Think of Nietzsche. Think of Ubermenschlikeit(supermanlike). Nietzsche was the child of Darwin and the brother of Bismarck wrote Will Durant. How very true. It does not matter that Nietzsche ridiculed the English evolutionists and the German nationalists; he was accustomed to denounce those who had most influenced him.
The ethical theory of Spencer was not the most natural corollary of the theory of evolution. If life is a struggle for existence in which only the fittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue and weakness a fault.
Thinkers during that period came up with the thought that in this battle called life, what we need is not goodness but strength, not humility but pride, not altruism but intelligence, and that equality and democracy are against the grain of selection and survival and that not the masses but geniuses are the goal of evolution. So Nietzsche conformed to this.
If all this were true then nothing was as significant than Bismarck. His blood and iron policy cleansed rotten Europe with an iron hand. He conquered Austria, then humbled France and got all those little German states to fuse themselves into a single mighty empire. The growing military and industrial strength of this new Germany needed a voice; it needed a philosophy for the justification of war. Christianity would not justify this, but Darwinism could. Given a little audacity this can be accomplished. Nietzsche had it and became its voice.
Hi idea was “Not mankind but superman is the goal”. The very last thing a sensible man would undertake is to improve mankind, mankind does not improve and it does not exist—it is an abstraction and all that exists is an ant-hill of individuals.
At first Nietzsche spoke as if his hope were for the production of a new species but later he came to think of his concept of the Ubermensch or the superman who as the superior individual rose precariously out of the mass mediocrity. The superman owing his existence more to deliberate breeding and careful nurture than to the hazards of natural selection.
The superman can survive only by human selction by eugenic foresight and a formidable education. He found it absurd to let “higher” individuals to marry “lower” individuals out of love-heroes with servant girls and geniuses with seamstresses.
He thought that love is not eugenic and a man in love should not be allowed to take any decisions affecting his entire life, coz it is not given to man to love and be wise. The best should marry only the best and love should be left to the riff raff. The purpose of marriage should not be mere production but also development of the produced.
Without good birth nobility is impossible, he said. Intellect alone does not ennoble, something else is needed for that. What is it? Given good birth and eugenic breeding the next in the formula for a superman is a severe school where perfection will be strived for. There will be few comforts and many responsibilities, where the body will be taught to suffer in silence and the will may learn to obey and to command. No libertarian freedom. Yet one will learn to laugh heartily; he said that grading should be done on a persons capacity to laugh. “He who strideth across the highest mountain laugheth at all tragedies”
He said that there will be no condemnation of the flesh but an asceticism of the will. Hence he told the girls, “Cease not to dance, ye sweet girls! No spoil sport hath come unto you with an evil eye….no enemy of girls with beautiful ankles” Even superman may have a taste for the flesh.
A man so bred would be beyond good and evil, he would be fearless rather than good. What is good? To be brave is to be good. What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power in man itself. What is bad? All that comes from weakness.
Perhaps the dominant mark of the superman would be love of danger and strife provided they have a purpose. He will not seek safety first but he will leave happiness to many. The character in his book “Thus Spake Zarathusthra” amply does all these.
He justifies war that it brings out the best in an individual and that war is good despite the pettiness of its causes in modern times. “a good war halloweth any cause”. Don't know whether Bush follows this concept.
He says that even revolution is good, but not in itself as nothing can be more miserable than the supremacy of the masses, but that it helps to bring out the latent greatness in an individual who did not have a stimulus or an opportunity. Napoleon out of the French revolution is a prime example.
Energy, intellect and pride in harmonious synchronization is the hallmark of the Superman or the Ubermensch. “Ye lonely ones of today, ye who stand apart, ye shall one day be a people; from you who have chosen yourselves, a chosen people shall arise and from it, the Superman.
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