https://old.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/bp2ev/comment/c0nvbza/
My Reddit comment message, upvoted 14 points:
Joseph Campbell, November 16, 1961, The Cooper Union; New York, NY
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TRACK 10: Nietzsche’s Superman
I would say that in most recent times, the strongest statement of the principle of the individual is that of Nietzsche philosophy and the idea of the Superman. This has been a greatly misrepresented point of view. There has been a general tendency to confuse Nietzsche’s view of the Superman with his view of the Masterman—they are not the same.
Nietzsche speaks of the naive man-animal, powerful in his life, who lacks however, the sense of the spirit. And then there is the principle of what he calls the man of the decadence, who is questioning man’s problems and so forth—the intellectual, the Socratic man who is, as he says, a sick man: the Masterman and the man of the decadence.
The Superman is the one who embraces both principles, who both has the courage to live, and has the wit to question life—to query it. Thomas Mann in all of his writings used this as his ideal. The ideal of the man with the intellect and the words that kill, that name life, that know all its faults, and yet has the courage and sympathy to love life in its faults, and with its faults, and because of its faults. Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman is beautifully summarized in Mann’s writings when he speaks of the plastic irony ("Erotic Irony") of the writer’s craft.