The Meaning of the "Overman [Übermensch]" in Nietzsche

Athens Corner

Talk of Nietzsche is almost always synonymous with talk of the "Overman [Übermensch]," and so what I do in this discussion is introduce a number of the most definitive themes in Nietzsche's thought by way of an introduction to the Overman in his thought. To achieve this goal, I begin with the importance of Goethe's Faust for Nietzsche, and then I canvass such diverse but thematic things pertaining to Nietzsche's thought as Homer, Greek tragedy (Aeschylus and Sophocles in particular), the so-called "death of God" or nihilism, and the confluence of the political ideals of the Modern Enlightenment with what we call "technology." I show how all these things come together for Nietzsche and explain how his concern with a seemingly inexorable and impending planetary dominance of a single technological nation-state led him to place at the very heart of his own deeply political project an enormous emphasis upon the differences of human types, their existence in "culture" as it presently is, and the possibility that they could become something much more noble from within experimentally new understandings of "culture" ushered in according to his understanding of philosophy and its new ranking and ordering of the most defining values by which man orients all life.