Notes on how to be Superman

Sri Aurobindo, an Indian mystic, was fascinated by Nietzsche, who he called a “troubled, profound, half-luminous” thinker. Nietzsche is full of “strange clarities and...rare gleaming intuitions that came marked with the stamp of an absolute truth and sovereignty of light."

Sri Aurobindo found the Nietzschean concept of the Superman interesting but half-baked. Man is “full of discords,” yet he “insists upon harmony.” Man is “possessed by Nature,” yet he is “convinced of his mission to possess and master her.” This is the Superman instinct in us.

And yet sometimes Nietzsche was “an apostle who never entirely understood his own message.” Sri Aurobindo writes that there are “two very different types of divinity” that are possible - he tags them Titan and God - and Nietzsche never clarified which way his Superman tilts.

For Sri Aurobindo, the Godly Superman is able to “grow in intuition, in joy, in love, in happy mastery” - he must be able to be “bold and swift and even violent without hurt or wickedness.” Superman's soul must have an inner compulsion to realize “its own greatest possibilities.”

The Titanic Superman, however, needs to “feel something writhing helpless under his heel” to feel powerful. This Titan is the “son of division and the strong flowering of the Ego.” To feel glory, he needs “ to coerce, exact, slay.”

Sri Aurobindo: “For Man is Nature’s great term of transition in which she grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open eyes towards her divine ideal.” As Nietzsche put it: “Man is a rope, tied between animal and overman— a rope over an abyss.”

Aspiring Supermen must remember that the God they’re trying to imitate is “complex, not simple.” A “short-cut to the divine” via an “exclusive worship” of 1 principle won’t work. Some principles people singularly worship to their own detriment: “Knowledge, Love, Power and Unity.”

Chase love exclusively and you’ll shut your psyche to knowledge for its “lack of sweetness and remoteness from the heart’s fervor.” Follow power blindly and you’ll reject “Love with scorn as a nurse of weaklings” and reduce knowledge to the “position of a squire of Force.”

If you pursue knowledge only, your heart is “dulled” and your “divine faculties” get “atrophied.” You stand “impotent with your science.” And if you become obsessed with unity alone, you dry up the “wells of Life within” and achieve “ death and not a greater existence.”

Aurobindo: “Love must call Power & Knowledge into the temple and seat them beside her in a unified equality; Power must bow its neck to the yoke of Light & Love before it can do any real good to the race.” The to-be Superman’s task is to perform this near-impossible juggling act.