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Getting to the Real Immanuel Kant

A young Immanuel Kant (the Becker portrait)
Without communication, love does not exist; without respect, it does not endure. —Immanuel Kant

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Immanuel Kant is often remembered as the driest of philosophers: austere, methodical, and so punctual that the people of Königsberg supposedly set their clocks by his daily walk. Yet beneath the formidable reputation lay a surprisingly warm and personable man. His greatest transformation came not through philosophy, but through friendship.

In his youth and middle age, the sharply dressed Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) moved in Königsberg’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours. In this period, his student Johann Gottfried Herder described him as ‘the most urbane fellow in the world.’

But when Kant turned forty, he underwent a midlife transformation. He quite literally sobered up, abandoning carefree carousing for the disciplined life of the mind. This profound change owed as much to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, as to the making of a new friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, who lived by the clock.

Kant essentially adopted Green’s modus vivendi.

Kant’s Daily Routine, and How It Helped Him

For the rest of his productive life, Kant employed a retired soldier, Martin Lampe, to wake him up at precisely five-to-five every morning. Lampe would stride into his master’s bedroom and cry out, “Herr Professor, the time is come!” Or in German, Herr Professor, es ist Zeit!

Kant worked at his desk in his nightclothes until his lectures began at seven. At eleven, he would change back into nightclothes and return to his desk. The working day effectively ended at one, when he would take lunch in company in a public inn or restaurant. Lunch would end at three with a round of manufactured jokes—in the belief that laughter was good for digestion and broader health.

After lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He walked alone, from fear that outdoor conversation would lead him to breathe through the mouth. He often wound up at Green’s, with whom he liked to discuss Hume and Rousseau. It is said that the housewives of Königsberg would set their timepieces by the time—seven sharp—at which he left Green’s house.

By automating trivial daily decisions, Kant’s rigid daily routine freed his mind to focus purely on philosophy. It’s because of Kant that I have six of the same shirt.

Kant’s Jokes and Philosophy of Laughter

What kind of jokes did Kant tell after lunch? Some of his jokes have come down to us in his writing. For instance: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a rich relative, but failed in the task: ‘The more I paid my mourners, the merrier they looked.’ A merchant sailed back from India with his fortune, but, in a violent storm, had to throw all his cargo overboard. This upset him so much that his wig turned grey overnight.

Laughter, Kant thought, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” The mind is deceived into tensing up, but with the deception revealed suddenly relaxes, leading to laughter, which mimics the motions of the mind and is extremely health-giving. Kant never laughed at his own jokes, but always kept a straight face.

In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant quoted Voltaire in saying that Heaven had given us two comforts against life’s hardships, hope and sleep—before suggesting that Voltaire ‘could have added laughter’.

The Death of Joseph Green

In 1786, Joseph Green died, deeply affecting Kant, who thereafter became much more housebound.

After a suitable period of mourning, Kant recruited a female cook and began hosting protracted lunches aimed at stimulating the play of thoughts. To this end, he gathered guests from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, believing that the ideal number of guests lay somewhere between that of the Graces and the Muses (three and nine). All topics great and small were on the table. Philosophy was allowed but not dogmatism, for fear that it would interrupt the convivial flow of ideas.

As well as wine (another of God’s comforts), Kant had a taste for Königsberger Klopse (meatballs in a creamy white sauce with capers), Teltow turnips (an heirloom turnip from the Berlin-Brandenburg region), roast beef, cod, and, as a condiment for the above, English mustard, which he mixed himself in the belief that his special mix protected against senescence.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green inspired Kant’s routine and became his philosophical sounding board. Kant allegedly discussed every single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason with Green before publishing it in 1781.

In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant ended his discussion of character traits just as, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ended his discussion of the same: with an analysis of friendship.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle made much of the idea of ‘perfect friendship’, which, he thought, is only possible between people of reason and virtue. He famously described a perfect friend as ‘another self’—later paraphrased by Diogenes Laertius as ‘a single soul dwelling in two bodies.’

Kant deemed ‘perfect friendship’ an ideal that in practice cannot be attained. But in striving for it, we might nonetheless arrive at ‘moral friendship’, in which two persons feel able to disclose their secret thoughts and feelings to each other. Moral friendship requires a savant mélange of love and respect, love for bringing two people together, and respect for not driving them apart by infringing upon their dignity and autonomy.

