![]() ![]() Walter Kaufmann's vastly influential translations and interpretations have led generations of translators and readers to suppose that Nietzsche's new use of this term referred merely to his admiration for extraordinary human individuals such as Napoleon and Goethe. This particular use did not exist in the German language at all, not even in Nietzsche’s own published texts, prior to its introduction in 1883 with the publication of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But he invented the third use in response to Darwin’s theory of the origin of the human species. ![]() ![]() He inherited the first two uses from earlier traditions in German writing, one having to do with philological investigations of validating mythological narratives, and the other having to do with the Romantic valorization of heroic individuals. Throughout his career, he used this term in three different ways: we call these the supernatural use, the superior-individual use, and the superior species use. In pages 730-732 and 748-797 of this excerpt from Volume 14 of CWFN, we discuss Nietzsche's invention in his 1882-1884 notebooks of a new use for the German term Übermensch. ![]()
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