The Übermensch: Man, Beast, Superman

To “behave like an animal” is to act according to one’s base instincts. Man is, obviously, an animal, but what it means to be human is diametrically opposed to animality. Control over our instincts is our mark of distinction. We consider ourselves “more evolved” the more we are able to act unlike animals. However, according to Nietzsche, this is mistaken. For Nietzsche, when man behaves in this way, when he denies his instincts, he regresses to a state worse than beasts.

Man, he says, is something that must be overcome. His term for what this would be is the übermensch (which is often erroneously translated as ‘overman’ to avoid the trivialised translation: ‘superman’). In the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his prophet say:

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

He doesn’t say much about the übermensch specifically, except that he would consider man a ‘laughing stock and painful embarrassment’, in the same way man considers an ape a ‘laughing stock and painful embarrassment’. He says that, ‘you have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape…