Dostoevsky and Nietzsche's Overman

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche's Overman

The definition of übermensch, or overman, in Barron's Concise Student's Encyclopedia makes anyone who has read Nietzsche's Zarathustra - even aphoristically, as I tried to do at first - cringe. Barron's Encyclopedia defines an overman as someone who "has his act together and gets things done." Of course, considering that this is a summary of one part of Nietzsche's ideas, and that the encyclopedia reduces his entire philosophy to one short paragraph, this is not a poor definition. But it eliminates parts of Nietzsche's concept of the overman, or superman, which are essential to an understanding of this idea.

Walter Kaufmann provides a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's philosophy in his work Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, a book which Thomas Mann called "a work of great superiority over everything previously achieved in Nietzsche criticism and interpretation." Kaufmann outlines several essential characteristics of the overman throughout the work. Perhaps the most important, and most central, characteristic of the overman is that the overman is one who has overcome his nature as a normal man. "Man is something that shall be overcome" is a phrase that occurs throughout Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a work which (it seems to me) most completely developed the idea of the overman of all of Nietzsche's books. (Zarathustra, I, Preface, 3)

For Nietzsche, the vast majority of people have no value. This is repeated by Walter Kaufmann several times throughout his Nietzsche. At one point, Kaufmann, explaining Nietzsche, states that man's inherent value is "zero," and states that only a few people have any value at all; in Kaufmann's words, "the gulf se...

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...s. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.

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Mann, Thomas, quoted on the back cover of Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche.

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Nietzsche, Friederich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.