Overcoming the Übermensch

In 1933, Adolf Hitler arrived at the Nietzsche archive with a whip in one hand. When he left, he traded it for a ceremonial gift: Friedrich Nietzsche’s walking stick. For decades, this image, of Facism with a Nietzschean crutch, tainted by the repellent scar of an unearned reputation as the genealogical thinker of Fascism. Though he might have felt pangs of sympathy for the soldier caste creation of Nazism, with its reconciliation of culture and politics, socially and intellectually, he must have shuddered in his decaying Lützen coffin as bourgeois pretenders instituted a government predicated on the popular will. 

Rescued from a Hitlerian fate, Nietzsche’s claims to philosophical perpetuity should be tempered. Admittedly ambiguous in output, for instance, the uncertainty of the completeness of his thoughts on the Will to Power, evidenced only by a letter claiming its completion, Nietzsche’s heavy clarity of thought can be misconstrued as a profound perceptive power for the ages. The willingness to detach a philosopher from his thoughts is to fall for their trick, for in locating those ideas in an atemporal setting, the student admits to their validity as objects of eternity. Coated by the galvanising title of ‘philosophy’, the murmurings of a recluse become the voice of an era. And so, the wild shrieks of a recondite academic became the reasonable doctrine of his time. 

Sue Prideaux and Lesley Chamberlain are the proponents of a modern revision of Nietzsche. The latter attempted to submerge the reader into biography of the German scholar in the last period of his life. The use of intimacy was a subtle stimulation for sympathy. Both reground Nietzsche away from the claims of his former Fascist proponents. Particularly in Prideaux’s analysis, Nietzsche stands as an eminently modern figure, highly sceptical of orthodoxy on issues as eclectic as women’s sexual educations to antisemitism. Yet unconventionality should not be misrepresented as progression nor prescience. Difference for Nietzsche was power, aggression was evidence, and disbelief was his divinity. We must not revive Nietzschean power philosophy without noting the mind from which they sprang, and in doing so, become more wary of universal claims, especially when they come from men so divorced even from their own time. 

Nietzsche’s most profound revelation – the diminution of spirituality in an industrial age, the corruption of faith in the capitalist market, the violent death of God by mechanisation – was a theory produced and proven by his own derangement. Overbeck, the friend who was subjected to the berserk ravings of a hermit historian, intermittently lucid and impenetrable, testified to Nietzsche’s perverse fulfilment of his argument: 

“Sometimes, in a whisper, he produced sentences of wonderful luminosity. But also uttered terrible things about himself as the successor of the now-dead God…”

The Nietzschean Übermensch, whatever other contemporary relevance it incidentally caught, was the product of an anachronistic academic enveloped in his energetic fantasies of the Greco-Roman world who sought to reconcile politics and culture through a devotion to this-worldliness and artistic attribution of meaning. Even Nietzsche, the philosopher with a proverbial hammer, espoused truths on a universal, cosmic, and religious scale, all of which were contingent on the conditions of his being and the environment of his era. Nietzsche was the rarest of historical actors: a figure so consumed by a structural truth of his epoch, yet who was so apparently outside of his own time. Nietzsche’s philosophy was not so much an abstract curiosity as a psychological necessity, for in staging the death of God within the theatrical recesses of his self-absorbed, tortured mind, Nietzsche required the destruction of the divine for his own sanity. Zarathustra may have come down the mountain, but Nietzsche went purposely up it, with a pre-rehearsed speech crumpled in his pocket planned for his spectacular return. 

Pierre Bourdieu wrote regarding artists that, traditionally, they have defied sociological explanation because their powers are assumed to be universal, as though they have access to truths transcending time and society. The implications of philosophical musings may have relevance outside of their ages, but the instance of Nietzsche comically proves that a belief in overcoming had its genealogy in highly conditional self-gratification. The man who spent his hours considering ancient heroes in armchairs and sickness invented a caste of warriors as his only claim to membership among them. Through the philosophy of the Übermensch, Nietzsche was relieved of his irrelevance to take on a new form.

Just as he accused the Christians of inventing a thought system which justified its believers’ demography, converting suffering into virtue, so Nietzsche established the basis of his unstable life on the principle that only an intellectual engulfed in classical knowledge could recognise be burdened with such insight. Madness was not the product of his investigations, but the aim: “you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?” Is it too poetic to suggest that the Übermensch was an invention of a man who had no intention of overcoming himself, but who swore by it to plunge into a self-imposed torment.

As Peter Gast perceived: “I believe Nietzsche would be as grateful to his rescuers as somebody who has jumped into the water to drown himself and has been pulled out by some… coastguard… as though he were only pretending to be mad, as though he were glad to have ended this way!”

Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that, “the higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.” Nietzsche appeared very small indeed, but there was no we in flight. He was no dynamite, he was a man, and one whose reputation does not deserve to be rehabilitated with such rapidity.

David Evans

our chaste libertine