The Übermensch, a German word often spelled ubermensch in English and usually rendered as the overman or superman, is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s image for what transcends the human being as it now is: in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1844–1900) has his Zarathustra proclaim in the marketplace, “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome.” (Nietzsche, 1883, Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede 3). Gwendolin Kirchhoff has talked about the Übermensch with her father, the philosopher Jochen Kirchhoff, in the episode “Was wollte Nietzsche?” (What Did Nietzsche Want?) of his Philosophical Conversations (2019) and in the SYMPOSIUM conversation “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit” (Nietzsche and the Great Health, 2024).
#What is Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch?
In Nietzsche’s concept, the Übermensch is a goal beyond the human being, and Zarathustra ties that goal to the earth: “The overman is the meaning of the earth.” (Nietzsche, 1883, Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede 3). Zarathustra asks his listeners, “What have you done to overcome him?” (ibid.). And he compares: “What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just that is what man shall be to the overman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.” (ibid.). In the fourth part, Zarathustra links the overman to the death of God: “God died: now we will—that the overman live.” (Nietzsche, 1885, Also sprach Zarathustra, “Vom höheren Menschen” 2). The sentence “God is dead!” Nietzsche had already given to a madman crying out in the marketplace in The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 1882, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 125).
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls the word Übermensch a designation for a “type of the highest well-constitutedness, in contrast to ‘modern’ people, to ‘good’ people, to Christians and other nihilists” (Nietzsche, 1888, Ecce homo, “Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe” 1). How Nietzsche describes the collapse of inherited values is traced in the entry Nihilism.
#What does Zarathustra teach?
In the prologue, Zarathustra teaches that man is not an end but a going-over: “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.” (Nietzsche, 1883, Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede 4). And further: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end” (ibid.). Against the overman, Zarathustra sets the last man: he wants to speak to the crowd “of the most contemptible”, and that is the last man (ibid., Vorrede 5). “‘We have invented happiness’—say the last men, and they blink.” (ibid.).
#Where does the word Übermensch come from?
The word Übermensch is older than Nietzsche. In Goethe’s Faust, the Earth Spirit addresses Faust as an Übermensch: “What pitiful dread / Seizes you, superman!” (Goethe, 1808, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil, Nacht).
In the conversation “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, Jochen Kirchhoff calls the Übermensch a religious term that was “used a great deal”, and he names the scene in Faust as a famous example (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 30:51–30:53; cf. 30:48–30:59). He had recently looked it up, he says, and found that Dante already uses the word, as a verb; in Dante’s Divine Comedy, he says, the Übermensch is the divine human being “who really only comes to himself in the beyond, in union with the divine” (ibid., 30:40–30:47; cf. 30:07–30:47). The term, he says, had been introduced, and Nietzsche then made it popular, one could say (cf. ibid., 31:34–31:43).
#How was the Übermensch misunderstood?
By Nietzsche’s own judgement, the Übermensch was already misunderstood in his lifetime. In Ecce Homo he writes that the word had been “understood almost everywhere, with complete innocence, in the sense of those very values whose opposite was made manifest in the figure of Zarathustra”, namely as an “‘idealistic’ type of a higher kind of human being, half ‘saint’, half ‘genius’” (Nietzsche, 1888, Ecce homo, “Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe” 1). Others, Nietzsche says, suspected him of Darwinism on its account (cf. ibid.). And he adds: “Anyone into whose ear I whispered that he should rather look for a Cesare Borgia than for a Parsifal did not trust his ears.” (ibid.).
In the conversation “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, Jochen Kirchhoff says that Nietzsche put such suggestive formulas into the world, “which one can simply tear out of context and use” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 29:36–29:39; cf. 29:30–29:39). With the Übermensch, he says, the counter-term Untermensch (subhuman) often comes up, and at once “a political, terrible dimension comes into play” (ibid., 32:35–32:40; cf. 32:31–32:40): the idea that Nietzsche marks out the Übermensch and that the others are Untermenschen. “That is not how it is,” says Jochen Kirchhoff (ibid., 32:45–32:47; cf. 32:39–32:47). He calls the Übermensch “an ambivalent formula”, “a very difficult formula, which of course immediately invites every kind of misuse” (ibid., 39:08–39:16).
#What role did Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche play?
