Prototypes of Nietzsche's Übermensch in Dostoevsky
Patrick Mooney
Philosophy 102
March 20, 1998
The definition of übermensch, or overman, in Barron's Concise Student's Encyclopedia makes anyone who has read Nietzsche's Zarathustra -- even aphoristically, as I tried to do at first -- cringe. Barron's Encyclopedia defines an overman as someone who "has his act together and gets things done." Of course, considering that this is a summary of one part of Nietzsche's ideas, and that the encyclopedia reduces his entire philosophy to one short paragraph, this is not a poor definition. But it eliminates parts of Nietzsche's concept of the overman, or superman, which are essential to an understanding of this idea.
Walter Kaufmann provides a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's philosophy in his work Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, a book which Thomas Mann called "a work of great superiority over everything previously achieved in Nietzsche criticism and interpretation." Kaufmann outlines several essential characteristics of the overman throughout the work. Perhaps the most important, and most central, characteristic of the overman is that the overman is one who has overcome his nature as a normal man. "Man is something that shall be overcome" is a phrase that occurs throughout Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a work which (it seems to me) most completely developed the idea of the overman of all of Nietzsche's books. (Zarathustra, I, Preface, 3)
For Nietzsche, the vast majority of people have no value. This is repeated by Walter Kaufmann several times throughout his Nietzsche. At one point, Kaufmann, explaining Nietzsche, states that man's inherent value is "zero," and states that only a few people have any value at all; in Kaufmann's words, "the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee." (Nietzsche 150; Nietzsche 151) The individuals with value are the overmen.
This process of overcoming the state of normal humanity is done in several ways, but perhaps the most important of these is the sublimation of normal human impulses. For Nietzsche, all human impulses -- indeed, all human activity -- is explainable in terms of his will to power. As he says in Beyond Good and Evil,
Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic for of the will -- namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic function could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment -- it is one problem -- then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as -- will to power. (Beyond Good and Evil, 36)
Nietzsche establishes a "long line of degrees" of the expression of the will to power. (Dawn 113) The overman is one who has attained the highest degrees expression in his will to power. Philosophy is one of these highest degrees. (Beyond Good and Evil 9) For Nietzsche, the more common expressions of the will to power (the sexual drive, for instance) are the lower ones, and must be sublimated, or redirected, so that the will to power expresses itself in higher, more creative ways. (Kaufmann 220) Art, for instance, is one of these ways, an idea which Nietzsche develops beginning with The Birth of Tragedy. To use the vocabulary developed in The Birth of Tragedy, sublimation is Apollo's triumph over Dionysus; it is the rational control of the impulses. Nietzsche later developed the idea, however, that both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are simply aspects of the will to power (the will to power is a dialectical process between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces, as Kaufmann stated on page 238 of his Nietzsche), and referred to the process which, earlier, had been referred to simply as Apollo's triumph over Dionysus as the Dionysian force. (Nietzsche 281)
Another important characteristic of the overman is that he has realized his "true self" so that his existence does not become a "thoughtless accident." (Nietzsche 309) For Nietzsche, a person who has realized his "true self" is a "cultured" man, and a man with "culture" is one who has reconciled his inner and outer natures. (Nietzsche 158) As before, this is done through a process of self-overcoming (Kaufmann uses the word "transcendence" several times) and the overcoming of obstacles to build self-reliance.
Finally, it is important to note that Nietzsche's overman is not bound by conventional standards of morality. In Zarathustra, for instance, Nietzsche's protagonist Zarathustra (who proclaims "I teach you the overman" in section three of the preface) urges us to "break, break, you lovers of knowledge, the old tablets" of values which "hang over every people." (Zarathustra III, 12, 7; Zarathustra I, 15; Nietzsche 250)
I believe that it would be possible to argue that the overman is a moral agent. However, the overman would be a very different type of moral agent than we traditionally consider when we think of this term. Because, for Nietzsche, the "greatest recent event -- that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian god has ceased to be believable -- is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe." (Gay Science 343) Without God, we can have no ultimate source of morality, of right and wrong. Hence, Nietzsche is not concerned with particular actions, but rather with the state of a person's being; if the demon of eternal recurrence were to appear to us, Nietzsche tells us that the overman would be able to rejoice in the fact that his present life would occur again and again. So, if an overman is a moral agent, he is not an agent of an absolute morality for each action, but rather an agent which affirms a state of being as the ultimate state of being that a human can achieve.
Dostoevsky's character Raskolnikov develops some very similar ideas in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, a poor and starving former student, conceives of the idea to kill an old pawnbroker and steal her money. Raskolnikov reasons that, because the old pawnbroker is evil, he will actually be benefitting society by murdering her. When he also steals her money, he will be able to do all sorts of "good" things with it, so the good that comes from the deed will outweigh the evil. After a long process of deliberation, Raskolnikov commits the murder, although he feels as if he were guided to it by an outside force; he thinks later that he feels as if someone else had planned his every move because his decision to commit the murder is based upon a large number of fortuitous circumstances occurring together. At this point, Raskolnikov becomes ill, when he is not actually delirious, and Dostoevsky spends the main portion of the novel describing the psychological agony that Raskolnikov undergoes after committing the murder and the psychological torture that police inspector Zossimov subjects him to when he becomes a suspect of the crime. Finally, Raskolnikov breaks down, confesses, and is shipped to a forced labor camp in Siberia to do penance for his crime.
