Nietzschean Self-Overcoming

The aim of this article is to provide a novel reading of Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming and in doing so draw out some distinctive features of his thinking about ethics and ethical ideals. However this reading will be different from the work of those interpreters who read self-overcoming in terms of Nietzsche’s will to power psychology. Rather it attempts to frame self-overcoming as a distinctive kind of re-evaluative, ethical activity. Section 1 explains what this reading of self-overcoming involves in terms of the idea of overcoming self-evaluative frameworks. Section 2 argues that Nietzsche’s idea of achieving a standpoint “Beyond Good and Evil” serves as a central example of self-overcoming read in this way. Finally section 3 explores Nietzsche’s remarks on continual self-overcoming and argues that this idea points towards what I will call the horizonal nature of “future moralities.”