Nietzsche and the Ubermensch

In the Jungian sense, the “archetype” is that which a society aspires to, that pure form of a particular set of values and ideals which bind a people through the ages into one common strand of human potentiality. While there are perhaps essential archetypes which exist in an almost universal sense across time, space, and cultural boundaries, there are also profound changes to those archetypes which occur at certain points in history. Perhaps the most radical of these changes has been the movement from what is ostensibly the Christian ideal of the charitable and humble human being, one that pursues a self-denying life ethic in order to obtain both spiritual perfection and a repression of the will, with that of the “Übermensch” (overman). The Übermensch, as this essay will show, is a new archetype built by the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche, which appears to reverse the Christian ideals which underpinned assumptions about the good life within the Western philosophical and cultural tradition. Instead of what appears to be a self-denying ethic, one gets a self-affirming one, and instead of a suppression of the will, one gets “the will to power”. These and other ideas will be examined with a critical eye and the implications of a life lived according to a Nietzschian ideal will be considered. In the end though, it will be argued that while applying certain aspects of Nietzsche’s Übermensch ideal to one’s life can provide a powerful animus for a more authentic existence, if mis-interpreted and taken to the extreme, it can also produce a situation where every woman and man is pitted against one another to such an extent that no order or peace is possible.

In order to understand the essence of what Nietzsche’s Übermensch ideal is all about, it is necessary to look at his basic philosophical assumptions, especially as they relate to morality. Nietzsche had a very strong understanding of the ancient and classical philosophical tradition. A philologist in his youth, he...