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s sister, took control of his literary legacy during his illness; among other things, she published a selection from his notebooks under the title The Will to Power (cf. Anderson, 2026). In the judgement of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this edition was not well founded in Nietzsche’s surviving plans for the book and was also marred by Elisabeth’s strong anti-Semitic commitments, which had been extremely distressing to Nietzsche himself (cf. ibid.). She had founded the Nietzsche Archive in Naumburg in 1894 and moved it to Weimar in 1896; an exhibition in the house today documents its contradictory history and its role “in the Nietzsche cult of National Socialism” (Klassik Stiftung Weimar, n.d.).
In the SYMPOSIUM conversation “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit”, Jochen Kirchhoff answers Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s question about the healthy Übermensch by saying that this is very difficult, that Nietzsche is very contradictory here, for he also admires men of power; at times that goes “as far as embarrassment” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit”, 32:57–32:58; cf. 32:48–32:59). The question of what Nietzsche would say had he lived to see Hitler he calls “an utterly idle question”; but one could of course say, he adds, that Nietzsche’s sister then became a National Socialist (ibid., 34:02–34:03; cf. 33:54–34:12). There are terrible sentences by Nietzsche, Jochen Kirchhoff says in the same conversation, but Nietzsche only noted them down for himself, after all; they do not appear, Jochen Kirchhoff says, in the main works. Whether it is legitimate to edit private notes and take every single statement as the author’s absolute statement he calls a basic question: “Difficult.” (ibid., 36:03–36:04; cf. 35:33–36:04).
#How does Jochen Kirchhoff read the Übermensch?
Jochen Kirchhoff reads the Übermensch, if you like, as Nietzsche’s term for the true human being. Nietzsche uses a term here, he says, “to single out the true human being, if you like”; spiritually one could say, “the human being as it is really meant to be” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 32:50–32:58; 33:00–33:03), which Jochen Kirchhoff himself calls the cosmic Anthropos (cf. ibid., 33:03–33:06). “And him he calls the Übermensch,” says Jochen Kirchhoff, “but he does not want to be the founder of a religion” (ibid., 33:05–33:12). After reading out part of the prologue, he speaks of a religious gesture, “quite religious, ecstatically charged” (ibid., 36:31–36:35; cf. 36:24–36:35).
Here we are once again in the realm of contradictions, Jochen Kirchhoff says: Nietzsche was also an admirer of a slave society modelled on the Renaissance, in which a few artist-tyrants are to rule (cf. ibid., 38:15–38:33). Then he sums up: “so the Übermensch is an ideal, if you like”; the Übermensch, he says, has overcome the moral-Christian world order and is in a certain way also a cosmic human being (ibid., 38:47–38:52; cf. 38:47–39:04). Later in the conversation he describes how Nietzsche imagined a reckoning of all humanity, in which it grasps what the human being is in its depths, “and also the Übermensch that then comes into being, not the man of violence and power” (ibid., 1:26:06–1:26:11; cf. 1:25:25–1:26:11).
#How does Gwendolin Kirchhoff speak about the Übermensch?
In the conversation “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, Gwendolin Kirchhoff asks about the Übermensch as the counter-image to the all-too-human: “So the Übermensch here, in this case, perhaps as the counter-concept to the all-too-human?” Jochen Kirchhoff answers: “Yes, exactly.” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 1:26:34–1:26:39). In the second part of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: “Never yet has there been an overman.” Zarathustra has seen the greatest and the smallest man naked: “All too similar are they still to each other. Verily, even the greatest I found—all too human!” (Nietzsche, 1883, Also sprach Zarathustra, “Von den Priestern”). At the end of the conversation, Gwendolin Kirchhoff sums up that they have considered “what is intended with the Übermensch”, as, in her words, also perhaps a being that goes beyond the all-too-human, and what Nietzsche lived through “as one who climbed the mountain and somehow never came down again”; Jochen Kirchhoff agrees: “One can say that, yes.” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 1:47:53–1:47:57; 1:48:01–1:48:08; cf. 1:47:49–1:48:08).
