“Man is something that shall be overcome,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his 1883 classic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “Man is a rope, tied between beast and superman—a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
When he wrote this, the famously troubled intellectual was reckoning with ambivalent feelings about German culture (including a fallout with his friend, the composer Richard Wagner), a series of illnesses, and an opium habit that very likely constituted a drug addiction. But he was also grappling with what historians call the Second Industrial Revolution, that is, the revolution of mass production.
