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

Abstract

Nietzsche's name in our time has been indelibly linked with four ideas: the death of God, nihilism, the will to power, and the 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 edi tion 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 result of his sister's misrepresentation of some of his notes as magnum opus called The Will to Power. This error was exacer bated by Heidegger's emphasis on this supposed work as part of his attempt to show that Nietzsche was really 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 distorted view of the importance of this concept for his thought. None of these concepts, however, plays as important role in the public perception of Nietzsche as the idea of the 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 unpub lished notes. It appears only fifty-three times in his published works and sev enty-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 different or at least in 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 single character in single work and then apparently aban doned. 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 product of the counter-Enlightenment.2 The Enlightenment itself