From his own experience, Kant came to believe that most people cannot develop their true character until middle age, when they might undergo a ‘rebirth’. At twenty, we are no more than the product of our upbringing and environment. At thirty, we are still reliant on the judgement and approval of others. Only at forty are we confident enough (or perhaps tired enough) to become who we truly are.

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Kant’s philosophy cannot be fully understood in isolation. The German Greeks places him within the great tradition of German philosophy, from Leibniz through Hegel and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche—revealing how these thinkers transformed the legacy of ancient Greece.

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Gottfried Leibniz and the Problem of Evil

God in the dock with Leibniz as his lawyer
‘It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much evil in the world? In the Theodicy, Gottfried Leibniz, philosopher, mathematician, and trained lawyer, took it upon himself to mount God’s defence.

Many people who have heard of Gottfried Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, ‘the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire’, a parody that is hard to get past. Insofar as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.

Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of 14, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship.

However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.

Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own lawyer—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. ‘Theodicy’, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for ‘vindication of God’.

The Problem of Evil

In 1755, nearly 40 years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?’

This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:

Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Leibniz’s Defence

In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence.

What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.

Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:

  • Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would merge back into God.
  • Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
  • Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.

God could have created a world without minds. But although such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil (and, so, much less evil), it would not have been the best of possible worlds.

Our Role in All This

What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimisation. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, ‘To perfect God’s creation!’

Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing upon Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.

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To explore Leibniz’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

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How Would You Respond to Nietzsche’s Madman?

Nietzsche's madman
Nietzsche’s Madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours and runs into the marketplace crying, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 15 August 2026.

The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1543, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe. The Aristotelian system had provided not only a scientific model but also a moral and metaphysical order, with everything in its proper place. To overthrow it was to overthrow everything. 

It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. These laws applied to the celestial spheres as much as to a falling apple—with the implication that the heavens were not some separate, higher realm, but of one piece with your backyard.

In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.

The More Radical Revolution

Also undermining the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Old Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.

More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even had the gall to publish in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The revolution was not merely in what people believed, but in how they came to believe it—and who they should believe.

In Search of a Hero

The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?

Consider the scale of the imaginative shift required. In 1588, as a young mathematician, Galileo had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno. The Scientific Revolution had begun to dismantle the circles of hell, and everything else, while remaining silent on what might replace them.

The three men who rose to the almost impossible challenge of weaving a new metaphysics that could accommodate the Scientific Revolution and make sense of man’s place within it were René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

Each offered a radically different solution. Descartes preserved God and the immortal soul by splitting reality into mind and matter. But in so doing, he created the problem of how such radically different substances might interact. Spinoza went in the opposite direction, collapsing mind and matter by identifying God with Nature. Leibniz sought another way out of the mind-body problem: his universe consisted not of interacting minds and bodies but of immaterial ‘monads’, co-ordinated by God in a ‘pre-established harmony’. Whereas Descartes and Leibniz sought to salvage what they could, and reaffirm man’s position in the order of things, the ‘heretic’ Spinoza provided no such comforts.

In November 1676, Leibniz travelled to The Hague to meet the dying Spinoza. He had been troubled by Spinoza’s still-secret metaphysics, and spent hours in discussion with him. If God and Nature were one and the same, and everything followed necessarily from the nature of God, what became of freedom, providence, and man’s special place in creation? Leibniz’s own metaphysics—the monadology—can be read as an attempt to solve Descartes’s mind-body problem without falling into Spinozism.

Nietzsche’s Break

By Nietzsche’s time, the great metaphysical systems had begun to look like what they were: elaborate attempts to salvage God and the soul of man from the assaults of science.

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche calls time on the projects of his predecessors. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he declares, is dead.

Nietzsche was not simply announcing his atheism. By the late nineteenth century, there would have been nothing new in that. Instead, he was pointing to the consequences of unbelief: if our highest values—human dignity, moral obligation, justice—are founded in God, what happens to them if we can no longer believe in this God? Do we just go around pretending as if nothing had changed? Or do we invent ourselves anew?

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman. In it, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: ‘Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]

Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, ‘What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’ [Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?]

The townspeople are not scandalised by the Madman’s atheism. They are themselves unbelievers, which is why they laugh at him. The joke, however, is on them. They have abandoned God without thinking it through. The Madman has arrived, then as today, ‘too early’.

Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called ‘gay science’: a sceptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life. Nietzsche’s response to the collapse of certainty is not despair, as is often thought, but freedom, creation, and experimentation: the courage to live without assurances and treat life as something to be interpreted, repurposed, and affirmed.

