GwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwD T h e G R E E N Y w o r l d D o m i n a t i o n T a s k F o r c e , I n c o r p o r a t e d Presents: __ __ 999999999 55555555555 _____ ____ _| |__| |_ 9999 9999 55 // | \ |_ __ _| 999 999 55 || ____ | || | | | | | 9999 9999 5555555555 || || \ / | || | _| |__| |_ 9999999999 555 \\___// \/\/ |____/ |_ __ _| 999 555 |__| |__| 999 55 555 999 555555555 "Ubermensch and Raskolnikov" by Bob the Master of the World ----- GwD: The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime ***** Issue #95 ----- ----- release date: 01-03-01 ***** ISSN 1523-1585 ----- (1) An immediate difficulty presents itself when attempting to glean the actual philosophical sentiments of Nietzsche in _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_, a problem common to this task when works of fiction are being investigated for the voice of the author. What is Nietzsche's true position in this work? Is his voice identical to the voice of Zarathustra or only at certain points in the latter's sermons? This question is the same that must be posed in the cases of both Plato and Soren Kierkegaard and is critical for discovering a greater philosophical "system" in Nietzsche, though such a label would no doubt repulse him. _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ contains the germs for several future philosophical doctrines of Nietzsche and as such must be taken seriously, though it diverges from mainstream philosophical writing in matters of style. One of these ideas is that of the Ubermensch, variously translated as "overman" and "superman," discussed in the third section of the first part of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ (2). But how is one to approach an interpretation of what kind of creature the overman really is, given the ambiguous language in which Nietzsche describes him? As Nietzsche himself would remind us, a perspective must be adopted and, despite the evidence in favor of it, a perspective it must remain. I shall take an approach that emphasizes the words themselves that Nietzsche utilizes for the description of the overman and proceeds on the assumption that Nietzsche did not choose these specific words arbitrarily. Problems emerge, however, when one considers that Nietzsche wrote in German; Walter Kaufmann's translation of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_, however, has generally been thought to be fairly reliable (3). Though I may open myself to accusations of interpretative naivety, I know of no better way to approach Zarathustra's sermon on the overman than by assigning him the role as Nietzsche's mouthpiece; for, after all, who can truly say whether or not Zarathustra represents the voice of Nietzsche? I undertake this task as a preliminary to another concern, namely to ascertain the veracity of the frequent identification of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_, with Nietzsche's overman. I. What is the overman? It seems clear that a definition of "overman," as gleaned from _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_, is required if an identification of Raskolnikov with the overman is to be made, regardless of whether or not this identification is fully realized, merely approximated, or absent entirely in _Crime and Punishment_. To arrive at the essence of the overman, one must begin by clarifying the language in which Nietzsche speaks of him, lest the ambiguity leads to a confused exegetical account. I will attempt to construct an account of the overman based on this clarification. It is important first to notice that Zarathustra addresses the common people. The overman can, and it appears must, be the willing creation of the masses, one of their own, not some elite superhuman as some would have him. The people, Zarathustra warns, must secure for themselves and by themselves the return to humanity that the overman promises or suffer continuing devolution. The "man" that needs to be overcome by the overman is the moral element of humanity, emaciated by religion and fettered by traditional morality. Man has become for Nietzsche "a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre...the European of today" (4). The overman comes to overthrow the "ape," Nietzsche's caricature of man when retarded by traditional morality, not to slay the man. According to Nietzsche, the European is not truly man, yet while the term "man" continues to be applied to him, its meaning must necessarily change to reflect his degeneration. Nietzsche does not want man to evolve into something higher than man, which for all he knows may be impossible, but calls for the overman to return man to being man, to cease the devolution of man, to divest humanity of its "ape-ness:" "Scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on that account" (5). In this passage, Nietzsche wants to distance the concept of the overman from the concept of a creature that eclipses humanity in a strict biological sense; that is, he wants to reserve the "man" in "overman." The way to achieve the restoration of humanity is the way of the overman: "Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea" (6). The overman conquers man by returning him to his essential humanity, to that purity of "humanness" possessed by all before the onset of morality, the man of nature. Yet he does so in the context of a new religion, the way of the earth, of nature, divested of all other-worldliness. This new religion is none other than the way of science: Nietzsche wants us to reject the idea that the soul is somehow superior to the body and that a noumenal world exists beyond our senses, a fiction exploited by the religious sphere to control man. Nietzsche, like both Confucius and the Buddha before him, wants to restore the attention of humanity to what they can actually perceive and affect, the "earth" as discussed in the overman section of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_. Man, being the noblest product of the earth in his untainted form, could be interpreted as the "earth" to which man should "remain faithful," an idea that would naturally lead Nietzsche to Protagoras' dictum that "man is the measure of all things." The overman strives to focus man back on man, essentially promulgating a new humanism. Zarathustra creates a vision of the overman that appears rather similar to that of a naturalistic Socrates. Socrates likened