!
    There, where the state ceaseth — there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.
    There, where the state ceaseth — pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman? — Thus spake Zarathustra.

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Man has developed the peculiar concept that he is not an animal at all … He demarcates himself in all possible ways from the bad animal and points, in proof of his "being better," to culture and civilization which distinguish him from the animal. … The theory of the German Übermensch has this origin. ~ Wilhelm Reich


  • MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?
    When I say "animal," I do not mean anything bad, cruel or "base"; I am stating a biological fact. Man has developed the peculiar concept that he is not an animal at all, but, well — man; a creature which long since has shed that which is "bad," which is "animal." He demarcates himself in all possible ways from the bad animal and points, in proof of his "being better," to culture and civilization which distinguish him from the animal. He shows, in his whole behavior, his "theories of values," his moral philosophies, his "monkey trials" and such, that he does not want to be reminded of the fact that basically he is an animal, an animal, furthermore, which has much more in common with the "animal" than with that being which he asserts to be and dreams of being. The theory of the German Übermensch has this origin. Man shows by his maliciousness, his inability to live in peace with his kind, his wars, that what distinguishes him from the other animals is only his unbounded sadism and the mechanical trinity of the authoritarian concept of life, mechanistic science and the machine. If one looks at the results of civilization as they present themselves over long periods of time, one finds that these contentions of man are not only erroneous; more than that, they seem to be made expressly for the purpose of making man forget that he is an animal.
    • Wilhelm Reich, critiquing prominent early 20th century ideas of Übermensch in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Ch. 10 : Work Democracy, Section 3 : Work Democracy versus Politics. The Natural Social Forces for the Mastery of the Emotional Plague.

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I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death. ~ Irena Sendler
 
To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. ~ George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman
  • THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.
    THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?
    THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman — what was his name? Nietzsche?
    THE STATUE. Never heard of him.
    THE DEVIL. Well, he came here first, before he recovered his wits. I had some hopes of him; but he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.
    THE STATUE. Superman is a good cry; and a good cry is half the battle. I should like to see this Nietzsche.
    THE DEVIL. Unfortunately he met Wagner here, and had a quarrel with him.
  • ANA. ...Tell me where can I find the Superman?
    THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora.
    THE STATUE. And never will be, probably…
    ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A father — a father for the Superman!
  • The “higher man” — or as Nietzsche sometimes called him, the “overman” or “Übermensch” — did not succumb to envy or long for the afterlife; rather he willed that his life on earth repeat itself over and over exactly as it was.
  • One can show that Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances. There is a direct line from Emerson’s “oversoul” to the “overman.” Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Emerson wrote, “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor.” More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value of overcoming the past. “Life only avails,” Emerson once wrote, “not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.”
    • Alexander Star, in "What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America", in The New York Times (13 January 2012)
  • In every generation Nietzsche finds admirers who blur his message with that of Aleister Crowley, the Nietzsche-reading occultist who wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
    If Nietzsche was terrible, was he also beneficial? In a 1985 book “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not imply that all beliefs are equally valid but that “one’s beliefs are not, and need not be, true for everyone.” On this reading, to fully accept a set of beliefs is to accept the values and way of life that are bound up with it, and since there is no single way of life that is right for everyone, there may be no set of beliefs that is fit for everyone. At its best, American individualism is not about the aggrandizement of the self or the acquiescent assumption that everybody simply has a right to think what they want. Rather, it stresses that our convictions are our own, and should be held as seriously as any other possessions. Or, as Nietzsche imagined philosophers would one day say, “ ‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it.”
    • Alexander Star, in "What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America", in The New York Times (13 January 2012)

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The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the Übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love-virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. ~ Leo Tolstoy
  • The art of our upper classes has educated people in this ideal of the over-man, — which is in reality the old ideal of Nero, Stenka Razin, Genghis Khan, Robert Macaire or Napoleon and all their accomplices, assistants, and adulators — and it supports this ideal with all its might.
    It is this supplanting of the ideal of what is right by the ideal of what is beautiful, i.e. of what is pleasant, that is the fourth consequence, and a terrible one, of the perversion of art in our society. It is fearful to think of what would befall humanity were such art to spread among the masses of the people. And it already begins to spread.
  • The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one´s passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the others religions).
    One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the Übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love-virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.
    • Leo Tolstoy, strongly repudiating the term and many of the harsher corruptions of it, which he perceived as correct interpretations of Nietzsche's ideas, in What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist?, Ch. 11 (1902)

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