Not simply hanging around, unsure whether to stay or leave.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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Nietzsche on Master and Slave Morality—and Why You May Be Both

A greek marble statue juxtaposed with a crucifix.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.

In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only ‘racially pure’ Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.

Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the ‘good European’, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, ‘Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.’

Despite his contempt for nationalism, Nietzsche’s philosophy would later be appropriated by German nationalists and Nazis, helped along by Elisabeth after his collapse into insanity. Nietzsche held every herd in contempt, whether Christian, democratic, or nationalist. But he reserved his highest contempt for the nationalist herd.

Herd Mentality

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic literature and propaganda while neglecting Nietzsche’s work.

In that year, Nietzsche also published a new book, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). As the title suggests, this is not a work of normative ethics (what is good and evil) but of meta-ethics (what is meant by ‘good’ and ‘evil’). Nietzsche portrays the life-denying Western religion, morality, and philosophy as rooted in a ‘herd mentality’, and calls for the abandonment of binary morality. After the death of God, there can no longer be a universal perspective. Therefore, there can no longer be an objective truth. Although philosophical systems purport to be objective, they are no more than the ‘involuntary and unconscious memoirs’ of their prejudiced authors. ‘Truth’ is no more than ‘the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live’.

Master vs Slave Morality

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche also introduces the dichotomy between master and slave morality. Slave morality is often confused with herd mentality, but can be understood more precisely as a component and expression of herd mentality. If slave morality arises out of the resentment-driven inversion of values created by the weak in revenge against the strong, herd mentality is the broader mediocrity that enforces conformity and suppresses individuality.

For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the older Greco-Roman master morality. Master morality originates in the strong, and is marked by values such as pride, nobility, courage, truthfulness, health, creativity, and joy. The Homeric era of Achilles and Odysseus was a pure expression of master morality, a time when actions were either noble or base, rather than good or evil.

Achilles does not apologise for seeking kleos, or glory. Homer does not ask his heroes to be humble or compassionate. Their virtues are precisely those qualities which distinguish them from other men: courage, strength, cunning, eloquence, and the capacity for magnificent deeds. The Greek word aretē, usually translated as ‘virtue’, originally carried the broader sense of excellence, and in Aristotle virtue blends with excellence. Aristotle doesn’t even know what forgiveness means—because the concept hadn’t quite been invented.

So, too, any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Slave morality, in contrast, is the envious and vengeful reaction of the mild and mediocre to the oppression of the masters, to create an inverted morality by turning their weakness into virtue and the virtues of the masters into vice.

Thus, slave morality is marked by values such as humility, meekness, conformity, patience, compassion, and pity. Christianity is called the religion of pity, which deprives us of strength and makes suffering contagious. In master morality, the good is whatever is good for the masters; in slave morality, it is whatever constrains and emasculates the masters. By pretending that humility and docility are a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence and subjugation. Thus, pride becomes a vice or sin, humility is elevated into a supreme virtue, and the son of God washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified like a common criminal.

What This Means in Us

Slave morality is a cynical and pessimistic inverse morality that involves the systematic subversion of the old, natural master morality. It seeks not to transcend master morality, but, through ‘priestly vindictiveness’, to emasculate and enslave the strong by persuading them that their strength is an evil. Democracy, with its fixation on equality, is in fact the heir to Christianity, even if most democrats would rather trace their lineage to Ancient Athens. God may be dead, but Christian values survive God, sometimes in other forms.

But for all that, the old Greco-Roman morality, because it reflects reality and the natural impulse, cannot be vanquished, and vies with the inverted Judeo-Christian morality. Modern man is confused because he has constantly to juggle their contradictions, while himself being neither Christian nor Ancient but drifting in an ill-defined no-man’s land. Thus, he is taught to admire humility, while being told to believe in himself. He condemns pride, but values ambition. He insists upon equality while idolising exceptional athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs. He preaches self-sacrifice, but also self-realisation; contentment, but also achievement; meekness, but also assertiveness. In sum, he wants to be good, while also wanting to be great.

But might these two things be incompatible?

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And His Challenge to Us: The Übermensch

NIetzsche's tightrope walker over an abyss
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On Nov. 5, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, nor why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, ‘So I really am going into utter solitude.’ He never saw Salomé or Rée again.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent out letters mentioning overdoses and suicide. On Christmas Day, he wrote to Overbeck: ‘This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.’

