Myth: The "overman" or "superman" (the Ubermensch [note: umlauts are unavailable on MovableType]) is one of Nietzsche's most important ideas, an organizing theme of his work.
Reality: After Zarathustra, the "overman" drops out of the published corpus, except for two brief references: once in the Genealogy, where he describes Napoleon as a synthesis of "Unmensch [inhuman] und Ubermensch...." (GM I:16) and once in Ecce Homo, in the course of discussing Zarathustra. Rather than being a central idea for Nietzsche, it plays a major role only in Zarathustra, but in none of the major works thereafter (Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, etc.). Since Zarathustra is a parody of the New Testament, in which Zarathustra himself plays the role of Christ figure preaching an anti-Christian message, the rhetoric of "teaching" the anti-Christian message lends itself naturally to the image of the Ubermensch. Once the paradodic form is dropped in subsequent works, there is no need for this rather exagerrated image.
To be sure, Nietzsche is very interested in the fate of those he calls higher human beings--as I argue in Nietzsche on Morality, his central charge against morality is that it thwarts their flourishing--but it is quite clear that Nietzsche's paradigm case of a higher human being is Goethe, who receives more--and more positive--references in the Nietzschean corpus than any other figure (as Thomas Brobjer has shown). Acknowledging this plain fact is hardly to sanitize or democratize Nietzsche, since it is equally plain that he assigns great weight to the flourishing of Goethes and none at all to the misery of the multitude that might be required for the former. But this is a far cry from the cartoon Nietzsche who promotes the mythical superman.
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