Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A person having authority over others, especially an overseer or a shift supervisor.
- transitive verb To provide with more personnel than necessary.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In general, an overseer, or foreman.
- noun An arbitrator, or umpire.
- noun In the writings of F. W. Nietzsche, a type with more or less superhuman qualities toward which he supposed mankind to be developing.
- noun In coal-mining, the person having charge of the work below ground.
- To employ too many men on or in, as on a ship.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun One in authority over others; a chief; usually, an overseer or boss.
- noun An arbiter.
- noun In the philosophy of Nietzsche, a man of superior physique and powers capable of dominating others; one fitted to survive in an egoistic struggle for the mastery.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A person who
supervises others; asupervisor - noun A person with great
powers ; asuperman - verb to provide with too many
personnel
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The father was faithful and grateful: the son knows no law but his own humor; detests the ugly dwarf who has nursed him; chafes furiously under his claims for some return for his tender care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the "overman" of
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He created the concept of "overman," the man stronger than others with the right to step over the weak, which attracted Hitler.
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He often summons the image of a bridge, as he does here in his perhaps most definitive passage about the Overman: There it was too that I picked up the word "overman" by the way, and that man is something that must be overcome-that man is a bridge and no end: proclaiming himself blessed in view of his noon and evening, as the way to new dawns-Zarathustra's word of the great noon, and whatever else I hung up over man like the last crimson light of evening.
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He often summons the image of a bridge, as he does here in his perhaps most definitive passage about the Overman: There it was too that I picked up the word "overman" by the way, and that man is something that must be overcome-that man is a bridge and no end: proclaiming himself blessed in view of his noon and evening, as the way to new dawns-Zarathustra's word of the great noon, and whatever else I hung up over man like the last crimson light of evening.
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Essentially, his model offers us five types of hero we could label god, demigod, overman, everyman, nobody.
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What we begin to see here is not a simple schema of relative social status — overman, everyman or nobody — but rather a set of protagonist types defineable by the interrelations of the deontic modalities that act upon them and the boulomaic modalities they enact.
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A creature of idyll and elegy, he's defined by his youth (and loss (like Daphnis)) -- a puer aeternus who can't be a conventional tragic hero in the overman sense because he's not yet reached the age where he * gets* the deontic modalities society would wrap him up in.
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Essentially, his model offers us five types of hero we could label god, demigod, overman, everyman, nobody.
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What we begin to see here is not a simple schema of relative social status — overman, everyman or nobody — but rather a set of protagonist types defineable by the interrelations of the deontic modalities that act upon them and the boulomaic modalities they enact.
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The protagonist of legend can be seen as, relatively speaking, the overman of high mimetic or everyman of low mimetic, while the protagonists of gothic/horror may be seen as, again relatively speaking, everyman of low mimetic or nobody of ironic.
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