I was disappointed by one thing during my first short-term missions trip to Berlin: our missionary on the field had never heard the word über. For some reason I was convinced that über was a word, that it was a German word, and something told me that it was even connected with a German philosopher. My brain has now been vindicated.
über
definition: denoting an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of person or thing.
language of origin: über is German. It can be used as a prefix as well as a separate word, and the translation depends on context, such as “over, above, super.”
update: during the late 1990s über became an English synonym for super; e.g. übercool = supercool, with a slightly intensified meaning. You can read more about the modern zeitgeist of über at reference.com.
So much for the details, how about the example usage. I first heard this word in 1995 in a philosophy class reading about Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the The Oxford History of Western Philosophy (edited by Anthony Kenny, 1994).
For Nietzsche, the highest order of life was inhabited by the Übermensch or Superman. This Superman is described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) as the man who overcomes, the man who is healthy, forceful, and able as opposed to the man who is sick, feeble, and incompetent. The überman is proud and powerful, and though he may love his neighbor, it is only because he loves himself first. The Übermensch was the ideal man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values.
As Christians we know that those who are truly great are those who humbly serve. We also know that loving our neighbors comes from loving God, not from loving ourselves. Our goal is not to rise above Christian morality but to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, the ultimate and unparalleled God-man. I suppose it is ironic that Nietzsche überhated the biblical Überman.
5 Comments
Well, one things for sure. You never cease to amaze with your bookoo amount of cool vocab.
I think you mean my über vocab.
I’m always so amazed that Nietzscheism is so widely accepted (especially unknowingly - where someone will quote a part of it or an ideal from it even though they don’t know where they got it from) in the world. It’s strange to me because its core is founded on (among others) two suppositions which are not at all popular in the world.
1. The basic nature of a thing (an idea, a belief, people) cannot be altered. Something which at its foundation was “good” cannot be made “evil” (evil and good are henceforth in air-quotes). Something which at its foundation was evil cannot be made good. If your parents were slaves, you are in your very nature a slave (and therefore evil), and so your children will also be slaves. A belief system founded by slaves contains slavery at its very core.
2. Intelligence is a poison created by the evil to subdue the good. Knowledge is self-destruction. It is a sickness created in an individual because they do not exercise their power over others and instead focus what power they have back at themselves and thereby torture their own minds and bodies.
Do you see the disconnect between our American presuppositions and these fundamental assumptions? Imagine telling a young African college student that they have a fundamental slave nature which they can do nothing to change and affects everything they do, say, and think. Imagine telling an elementary school teacher that all their work accomplishes is to emasculate their little charges - that the knowledge they teach is not power but poison.
What kind of reaction would that garner? And yet Nietzscheism is one of the wide-spread philosophies in the western world. Blows my mind.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s what I got out of “Beyond Good & Evil”. A load of dingo’s kidneys, I must say.
“one of the [most] wide-spread philosophies in the western world.”
Well, I’m sure Nietzsche wasn’t thinking about knitting;-) but let me asure you that nobody is thinking about Nietzsche’s “Übermensch”,when using that unimportent word “über” By the way Maggi and Calvin are adorable and they look alot like Brooke.
Brooke’s bff:-)