Rilke's Orpheus and Nietzsche's Übermensch: Alternative modes of being in becoming

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke both seek through their work to affirm the ephemerality and mutability of life or what Nietzsche terms 'becoming' without which they believe there can be no true being in the world. The nature of their respective affirmations however is radically different. For Nietzsche man is to will becoming as a self-creative force whereas for Rilke man instantiates becoming precisely by relinquishing force and suspending the will. These divergent views are reflected in the symbolic vehicles of Rilke and Nietzsche's affirmative and celebratory ideals: the titular singing god of The Sonnets to Orpheus representing openness to and immanence in the temporal physiological becoming of the world and the Übermensch of Thus Spake Zarathustra representing a willed re-creation of a radically revalued world at the centre of which the ever-shifting self resides. This essay weighs the relative merits of these two visions of being in becoming. © The Author(s) 2013. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.