Übermensch
Nietzsche's figure of the human type capable of creating new values after the death of God — usually translated as overman or higher type.
The Übermensch is announced by Zarathustra in the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85): I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. The figure stands for the human type capable of affirming life in its full conditions — including suffering and the eternal recurrence — and creating new values after the collapse of the Christian-Platonic moral inheritance.
Nietzsche presents the Übermensch as a counterweight to the last man, the comfortable egalitarian for whom nothing is worth striving for. The Übermensch is not a biological successor to humanity (Nietzsche was scornful of the social-Darwinist readings) but a cultural and spiritual achievement: the type whose values are self-imposed rather than inherited. Subsequent twentieth-century misreadings, especially the Nazi appropriation, distorted the concept beyond recognition; recent scholarship has worked to recover Nietzsche's original meaning.