r/Nietzsche • u/dunkeater • 11h ago
The Real Traits of an Ubermensch
I’ve read a lot of misunderstanding of the Ubermensch idea here, so offering my take on the key qualities as described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
Universal affirmation of the world. An Ubermensch thinks everything in the world, and everything that has ever occurred in the past, is perfect. Including all tragedies, pain, and their own will frustration.
The Great Redeemer. The will to power looks forward to make the future match the will, but when the world does not follow the will, an Ubermensch changes their will so that it matches whatever happened (maintaining universal affirmation). This perfect control of the will makes an Ubermensch immune to fate since nothing can happen that would be against their will.
Child like state. The last stage of the metamorphosis is a clue to what it feels like to be an Ubermensch. Everything in the world, including pain, is a novel toy to play with. Forgetting past attachments and treating life like a game. This universal appetite for everything contrasts with the comparatively shallow values of hedonists.
In a nutshell, the Ubermensch is an imagined super human who has such perfect control of their mind that they can value anything they want, and they use this power to maximally extract value from everything that happens. It’s a downstream consequence of abandoning the idea of objective value and reasoning through what the pinnacle of deciding your own values would be, free from all external influence. It doesn’t require any physical domination or world achievements, as it’s purely about the mind, and could in theory be emulated by a disabled person or a child.