Overcoming the Superman

by Julius Evola

Julius Evola critically examines the resurgence and limitations of Nietzsche’s “Superman” theory and explores how this idea, rooted in Indo-European traditions, has been misinterpreted by contemporary ideologies, such as racism and evolutionism.

This article was first published in the magazine Deutsches Volkstum (German Folk Culture) in 1936.

It is surprising how easily ideas that lack any real consistency often gain suggestive power — so much so that they create a kind of passionate alibi: those who believe them to be true experience them in a way that they eventually believe they are confirmed by their own experience. This applies, for example, to evolution and Darwinism. The theory of man’s evolution from animals and the selection of species through the survival of the fittest, through adaptation and hereditary transmission of traits — this materialist and anti-aristocratic myth of yesterday’s science is already recognized by everyone as a more than shaky hypothesis that has had its time and is increasingly losing its supposed “positive” foundations day by day. And yet, until recently, this theory represented a revelation for an entire generation: not as a hypothesis to be considered and tested within the purely scientific realm, among many others, but as a new and unquestionable worldview, as an illuminating discovery, as new knowledge once and for all won by the human race. There we find an art like that of Jack London’s as a typical example of the mentioned passionate alibis. Jack London often makes us experience the theory of evolution and natural selection. As the basis of his general view of life in a whole series of characters, events, descriptions, and episodes, it appears to us as true, as evident. The suggestive power of art presents a world to us as true, in which biological inheritance, the instinct for self-preservation, and the struggle for existence are indeed the leitmotifs, in which the highest type of man resembles more or less the type of the marvelous beast, the animal that, in full possession of all its forces and life instincts, has triumphed over everything, asserted itself against everything: as if it were the sum of a series of inheritances that have reached it through the dark paths of blood, from the primeval times of the savages, the forests, or ice deserts, if not even from prehuman animality.

Not too different is the atmosphere in which, in general, the myth of the “Superman” took form and life. The relationship partly goes back to Nietzsche. We say partly because Nietzsche’s philosophy is composed of far more diverse and heterogeneous components than commonly assumed. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the evolutionist superstition with its biological appendages could extensively operate in a field of Nietzsche’s thought that, although not insignificant, is naturally the most tenuous. One can say that what was understood of Nietzsche until recently primarily goes back to this area, precisely because it is in direct connection with the ideas prevalent at the time.

Nietzsche’s theory of the “Superman” is an appendage of naturalism — and as such, it is something that now belongs to the past and which, taken by itself, could mislead the aspirations of the best of the new generation — insofar as in it everything begins and ends in the “religion of life” or, better said, in the “superstition of life.” Thus, we would like to call a conception, in the center of which stands that pure vitality in its merely biological meaning, which natural science considers purely externally, by the same method it applies to matter, and which the “voluntarists,” the “intuitionists,” and the “activists” interpret as immediate sensation, as something immediately given by consciousness. In any case, such is only that of animal, instinctual, pre-personal life; it is the root and the deeper will of what in us is only body and nature. Now, the conceptions in question seem to want to see nothing else in man, or if they recognize something else, they always recognize it as a subordinate, derived reality in comparison to “life.” The “I” for them is not a supernatural principle, not an expression of another reality, but more or less the feeling of vital force, which can be increased or decreased, strengthened or weakened.

It is only from here that the well-known Nietzschean concept of the “revaluation of all values” and the consequent theory of power receives existence and significance to a certain extent. According to this, a number of ethical, social, and religious conceptions would have conspired against “life” for centuries, would have favored a pernicious selection in the wrong sense, insofar as everything in them was presented as spirit and value that kills and emasculates instinct, that clouds or diminishes the feeling of vital force. These are the values of “decadence” and “resentment” proclaimed by the slaves, the weak, the disinherited, the ill-fated, and with which they gradually eroded the basis on which, in healthy and strong times, the Superman and the right of the Superman as the ruler stood and triumphed. Nietzsche calls for an uprising against these “values of decadence”; he reveals their poison and sets up the criterion of a new valuation — that only what affirms, justifies, and enhances the instinct for life, whose highest expression for him is the “will to power,” should be considered true, moral, legitimate, spiritual, and beautiful; and that everything that removes, limits, condemns life is false, immoral, ugly, and illegal. Nietzsche proclaims a new religion of the will to power as a prelude to the dawn of a new epoch of the Superman. It must be admitted that Nietzsche understands the “will to power” as the will not only to external but also to inner mastery. The Superman is not only the master of men but also the one who matches the instincts, developed to an elemental, threatening vehemence, with the ability to absolutely control them, not in the sense of suppressing them, but of keeping them like wild animals on a leash and letting them loose whenever he wants. However, in either case, whether in the ruler over oneself or over others — in this part of Nietzsche’s philosophy — everything ends only in a feeling, a sensation.

