Übermensch, Habitus, Power: A Reckoning with Three Philosophers

There's a question that's been circling in my head for a while: can a person truly create their own values, or do they remain a product of the system they were born into? Where do the notions of higher and lower humans come from, and do they even exist? To answer these questions I turned to three philosophers: Nietzsche, Bourdieu and Foucault. The three complete each other, yet they also clash. And it's precisely within that clash that something meaningful begins to appear.

Nietzsche: God is dead, now what?

Nietzsche was a German philosopher writing at the end of the 19th century. Trained in classical philology, he cut his ties with academia, wrote in aphorisms, lost his sanity at 44 and never recovered. His theory, in other words, was lived not only in his books but in his life.

His most famous sentence is "God is dead." It's not a cry of victory; it's a diagnosis. Nietzsche says: the Christian-metaphysical foundation on which Europe stood for centuries has collapsed. Science, the Enlightenment and secularization eroded it. But most people haven't noticed yet. What's coming once they do is nihilism, the feeling that nothing means anything.

This is where the concept of ressentiment comes in. It can be translated as "resentment," but that doesn't quite capture it. Ressentiment is the inner rage that the person who feels beneath directs at those above; a rage that cannot be expressed outwardly, because the power imbalance is real. So it turns inward and becomes a value system. It says: "those above are actually evil; we are good because we are below." Nietzsche calls this "slave morality." Christianity, in his eyes, is its purest form: humility, pity, escape into the next world; all of it weakness converted into virtue.

Against it he sets "master morality": a stance that affirms life, the body, even suffering. And from there he moves to his best-known concept: the Übermensch, the overman.

Here I need to open a parenthesis, because this is one of the most misunderstood concepts there is. The Übermensch is not a race. It is not biological superiority. The Nazis twisted the concept into a tool for their ideology. Above all his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, tampered with his texts after his death and made them amenable to an antisemitic-nationalist reading. But what Nietzsche actually meant is something else entirely. The Übermensch is the person who, after "God has died," after external authority has collapsed, can create their own values. Not a position but an orientation. Not a destination but a becoming.

As for the "subhuman" (Untermensch), it was never central to Nietzsche's vocabulary at all. It was the Nazis who used it systematically and turned it into a racist doctrine. Nietzsche's real counter-concept is the last man: comfort-loving, risk-averse, content with small pleasures, winking "we invented happiness." A herd type that is existential, not racial. And one we find in generous supply around us today.

The concept that best completes the idea of the Übermensch is the "eternal return": are you willing to want every moment of your life repeated, exactly as it was, infinitely many times? Nothing will change: the same pains, the same joys, the same shames. The person who can say "yes, I would live it again" is approaching the Übermensch.

Bourdieu: But you're not as free as you think

Now for the counter-voice. Pierre Bourdieu was a 20th-century French sociologist whose life reads like a living example of his own theory. He was born in a small village in southern France; his father a postal worker, his mother a seamstress. A kid playing rugby in the village gets admitted to France's most elite school, the École Normale Supérieure: a sociologically near-impossible leap. He then does his military service in Algeria, where he witnesses the war of independence and colonialism up close, an experience that becomes the source of his lifelong preoccupation with domination. He went to Algeria a philosophy student and came back a sociologist.

Bourdieu's fundamental question is this: how do social inequalities manage to reproduce themselves generation after generation, as if they were natural? Why does the rich child stay rich and the poor child stay poor, even while everyone insists there is "equality of opportunity"?

To answer it, he uses three core concepts.

Habitus. The things the class you were born into instills in you without your noticing: how you speak, what you find beautiful, how you sit at a table, which music you consider "good," whether you feel at ease or cramped in a restaurant. Habitus is class written into the body. You didn't choose it; it shaped you. Which is why much of what you take to be "your personality" is in fact class inheritance.

Capital. Bourdieu's most powerful move: refusing to see capital as money alone. There are three kinds. Economic capital (money, property). Cultural capital (education, book knowledge, which artists you know, which languages you speak, diplomas). Social capital (who you know, your network, whose father you can call). And they convert into one another: money becomes cultural capital (private school), cultural capital becomes money (a good job).

Field. Society consists of arenas in which people compete for these capitals: the artistic field, the academic field, the political field. Each field has its own rules, its own codes of what counts as valuable.

Bourdieu's real blow lands in his book Distinction. There he shows that "good taste" is actually a class weapon. The upper class presents its preferences as "natural superiority," thereby condemning the lower classes to their position. The lower class isn't "vulgar"; it simply has a different habitus, and the dominant class imposes its own habitus as "culture."

