Finding the Ubermensch in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality

Although it is natural to study a philosopher's works in chronological order, and to suppose that what is written later supersedes what is written earlier, this scholarly practice proves complicated in Nietzsche's case. For he himself privileges above all his other works Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ), a book he wrote before his widely acknowledged twin masterpieces Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) and On the Genealogy of Morality (GM).¹ According to Nietzsche, these later works are "fish hooks" (Angelhaken) meant to attract and prepare readers for the superior insights of TSZ. These later works, he tells us, are No-saying, destructive books focused on the contemporaneous; while TSZ is a Yes-saying, constructive book focused on the future (EH "Books" BGE). So, contrary to scholarly expectation, Nietzsche himself instructs us to think of the analyses in BGE and GM as pre-emptively superseded by the philosophy of TSZ.

Most Nietzsche scholars today ignore this instruction. Although they sometimes cite TSZ as a source of confirming textual support, they mostly regard this work as an embarrassment that needs to be finessed. Their chief reasons for this opinion are well known. First, TSZ is a poetic fictional work that is not written in Nietzsche's own voice. And, second, it centers around two philosophical ideas, the Übermensch and eternal recurrence, that are not substantially revisited in any of his later works.² As for Nietzsche's instruction mentioned above, it cannot be taken seriously because it appears for the first and only time in Ecce Homo, the book he was writing as he quickly approached his breakdown. When we consider the problematic aspects of TSZ alongside the sustained brilliance and power of BGE and GM (especially the latter), we have no choice but to regard the later works as "mature" by comparison. Michael Tanner sums up the case as follows in his Past Masters introduction:

[Nietzsche] insisted that everything he wrote after TSZ was a commentary on it, but that seems to have been more in the nature of an attempt at self-reassurance than a genuine assessment of their nature or quality. For one thing, the Übermensch is never heard of again; the Eternal Recurrence rarely recurs. . . . For another, the progress through the first post-TSZ book, Beyond Good and Evil, through his masterpiece The Genealogy of Morals, to the torrential pamphlets of the last year, has little do with anything stated or adumbrated in TSZ.³

One of my goals in this essay is to suggest a line of defense against this scholarly consensus. More specifically, I wish to address the claim that the Übermensch plays no role in Nietzsche's most important mature work, GM, and therefore does not warrant much attention from his commentators.⁴ Against this, I will argue that Nietzsche's supposedly immature and discarded TSZ concept of the Übermensch does indeed supersede his supposedly mature and final ideas in the second essay of GM. This does not mean, of course, that Nietzsche's thought simply stopped evolving after TSZ. He obviously did develop a new and sophisticated analysis of bad conscience in GM II. But I will argue that he developed this analysis on behalf of his earlier and superior insights in TSZ, and that this analysis is therefore best appreciated when understood against the background of these insights.

Nietzsche and Zarathustra

The most obvious problem for today's consensus about the relation between TSZ and GM is the conclusion to the second essay of GM. Alluding specifically to the "Vision and the Riddle" chapter in TSZ, where Zarathustra challenges the sailors to guess "who it is that must come one day," Nietzsche writes as follows:

24. [. . .] But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt...