Nietzsche's <i>Übermensch</i> is not <i>über Alles</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay deals critically with Nietzsche’s anthropological typology of the “free spirit par excellence”, “we spirits”, persons endowed with positive as against negative powers, and the ideal of the Übermensch. From this presentation, which actually amounts to a concise summary of my various publications on Nietzsche, I draw two conclusions: The first, and quite surprising one, is that it was not Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch that was the pinnacle of his anthropological philosophy but the even more ideal type of the “free spirit par excellence”. The second, and less surprising, conclusion asserts that a society consisting of such “free spirits” is impossible. This finding will be highlighted by contrasting the Übermenschen, who, according to Nietzsche, need society as a sine qua non for their cultivation, with free spirits par excellence, who, by definition, are free from any need of a society. We will see, however, that on Nietzsche’s terms the ideal of the Übermensch is also not viable in society. Hence this paper points to an inherent flaw in Nietzsche’s existential philosophy -- the non-viability of its most sublime ideals. Nonetheless, one has to speculate about Nietzsche’s reasons for introducing the ideal of the free spirit par excellence -- an ideal that he himself thought to be existentially impractical.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".