Nietzsche imagined the "ubermensch". The reality is Hitler and Kevin Federline.

Zeus is dead.

Nietzsche here points out one of the things I really dislike about most modern atheists--Richard Dawkins, etc. Most of them reject Christianity, but nonetheless adopt values derived from Christianity--and don't bother really trying to question it or put it on some kind of philosophical grounding. Were they really to look closely at it, many of their moral tenets would evaporate like mist in the sunlight.

While I dislike Sam Harris in general, his remarks on morality are essential for an intellectually honest atheism. He proposes that we ground morality on scientific rationality and analysis of neuroscience and psychology. Which at the very least gives an atheist standing to make moral claims.

However, I do not believe that this will, as Harris hopes, be sufficient for a society wide morality or the end of moral dispute. There are too many lines of attack one can take. Nietzsche himself, for example, would raise the point that the scientific attitude Harris espouses is simply a manifestation of the will to nothing--the inversion of the will to power caused by socialization into a society that limits freedom of action, and overall an unhealthy way to be. It is out of the will to nothing that Judaism arose, he claims, and then later Christianity. In fact, he even says that the scientific attitude arose as the victory of the will to nothing over lingering elements of the will to power in Christianity.

To overcome nihilism, we must overcome the will to nothing. And so much for Sam Harris, if we're to follow Nietzsche's schema.

Beyond that, a couple of interesting notes.

The fact that the Madman carries a lantern is a reference to Diogenes of Sinope, one of the founders of the Cynic school of Greek philosophy. (Really more of a way of life than a school, though.) He was famous for living in a tub and carrying a lantern wherever he went. He was perceived as crazy, but all he was really trying to do was show the Athenians how ridiculous and irrational their customs and values were. The connection with questioning the values of modern man is obvious.

It isn't necessarily clear that Nietzsche thought the Ubermensch was an actual man who would live, or an ideal to strive for. It's essential to keep this ambiguity in mind when talking about the Ubermensch.

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