Today's Philosophical Quotation Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra Translation: I teach you the Overman Superman. Man is something which shall be surpassed. These are some of the most famous words of Nietzsche, they are extremely ambivalent and provocative and the term Übermensch has been trivialised, misunderstood and discredited by the Nazis in Germany's dark age from 1933-45. I'd like to explain a little how I read them. In contrast to what most people associate when hearing this quotation I think Nietzsche does not think about race or even master's race (Herrenrasse) here. Those words do not appear in Also sprach Zarathustra. This is a statement of modesty and farsightedness. Man is not the crown of the evolution as the bible implies. And the evolution which lead to man does not finish there. Man is just a stage, not a final state of evolution. The big question is how the overman can be reached. Probably Nietzsche thought the overman can be bred (by man), but here I really have my doubts. That sounds like Münchhausen's paradox/dilemma (to draw oneself plus horse out of the mud by oneself's shock of hair) to me. But I think mankind can only survive long-term if man surpasses himself. If mankind stays on its current mediocre level it will be doomed soon. A good starting place to get a grasp of Nietzsche's thinking is his short essay from 1873 (when he was 29 years old) Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne. English-only readers should either use Altavista's Babelfish translation service or look for the English translation "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense". That essay illustrates the problematic limited nature of the concept of anthropomorphism.