"Slouching Toward Bethlehem to Be Born": On the Nature and Meaning of Nietzsche's Superman

Nietzsche's name in our time has been indelibly linked with four ideas: the death of God, nihilism, the will to power, and the superman. These ideas, however, are not as central to his work as we often assume. The death of God, for example, is not announced in his published work until the first edition of The Gay Science (1882). The idea of the will to power first appears in print only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), and while it occasionally recurs in his later published work, it gains its preeminent stature only after Nietzsche's death, and then largely as a result of his sister's misrepresentation of some of his notes as a magnum opus called The Will to Power. This error was exacerbated by Heidegger's emphasis on this supposed work as part of his attempt to show that Nietzsche was really a metaphysical thinker. The concept of nihilism appears even later in Nietzsche's thought. He uses the term in print briefly beginning in 1886, but he abandons it in 1888 in favor of the idea of decadence.¹ Here again the posthumous publication of his notes gave readers a distorted view of the importance of this concept for his thought. None of these concepts, however, plays as important a role in the public perception of Nietzsche as the idea of the superman, which is certainly the most famous of Nietzsche's many powerful images. This idea, however, actually plays an even smaller role than the other three in both his published work and in his unpublished notes. It appears only fifty-three times in his published works and seventy-eight times in the Nachlass. Outside Zarathustra, the notes for Zarathustra, or the discussion of Zarathustra in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche uses the term only eight times, and then in a different or at least in a derivative sense, typically referring to, "a kind of superman," or "a mixture of non-man and superman." In Nietzsche's work, the concept properly understood is thus really used only by a single character in a single work and then apparently abandoned. What, then, accounts for the astonishing popularity of the concept? And more importantly, is this concept as crucial for Nietzsche as its popularity would seem to suggest?

The later importance of this concept has perhaps less to do with Nietzsche than with those who came before and after him. The idea of the superhuman had already appeared on the European intellectual horizon in the eighteenth century, largely as a product of the counter-Enlightenment.² The Enlightenment itself was an essentially egalitarian movement that articulated a notion of reason that was universally accessible, and a doctrine of the division of labor that imagined that all great things were brought about by the common and collected efforts of large numbers of human beings. Drawing on Milton's Satan and a few earlier models such as Prometheus, the Romantics emphasized not man's common humanity or reason, or even the general similarity of rudimentary human desires, but the enormous differences in the hidden depths of the individual soul or self. This was conjoined to a theory of historical change that saw titanic individuals and not the masses as the decisive force in world history. Goethe, for example, saw demonic individuals as forces of nature, unpredictable and uncontrollable by human beings, and yet playing a decisive role in shaping the course of human events. He had in mind people like Napoleon, and personified them most famously in Faust. Byron portrayed a similar titanic individual in Manfred, and later himself became a model for such an exalted "demonic" individual, joining Napoleon, Beethoven, and others in this Romantic pantheon of supreme human possibilities. Hegel in a similar vein argued for the decisive role of world-historical individuals in...