It might be argued that Raskolnikov is an overman, because he thinks that conventional laws of morality do not apply to him and because he acts as a moral agent. Raskolnikov even makes an argument very similar to Nietzsche's when he says, over and over, that great men (the Napoleons and Galileos of the world) must not be subject to the morality which binds others. However, there are several crucial characteristics of a Nietzschean overman that Raskolnikov lacks.
One of the most important of these is health. One of Nietzsche's overmen must be healthy, not only physically, but psychologically. Kaufmann explains Nietzsche's concept of health "not as an accidental lack of infection but as the ability to overcome disease." Raskolnikov spends a good part of the book insane; in the rest, he is sickly. He fails to meet this requirement.
Another, more important difference between Raskolnikov and the Nietzschean overman is faith. Raskolnikov's eventual salvation comes through a prostitute, whose faith eventually convinces Raskolnikov that, to paraphrase Ivan Karamazov, God is not dead and all is not permitted. Nietzsche, however, condemned "faith" throughout his works -- at least, he condemned faith as a tool of the overman. Zarathustra declared, "For you it is a disgrace to pray!" (Zarathustra, III, 8, 2)
Raskolnikov also feels as if he is guided to his deed, his rejection of conventional morality, by an outside force. For Nietzsche, the overman must use his will to overcome the standards of the all-too-human. Raskolnikov plays with the idea of the murder of the old pawnbroker woman in his head, almost as if it were a mathematical problem or as if he were working out the details of a detective story he were going to write. At the end, he fails to will himself to commit the crime; it simply happens. Rather than sublimating his drive for power, and expressing it in a higher manner (as Nietzsche suggests that the overman does), his basic passions find an outlet by chance, through a lucky coincidence. Rather than sublimating his drive for power, rather than channeling it so that it is expressed in a higher form, Raskolnikov simply gives vent to his "animalic" (to use Kaufmann's term) urges. In his Nietzsche, Kaufmann has a passage which might almost be aimed at Raskolnikov: While discussing the overman, Kaufmann says,
The unphilosophic and inartistic mass remain animalic, while the man who overcomes himself, sublimating his impulses, consecrating his passions, and giving style to his character, becomes truly human or -- as Zarathustra would say, enraptured by the word über -- superhuman. . . . the "superman" is the one who has transfigured his physis and acquired self-mastery. (Nietzsche 312)
Raskolnikov fails on all counts. He does not overcome himself by sublimating his impulses -- he submits to them. He does not consecrate his passions -- he embraces a religion which, typically, holds ascetic ideals as the highest ethical standard for humanity. (See, for instance, Matthew 19:10-12, Galatians 5:17, and Revelation 14:4.) He does not give style to his character through the murder, his repudiation of typical morality -- he blunders along blindly in the act, and murders a bystander, almost accidentally. To return to the Barron's Encyclopedia definition of the overman, Raskolnikov does not "have his act together" and does not "get things done."
Finally, it is important to realize that, for Nietzsche, no one ever is an overman -- it is something that is worthy as an ideal. As Zarathustra says, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under." (Zarathustra, I, Preface, 4) Raskolnikov, then, is in error in thinking that he is the overman: the overman is an ideal for which we can reach, and it may guide us in the process of becoming which we undergo in our lives, but it is not an end that we can actually reach.
It should be noted that it is quite likely that Dostoevsky never even heard of Nietzsche, and Nietzsche did not read Dostoevsky's works until very late in his career -- much later than any of the works I have cited here. (Kaufmann, "Notes" 118) Dostoevsky, then, was not trying to give an example of a particular Nietzschean type. But the similarities between the thoughts of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche are striking, and are worthy of consideration.
Rather than giving us an example of an overman, then, Dostoevsky has given us an example of what Nietzsche might term the all-too-human -- the people who fail to transcend their "animalic" natures, who fail to become (or do not even try to become) overmen. As an ethical guide, Raskolnikov might serve Nietzscheans everywhere as an example of the dangers of "breaking the old tablets." Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, then, can be a valuable book for those considering and evaluating Nietzsche's philosophy.
References
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Laurel, 1959.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Andrew MacAndrew. New York: Bantam, 1981.
Kaufmann, Walter. Notes to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.
Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Fourth Edition. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Mann, Thomas, quoted on the back cover of Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, Friederich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
Nietzsche, Friederich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover, 1995.
Nietzsche, Friederich. The Dawn, quoted in Kaufmann's Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, Friederich. The Gay Science in The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1958.
"Nietzsche, Friederich" in Barron's Concise Student's Encyclopedia. 1993.
Nietzsche, Friederich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.
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