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

Last updated: November 3, 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, and who says yes to this life on earth instead of hoping for another. Nietzsche introduced the figure in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885), where the prophet Zarathustra announces: “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 by 1888 he was already complaining about how badly it was being read. It has been misread ever since, as a master race, as a comic book hero and lately as a morning routine. None of those is what Nietzsche meant.

A Very Large Coat for a Very Fragile Man

The meme above 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”. It is funnier once you know that the 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. Recent work, the SEP notes, suggests he probably had a slow growing tumour behind his right eye. He was 38 when he began Zarathustra, a retired professor with failing eyes who wandered between Swiss mountain villages and Italian coastal towns in search of a climate he could bear. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mental health. He spent his last eleven years in the care of his mother and then his sister, and died in Weimar in August 1900. The concept that now sounds like a gym slogan was dreamed up by a man whose eyes often would not let him read.

That is not a cheap shot at Nietzsche. It is the key to the idea. The overman is not a description of strength someone already has. It is a picture of what a person might become by overcoming what weighs on them, and Nietzsche knew more about weight than most.

Overman, Superman, Übermensch: What the Word Means

The German word is built simply: über means over or above, Mensch means human being. An Übermensch is a human who has gone over, beyond or above the human. The grammatical article is der, so it is “der Übermensch”, not “das”, and the plural is Übermenschen. Nietzsche did not invent the word. Goethe had already used it in Faust, where a spirit mocks the hero as an “Übermensch” who trembles in fear, but Nietzsche gave it the meaning everyone now associates with it.

English readers meet the figure under different names, and the translation changes the picture. Thomas Common’s early translation of Zarathustra says “Superman”, a word George Bernard Shaw had popularised with his play Man and Superman (1903). Walter Kaufmann, whose translations dominated the second half of the twentieth century, deliberately chose “overman” to get away from the comic book associations and to keep the sense of going over, overcoming, überwinden. Many scholars today simply keep the German. If you search for “overman meaning” and “ubermensch meaning” you are looking for the same thing.

The comic book connection is not entirely imaginary, by the way. In 1933, five years before Superman flew in Action Comics, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster published a short story called “The Reign of the Superman”, in which the title character is a bald villain with telepathic powers who wants to rule the world. They then flipped him into a hero. Nietzsche would have found both versions baffling, because his overman has no superpowers at all.

Where the Overman Actually Lives

The Übermensch belongs to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Despite what the web address of this page suggests, it is not a central term of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where 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 way. If you want the ideas that book is actually about, read our post on master and slave morality.

In Zarathustra the figure appears at once, in the prophet’s first speech in a market square. 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”, a rope over an abyss, and “What is great in man is, that he is a bridge and not a goal”. Then comes the line that explains why people search for “overman the meaning of life”: “The Superman is the meaning of the earth.” Zarathustra begs his listeners to remain true to the earth and to distrust anyone who promises them hopes beyond it.

That is the context everything else depends on. Nietzsche had announced the death of God a year earlier in The Gay Science, in the famous scene with the madman and his lantern, which we explain in what “God is dead” really means. If there is no God to give life its meaning from outside, then either life has no meaning, which is the road to nihilism, or human beings have to create meaning themselves. Nietzsche’s name for the second option, pushed as far as it will go, is the Übermensch.

The Crowd Wants the Last Man

The overman only makes sense next to its opposite, the last man. When the crowd laughs at the 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. “No shepherd, and one herd!”

The scene ends with one of the bleakest jokes in philosophy. The crowd shouts back: give us this last man, Zarathustra, make us into these last men, and you can keep your overman. Notice what the contrast leaves out. Strength and dominance do not come up at all. 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 be comfortable. Read today, with infinite feeds and next day delivery, the last man looks less like a caricature and more like a product description.

Camel, Lion, Child

If the overman is not a superhero, what does becoming one look like? Nietzsche’s best answer comes in the first speech of the book proper, “The Three Metamorphoses”, and it is the passage most worth knowing. The spirit, Zarathustra says, goes through three transformations.

First it becomes a camel. The camel kneels down and asks to be loaded with the heaviest burdens: duties, traditions, “thou shalt”. It carries them into the desert, proud of how much it can bear. Then, in the loneliest desert, the camel becomes a lion. The lion wants freedom, and it has to fight a great dragon whose name is “Thou shalt”. On every scale of the dragon a value glitters, and the dragon says that all values have already been created. Against it the lion says “I will”. But the lion can only win freedom. It cannot create anything new.

For that the spirit must become a child. “Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.” This is the most surprising image in the book and the one most misreadings skip. The end point of self-overcoming is not a warrior or a ruler but a child at play, someone who creates values not out of resentment or rebellion but the way children make up the rules of a game, freely and seriously at the same time. The goal is less a conqueror than an artist of their own life.

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

In Ecce Homo, written in 1888, Nietzsche 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. That is a misreading worth taking seriously, because Nietzsche’s overman is not a biological upgrade produced by natural selection, and natural selection is not what people think it is either, as we explain in what “survival of the fittest” really means.

