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# What Is the Übermensch?
- URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/what-is-the-ubermensch/
- Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:27:21.000Z
- Description: The Übermensch is not a superman or a master race but Nietzsche's name for the human being who stops receiving values and starts creating them.
- Author: Andrew Wessels
- Tags: Clancy Martin on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #essay

No idea of Friedrich Nietzsche's has been more abused than this one. Übermensch gets translated as superman, overman, superhuman, and dragged into comic books and worse. Clancy Martin, [who translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra](https://www.rebindclassics.com/clancy-martin-read-zarathustra-to-survive/), would rather you forget all of those. "We're going to leave it untranslated for our purposes," he says, "because I don't want any of the theoretical baggage that goes with past translations of the word. I want you to be able to think about the concept with fresh eyes." So set the cape aside. The Übermensch is neither a master race nor a superhero but something both stranger and more demanding.

Start with what Nietzsche actually says about it, because it is humbler than the legend. The Übermensch does not exist yet. Martin points to the line where Zarathustra looks at the greatest and smallest human beings and finds them disappointingly alike. "When I saw the greatest man and the smallest man and saw both of them naked, they looked very, very much like each other. [They were human, all too human](https://www.rebindclassics.com/bathroom-wall-nietzsche/)." Even our finest examples, in Nietzsche's view, have not yet become what a human being could be. The Übermensch is not a person who has arrived but a possibility held open in front of us, a direction rather than a destination.

## **The Three Metamorphoses: Camel, Lion, Child**

The clearest map Nietzsche gives for getting there is [the parable of the three metamorphoses](https://www.rebindclassics.com/camel-lion-child/), and Martin treats it as the spine of the whole book. The spirit becomes first a camel, then a lion, then a child. The camel is the one who carries, who takes on the heaviest burdens, who says I should and bears the weight of inherited duty. The lion is the one who rebels, who fights the great dragon called Thou Shalt, whose work is destruction: the lion cannot yet create new values, but it can win the freedom to create. And the child is the one who creates, who Nietzsche describes as innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a self-propelled wheel, a sacred yes. Martin reads the sequence as a real developmental arc, not an abstraction, and he reads it partly through his own life: the dutiful early self, the rebellious lion years he describes falling into during his time in the jewelry business, and only later something like the child's fresh beginning.

## **Self-Overcoming, Not Domination**

The Übermensch is not about power over other people, and this is where Martin most wants to correct the record. He is emphatic that [the will to power](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-most-falsified-idea/), the engine of self-overcoming, [has been catastrophically misread as a will to dominate](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-most-falsified-idea/). "Nothing could be further from the truth," he says. What Nietzsche actually means is visible "when you look at any human being who is in the struggle with herself to create something greater out of herself." The overcoming is internal. The opponent is yourself. Martin's own example is his collaborator: when John Kaag was writing his book on Nietzsche, the struggle was "writing and rewriting and reading and rereading," and "this search within himself for some of the most painful truths about himself." That is will to power. Not conquest. Self-creation.

Nietzsche gives the creative will an unforgettable image, and Martin lingers on it. In the stone, an image is sleeping. The Übermensch is the figure the sculptor sees inside the rough block, and the work is to carve everything else away. "Let it slumber in the hardest, ugliest stone," Martin says, glossing Zarathustra, "because that is what I, that image is what I am going to, like a sculptor, I'm going to carve away, I'm going to impose my will upon the stone to make that image, that idea I have to create real for me." The material is your own life, with all its ugliness and resistance. The image is what you could become. The Übermensch is not given. It is carved, painfully, out of the only stone you have.

## **The Way That Does Not Exist**

The most important guard Martin puts up against misreading is this: the Übermensch is radically individual, not a single template that everyone is supposed to match. Martin anchors this in the line he treats as the summary of Nietzsche's entire teaching: this is now my way, where is yours, for [the way that does not exist](https://www.rebindclassics.com/this-is-my-way-zarathustra-walden/). There is no universal path to the Übermensch, no program, no checklist. "There is just us on the earth trying to discover our own particular ways, our own particular values, our own particular flourishing." To become the Übermensch is to find a way of living that is unmistakably, unapologetically your own, "not good, not bad, but my taste, of which we are no longer ashamed." A mass-produced Übermensch is a contradiction in terms.

So what is the Übermensch? It is Nietzsche's name for the human being who has stopped receiving values and started creating them, who has carried the burdens like a camel, fought free like a lion, and begun again like a child. It is self-overcoming aimed at the self, not domination aimed at others. It is a possibility, not a person, held in front of us as the meaning of the earth. And it is irreducibly singular, available only to someone willing to say, with Zarathustra, that the universal way does not exist, that there is only my way, and to go looking for it. The Übermensch, in Martin's reading, is less a superhuman to admire than a question to live inside: what would you have to overcome in yourself to become what you actually could be?