ABSTRACT
The ‘overman’ is the ideal extension of the ‘higher man’ who remains ‘part inhuman and part superhuman’.(4) The main difference is that what is still a matter of struggle and effort for the ‘higher man’ will become natural for the ‘overman’ of the indeterminate, or ideal future. It is a mark of ‘higher men’ that, within their souls, great battles are still raging-‘Rome vs. Judea’, ‘virtu vs. virtue’, ‘egoism vs. morality’;(5) battles that will have their successful issue in the ‘overman’. It is in this light that we should understand the comments that only the ‘overman’ comes to a living acceptance of ‘eternal recurrence’, and that only he learns to ‘laugh’ and ‘dance’. Neither the doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’, nor its place in Nietzsche’s thought, is at all clear: what is certain, though, is that living acceptance of the doctrine is supposed to herald the achievement of a totally ‘affi rmative’, ‘Ja-sagend’ àttitude in which condemnation, criticism of the world, struggle against others and their thoughts are transcended. ‘Laughing’ and ‘dancing’ are Nietzsche’s metaphors for just such an attitude. Richard Strauss, when he made the ‘overman’s’ Tanzlied in his Also Sprach Zarathustra a jolly Viennese waltz, may have been closer to Nietzsche’s conception than most Nietzsche and Strauss scholars are wont to think.(6)
Although the ‘higher man’ is not the fi nal goal, it is he whom we fi nd the more richly described, and upon whom the educational task must focus for the foreseeable future. Who, then, is the ‘higher man’, and how shall he be bred? We must already know a certain amount about him; as much, indeed, as we so far know about authenticity. For if I am right to portray Nietzsche’s educational concern as one for authenticity, then the ‘higher man’ must be, or approximate to being, the authentic man. We know, then, how he stands towards morality, for example, or towards ‘scholarship’. It would help us collect together and expand upon the various themes and features connected with authenticity if we could
identify an actual person who, for Nietzsche, counts as a ‘higher man’. Hunting after such an identifi cation has been a favourite game among Nietzsche commentators. Given the heuristic value of the hunt, it ought not to be a game, but it is hard to take all efforts in this direction seriously when one considers that the quarries have ranged from Socrates to Hitler.(7) At the risk of being dubbed just one more player of this game, let me state that there seems to me little doubt which fi gure Nietzsche usually regards as the nearest approximation to the ‘higher man’. It is the fi gure referred to more often in his writings than any, save Wagner; the man of whom Napoleon exclaimed ‘Voila! un homme!’ It is Goethe
Nietzsche makes it clear that Goethe is not the ‘overman’, not ‘the great synthetic man’, but only ‘the most beautiful expression of the type’, man, as we have hitherto known it.(8) In some early writings, during the period of his fascination with a largely mythical Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is indeed critical of Goethe-the man and his writings. Generally, though, the attitude is one of unstinting admiration. Goethe is the ‘fi nest and brightest soul’, ‘superior to other Germans in all respects’, ‘a culture’ in himself, a ‘mighty, defi ant, solitary rock’.(9) Let us examine the basis for this admiration of Goethe, as Nietzsche saw him. That qualifi cation is, perhaps, unnecessary, for it seems that Nietzsche’s portrait was a remarkably perceptive one.(10) It might be pedantic, too, to speak of ‘the Goethean man’ rather than of Goethe himself, for contemporaries and biographers are generally agreed that the man succeeded, to an extraordinary degree, in living according to his conception of how a person should be.