himself to a stinging gadfly, awaking the horse (Athens) from his torpor. So too must the overman be, a thorn in the side of man, to wake man from his slumber. He is the "inoculation" for the disease of traditional morality: like an injection of a vaccination, the overman's coming will initially bring pain but then a better life. Yet, unlike Socrates with dialectical argumentation, the overman does not attempt to slowly erode the life-denying beliefs of traditional morality, which might be impossible; instead, he seeks to strike man as lightning would a tree in certain circumstances, whereby the tree is not wholly destroyed. What remains after this "frenzy" and "lightning" will be man as he should be according to Nietzsche, unpolluted by the deceits of traditional morality. So far all that has been demonstrated are various facets of the overman; a requirement at this point to describe the overman as a whole is obvious. The overman as described by Nietzsche is nothing other than a man who is determined to free his fellow men from the oppression of traditional morality and does so by first freeing himself and then violently attacking the beliefs of others, for he cannot free them without their cooperation. In this sense, Nietzsche's philosophical project, to arrive at a "creation of our own new tables of what is good," (7) mirrors the overman's quest in the manner of its undertaking: Nietzsche's virulent ad hominem attacks seek to cause pain in the reader in the hope of causing greater awareness. The overman's identity, expressed as a disjunction of the above characteristics, is essentially linked to his relationship with the rest of humanity; that is to say, one cannot be an overman without being the "sea" which cleanses man. Thus, the cave dweller ceases to exist as a cave dweller when he leaves the cave; the cave was essentially bound up with his being a cave dweller. Furthermore, upon approaching a cave, a man cannot be said to be a cave dweller, for he has yet to dwell in a cave. I propose that the overman fits into this metaphor: his existence as an overman depends essentially on doing what it is that an overman does. Well, what is the overman's occupation that makes him an overman? To be an overman means to have cast aside traditional morality, but this is only the first step, only the approach. He must then help to liberate others, to restore their humanity, and potentially in the process to create other overmen to assist him in this task. Just as the cave dweller can be said to be a cave dweller only after living in but a single cave, I think the overman can only be said to be an overman after having "overcome" at least a single man. II. Raskolnikov's Claim to Overmanship Under the above definition, it seems clear that the character of Raskolnikov in _Crime and Punishment_ is not an overman. Furthermore, given the ending of the novel in which Raskolnikov puts himself back under the yoke of traditional morality, he has not even successfully completed the first step, which, as mentioned above, consists in detaching oneself from the fetters of traditional morality. Raskolnikov attempts to justify his murder of Alyona Ivanova by extrapolating from her death the good that would occur to those under her oppression. Yet, in thinking in this fashion, Raskolnikov is still thinking of "good" in terms of traditional morality, though he might be commended from a utilitarian perspective. He strives to place his action above the law, but not above morality. Thus, he heads in an entirely distinct direction from that of the overman, seeking to become a paragon of traditional morality rather than its conqueror. Raskolnikov desires to arrive at some point beyond good and evil, yet it seems as if good and evil both remain and are accepted by the overman, though reinterpreted in the light of Nietzsche's humanism. Nietzsche clearly depicts the overman in a social context: lightning must necessarily strike something, at least in nature, it does not exist in a vacuum; Raskolnikov's isolationist character seems to preclude him from ever becoming an overman, though he may have accomplished the first step. It is to Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, to which we must turn if a suitable parallel to the overman is to be found. The Buddha, upon reaching enlightenment, could have left immediately for the bliss of Nirvana yet chose to live on the earth for another fifty years to teach others how to obtain this highest of mystical states. He strove to teach man to ignore metaphysical speculation and concentrate on improving himself in the present; I think Nietzsche would not object to these projects being identified with the tasks of the overman. ----- -=[Footnotes]=- 1. Uncited citations refer to the third section of the first part of _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_, save for a commonly used quotation from Protagoras. 2. Nietzsche also discusses the overman in the section entitled "Why I Write Such Good Books" in _Ecce Homo_. I focus on _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ not only because its discussion of the overman precedes _Ecce Homo_ but also because the former attempts to say what the overman is while the latter wants to say what it is not. 3. I make this seemingly bold declaration in light of the fact that both _The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche_ and _Oaklander's Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction_ make citations from this particular translation. 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. _Beyond Good and Evil_. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Random House: 1966. 62. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. _Ecce Homo_. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Random House: 1967. From "Why I Write Such Good Books." 6. Nietzsche, Friedrich. _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Random House: 1966. 125. 7. Nietzsche, Friedrich. _The Gay Science_. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Random House: 1974. 335. ----------------------------------------------------------- GwDweb: http://www.GREENY.org/ GwD Publications: http://gwd.mit.edu/ ftp://ftp.GREENY.org/gwd/ GwD BBSes: C.H.A.O.S. - http://chaos.GREENY.org/ Snake's Den - http://www.snakeden.org/ E-Mail: gwd@GREENY.org * GwD, Inc. - P.O. 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