BEYOND NIETZSCHE

1. Nietzsche's 'overman' (übermensch), as described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is arguably more diabolic than divine, more metachemical than metaphysical, more objectively free than subjectively bound, more evil than wise, more will than soul, more beauty than truth, more fire than air.

2. I have shown that the 'overman', the upper-class person, can be diabolic or divine, female or male, unwoman or subman, free or bound, and that only the latter is commensurate with truth and joy, and hence the wisdom of philosophy.

3. The Zarathustrian 'overman' seems to me more the product of poetic imagination than of philosophic individuation, a creature ruled by power rather than led by contentment.

4. For years - right from the dualistic beginnings of my philosophical career to the recent transcendental flowering of it - I adhered to the identification of the Nietzschean 'overman' with the concept, widely prevalent, of 'superman', never for a moment imagining that the superman could be anything but a godly individual (and this despite Nietzsche's identification of him as the meaning of the earth!), commensurate with the ne plus ultra of human maturation.

5. Little did I realize that the superman is not even commensurate with upper-class or noumenal criteria in space and time! That, on the contrary, the superman is a paradoxical approach to strength which could only be secondary to the water-based (chemical) strength per se of the superwoman, of what is superfeminine, and that both alike are lower-class and therefore phenomenal parallels.

6. Thus as a vegetative (muscular) paradox, the superman became for me the male equivalent, in volume and mass, of the feminine woman, the quasi-humanist woman for whom knowledge, if paradoxically approached via water, viz. the tongue, was more important than strength.

7. In other words, the muscular man, a superman, and the intellectual woman, a feminine woman, were equally distinct from the generality of lower-class females and males, the former superfeminine in their watery strength and the latter masculine in their vegetative knowledge.

8. Thus supermen, commensurate with the supermasculine, and women, commensurate with the feminine, stand apart from the generality of chemical females and physical males as paradoxical exceptions to the general rule of superwomen and men, the former superfeminine and the latter masculine.

9. Far from being upper class and 'overmen', both the superfeminine superwoman and the supermasculine superman, the genuine and paradoxical manifestations, in strength, of supernaturalism/superhumanism, transpire to being lower class and, in Nietzschean parlance, 'undermen' (untermenschen), like water under fire, or the chemical under the metachemical.

10. Likewise feminine women and masculine men, the paradoxical and genuine manifestations, in knowledge, of naturalism/humanism, transpire to being lower class and ... 'undermen', like vegetation under air, or the physical under the metaphysical.

11. Thus the one kind of 'underman' is akin to woman under the Devil, while the other kind is akin to man under God - the superfeminine/supermasculine under the unfeminine/unmasculine on the one hand and the feminine/masculine under the subfeminine/submasculine on the other hand.

12. Thus my concept of the 'overman', divisible between devils and gods, the unnatural/unhuman and the subnatural/subhuman, bears no relation to anything supernatural/superhuman whatsoever, since more genuinely representative, it seems to me, of what are in fact upper-class, and hence noumenal, positions.

13. Far from the superman, it is the subman who is the ne plus ultra of human maturation, the type of the philosopher rather than of the dramatist, and his principal concern, whether in sensuality or sensibility, can only be with metaphysical being.

14. Certainly the subman is not to be thought of, in disparaging vein, as somehow sub-human, meaning, I would guess, less than human and therefore effectively pre-human.

15. On the contrary, the subman is neither pre-human nor post-human, nor even human-all-too-human, since deeper and higher than the generality of humanistic men, with their natural/human shortcomings in relation to God, or to what is godly.

16. Both the subwoman, corresponding to the subfeminine, and the subman, corresponding to the submasculine, are transcendentalist, given their respective gender-conditioned approaches to the subnaturalism/subhumanism of metaphysics, with its fulcrum in being.

17. Even the subhuman are divisible, as hinted above, between chemical, physical, and metaphysical approaches to transcendentalism, whether in the idealistic context of religion or otherwise, though only the metaphysical subman, properly submasculine, is truly commensurate with transcendentalism, and thus with a first-hand commitment to either music (in sensuality) or meditation (in sensibility).

18. Certainly the meditating subman, the devotee of transcendental meditation, is the ultimate type of metaphysician, and it is for him that the greatest joy in the deepest being becomes the heavenly redemption of his godly taking, metaphysical soul duly eclipsing metaphysical ego with the assistance, in secondary vein, of the metaphysical will and spirit, the metaphysical doing and giving (in lungs and breath), of meditative praxis.