The Übermensch

Are some people so superior to the rest of us that they are beyond our standards of good and evil?

Nietzsche believed that the religions of Christianity and Judaism and Islam grew out of the bitter resentment which the weak feel toward the strong. These religions, he said, are slave moralities- which hold up humility, meekness, and long-suffering as virtues and condemn strength, power, and ruthless brutality as vices. But these "vices" are really the virtues of the master, the leader, the Übermensch (Superman).

Adolf Hitler misinterpreted Nietzsche's philosophy to justify his maniacal political doctrines, which included the project of murdering twelve million Jews and Christians. But Nietzsche's Superman was not meant to be a model for the SS thug. The Superman was, rather, a combination of reason and passion, a person who stands out from the crowd (like Kierkegaard's individual) and who is a law unto himself. He is beyond good and evil in that what he does is right because he wills to do it. He sets the standards which the rest of us ordinary people can only follow.

As examples of such superior people Nietzsche mentioned Christ, who destroyed the old Jewish morality and replaced it with his own, and Richard Wagner, the great German composer who gave musical form to the wild passion hidden deep within the German spirit. The supreme instance of the Übermensch is the artist, who gives rational form to the dark and shapeless forces within the soul.

Do such people really exist? Are they really beyond good and evil? They offend our sense of morality while at the same time they enrich our lives with change and challenge, Consider, in our own time, John Lennon, Mick Jagger,Mikhail Gorbachev, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley . Who else would you include?

Bibliography

Kaufman, Walter. "Friedrich Nietzsche," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 504-514.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman, New York, The Viking Press, 1968. See Thus Spake Zarathustra

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Philosophy of Nietzsche, New York, Modern Library, 1927,Helen Zimmern, trans.. See Beyond Good and Evil.