The Overman

Though not over convinced of the likelihood of improvement of the human condition through Darwinian survival of the fittest, Nietzsche does accept a little help from his contemporary. He says, “I teach you the Superman(Overman). Man is some thing to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man….What is the ape to man? A laughing stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the superman: a laughing stock, a thing of shame.”

Though he generally derides religion and, though intended for the Lutheran priesthood, he renounced what he saw as Christianity, he speaks well of the Brahmin priests who use religion to keep the population docile and their own position unassailable. These priestly rulers he says, “gave themselves the powers of nominating their kings for the people.”(BGE 61.p.86.)

Though he tries to “teach us the Superman(Overman)” he fails entirely, there is no such thing. It is all a product of Nietzsche’s over-fertile imagination and has no relation to the reality of human life which he despised as that of, “the many, all too many.”

Lovers of the Nazi myth have selected and used the bits of his writings which have suited them and some even saw the madman ordering his imaginary armies to move against the Russian invader as one example of the species.

That Nietzsche imagined himself in the role was due not to his madness but to the belief in his own superiority which led to his madness. He perhaps wrote his own epitaph at the beginning of Ecce Homo where the delusions of grandeur were rapidly eating away at his mind. “He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible – but how peacefully all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath one. Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains -a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality….How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?”

There is much more in that book with the Messianic title, with the blasphemous title. As with such delusions, the one who labours under them knows, in his heart of hearts, that he cannot live with them. He has pulled the rug of Christian morality out from under his feet and there is no morality, he has failed to revalue values and he has no values at all. He tries to teach us the Overman but that monster is a chimera, a thing created by a Frankenstein of the spirit.

Hayman concludes that Nietzsche actually found escape from his inconsistencies in his madness. He, “had no appetite for living.” (Hayman p.182.)