“Just see this superfluous crowd! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money - these impotent ones. See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one-another and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss. Toward the throne they all strive: it is their madness - as if happiness sat on the throne! Oft times sitteth filth on the throne - and oft times also the throne on filth.” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, p.105)
Hayman, one of Nietzsche's biographers, in his introduction, explains this sort of attitude as his intolerance of mediocrity.(R.Hayman 1980.p.10) However we may see more here. His intolerance of others, particularly those he considered his inferiors, was almost pathological. He seems to have considered most people his inferiors, for even when he was awarded a professorship at Basel, he found his colleagues irksome and frivolous and soon refused to join them on their walks. This also may have been due to Nietzsche's over-serious personality which was lacking in humour.(Hayman p.103.)
Even at school he was regarded with something like awe by some of his schoolfellows and delighted in sermonizing to them. They referred to him as "the little minister". There is the story of him walking home in the pouring rain, protecting his slate with his cap, when all his fellows were running to escape a drenching. He explained that the school rule was that pupils must walk, to run was undignified.(Hayman p.20.)
By contrast he did admire, to the extent of idolizing, at times, father figures. This may have been because of his losing his own father at an early age. It is also true that his ardent devotion to such figures soon cooled when he perceived that they had feet of clay. This was another way of saying that he found himself in disagreement with some of their ideas. One of them a professor he admired and who supported him in his early career, later wrote of Nietzsche the one word, in his diary, "megalomania".
His idolization of Richard Wagner was extreme to being sycophantic. After Wagner's move from Switzerland to Bayreuth Nietzsche found his support for the German state and nation distasteful. Before this he had praised Wagner as the supreme artist and had, in return, spent many happy hours and days with the Wagners at their home. He also fell out over Wagner's opera Parsifal, which he considered "too Christian".
When in Wagner's company, Nietzsche was described by one acquaintance as, “timid, embarrassed and nearly always silent.” On the other hand Nietzsche himself found the aristocratic crowd at Bayreuth, a “pathetic crowd of patrons, spoilt, bored and unmusical.” He described how there were, “princes in and out of Wager's house as if it were a sporting event.” This was when the disillusionment with Wagner was setting in and, with it, probably, disillusionment with the German aristocracy which may explain his inconsistencies regarding the overman who he describes as sometimes a military ruler in the medieval pattern and sometimes a singular individual able to overcome the needs and drives of his own body and the life of common individuals.
There was a certain fastidiousness about his attitudes and his dislike of the ordinary. “Life is a well of delight,” he wrote, “but where the rabble drink, there all fountains are poisoned. To everything cleanly am I well disposed; but I hate to see the grinning mouths and the thirst of the unclean.” It must be remembered that he said of Socrates that he was “rabble” and despised him as someone “belonging to the lower orders.” (Twilight of the Idols p.31.) Indeed he accused him of causing a change in Greek taste that was a “defeat of the nobler taste.” He went on to say, “with dialectics the rabble gets on top.” ( Tw. P.31.)
Like many men not entirely at peace with themselves, who despise those who through no fault of their own are beneath them in the social order, he had an awe of those of higher social status. As has been argued, this deference could as readily change to anger and distaste when he saw that his social superiors were but human after all and did not measure up to his ideas of leaders.
The overman, then, is in Nietzsche's writings, an enigmatic and contradictory figure. Sometimes he is medieval conqueror, sometimes imperial ruler, sometimes even a barbarian when Nietzsche cries out against the Christian values of pity and humility. At other times the overman, or superior man is clearly an intellectual and an ascetic even. Zrathustra has been described as his alter ego and he is clearly the person Nietzsche would like to be or imagines himself to be.