Fortunately, Nietzsche did discover the alchemical trick, and the result was his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

The book is an act of self-overcoming of the kind that Nietzsche came to preach. Out of rejection, illness, and despair, he produced his magnum opus. He turned muck into gold.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written as a stylised, biblical, and poetic narrative about a prophet, Zarathustra, who isolates himself in the mountains with his animals, a snake and an eagle. After ten years of solitude, he comes down to share his wisdom with humanity in the form of speeches, parables, and aphorisms. When the masses laugh at him, he recruits an elite band of followers.

But he remains ambivalent about having followers: ‘You are my believers, but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves, and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore, all faith amounts to little.’ He instructs his followers to leave him and become free thinkers: ‘I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only then… will I return to you.’

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, the prophet Zarathustra advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In so doing, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes, including the Übermensch and Last Man.

The death of God presents us with both a crisis and a choice. If our inherited values can no longer sustain us, we must either create new values of our own or retreat into self-deception, conformity, and comfort. We can be Last Men, or rise towards the Übermensch.

The Übermensch

Zarathustra exhorts his followers to remain faithful to the earth. Instead of harbouring otherworldly hopes, they should embrace life as it is and take responsibility for creating their own values. The meaning of the earth is the Übermensch, a higher, self-overcoming type of human that is yet to exist.

The Übermensch is sometimes misunderstood as a biologically superior ‘Superman’, or as someone who seeks power over other people. But Nietzsche’s emphasis is on power over oneself: on self-creation, self-mastery, and, above all, self-overcoming.

Humanity is not an end, but a bridge between its animal past and its Übermensch future. Humanity is a ‘rope over an abyss’—’a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still’—that most people fail to cross, falling instead into nihilism, that is, into despondency and mediocrity.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end in himself: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under.

Was groß ist am Menschen, das ist, daß er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist: was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, daß er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist.

Zarathustra delivers these words to a crowd that has gathered to watch a tightrope walker, who sets out along a rope stretched between two towers. The performance ends in disaster: the tightrope walker loses his footing and plunges into the void. The safe alternative would have been not to cross at all.

Although the Übermensch is a future concept—not even Zarathustra is an Übermensch—in later works Nietzsche discusses certain ‘higher men’ who approached the ideal, like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Goethe, and Beethoven. The Übermensch rises above the conventional morality of the herd to become a law unto himself.

The Last Man

The antithesis of the Übermensch is the Last Man, a mediocre, apathetic, comfort-seeking creature who fears risk and struggle and chooses security over greatness. Without the drive to create or achieve, the Last Man focuses only on ‘little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night’ while maintaining a strict regard for his health. Unlike the tightrope walker, he lacks the gumption, or even the vision, to cross and risk himself.

Have you noticed how, when people are overwhelmed, they start blinking? Nietzsche famously describes the Last Man as ‘blinking’—because his vision of humanity is so small.

Last Men, who are in the overwhelming majority, arrange things so that everyone is like them, so that no one rises, or even can rise, above the herd, so that no one can dare to dream or risk having an original thought. Any deviation from the norm is interpreted as a form of madness.

Zarathustra challenges the complacency of the herd:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Übermensch. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

Wo ist der Blitz, der euch mit seiner Zunge lecke? Wo ist der Wahnsinn, der mit euch ausgeimpft werden müsste? Seht, ich lehre euch den Übermenschen: er ist dieser Blitz, er ist dieser Wahnsinn.

Ironically, the crowd does not heed the warning, but cheers and demands that Zarathustra make them into these Last Men.

Nietzsche’s Last Man marks the end of human evolution and ambition. It is a prophetic warning of what humanity could become if it settles for nothing higher than material wealth, risk-aversion, technological pacification, and a culture of feeling ‘safe and happy’—in one word, for mediocrity.

The prophecy is disturbing because the Last Man does not appear miserable. On the contrary: he has engineered his world to minimise discomfort. But in removing danger, struggle, solitude, and uncertainty, he has also removed many of the conditions under which a person might overcome himself and be and become so much more.

For Nietzsche, becoming a person is not a matter merely of ‘discovering who we are’, when we are still nobody. It is the harder task of creating ourselves: of questioning inherited values, thinking our own thoughts, choosing what is worth suffering for, and accepting the danger of the rope over the abyss.

Nietzsche was writing in 1883. Since then, it has become ever more difficult to be free. I have seen it in my own lifetime. Very soon, if not already, it will be impossible to become a person.

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