The same paragraph contains the line that makes Nietzsche hard to tidy up: it would be better, he says, to look for the overman in Cesare Borgia than in Parsifal, the pure knight of Wagner’s opera. In the Genealogy of Morals he calls Napoleon a “synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman”. Readers have argued ever since whether such lines are provocations or preferences. What is clear is that Nietzsche admired great individuals, not groups. The overman is “a type of man”, an exception, never a people or a race.

The darkest misreading came after his collapse. His sister Elisabeth, who had married the antisemitic agitator Bernhard Förster and gone with him to found a colony in Paraguay, took control of his literary estate and his archive in Weimar. Nietzsche had despised her husband’s politics and told her so in letters. According to the SEP, the notebook edition she published as The Will to Power was marred by her “strong anti-Semitic commitments” and leaves a “somewhat misleading impression” of his notebooks. She later welcomed Hitler to the archive. That is how a philosopher who mocked German nationalism and antisemites ended up as a supposed prophet of the master race.

The newest misreading is softer. The overman is regularly recycled as self improvement advice: cold showers, five a.m. alarms, become the best version of yourself. It sits oddly with a book that treats comfortable, optimised happiness as the danger, as our post on Nietzsche versus self-optimization argues. Powerful people bend him too, as in Misreading Nietzsche: What Peter Thiel and Alex Karp Skip About Nationalism.

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 knows: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more”, and the soul is only a word for something in the body. Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a mighty lord, the Self, which lives in your body and is your body, and “There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom”. The speech ends with a verdict on the despisers: “Ye are no bridges for me to the Superman!”

Anyone hoping this licenses a weekend of following every craving 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.” Self-overcoming means becoming the master of your drives, not their servant. The same book insists, against every egalitarian reading, that “Men are not equal”, and it is plain that Nietzsche thought most people would never get near the overman and would not want to. Whether that is inspiring or simply elitist, the book does not settle.

Self-Overcoming and the Will to Power

The verb behind the whole idea is überwinden, to overcome, and Nietzsche applies it to life itself. In the speech “Self-Surpassing”, Zarathustra says that life told him its secret: “I am that which must ever surpass itself.” Wherever he found something living, he says, he found will to power, even in the servant who wants to be master over someone weaker still. This is the phrase that has caused the most damage, because it sounds like a licence to dominate others. In Nietzsche it is closer to a description of growth. A living thing does not merely want to survive. It wants to expand, shape, master and express itself, and the highest form of that drive is turned inward, as mastery over one’s own chaos.

That is why Nietzsche’s heroes are not generals but people who made something of themselves out of difficult material. In Twilight of the Idols (1888) he praises Goethe as someone who did not run away from life but took as much of it as possible into himself and disciplined it into a whole. Elsewhere he admires artists and thinkers who gave “style” to their character. The overman is the limit case of this idea: a person in whom self-overcoming has gone so far that it produces new values rather than borrowed ones. Whether anyone has ever reached it, Nietzsche does not say. Zarathustra himself only announces it. He never claims to be it.

Would You Live It Again?

The overman is tied to Nietzsche’s strangest thought, the eternal recurrence. It first appears near the end of The Gay Science (1882, section 341). Imagine, Nietzsche says, that a demon creeps into your loneliest loneliness and tells you that you will have to live this life again, and innumerable times more, every pain and every joy, every sigh and every thought, in the same order. Would you throw yourself down and curse the demon? Or have you ever had a moment so great that you would answer: you are a god, and I have never heard anything more divine?

Whatever Nietzsche thought about the cosmology, the test is clear. The overman is the one who could say yes to that question without lying. Not because everything in life is pleasant, but because he wants his life as a whole, including the hard parts, so completely that he would choose it again. Nietzsche had a Latin name for this attitude, amor fati, love of fate. It is the opposite of the last man’s blinking, and it is also the opposite of resignation. The existentialists took a great deal from this idea, as you can see in What Is Existentialism?, and so did Camus with his happy Sisyphus.

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 and the higher type riven by internal contradiction, while others read the related idea of a higher self as an ideal a person may or may not live up to. In Beyond Good and Evil (section 62) Nietzsche calls the human being das noch nicht festgestellte Tier, “the not yet determined animal”. On one reading, the overman is simply what such an undetermined animal could still become.

Nietzsche himself kept a sense of humour about all this, which is easy to forget. The chapter titles of Ecce Homo read “Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Write Such Good Books”, and we explain the joke in Nietzsche Memes Explained: Ecce Homo and Self-Irony. A thinker who could laugh at himself like that is a poor patron saint for people who take their own greatness very seriously. The overman, in the end, is less a person you could meet than a direction you could face: away from comfort for its own sake, toward creating something you would be willing to live again. Zarathustra, at the end of his first speech, leaves the laughing crowd and goes back to his eagle and his serpent. If you want to follow Nietzsche from the beginning instead, C.M. Black starts with The Birth of Nietzsche from the Spirit of Philosophy.