Nietzsche’s Übermensch: What the Overman Really Is (and Why It Is Not a Superhero)

Last updated: October 19, 2026

The Übermensch, usually translated as “overman” or “superman”, is Friedrich Nietzsche’s image of a human being who has gone beyond humanity as it now is, someone who creates their own values in a world that can no longer lean on God. Nietzsche made the figure central in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885), where the prophet Zarathustra announces in the prologue: “I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed.” For an idea this famous, it gets remarkably few pages: outside Zarathustra Nietzsche returned to the word only occasionally, and in Ecce Homo (written in 1888, published in 1908) he complained about how badly it was being read.

The meme shows a man with a very small head sitting inside an enormous coat. The head is labelled “Nietzsche”, the coat “Nietzsche’s conception of der Übermensch”.

A Very Large Coat for a Very Fragile Man

The man who imagined humanity surpassing itself was in poor health for much of his adult life, so the meme’s proportions are closer to biography than to insult.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nietzsche’s health was “always fragile”. He suffered from intense headaches, nausea and trouble with his eyesight, took leave from his professorship in Basel in 1876 and 1877, and by 1879 was forced to resign it altogether. The SEP notes that recent work suggests he probably had a slow-growing tumour behind his right eye. Zarathustra was written between 1883 and 1885 by a former professor who was 38 when he began it. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mental health. So the concept that now sounds like a fitness slogan was dreamed up by a man with failing eyesight and intense headaches.

Where the Overman Actually Lives

The Übermensch belongs to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is not a central term of Beyond Good and Evil, and Nietzsche’s other books mention it only occasionally.

The figure appears at once in Zarathustra’s first public speech. Humanity, he says, is to the overman what the ape is to humanity: “a laughing-stock, a thing of shame”. Man is “a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman”, and “what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal”. The overman is also tied to the earth rather than to heaven: “The Superman is the meaning of the earth”, and Zarathustra begs his listeners to “remain true to the earth” and distrust anyone who promises them superearthly hopes. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), by contrast, the noun does not appear at all: the only trace is the adjective übermenschlich in section 294, where gods might laugh “in an overman-like and new fashion”, as Helen Zimmern translates it. English readers meet the figure under different names: Thomas Common’s translation of Zarathustra says “Superman”, Walter Kaufmann’s later translations prefer “overman”, and many scholars simply keep the German.

The Crowd Wants the Last Man

The overman only makes sense next to its opposite, the last man: a humanity that has made itself comfortable and small and calls that happiness. Nietzsche’s worry was that once the old faith had collapsed, this comfortable emptiness would become the default, and the overman is his counter-offer.

When the crowd laughs at his talk of the overman, Zarathustra tries the opposite tactic and describes the most contemptible thing he can imagine. The last man asks “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” and blinks. “We have discovered happiness”, say the last men, and blink again. They avoid hardship, work only because “work is a pastime”, take “a little poison now and then” for pleasant dreams, and want everyone to be the same. The scene ends with one of the bleakest jokes in philosophy. The crowd shouts back: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra”, make us into these last men, and you can keep your overman. Zarathustra concludes that they do not understand him. Notice what the contrast leaves out: strength and dominance do not come up. What separates the overman from the last man is that one still wants something after the old sources of meaning have collapsed, and the other has decided he would rather blink.

Not a Master Race, Not a Superhero, Not a Morning Routine

The Übermensch is neither a master race nor a comic-book superhero: Ecce Homo calls it “a type of man”, an individual exception rather than a people, and Nietzsche was already complaining that readers had turned it into something else.

In Ecce Homo (written in 1888), he complains that the word “Superman”, which designates a type of man that would be “one of nature’s rarest and luckiest strokes”, is understood “almost everywhere, and with perfect innocence”, as an idealistic type, “half ‘saint’ and half ‘genius’”. Other “learned cattle”, he adds, suspected him of Darwinism, as if the overman were the next species in line. Others read Thomas Carlyle’s hero worship into it, a cult he says he had repudiated. The same paragraph contains the line that makes him hard to tidy up: he once whispered to someone that it would be better to look for the overman in Cesare Borgia than in Parsifal, the pure knight of Wagner’s opera. Readers have argued ever since about whether the Borgia line was a provocation or a preference.

The darkest misreading came after his collapse and death. The SEP describes how his sister Elisabeth took control of his literary legacy and published notebook material as The Will to Power, an edition marred by her “strong anti-Semitic commitments” that, in the SEP’s words, leaves a “somewhat misleading impression” of his notebooks. The overman is also regularly recycled as self-improvement advice, which sits oddly with Zarathustra’s contempt for comfortable happiness, as our post on Nietzsche versus self-optimization argues.

The Body Has Its Reasons

In Zarathustra the overman is loyal to the body as much as to the earth, because the self is the body rather than a soul lodged inside it.

In the speech “The Despisers of the Body”, Zarathustra mocks those who treat the body as a prison for the soul. The awakened one, he says, knows: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more”, and the soul is only a name for something in the body. Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a “mighty lord”, the Self, which dwells in your body and is your body, and “There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom”. The speech ends by telling the despisers of the body: “Ye are no bridges for me to the Superman!” Surpassing humanity, on this picture, means affirming this world, including the body that the Christian and Platonic traditions, as Nietzsche read them, had taught people to distrust. Anyone hoping this licenses a weekend of following their desires will be disappointed. In “The Way of the Creating One”, Zarathustra tells the creator: “Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame”. That sounds more like discipline than indulgence.

The Not Yet Determined Animal

There is no settled interpretation of the overman, partly because Nietzsche left so little about it outside Zarathustra, a book written in prophetic parables rather than arguments.

The SEP notes that some scholars, following Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, find Nietzsche’s position on the overman or “higher man” simply riven by internal contradiction, while others treat the related idea of a “higher self” as an ideal a person may or may not live up to. A related debate concerns his claim in Beyond Good and Evil (section 62) that the human being is das noch nicht festgestellte Tier, “the not yet determined animal”, rendered by Walter Kaufmann as “the as yet undetermined animal” and by Zimmern as the animal “not yet properly adapted to his environment”.

Read alongside Zarathustra, the phrase suggests that the overman is what an undetermined animal could still become. On another, the overman is tied to the thought of eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche first introduced near the close of The Gay Science (section 341, the end of the original 1882 edition): the test of whether you could affirm your life so completely that you would want to live it again, endlessly. Few readers dispute that Nietzsche was openly anti-egalitarian (in “The Tarantulas” Zarathustra declares that “Men are not equal”), or that the overman is a standard most people fall short of. Whether that is inspiring or just elitist, the book does not settle. Zarathustra leaves the crowd and goes back to his eagle and his serpent.

For a case study in how powerful readers bend Nietzsche to their purposes, read Misreading Nietzsche: What Peter Thiel and Alex Karp Skip About Nationalism.