As one of the most influential early 20th-century philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche comes burdened with a controversial legacy. His elitist and anti-democratic ideas were adopted, and distorted, by figures such as Adolf Hitler. Indeed, few thinkers in history have so utterly critiqued and condemned modern mass society. This article explores Nietzsche’s distaste for the modern masses and his concept of the idealized “superman” (Űbermensch) or “overman” who would emerge by shunning the conventional Christian morality of the time.
Nietzsche’s Infamous Phrase: “God is Dead”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote numerous treatises and tracts during his tragically short, illness-plagued lifetime, on a range of complex philosophical and aesthetic subjects. This article will concentrate on what is surely his best-known work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1892).
Nietzsche rather grandiosely called his Zarathustra a new “gospel” for what he hoped would inaugurate a brilliant new dawn for humanity. Born into the age of Charles Darwin and his revolutionary theory of evolution, Nietzsche was one of those visionary 19th-century intellectuals (not unlike Karl Marx and, later, Sigmund Freud) who felt that the traditional Judeo-Christian moral and ethical frameworks were not up to the challenge of a secularizing modern world in the midst of epic scientific, technological, and social changes. Indeed, one of Nietzsche’s most infamous (and blasphemous) pronouncements was that “God is dead.” One could say that Nietzsche was a “social Darwinist” of sorts since he believed that evolution and the ethos of the “survival of the fittest” point to the way that mankind should be organized.
Nietzsche began to write Zarathustra during a deep crisis in his life. By 1881, his romantic life was in ruins, and his health was deteriorating. Nietzsche suffered from chronic headaches and stomach disorders and eventually went insane, likely due to the long-term effects of syphilis or gonorrhea. Fleeing to northern Italy, he envisioned his new work as a series of provocative philosophical statements. This revolutionary new testament would denounce modern man and herald man’s potential metaphysical rebirth as a higher being.
Taking Down Christianity and the Modern State
Through the four books of Zarathustra, Nietzsche declares war on a number of social institutions, starting with Christianity. Why? In its truest form, Christianity is a religion based on self-denial and self-sacrifice. Instead of a celebration of humanity and the human spirit of achievement, Christianity prioritizes the pious virtue of suffering, equality before God, uniform laws, i.e., the Ten Commandments, and championing the weak. It is also an otherworldly creed, for which neither the body nor the Earth itself is regarded with much esteem.
Nietzsche asks how often it is that Christian dogma has asserted that humans are “born into sin,” thus contributing to untold personal guilt over the millennia, particularly with regard to sexuality? If God is indeed dead—or never was—it means all such so-called divine laws originate in human beings. More often than not, these dictates of “good and evil” were ordered to legitimize one group’s power (like the Church or a monarchy) over another.
Nietzsche’s other main adversary was the new 19th-century nation-state and its ideological fuel, rabid nationalism. Such developments suppress the individual’s will and creativity, at worst rendering him cannon fodder, and induce a conformist patriotic (“My country right or wrong”) fever. Nietzsche calls the bureaucratic modern state the “new idol,” “the coldest of cold monsters,” and it is chilling how he predicted the militaristic and nihilistic ultra-nationalism that would march out of Nazi Germany and, to a lesser extent, Fascist Italy during the 1930s.
Riding the “Herd”
Whether calling out countries East or West, Nietzsche has little regard or patience for the complacent, mediocre, other-directed modern masses, or what he calls “the herd.” Asleep even during their waking hours, they blindly follow the rules and norms set by others—and resent and ostracize their betters who don’t. They are not creators but only users, consumers, and automatons. Instead, Nietzsche foretells a new, much-improved, if lonely, breed of free-thinkers and “lawbreakers” who “live dangerously.” This is the idealized “superman” (Űbermensch) or “overman” that Zarathustra heralds and longs for.
Transfiguring an ancient Persian prophet as his seer and figurehead, Nietzsche tells how the wise hermit Zarathustra ventures down from the mountaintops at age 40, returning to the world of men after living as a recluse for a decade. Like Jesus Christ in the New Testament, Zarathustra has come back to preach the truth, to beckon a transcendent new era of mankind, if only mankind would listen. To emphasize his lessons, Zarathustra speaks in what’s called aphorisms—brief statements, usually repeated and sometimes paradoxical, with which he ends his chapter-long sermons. For instance, he says that “whoever must be a creator also annihilates,” meaning that a true creator typically destroys the old (rules, laws, mores, values, etc.) first before replacing it with the new. Socially and psychologically, it is a process that is rarely without risk and friction, generating conflict, if not upheaval.
