The 'Superman', the Overman or Übermensch.

[PDF] We are now concerned now with the idea, with Nietzsche's idea of 'the Superman' as well as with the idea of self-overcoming and with the will to power. The word 'Superman' is not a literal translation of Nietzsche's original German term. And the inverted commas also remind us, also warn us that we must not attach to the word or to Nietzsche's idea, Nietzsche's concept, connotations which have gathered around this word 'Superman' in recent decades. The original term, the term used by Nietzsche, the German term, is übermensch, which literally means not 'Superman' but overman; or we might even translate it, not to say paraphrase, as 'over-and-above-man'. In other words, the übermensch, the overman, is the man who stands over and above Man as he exists at present. The overman is what, or who, transcends Man. In fact, we could even speak of the overman as transcendent man. In other words, the overman, what we have been mis-calling 'Superman', the Nietzschean 'Superman' or overman, is not just present-day man writ large, as it were; not just present-day man, present-day humanity in a superlative degree. The overman represents, rather, a completely different type of man.

From now onwards I shall speak not of the superman with all its misleading connotations, but of the overman. The word superman, incidentally, as a rendition of Nietzsche's übermensch, was first popularised apparently by George Bernard Shaw. You probably remember there is a play of his called Man and Superman. And since then the term, the word, has become hopelessly vulgarised and hopelessly debased, so that it has come to mean something very far indeed from what Nietzsche meant, from what Nietzsche intended by this expression übermensch or overman. In fact we may say, and it is a very regrettable fact, we may say that after his death the whole thought, the whole way of thinking of Nietzsche was hopelessly corrupted and debased; first of all, as is very well known, at the hands of his sister, and after that at the hands of various people who wanted to try to make out a sort of case for the Nietzschean philosophy or Nietzschean thinking being in accordance with the thinking of the [Third] German Reich, the Nazi régime. And it is only in comparatively recent years that Nietzsche's thinking has been rescued from all these misinterpretations, these perversions, and been at last correctly interpreted, notably by Walter Kaufmann of Princeton University and a few other scholars and commentators.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Superman:

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Superman.
2. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
3. The Superman, the Overman or Übermench.
4. * Thus spake Zarathustra.
5. Man is something to be overcome.
6. Giving style to one’s character.
7. The will to power.
8. The Higher Evolution and the Overman.

By Urgyen Sangharakshita.

[in French] [Introduction] [Buddha] [Buddhism] [Meditation] [Sangharakshita] [FWBO] [the Centre].

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Dernière mise à jour:
21 juillet, 2008.