Overman (Übermensch) — The central figure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) by Friedrich Nietzsche: the human type that overcomes present-day humanity and gives meaning to the earth after the “death of God.” The German word combines über (“over,” “beyond”) and Mensch (“human being”), which is why translators vary among “overman,” “superman,” and “overhuman.” The word circulated before Nietzsche, for instance in Goethe’s Faust I, but he gave it philosophical standing. Zarathustra announces it in the Prologue, §3, and sets it against the “last man” (Prologue, §5), the figure of comfort and self-satisfied mediocrity. In the “Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit” (Part I), the passage from camel to lion to child suggests a process of self-overcoming and value creation. The doctrine is tied to the will to power, to eternal recurrence, which tests the capacity to affirm life in its entirety, and to the response to nihilism. In Ecce Homo (“Why I Write Such Good Books,” §1), Nietzsche rejects a Darwinian reading of the term and presents it as a type of higher constitution. Its reception is contested: the Nazi appropriation was aided by the manipulated editions of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and was challenged by interpreters such as Walter Kaufmann, who stresses individual self-overcoming. Critics point to the concept’s vagueness and its aristocratic tone. See also the article Nietzsche: will to power, eternal recurrence, and the genealogy of morals and ressentiment, its psychological counterpart.
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