"When he wrote this, the famously troubled intellectual was reckoning with ambivalent feelings about German culture (including a fallout with his friend, the composer Richard Wagner), a series of illnesses, and an opium habit that very likely constituted a drug addiction. But he was also grappling with what historians call the Second Industrial Revolution, that is, the revolution of mass production."
"Much of Nietzsche's writings, obscure in his own lifetime, foreshadowed a 20th century full of what he called "nihilism," especially his famous proclamation, "God is dead." In his place was the superman, or "Übermensch," a determiner of his own life, who eschews traditional Christian mores and births his own system of values that allows him to conquer all human challenges."
"During times of technological upheaval, it seems that Nietzsche's prophecy of the birth of the Übermensch always reemerges. There are two famous examples-you already know them. First, about a half-century after Nietzsche conceived his version, Action Comics released its first issue in 1939, featuring a character named Superman who went on to become the very first comic-book superhero just as the world was hurtling into the atomic age, recently depicted in the blockbuster smash hit Oppenheimer."
Friedrich Nietzsche described man as a transitional bridge toward an Übermensch who creates his own values and rejects Christian morality. He wrote amid personal illnesses, an opium habit, and strained relations with figures like Richard Wagner while society experienced the Second Industrial Revolution of mass production. Nietzsche anticipated widespread nihilism and proclaimed "God is dead," framing the Übermensch as a response to moral collapse. Contemporary advances in artificial intelligence and claims of a Fourth Industrial Revolution raise questions about a new superhuman and whether humanity remains a precarious rope over an abyss. Popular culture has reflected these anxieties through icons such as Superman.
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