Imagine There’s No Heaven … Or Hell
Far from partaking in the rosy zeitgeist optimism of the late 19th century that Western civilization was on the eve of a technological golden age, Nietzsche was among the most notable naysayers, joining his early philosophic idol, fellow German Arthur Schopenhauer, as one of the most compelling misanthropes of the age. Again influenced by Darwin, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra proclaims that the common man is “something to be overcome” and, worse, is “more ape than any ape.” Zarathustra describes mankind as but a “rope tied between beast and overman … he is a bridge and not an end.”
Thus, Zarathustra calls for a thundering transformation of humanity, a select, dynamic metamorphosis. It is not for everyone but only for the heroic few willing to risk everything, especially loneliness, and flee from the lazy mindset of the herd. If one can survive both the fearful solitude of self and the spiteful ostracism of the masses, the new man, the overman, will emerge like a beautiful butterfly from a lowly caterpillar. He is “lightning” who has shunted aside all archaic fantasies of God and the afterlife and is instead “faithful to the Earth.”
The Lonely Road to Freedom
After his descent from the mountains, Zarathustra sings the praises of the future overman to the townspeople but only receives indifference or jeers in return. “I am not the mouth for these ears,” he admits, realizing his need for worthy disciples. Turn away from the mob, he tells them, from childish fantasies and illusions. Embrace your loneliness, he tells them, and think for yourself. It is a hard road, this solitary road to personal transformation. One day, at the end of his (or her) own rope, the true individual will cry out, “I am alone!” But Nietzsche adds, “Slow is the experience of deep wells: long must they wait before they know what fell into their depths.”
While Nietzsche berates Christianity and its selfless theology, Zarathustra’s sermons ironically follow some of the main paths staked out by Jesus in the Gospels. When Jesus spends 40 days in the desert alone with himself and God (and a tempting Satan), is this not the awful but meaningful solitude Nietzsche writes of? Zarathustra also symbolically uses the language of war and violence to explain the overman’s hard road to true freedom and creativity (“Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!”), but is this not so different from Jesus telling his followers, “I am not here to bring peace but a sword”?
Nietzsche’s Übermensch Legacy
For all his proselytizing, in much of his new gospel, Zarathustra is more obsessed by the outmoded social institutions he wishes to tear down than what he urges to erect in their place. He is emphatic that humanity must replace “Thou shalt” with “I will,” esteeming the here and now, not the mummified relics of religion. Perhaps an even deeper crack in Zarathustra comes from the actual self-selection process of these new overmen. Many a ruthless human being has seen himself as an exceptional “stable genius” not subject to the bourgeois laws of society, whether mass-murdering dictators like Hitler or Josef Stalin or depraved American serial killers such as Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy.
Still, such cracks in Nietzsche’s philosophical foundations nevertheless can lead to higher ground. In the U.S., for example, critics point out how its high levels of gun violence can be circuitously traced back to 1789 constitutional laws created by an elite landholding class of white men living in an era in which a), governmental regulatory power and control was seen as unnecessary, wrong, even morally evil; b), “firearms” almost exclusively existed as primitive single-shot, short-range muskets; and c), the most likely enemies necessitating such arms for protection would be invading British troops, rebelling black slaves, or displaced Native Americans. But surely these are musty, man-made laws from the antiquated past, Zarathustra might say, closer to a beastly “law of the jungle” than to a high-tech modern age of the mail-order guns. But who is bold enough today to shoot down these barbaric old laws and fashion better ones?
However, despite acquiring some controversial followers, Nietzsche has also exerted a profound influence on philosophers, writers, and artists, from the playwright George Bernard Shaw to the painter Gustav Klimt. In his atheism coupled with a combative, uncompromising individualism, many see him as a pioneering existentialist thinker, paving the way for mid-20th century writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In today’s omnipresent, digitized and globalized cyber-society in which “lowest-common denominator” algorithmic strategies increasingly rule the marketplace of both things and ideas, Nietzsche’s impassioned defense of march-to-a-different-drummer autonomy is arguably more relevant than ever.
