The Birth of the Übermensch from the Spirit of Ecstasy

I want to teach humans the meaning of their Being: That is the Übermensch, the lightning from the dark cloud of the human.
(Nietzsche, 1883-1885/2005, p. 18)


Behold, I teach you the Übermensch: it is this lightning, it is this madness! (ibid., p. 13)

Nietzsche's response to overwhelming disappointment and loss was often a flight into heroic elation. As a young man in 1864, Nietzsche wrote an essay "On Moods", and one might suspect that the topic was already then close to his heart. Later, he continued on the theme:

It seems to me that most people simply do not believe in elevated moods, unless these last for moments only or at most a quarter of an hour - except for those few who know at firsthand the longer duration of elevated feelings. But to be a human being with one elevated feeling - to be a single great mood incarnate - that has hitherto been a mere dream and a delightful possibility; as yet history does not offer us any certain examples. Nevertheless history might one day give birth to such people, too - once a great many favourable preconditions have been created and determined that even the dice throws of the luckiest chance could not bring together today. What has so far entered our souls only now and then as an exception that made us shudder, might perhaps be the usual state for these future souls; a perpetual movement between high and low, the feeling of high and low, a continual ascent on stairs and at the same time a sense of resting on clouds.

Luke rightly considered this fragment to be a pre-formation of the Übermensch. He also interpreted Nietzsche's exhilarated states as part of the manic phase of his manic-depressive temperament, both aspects of which, he believed, were later fully expressed in Zarathustra. Nietzsche completed the first part of Zarathustra, where the Übermensch made its forceful appearance, in only ten days. This speed of writing may well have been fuelled by his manic mood. It has been asserted that Nietzsche had a cyclothymic personality, and, as from 1881, a frank manic depressive illness with periodic psychotic features. As Melanie Klein maintained, in mania there is "the utilization of the sense of omnipotence for the purpose of controlling and mastering objects and it is based on the mechanism of denial". This defence mechanism is particularly applicable to the "lost objects", and mania is often a reaction to painful loss. Shortly after completing Part I of Zarathustra, Nietzsche sent Franz Overbeck an undated letter:

... I feel as if the lightning had flashed - I was for a short time completely in my element and in my light. And now it has passed. I think I shall inevitably go to pieces, unless something happens - I have no idea what. ... This book [Zarathustra] seems to me like my last will and testament.

A man for whom all light was lightning was alone again, with his pain and with his despair. However, the deep yearning for the moments of ecstasy and transfiguration would return. Less than a year before his mental collapse, Nietzsche wrote in his private notebook the following passage inspired by Kirilov's description (similar to that of Prince Myshkin in The Idiots) in Dostoyevsky's The Devils of the fleeting aura of unendurable ecstacy preceding an epileptic seizure:

Five, six seconds and no more: when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony. Man in his mortal frame cannot endure it; he must either physically transform himself or die. ... The most dreadful thing is the horrifying certainty with which it expresses itself and the joy with which it fills one. If it lasted longer, the soul could not endure it, it would have to disappear - in these five seconds I would live the whole of human existence. I would give my life for it, the price would not be too high.

Nietzsche, who wrote with his "blood" and his entire being, must have experienced such intense moments himself. In one such moment of manic psychotic elation, during the summer of 1881, the idea of "eternal return" suddenly assailed his consciousness and became central to his thought. He transfigured a deep sorrow (related to his disappointment with Wagner) into a life-redeeming formula. The intersection of pain and elation became fixed in his mind, and I argue that the Übermensch was a product of such intersection too. Moreover, he would crave the return of that moment - the more pain, the more overcoming, the more of the victorious elation. But, as he was unable to directly communicate and share this experience, his sorrow and great sense of loss remained deeply buried in silence.