And His Challenge to Us: The Übermensch
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.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.
You may also enjoy
You must be logged in to post a comment.