This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

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There are various things we all know about Nietzsche. We know that

central to his philosophy was the idea of the Ubuminch or Superman, a vision of

future man who's escaped from the shackles of Christian morality.

We know that Nietzsche was an anti-semite who targeted both Jews and Judaism,

and we know too that he was the father of postmodernism and fatally undermine the idea that there's

universal truth.

We know all that right.

Except as leading Nietzsche scholar Brian Lighter of the University of Chicago points out. That's all baloney.

Brian Lighter, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you very much.

We're going to talk about Nietzsche, but specifically myths about Nietzsche.

Let's start with perhaps the most famous idea from Nietzsche that what he really was about was the

uvermench, the overman or Superman.

Well, it's certainly true that the image of the Ubermanch, the Superman, the overman, has dominated popular perception of Nietzsche for a very long time now.

The funny thing is and people who haven't read Nietzsche carefully don't know this,

the image of the overman appears in only one book in Nietzsche's entire corpus and Nietzsche wrote

depending exactly on what you count as a book a dozen or so books but there's only

one from the early 1880s thus spoke Zarathustra in which this image of the

Oberman figures very centrally so that should immediately raise our antennae that

something funny is going on here if it's so important to Nietzsche this idea of the

...