The Superman (Übermensch)

The Superman is not a race, a nation, or a conqueror. It is a type: a human being who has overcome the herd instincts of resentment and self-negation, who creates values rather than merely inheriting them, and who affirms life in all its suffering and repetition.

Zarathustra's audience, far from being inspired, applauds the opposite: the last man. The last man has invented happiness; he blinks. He avoids risk, pursues comfort, has no great desire and no great contempt. For Nietzsche, this creature represents the deepest danger facing humanity: not evil, but the extinction of aspiration itself.

The Superman stands against mediocrity not through domination of others but through radical self-overcoming: the painful process of revaluing inherited values and creating new ones from one's own depths. Nietzsche's concept was catastrophically misappropriated by Nazi ideologues, who stripped it of its individualism and applied it to racial nationalism, the precise opposite of what Nietzsche intended.

Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth edited his Nachlass after his mental collapse and bore significant responsibility for distorting his ideas in a direction he had explicitly rejected.