The Übermensch and the Revaluation of All Values

The figure of the Übermensch (often translated 'overman' or, more misleadingly, 'superman') is announced in the Prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), where Zarathustra, descending from ten years of solitude in the mountains, proclaims to a crowd gathered in a marketplace that 'man is something that shall be overcome' and that the Übermensch is 'the meaning of the earth,' urging his listeners to remain faithful to the earth rather than seeking otherworldly hopes. Nietzsche presents the Übermensch not as a biologically distinct future species, and explicitly not as a program for eugenic breeding — a reading later grotesquely appropriated by National Socialist propagandists in the 1930s with the active complicity of the Nietzsche Archive under Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who cultivated relationships with the Nazi regime and, notoriously, arranged a visit by Adolf Hitler to the Archive in 1934 — but as an aspirational figure of self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung), one who creates and lives by values of his or her own making rather than inheriting them unreflectively from religious or social convention.