Nietzsche's Übermensch
Overcoming Resentment
I teach you the Übermensch. The human is something that shall be overcome.(Nietzsche, 1883-1885/2005, p. 11)
(Nietzsche, 1883-1885/2005, p. 86)
Nietzsche's
worship of Wagner could be compared with that of Brutus in relation to
Julius Caesar, and so could his "murderous" impulses towards the tyrant
for the sake of "the independence of the soul". In fact, Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar was Nietzsche's most
admired. In 1872, Nietzsche risked his entire academic career by
publishing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he
extolled Wagner as an heir to Aeschylus and a reviver of Greek Tragedy.
It pleased the Master's vanity, but he expected more and persuaded his
young admirer to write a devastating attack on David Strauss (whose book
The Life of Jesus Nietzsche had previously much admired). Wagner had
been involved in a public feud with Strauss and unceremoniously used
Nietzsche as his hit-man. In August 1873, the essay David Strauss, the
Confessor and the Writer was published, and it later formed part of
Untimely Meditations. Strauss died suddenly six months later. Nietzsche
must have been stricken by a sense of guilt and wrote to his friend Carl
von Gersdorff in February 1874: "I very much hope that I have not
aggravated the end of his life". Nietzsche wished that Strauss
hadn't read the essay, but unfortunately he not only had, but had
regarded it as an unprovoked and unjust attack. Later, Wagner repaid
Nietzsche for this sacrificial act of devotion by spreading rumours
about his headaches and eye complaint being due to masturbation, and by
launching an indirect, vicious assault on him in Bayreuther Blätter. The
greatest pain for Nietzsche, however, must have been disgust with
himself for having betrayed his own moral standards. One wonders whether
his self-reproach of "having ruined the lives of several people", which
he expressed at the time of his admission to the Basel psychiatric
clinic in January 1889, was related to that
episode.
When, in August of 1876, Nietzsche walked out on his
eight-year friendship with Wagner, wounded and disillusioned, he plunged
straight into writing Human, All Too Human. This marked the beginning
of his struggle with deeply cherished ideals and idols - such as
Christianity, morality, Schopenhauer, Wagner -and of a relentless agon
with himself. In the Preface to that book, written a decade later in
Sils-Maria, he revealed:
Lonely now and miserably
self-distrustful, I took sides, not without resentment, against myself
and for everything that hurt me and was hard to me. Thus I once more
found the way to that courageous pessimism that is the antithesis of all
romantic fraud, and as it seems to me today, the way to "myself', to my
task.
But there was more to come.
In April of 1882, Nietzsche met Lou Salomé, a young, intelligent woman
born in St. Petersburg of mixed German and French extraction. She seemed
to have understood instantly not only the essence of Nietzsche's
philosophy, but the essence of his soul. Although their acquaintance
lasted only months, she pronounced herself an expert on all things
Nietzschean and later published a book, Nietzsche: The Man in His Works. Nietzsche believed that she was "as shrewd as an eagle and
brave as a lion" and hoped to have found a soul mate and a disciple. Not
for long, however, as it soon all ended in tears. Flirting with geniuses
(such as Nietzsche, Rilke, and also Freud) and enticing them into a
circle of admirers seemed to have been Lou's life's mission. Reading
their work, prior to reciting it back to them, proved very successful
bait. Her favourite pastime, however, was reducing a genius to a voyeur
in a ménage à trois setting. In the famous photograph entitled "The Holy
Trinity", which she later displayed in Wagnerian circles, Nietzsche and
his friend Paul Rée pose as two bewildered horses while Lou brandishes a
whip over their heads. Lou was no Cosima whose life task was to live
and die for Wagner; instead she aimed at making a genius live and die
for her. Yet again, Nietzsche found himself a victim of his own
enthusiastic idealisations and had to face yet another huge
disappointment. His sister's interference made it even harder for him to
cope with discordant emotions and, not surprisingly, his attitude to
women changed as a result.
At the end of that turbulent year, Nietzsche confessed to his Horatio-like friend, Franz Overbeck:
This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew, and it
is still possible that I shall choke on it. I have suffered from the
humiliating and tormenting memories of this summer as from a bout of
madness. ... It involves a tension between opposing passions which I
cannot cope with. This is to say, I am exerting every ounce of self
mastery; but I have lived in solitude too long and fed too long off my
"own fat", so I am now being broken, as no other man could be, on the
wheel of my own passions. ... Unless I discover the alchemical trick of
turning this muck into gold, I am lost.
The Übermensch was that gold, and Nietzsche may have been trying to overcome his own resentment by evoking this figure. In a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz in August 1883, he wrote:
For a whole year I have been goaded on to a class of feelings which with the best will in the world I had abjured, and which - at least in their more gross manifestations - I really thought I had mastered; I refer to the feelings of revenge and ressentiment [resentment].
On the
same day, he wrote to Franz Overbeck about his deep melancholy and of
being possessed by evil, black feelings. He also conceded: "I have
finally become the victim of a relentless desire for vengeance,
precisely when my innermost thinking has renounced all schemes of
vengeance and punishment. This conflict is bringing me step by step
closer to madness".
Kaufmann has
persuasively argued that self-overcoming (Selbst-überwindung) was
central to Nietzsche's conception of the Übermensch. He regarded it as a
symbol of the repudiation of conformity and the antithesis to
mediocrity and stagnation. He also saw the Übermensch as a creator of
values and as a self-creator, who overcomes himself by sublimating his
impulses and passions. Greek gods, demigods and heroes would have been
the obvious personification of this idea. In this essay, I argue that
Nietzsche was attempting to overcome his own passions and impulses by
evoking the ideal of the Übermensch.