SUPERUOMO (German 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 II.
It first appears in seventeenth-century German literature, but finds a parallel in the titanism of the Renaissance,
mento, in Vico’s conception of the ages of giants and heroes, and in the categories of Romanticism (v.). Nietzsche (v.) developed its theory in his Zarathustra and in Al di là del bene e del male (1883–85, 1885–86), vigorously opposing the spirit of decadence and melancholy characteristic of the end of the century, but in a paganizing tone and with reminiscences of the sophistic theory of the “triumph of the strongest.” He does not, however, conceive of his s. so much as a heroic man as a prophet conscious of a “philosophy of the future,” who dominates human mediocrity and weakness through the revelation and practice of the becoming of life according to the law of sensible love, in which everything is transitory and everything returns. The Nietzschean s. possesses “immaculate perception,” or immediate communion with the pure flow of existence; but for him God is dead, no longer demands the sacrifice of humanity, and has left it free to exalt itself. The panicked feeling of nature would thus replace religion: the will to power would transcend the limitations of habitual morality. These ideas were developed within the tendency toward sensual immanentism by D’Annunzio (v.), who regarded the preparation for the advent of the s. as a task of art itself, but returned to bestow upon him a heroic valuation. Some of the protagonists of his novels (Il trionfo della morte; Forse che sì, forse che no) and dramas (La gloria) are types of s. Yet he sought to reconcile Nietzsche with Wagner, arguing (in Fuoco) that the mythical and chivalric heroes of poetic-musical legend were also s.; 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 by French socialists before the war of 1913–18, in order to establish whether it corresponded to the Marxist doctrine of surplus value or to the figure of the dictatorship of the proletariat; but the Pan-Germanists, on the same occasion attributing the quality of s. to the entire German nation, deprived the question of its philosophical flavor and restored Nietzsche’s fame in this connection.