Sensing the Overhuman

In his intriguing reflections on why he writes "such good books," Nietzsche claims that one can "hear" (heraushören) in things no more than what one already "knows": "What one has no access to through experience, one has no ears for" (EH "Books"1). In this context, he invites his readers to consider the exceptional case in which a book speaks of nothing but encounters which lie outside the possibility of common or even of rare experience, claiming that this is "the first language for a new range of experiences": "In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustic allusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing. . . . This is, in the end, my average experience, and, if you like, the originality of my experience." Nietzsche goes on to assert that failing to "hear" what is at stake in his work can manifest itself in two ways: either nothing is understood and his ideas simply go unregistered or they are commuted to existing models that are wholly inappropriate. By way of illustration of the latter, Nietzsche adds that the word "overhuman" has frequently been interpreted as an "idealistic" type of a higher kind of human being:

the word "overhuman" as the designation of a type of the highest achievement, in contrast to the "modern" human being, the "good" human being, to Christians and other nihilists—a word that in the mouth of Zarathustra, the denier of morality, becomes a very thought-provoking word—has been understood almost everywhere with complete innocence in the sense of those values whose antithesis is realized in the figure of Zarathustra, that is to say as an "idealistic" type of a higher kind of human being, half "saint," half "genius."

Warming to his theme, Nietzsche repudiates the "scholarly oxen" who have understood the overhuman in terms of Darwinism and "hero worship." Their error in interpreting this "thought-provoking" word is not simply their tendency to read in standard ways but an inability to "hear"—a deafness to frequencies outside the normal range.

Before aligning ourselves with Nietzsche and condemning the ineptitude of his readers, we must ask what it would mean to identify with the ideas to which he alludes. If his experience is as original as he suggests, we ought not to expect to "hear" what is at stake in his thought. Nietzsche is at pains to insist in Ecce Homo that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an exemplary work and that it is a "privilege without equal to be a listener here" (EH P 4). Moreover, if having an "ear" for such a work is dependent upon experience, it is not clear how the thought of the "overhuman" is to be reached. By simple definition, it seems that the over-human (Über-Mensch) is not something that is available as an item of human (menschlich) experience. Indeed, the condition for the emergence of the over-human seems to be the collapse of any "type" of human being however "elevated" or "noble." This said, if to experience the overhuman we have to "overcome" the human, this is not something that is attainable, indeed knowable so long as we remain "what we are." Here, then, is our problem. How could anyone—Nietzsche included—experience that which is beyond experience?

In asking how it would be possible to experience the overhuman, we are obliged to question and to perhaps relinquish our habits of thought. On the face of things, it seems that we can only speculate about the overhuman from within the constraints of human knowing, attempting to understand it according to our "own image" (EH "Books" 1). However, despite suggesting the occasional "role model" for the overhuman, Nietzsche offers very little by way of positive determination of the idea.¹ Furthermore, he is at pains to emphasize in the Foreword to Ecce Homo that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a book characterized by the "air of the heights" and that the "whole fact of the human lies at a tremendous distance beneath it" (EH P 4). The most pressing question is what can be heard at this extra-human altitude. One has to "hear correctly the tone...