Editorial Foreword

"[The Übermensch] has fallen on hard times in the recent literature," reports Alan Schrift, the editor of the proceedings of the North American Nietzsche Society. Not only have leading commentators been downgrading the importance of the Übermensch, but "a survey of the recent secondary literature would find discussions of the Übermensch lagging far behind accounts of such themes as, for example, eternal recurrence or nihilism."¹ It is ironic that this should be the case, since many influential observers outside the world of Nietzsche commentary think it likely that we are now entering an era that will fulfill his famous prophecy of a posthuman future. Most prominently, the Nietzsche-phile Francis Fukuyama has declared "the recommencement of history" and argued that the contemporary biotechnology revolution may "alter human nature and thereby move us into a 'posthuman' stage of history."² Although Fukuyama decries such a prospect (and has even served on the President's Council on Bioethics to help write its official critique),³ others such as Andy Clark, Jonathan Glover, and Gregory Stock have defended and advocated the rapidly evolving technologies of human enhancement.⁴ As Keith Ansell Pearson remarks in his pioneering work, Viroid Life, "The 'superman' of Nietzsche legend has become the emblem of this brave new world":

Shorn of its fatal association with Nazi eugenics . . . the figure of the Übermensch is once again prominent within techno-discourses on the fate and future of evolution. These discourses speak of a new emerging "biotechnological" civilization in which technology becomes more and more biological, while biology becomes more and more technological . . .⁵

This seems like the right time, then, for Nietzsche scholars to revisit his concept of the Übermensch and to think about what this concept means today, especially in light of these truly twenty-first-century developments and debates. In the last thirty years, we have seen the Nietzsche community vigorously interrogate the relation of his thought to wider trends, such as the culture wars, or postmodernism, or, most recently, philosophical naturalism. But none of these trends seem as closely related to Nietzsche's distinctive philosophical contribution as the current widespread and growing conversation about our potentially posthuman future.

This special issue on Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch aims to remedy some of the neglect or outright dismissal it has suffered in the recent literature and thereby to take a significant step toward connecting our scholarly conversation with the outside conversation about the posthuman. Although none of the essays gathered in this issue were written with this outside conversation specifically in mind, they are all inspired by the conviction that Nietzsche did regard his concept of the Übermensch as one of his chief accomplishments, and they all proceed to ask how we should best interpret this concept today. It is no coincidence, I think, that each essay does in the end focus on one or more of the various issues that are currently at the heart of the posthuman controversy.

To begin, Ansell Pearson unpacks Nietzsche's suggestion that our movement beyond the hitherto-evolved human will be enabled, as well as required, by our now-dominant passion for truth and scientific knowledge. Although this power-enhancing knowledge will of course have to concern us and our bodies, Ansell Pearson, Claudia Crawford, and I emphasize Nietzsche's lesser-known claim that this knowledge will also have to include a new physics. Both Ansell Pearson and Michael Gillespie explore Nietzsche's conviction that the human is still in flux, as well as Nietzsche's claim that the precondition of our moving beyond the human is our loss of faith in the Christian God and all the attendant metaphysics, values, and meanings. The Übermensch may thus become our new collective supergoal, but Gillespie warns that Nietzsche himself thought this would require our accepting troubling new values and political turmoil on a global scale. Jill Marsden asks the profound question whether we humans can ever truly conceptualize the übermenschlich. And she emphasizes a puzzle that Ansell Pearson, Gillespie, and I also note: however novel and transcendent and futuristic the Übermensch may seem, Nietzsche worries that it will always be haunted by our...