O Superman

 Atanas Botev: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2004)

Nietzsche's great concept of the Übermensch remains something to ponder and to play with. But there are still those who just don't get it and insist on believing that the overman is merely a higher type of human being - a tendency that has not been helped by the unfortunate and misleading English translation of the original German term as 'superman'.

Thus, amongst our transhumanist friends for example, we still find those who naively think of the idea exclusively in terms of genetic engineering and contrived evolutionary advance. But the metaphysical, moral and material overcoming of man is absolutely not the same thing as his biological self-preservation and enhancement.

To be fair, Zarathustra doesn't help matters by initially speaking about worms and apes and describing man as a rope fastened between animal and Übermensch. But he is later at pains to point out that his primary concern is not with what might or what should succeed mankind in the sequence of species and that his teaching is not a variety of Darwinism.

What then is the concept of the Übermensch all about?

For me, the best reading is developed in the work of Michel Foucault in terms of forces and forms; the latter defined as a compound of relations between the former. In this interpretation, our humanity is understood as a non-predetermined form which results when forces internal to ourselves as a species (such as imagination and memory) enter into a historical relationship with certain external forces (be they natural, artificial or virtual).

Thus Man - with a capital M and by which we mean the hu-man - has not always existed and will not exist forever. Our humanity is a contingent form and as internal and external forces as well as the relations between them change, so our form changes. This is why Foucault famously writes of Man being nothing but a face drawn in the sand that is destined to be erased by the incoming tide.

The Übermensch is thus simply another word for these external forces: the sea which receives us; the lightning that licks us with its tongue; the madness with which we might be cleansed. In other words, it is that which frees the life within us and reconfigures form in a manner that is not only posthuman, but genuinely transhuman and inhuman.