Gillespie, Michael Allen. “‘Slouching Toward Bethlehem to Be Born’: On the Nature and Meaning of Nietzsche’s Superman.” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 30, no. 1 (2005): 49–69.

Excerpt:

“Nietzsche’s name in our time has been indelibly linked with four ideas: the death of God, nihilism, the will to power, and the superman. These ideas, however, are not as central to his work as we often assume. The death of God, for example, is not announced in his published work until the first edition of The Gay Science (1882). The idea of the will to power first appears in print only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), and while it occasionally recurs in his later published work, it gains its preeminent stature only after Nietzsche’s death, and then largely as a result of his sister’s misrepresentation of some of his notes as a magnum opus called The Will to Power. This error was exacerbated by Heidegger’s emphasis on this supposed work as part of his attempt to show that Nietzsche was really a metaphysical thinker. The concept of nihilism appears even later in Nietzsche’s thought. He uses the term in print briefly beginning in 1886, but he abandons it in 1888 in favor of the idea of decadence. Here again the posthumous publication of his notes gave readers a distorted view of the importance of this concept for his thought. None of these concepts, however, plays as important a role in the public perception of Nietzsche as the idea of the superman, which is certainly the most famous of Nietzsche’s many powerful images. This idea, however, actually plays an even smaller role than the other three in both his published work and in his unpublished notes. It appears only fifty-three times in his published works and seventy-eight times in the Nachlass. Outside Zarathustra, the notes for Zarathustra, or the discussion ofZarathustra in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche uses the term only eight times, and then in a different or at least in a derivative sense, typically referring to, “a kind of superman,” or “a mixture of non-man and superman.” In Nietzsche’s work, the concept properly understood is thus really used only by a single character in a single work and then apparently abandoned. What, then, accounts for the astonishing popularity of the concept? And more importantly, is this concept as crucial for Nietzsche as its popularity would seem to suggest?”

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