Superman's Vision

In the long chain of human self-deception — from the shadows of Plato’s cave through Feuerbach’s projected gods to Kant’s unleashed reason — the critique of religious exploitation culminates in Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical transvaluation of all values. The history of religion is a chronicle of exploitation: invented gods as mirrors of human weakness, magical self-enchantment as an escape from the harshness of immanence, institutionalized priests as guardians of a slave morality that weakens the strong and elevates the weak.Socrates, the first martyr of truth, sacrificed himself to the hemlock cup to pierce the illusions of the polis; Kant shattered the chains of immaturity with the courage of autonomy. But Nietzsche goes further: his Übermensch is the ultimate unmasker of this deception — one who not only endures reality but affirms it, without backward-looking enchantment, through an amor fati that transforms supposed transcendence into a beloved necessity. He does not appear as a prophet of enlightenment, but as a dancing philosopher who embraces fate.

The Exploitation by Invented Gods: Nietzsche’s Diagnosis

Nietzsche’s critique of religion is relentless: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” This famous declaration from The Gay Science (1882) exposes Christian morality as a slave revolt against the vitality of life — an exploitation that forces man into the role of the eternal guilty one.Feuerbach had already unmasked God as the reflection of man — a projection of his own desires to bewitch finitude. Nietzsche radicalizes this: religion is not only illusion but active enslavement. The priests, those “disguised preachers of hatred,” install an afterlife that poisons this life — a magical loop in which the believer sanctifies his own suffering as divine trial and thus cements the rule of the weak.

The Übermensch sees through this deception not merely as a critic but as a creator of new values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Nietzsche proclaims: man is a bridge, not a goal — and the Übermensch is the goal beyond the “last man,” that cowardly being wallowing in religious consolation. Here the circle closes back to Socrates: as the Athenian philosopher endured the accusations of impiety, so the Übermensch endures the harshness of a godless world. No transcendental causality, as Kant denied it; no priestly absolute — only the naked recurrence of the same, which Nietzsche understands as the eternal test of the will to power.Religion, that “great lie,” is exposed as an instrument of exploitation that diverts man from his creative potential.

The Harshness of Reality: Without Self-Enchantment

Nietzsche turns back toward Enlightenment — not as regression, but as a dialectic of strength. Kant’s “Sapere aude!” becomes, in him, a call to wield reason not as a cold judge but as a passionate hammer: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”The Übermensch endures the harshness of reality because he does not enchant it. No god as buffer against suffering, no soul as escape from the body — instead, radical immanence, in which pain and ecstasy become one. This is amor fati:

“My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less to conceal it — but to love it.”

Here, supposed transcendence is not rejected but reinterpreted: fate is no distant god, but the beloved necessity of one’s own being — a love that completes Enlightenment by uniting reason with the Dionysian.

Unlike Socratic Apologia, where death is celebrated as a rational transition to the immortality of the soul, Nietzsche celebrates the suicide of the old man as the ecstasy of the new. The hemlock cup becomes the chalice of Dionysus: the Übermensch drinks the poison of life to ferment from it the wine of affirmation. No more priests proclaiming morality as divine decree — instead, the individual who forges his own values, endures the hardness, and dances in the eternal recurrence.This is a reversal — not back into the cave of illusions, but back to the archaic strength of the Greeks, whom Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), praised as a synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionysian: an Enlightenment that does not disenchant but re-enchants, without deception.

Amor Fati: The Lover of His Fate

The Übermensch appears as the lover of his fate — not as a slave to invented transcendence, but as the master of immanence.

“Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I will not wage war against the ugly. I will not accuse; I will not even accuse the accusers; and it shall be all right with me if I myself should accuse.”

In this attitude, critique and affirmation merge: the deception of religion is unmasked, yet instead of despair comes the great yes-saying. The exploitation by invented gods — that magical self-enchantment which Feuerbach saw as an anthropological necessity — is overcome when the Übermensch loves what is ugly and necessary. It is a transcendence of the earth: not a beyond, but the depth of the here, where man embraces his fate as a lover.

Nietzsche warns of a new enchantment — science as the new religion, forcing the Übermensch into dry rationality. Instead, he demands a return to Enlightenment as living power: to endure hardness, see through deception, and yet love. As Socrates in the Phaedo freed the soul, so the Übermensch frees the will — through amor fati to greatness.

Resonance: From Magician to Dancer

The history of exploitation does not end with Nietzsche; it challenges us. The Übermensch is not an ideal but a task — the one who sees through, endures, and affirms. In a world still haunted by religious shadows, he calls out: “Become who you are!” Without self-enchantment, with a backward leap to the strongest Enlightenment, as the lover of fate.Socrates died for truth; Nietzsche lived it: the death of God is the birth-pain of the Übermensch. And in the eternal loop of recurrence, amor fati whispers: nothing is to be changed — everything is to be loved.

The Honesty of the Übermensch According to Nietzsche

First of all: yes, the Übermensch is honest — but not in the conventional, bourgeois, or moral sense of “honesty” aimed at avoiding lies or adhering to norms. Nietzsche understands honesty (Redlichkeit) as a radical intellectual and existential practice: a merciless self-knowledge that forces man to face his strengths and weaknesses, his drives and illusions, without fleeing into delusions or false values. It is a “duty to truth” beyond good and evil, which distinguishes the Übermensch as the creator of new values — he does not deceive himself but affirms life in its chaotic, powerful totality. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this is implied as a prerequisite for overcoming man: the Übermensch “recognizes himself as justice itself,” because he no longer distorts the world through moral filters but charts it as his own becoming.This honesty is affirmative, not ascetic — it serves the enhancement of power, not self-abasement.

The Übermensch is probably also animated by the will to power, dwelling already beyond good and evil — a lover of his fate, rejoicing in the eternal recurrence of the same.