SUPERMAN (Ger. Übermensch). - A term coined to indicate a conception of humanity superior to its normal or typical form, but free from whatever appears weak or defective in it.
It appears for the first time in German literature of the 17th century, but it has its counterpart in the titanism of the Renaissance,
[and] in the Vichian conception of the ages of giants and heroes, in the categories of the universal superhuman formulated by Romanticism (v.). Nietzsche (v.) developed its theory in his Zarathustra and in Beyond Good and Evil (1883-85, 1885-86), vigorously opposing the spirit of decadence and melancholy peculiar to the end of the century, but with a paganizing tone and reminiscences of the sophistic theory of the "triumph of the strongest." He does not, however, consider his superman so much as a heroic man as a prophet and one conscious of a "philosophy of the future," which dominates human mediocrities and weaknesses through the revelation and practice of the becoming of life according to the law of sensual love in which everything is transient and everything returns. The Nietzschean superman has at his disposal "immaculate perception," or immediate communion with the pure flowing of existence; but, for him, God is dead, He no longer demands the sacrifice of humanity and has left it free to exalt itself. The panic feeling of nature would thus replace religion: the will to power would go beyond the limitations of customary morality. These ideas were developed in the tendency of sensual immanentism by D'Annunzio (v.), who regarded the preparation of the advent of the superman as the task of art itself, but returned to conferring on him a heroic valuation. Certain protagonists of his novels (The Triumph of Death; Maybe Yes, Maybe No) and of his dramas (The Glory) are types of superman. But he sought to reconcile Nietzsche with Wagner, maintaining (in The Fire) that the mythical and chivalric heroes of the poetic-musical legend were also supermen; whereas in the German philosopher the Übermensch, like the Überhaupt of logic ("in general"), contained not only the overcoming but also the contempt of traditional humanity. Finally the surhomme was much discussed before the war of 1913-18 by the French socialists, in order to establish whether it corresponded to the Marxist doctrine of surplus value, or to the figure of the dictator of the proletariat; but the Pan-Germans, attributing on the same occasion the quality of superman to the entire German nation, deprived the question of its philosophical flavor and restored in this regard the reputation of Nietzsche.
Bibliography5 works
Santino Caramella