Becoming Superman

Maximizing our potential and becoming who we are in the process

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Potential.

We’re all capable of being more than what we are, and yet few of us take the necessary steps to abandon the world we know for the world that could be.

In his most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche lays out what can be interpreted as a thought experiment in evolution and in what each of us are capable of.

Zarathustra, a hermit-like prophet, presents himself to a village with the wisdom he has acquired. In his message to the villagers, Zarathustra advises the world needs new goals.

“The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope,” Zarathustra states.

But the villagers are not jumping to change, in fact, many are comfortable in the existence they know and live. They like the beliefs they have. Why change a good thing? Zarathustra continues:

“His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir! I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves!”

In order to truly uncover our potential, we must be willing to give up the notion of what we believed of ourselves and the world, we must abandon it for the greater purpose of exploring what we ourselves are made of. But perhaps more importantly, what we could be.

There is comfort in what we know, but comfort does not move us to fulfilling our potential. We do not become who we need to be by accepting the life we have. Rather, we must abandon the comfort of our known existence and begin the pursuit of what we can become. It is only through this arduous pursuit that we can discover, and in turn, become ourselves.

If we do not choose this path, we cannot choose the path we wish to walk. And if we do not choose it for ourselves, then it will be chosen for us.

“Man is a thing to overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” Zarathustra asks the villagers.

Zarathustra is there to advise the villagers that they hold the ability to be special, to be the conduit between the evolutionary past of apes, and the future of what Nietzsche calls the superman (Übermensch).

Like with our potential, the villagers have a choice: they can ignore Zarathustra’s advice of the superman and just continue on with their daily lives. Or they can use it to wake up, see it as a call to action, and realize the opportunity they have.

The villagers are “a rope fastened between animal and superman, a rope over an abyss” for which they can make the decision of what to do. They can choose to sit with their history and current living, or they can choose to stretch, to be that bridge to the future, to help push evolution to the next level, to the superman.

We too have a choice. We in our present state are at an impasse. We can choose between continuing the life we know. There is comfort here. It has its negatives but we know what to expect.

Or we can choose to be more than our present state, to reach for the next generation of ourselves, to imagine what we could be, and do what is necessary to achieve that.

We must, in other words, strive to be beyond what we are. By doing so, we not only create something beyond what we could imagine but we help build society to push beyond what was ever thought possible.

But this requires strife, friction, and struggle. The antithesis of comfort and what we know.

Achieving our potential is not just aspirational, it is painful, it requires grit and determination. It requires the ability to push on when suffering sets in.

Nietzsche’s answer to suffering is that of pure acceptance: amor fati, a love of one’s fate. A total embrace of life and what it has to offer, both pain and pleasure, victory and loss, good and bad.

Suffering is a part of becoming, it’s inherent in striving, in pushing our boundaries, in moving ourselves from mediocre to excellent. But we can’t do this by having an overly positive attitude, we must have a realistic approach to life, one that aspires for more and does what is required to achieve such ends.

In so doing, we not only provide ourselves an opportunity to fulfill our potential, we learn to understand who we are, and in the process, become that person.

So the decision we must make is this: do we want to strive to be what we can imagine? Or will we be content with what we have?

Before you go…

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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