The will to power, developed through good and evil, through the hardest trials and to the most absurd consequences, with absolute ruthlessness towards oneself and others, always has only the value of an intensified and heightened “life” feeling and an “I” that gains its consciousness and affirmation from nothing but this wild feeling. The tide rises, but it can lead nowhere and finds no transfiguration. The ascent is essentially in vain; the asceticism is dark, almost “demonic”; it enjoys itself; it is without higher significance. A commentator on Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, spoke of circumstances in which the intensity of life in its extreme degree — the “more-life” — transforms and virtually turns into another “quality,” into a “more-than-life.” But in the world of this Nietzschean Superman, the prerequisites for such a process to become reality are lacking: there is no idea, no reference point that would act as a transformer in the circuit and manifest this as “light,” as “super-life,” i.e., as revelation and affirmation of something supernatural. Apollo, the Olympian principle, the Olympian superiority, interpreted by Nietzsche as a symbol of the unreal and external, remains for him always the enemy and danger to Dionysus, i.e., to life, the untamable impetus of life that turns to itself, affirms itself, and does not want to be anything other than what it is, insofar as every beyond is considered an illusion and escape of impotent and sick people. The circle remains closed. And we hold it certain that the — albeit unconscious and speculative — conjuration of a life of the highest height, whose intensity could only be matched by a supernatural reference point, and the lack of possession of such a reference point, so that that intensity driven back into itself caused a kind of short circuit — we hold it certain that this was precisely the situation that actually led Nietzsche to a tragic end, to madness.

If “man is something that must be overcome,” if “man is the bridge between the animal and the Superman,” then this overcoming, this transition is illusory if one does not start from the premise of the existence of two opposing natures, two opposing worlds, and instead continues to consider nothing but “life” in its various forms and degrees of strength — “life” as the sole attribute. Today, it seems that “racism” in some of its misdirections, which certainly correspond neither to the higher ideality of the German tradition nor to that of the National Socialist revolution, is precisely taking up Nietzsche’s worst legacy again when it aims to reduce every value to the biological basis and to see in life, blood, and race the measure and preconditions for every spiritual form: it thus runs into a distorting limitation that straightforwardly blocks the path to true overcoming and true superhumanity. For us, however, what has always applied in all great traditions applies: that “life” is not spirit, and spirit is not “life,” but that spirit gives form to “life” and that what actually gains higher and compelling expression in “life” does not come from “life” itself, but from the spirit that reveals itself through life or by means of life, i.e., from something supernatural. If one has recognized the true center in this sense, then the first prerequisite for any true overcoming is to gradually lead self-awareness, the “I”-feeling, from the pole of “life” to the pole of “spirit.” But today the voluntarist, activist, and irrationalist tendencies work exactly in the opposite direction: by strengthening the purely physical and “vital” self-feeling in every way, they simultaneously reinforce the prison of the self, leading to a stiffening, a boasting, a brutalized and de-spiritualized conception of will and individuality, health and power, which amounts to many hindrances for inner emancipation. Here the circuits remain closed. The reference point for the “transformation” of “intensive life,” of “more-life” into a “more-than-life” is missing. The Superman does not go beyond the “beautiful, compelling beast” or the “demon” of Dostoevsky, this reduction of Nietzsche to the absurd. If the inwardly conjured intensity does not have the possibility to culminate in something, it can only give way to an exaggerated, tearing tension, that silent tragedy that the “titanic” always brings with it.

Olympian, on the other hand, is the true type of Superman: a calm greatness that expresses an irresistible superiority, something that frightens and simultaneously inspires admiration, suddenly evoking the sensation of a perfectly controlled yet dischargeable transcendent force, the marvelous and threatening feeling that antiquity always associated with the concept of numen. “Super-life” — i.e., spirit, the fully realized self in its supernatural form — which permeates and absolutely dominates everything that is merely “life” — this is the essence of that type. However, this type, the true Superman, cannot be traced back to a construct of contemporary thought. A quality characteristic of a super-race, the substance of what in the Nordic-Doric race was the classical ideal of form in the heroic-sacred-Hellenic cultural circle, has always been retained as a symbol in the ruling aristocracies. There is no great tradition of ancient Indo-Germanic antiquity that did not know it. The tradition of the “divine right” of legitimate kings, as male bearers of a power from above, is the last echo of this. If one understands the sudden reappearance of this ancient concept in a world where all great horizons were already missing, where there was nothing for its embodiment besides a confused desire for power and freedom, except for the profane and obscure myths of evolutionism and natural selection, one also understands the invisible birth of the Nietzschean theory of the Superman, its limits, and the way that can lead beyond it.

(translated by Heinrich Matterhorn)