So Bourdieu says: the person Nietzsche calls a "master" is really just someone born into the right family. And what he calls "slave morality" is, much of the time, the survival strategy of the dominated. There is no natural hierarchy of higher and lower; only social positions that have naturalized themselves.

Where Bourdieu is genuinely weak is here: the human capacity to see one's habitus and reckon with it. Bourdieu himself did exactly that: he rose from a poor peasant family into France's elite intellectual circles, and from there analyzed the world he came from. The system, in other words, also produced someone capable of analyzing it. That contradiction is never fully resolved in his theory. Is a complete exit from the system possible or not? Bourdieu gives no clear answer.

Foucault: Power is everywhere, but freedom is possible too

Foucault is almost Bourdieu's opposite pole, in his life as much as in his thought.

He was born into an upper-middle-class family in Poitiers; his father and grandfathers were surgeons. Unlike Bourdieu, then, Foucault's "capital" came ready-made. The same school, the ENS; even the same teacher, Louis Althusser. Yet he went somewhere entirely different. He was a gay man who spent a youth wrestling with suicidal thoughts, close to madness. He died of AIDS in 1984. These biographical facts are inseparable from his thought.

His first major book is History of Madness (1961). The question: is "madness" a natural category, or something invented in a specific historical period? His answer: invented. In the pre-modern era the mad lived within society; only in the 17th century were the great asylums built and the mad confined. It is power, not knowledge, that draws the line between "reason" and "unreason."

From there he arrives at his most important concept: power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir). In the classical view, knowledge and power are separate things: knowledge is objective, and power merely uses it. Foucault says: no, the two are produced together. The category of "mental illness" exists because psychiatry produced it, and in the same motion built the institutions that govern, monitor and "treat" that category. Knowing and controlling are two faces of a single act.

Nor does he think of power in the classical sense (king, state, police). For him power is not pressure from above but a network spread everywhere, working like capillaries. School disciplines you. The hospital normalizes your body. Psychiatry tells you what you are. Prison produces the convict. Power doesn't repress you; it produces you.

His most striking example is the panopticon, a prison model designed by Jeremy Bentham: a watchtower at the center, cells arranged around it. The prisoners can't see the guard, but the guard sees them. Because the prisoner can't know, he behaves as if he is being watched at every moment. After a while even the guard becomes unnecessary; the prisoner watches himself. Foucault says: this is modern society. School, factory, army, hospital, office, even social media: all run on the panopticon's logic. We discipline ourselves, because we know we are seen.

It's a dark picture. If power constitutes us this deeply, where is freedom?

Late Foucault begins searching for an answer to this question, and turns to ancient Greek and Roman ethics. The Stoics, the Epicureans, the Christian monks: they had developed practices of "working on oneself." Keeping a journal, testing yourself, governing your desires, contemplating death. Foucault calls these technologies of the self. And from there he reaches the notion of an "aesthetics of existence": making your own life a work of art.

This is the Foucauldian version of Nietzsche's ideal of the Übermensch. Not someone naturally superior; someone who sees their own conditions and works on themselves. Freedom is not a possession; it is a continuous practice.

What do the three say together?

When I set the three side by side, the picture that forms in my head looks like this:

Nietzsche says: external authority has collapsed. You are obliged to create your own values. If you don't, you fall either into nihilism or into being the "last man": comfortable, meaningless, adrift.

Bourdieu says: slow down. What you call "your values" is largely the script the class you were born into wrote for you. If you're going to create your own values, you first have to see which values you were handed. Otherwise the thing you believe you "freely chose" is just your habitus reacting on autopilot.

Foucault says: Bourdieu is right, but it isn't only about class. Power is everywhere: in school, in the hospital, in language itself. What you call "you" is the point where all these power relations intersect. But seeing precisely that opens onto a practice of freedom. You can work on yourself, and that is continuous work, not a finished position.

What the three share: a human being is not a fixed thing. It is a made thing. And what has been made can be made differently.

Coming back to the concepts of higher and lower humans: I think the most illuminating part of this whole reading was this: these concepts are not natural, but they are not pure fabrication either. As Bourdieu shows, social hierarchies really exist and really constrain people. But as Nietzsche shows, accepting them as "natural" or "unchangeable" is slave morality itself. And as Foucault shows, the way out is not sudden liberation; it is continuous work on oneself.

Together the three seem to be saying: there is no position called "Übermensch." There is no position called "subhuman" either. There are only people who see the conditions they were born into and reckon with them, or don't. Reckoning is hard, because most of the conditions are invisible: like your habitus, like your power relations. But seeing is possible. And seeing means beginning.

Saying "this is how I am" is a surrender. Saying "this is how I have been made so far" is a beginning.