On the Ubermensch: Domination or Self-Erasure
Abstract: I briefly argue that the idea of the ubermensch is burdened by the necessity to either choose forms of worldly domination or forms of worldly retreat—that, broadly, “neutrality” is not an option for “higher men.”
The self-mythmaking of the ubermensch suffers from an internal preordination: set in the real world, the endgame of the ubermensch is either domination or self-erasure—it must be one, and cannot be both. The genteel tradition, having appropriated the sinews of transcendentalism and having mixed it with German idealism, ironically reached its apotheosis not in the United States, but in the European tension between nihilism and the ubermensch that spilled out into 20th century postmodernism. Or: while the nadir of the genteel faith produced a particular form of the final man, its zenith signaled the bifurcation of the ubermensch, it signaled a two-pronged possibility for the trajectory of higher-men: either one who, with conviction drawn from some inner furnace, sees the world as something to dominate, to intervene into (the power of the monist)—I think here of someone like Bataille; or one who represents something like Virginia Woolf and William James’s aesthetic self-erasure, the attempt to “leave the world as it is” (the art of the pluralist), quieta non movere—the shadow of a Mallarme.
Both are a response to the inherent boredom of the genteel self, e.g. to its self-exhaustion, to the self-cruelty Nietzsche was so keen to triangulate, and which exhausts its capacity to look inward at some arbitrary point only to then—what?—turn its energies outward. By drilling as inward as possible, the trajectory that Descartes and Kant began could only and necessarily explode as exogenous violence. The arc of the genteel tradition, in its fulfillment of the demands of an infinite individualism, must therefore come to erase the self it most fully and robustly inaugurated (and which inaugurated it), and delineate the general response for a type-of confused, internal/external internationalism: either the imperialism of pragmatism, cast outward and unto the world, or the isolationism of idealism, the stoic retreat into ancient cloisters that sound and echo not.
When all is said and done, one either turns back to the world to act, or decides to leave it alone. What is left in the ash-heap are only activists and stoics—post-genteelism, there is no neutrality toward this decision, only the responsibility of the decision itself. It is acceptance of this deontology that instructs much of the overman’s ability to self-realize.