On the Manova podcast “Die Abschaffung des Menschen” (The Abolition of Man, 2024), Gwendolin Kirchhoff is asked whether transhumanists are right to see Nietzsche as a kind of ancestor, with the Übermensch as the keyword. She answers: “Yes and no.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Manova podcast, 1:03:45). There are indeed statements, she says, in which Nietzsche speaks of breeding different castes of human beings and praises the laws of Manu (cf. ibid., 1:03:46–1:04:00); in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche names as the task of those laws “to breed no fewer than four races at once” (Nietzsche, 1889, Götzen-Dämmerung, “Die ‘Verbesserer’ der Menschheit” 3). One could take that out, “and then one can say, I teach you the overman and so on, and can interpret the whole thing that way” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Manova podcast, 1:04:23–1:04:29).
“Nevertheless, I personally see Nietzsche,” Gwendolin Kirchhoff begins her next thought (ibid., 1:04:42–1:04:44). Nietzsche, a pastor’s child, felt something like a movement within himself, she says, and he tries “to be immediate and very, very honest” (ibid., 1:05:16–1:05:19; cf. 1:05:05–1:05:19). He “wrestled with enormous opponents” and “tried to overcome enormous things within himself, without quite knowing where it all was supposed to lead” (ibid., 1:05:37–1:05:47). “In that sense, I personally defend Nietzsche.” (ibid., 1:05:46–1:05:49). She believes that for Nietzsche it was in fact really about overcoming systems of power and control, “really in morality as well. That was the original starting point.” (ibid., 1:06:24–1:06:28; cf. 1:06:17–1:06:28). One point is missing in the will to power, she says, the will alone is not it: “There is a second component, love.” (ibid., 1:06:33–1:06:37; cf. 1:06:30–1:06:37).
#What can the Übermensch teach us to ask?
For philosophical conversation, this entry suggests reading Zarathustra’s speech not as a programme but as a question; Zarathustra himself asks, “What have you done to overcome him?” (Nietzsche, 1883, Also sprach Zarathustra, Vorrede 3). Turned towards you: what have you done to overcome the human being in yourself? Where do you make your life small so that it stays comfortable, like the last man who believes he has invented happiness? And if you understand yourself as a rope, as a going-over: where do you want to cross to? A conversation like this decides nothing about a person; it asks about direction.
How Jochen Kirchhoff reads Nietzsche’s yes as health is traced in the entry Great Health; how Nietzsche conceives the love of fate and eternal recurrence, in the entry Amor Fati. Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole is the subject of the entry Nietzsche, and the essay What Did Nietzsche Really Want? examines what he wanted; transhumanism is described in the entry Transhumanism.
#Sources
- Nietzsche, F. (1883). Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. Parts I and II, Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner, 1883; Part IV as a private printing, Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1885. Quoted from Project Gutenberg (Zarathustra’s Vorrede 3, 4, 5; Part II, “Von den Priestern”; Part IV, “Vom höheren Menschen” 2); English renderings are our own.
- Nietzsche, F. (1882). Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner. Quoted from zeno.org, http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Nietzsche,+Friedrich/Die+fr%C3%B6hliche+Wissenschaft (§ 125); English rendering is our own.
- Nietzsche, F. (1888). Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist. Written 1888, first published Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1908. Quoted from Projekt Gutenberg-DE (“Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe” 1); English renderings are our own.
- Nietzsche, F. (1889). Götzen-Dämmerung. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann. Quoted from Project Gutenberg (“Die ‘Verbesserer’ der Menschheit” 3); English renderings are our own.
- Goethe, J. W. von (1808). Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil. Quoted from Project Gutenberg (Nacht); English rendering is our own.
- Anderson, R. L. (2026). “Friedrich Nietzsche”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published 17 March 2017, substantive revision 25 June 2026. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
- Klassik Stiftung Weimar (n.d.). “Nietzsche-Archiv”. https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/nietzsche-archiv/ (accessed 5 October 2026).
- Kirchhoff, J. (2019). “Was wollte Nietzsche?” [Video]. Philosophische Gespräche mit Jochen Kirchhoff, episode 21. YouTube, 14 April 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EcVGcw8LlI (in conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff).
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff – SYMPOSIUM” [Video]. YouTube, 19 October 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS8vCl4BkvI (in conversation with Jochen Kirchhoff).
- Manova (2024). “MANOVA Podcast: ‘Die Abschaffung des Menschen’ (Gwendolin Kirchhoff und Tom-Oliver Regenauer)” [Video]. YouTube, 31 May 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRamOfDdZZE
