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“Übermensch” Is Said in Many Ways: On the Multiplicity of Names and the Refusal of Fixity

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Introduction Anyone reading Nietzsche with even minimal attentiveness soon notices a peculiar trait: when he approaches the question of value-creation, he rarely relies on a single name. Instead, a shifting constellation of figures appears: free spirits, new philosophers, commanders and legislators, teachers of the purpose of existence, contemplatives, higher types, nobles. The temptation is to treat these expressions as loosely interchangeable, or to assume that Nietzsche simply lacked terminological discipline. Yet this reaction overlooks something essential. The multiplication of names is not a failure of precision; it is a strategy aimed precisely at resisting the illusion that a concept could ever fully capture what is at stake. A proliferation that demands attention Across Nietzsche’s works, the same structural role is repeatedly inhabited by different figures. In The Gay Science , the “free spirit par excellence” is described as one who dances “even near abysses” and maint...
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Is the Übermensch One or Many? Reconsidering the Debate through The Antichrist §4

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A Metaphor for Exceptionality. AI image Introduction Discussions of the Übermensch repeatedly return to the same interpretive impasse. Readers regularly stumble over a seemingly simple question: is the Übermensch a singular individual or a collective figure, perhaps even a future species? The difficulty is not accidental. It is encouraged by the prophetic cadence of Thus Spoke Zarathustra , where Nietzsche places the concept in the mouth of a solitary teacher who announces what is to come. This tone easily invites messianic expectations. Yet the persistence of the question suggests that something more than stylistic ambiguity is at stake. A decisive clarification emerges when one turns to The Antichrist , where Nietzsche addresses the issue with striking precision. Read carefully, §4 dissolves the apparent dilemma by reframing the very terms in which it is posed. The Übermensch as Individual: Evidence from Zarathustra and Ecce Homo Positive textual evidence favors the individu...
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The Failed Integration: Jung and Nietzsche in the Seminar on Zarathustra

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Jung and Nietzsche, Degas-inspired. AI-generated image. Objective To analyze Jung’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a paradigmatic case of interaction between archetype, consciousness, and psychic disintegration, drawing primarily on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar and other relevant works by Carl Gustav Jung. Introduction Over many years, Carl Gustav Jung devoted sustained and meticulous attention to Friedrich Nietzsche, regarding his case as one of the most significant for understanding the relationship between archetype, consciousness, and psychic disintegration. His most extensive engagement is found in the seminar Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar (1934–1939), published posthumously in two volumes. In this work, Jung approaches Nietzsche neither as a philosopher nor as a literary figure, but as a psychological phenomenon in which symbolic expression reveals extreme tensions between the archetypal unconscious and the ego’s capacity to contain it. ...
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Jung’s Zarathustra: Archetype, Destiny, and the Self

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Introduction Nietzsche was not merely a philosopher; Thus Spoke Zarathustra constitutes a singular manifestation of psychic contents of extraordinary intensity. Jung, for his part, approached the work as a clinical and archetypal phenomenon in a seminar conducted between 1934 and 1939. For Jung, Zarathustra is not a conventional literary character but an irruption of the Self, capable of mobilizing unconscious energies that the author’s conscious ego cannot fully sustain. This article examines how Jung interprets the Dionysian eruption in Nietzsche, the attendant risk of psychic disintegration, and the symbolic function that makes individuation possible. The central thesis is that, although Zarathustra embodies a remarkable affirmation of life, its emergence without sufficient archetypal containment leads to a psychic danger that Jung analyzes with both clinical precision and philosophical depth. Nietzsche and the Archetypal Eruption Jung approached Zarathustra as a text in whi...
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Poe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche: Lines of Influence and Lines of Imagination

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Introduction The triangle formed by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche invites fascination…and caution. While Baudelaire’s intimate engagement with Poe is firmly documented, Nietzsche’s relation to either figure is far more oblique. No direct line of influence between Nietzsche and Poe exists, and evidence of Nietzsche reading Baudelaire is thin. Nevertheless, scholars have repeatedly returned to these three figures as emblematic of a broader genealogy of modernity: a lineage concerned with aesthetic autonomy, psychological depth, decadence, the critique of morality, and the darker impulses of the human psyche. Exploring this constellation means stepping into a space where literary history blends with philosophical interpretation and where documented fact intersects with conceptual resonance. What We Do Know: Baudelaire and Poe The strongest relation in this triad is between Baudelaire and Poe. Baudelaire discovered Poe in the late 1840s and felt an imme...
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Beginning with Ecce Homo: The Question of How to Approach Nietzsche

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Ecce Homo , surrealist style.Generated with DALL·E. Introducing Nietzsche Students frequently ask where to begin with Friedrich Nietzsche. Many teachers propose Beyond Good and Evil , On the Genealogy of Morals , or even Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Rarely does one hear a recommendation to start with Ecce Homo , a dizzying late work composed shortly before Nietzsche’s collapse. At first glance, the text reads like a catalogue of bold declarations and flamboyant self-presentations—hardly an intuitive starting point for newcomers. Yet Jacques Derrida suggests otherwise. In Otobiographies , he claims that the preface to Ecce Homo is “coextensive with Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre,” that Nietzsche’s complete body of writings “prefaces Ecce Homo and finds itself repeated in the few pages” introducing the book. Derrida’s remark invites us to reconsider whether this disconcerting autobiography might, under the right circumstances, serve as a legitimate point of entry. This essay explores th...
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