Philosophy books have enjoyed steady popularity at South Korean bookstores in recent years. Following the Schopenhauer craze of 2023 and 2024, books on Friedrich Nietzsche have topped bestseller lists since last year, keeping the interest alive.
Kang Yong-soo, a research professor at Korea University's Institute of Philosophy who set off the Schopenhauer boom with "Schopenhauer at Forty," published in 2023 and selling 600,000 copies to date, has now returned with Nietzsche. Kang, who recently released "Nietzsche's Superman Lessons," met with a reporter at his office in Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu, Seoul.
Kang is regarded as an authority on Nietzsche after his 2002 doctoral dissertation, "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Culture," appeared in Nietzsche-Studien, the field's leading academic journal. It drew attention at the time as the only paper by an East Asian scholar featured in the journal.
Why did Kang decide to write a book on Nietzsche? "There are already so many books on Nietzsche that I wondered whether another one was needed," he said. But as he reviewed existing titles, he noticed that many of them blurred the line between Nietzsche's ideas and the authors' own. In this book, he focused on separating Nietzsche's voice from his own thinking.
Kang stressed that conventional assumptions about the superman, a core concept in Nietzsche's philosophy, need to be overturned. The term is "Übermensch" in German, translated into English as "overman" or "superman." "When people hear 'superman,' they tend to picture a being who has grown stronger than their former self," he said. "But the superman Nietzsche described is not at the stage of rising by overcoming oneself. It is a being that descends again after overcoming."
Nietzsche's comparison of the superman to the sea follows the same logic. "Just as the sea takes in all the filth that flows down from the rivers, a true leader is not someone who stands above others but someone who lowers himself and embraces them," Kang said.
Nietzsche describes the path to becoming a superman in three stages: the camel, the lion and the child. To become a true superman, one must move beyond the camel, which affirms blindly, and the lion, which denies blindly, to reach the state of the child, who possesses an affirming spirit that creates new values. Kang explained this through the lens of modern organizational life. "If the camel is the yes-man who obeys the boss unconditionally, the lion is the employee who pushes back on everything and thinks only of quitting," he said. "The child, by contrast, is a being who enjoys the work itself."
Why does Nietzsche's philosophy remain relevant 120 years after his death? "In a fiercely competitive modern society where everyone chases the same definition of success — a good school and a good job — Nietzsche's call to walk your own path resonates," Kang said. In Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Zarathustra rebukes the disciples who follow him, telling them to leave him and find themselves and their own path. The same cry is engraved on Nietzsche's tombstone.
Kang said Nietzsche's concept of "slave morality" is worth noting in connection with the double standards pervasive in Korean society today. Nietzsche defined the negative thought of "you are evil, therefore I am good" as slave morality. The master, by contrast, begins from self-affirmation: "I am good, therefore others must be good as well." "Some people are happy to have money themselves but feel resentful when others are well off," Kang said. "It is better to ignore the attitude of tearing down and slandering the success of others."
Nietzsche compared the superman to a child who builds and knocks down sandcastles on the beach, fully enjoying the moment with all worries forgotten. Is it possible to become such a superman in a harsh reality? The answer was unexpected. "There is no need to try so hard to become a superman," Kang said. "All of us were already supermen once in the past. Becoming a superman a second time is not difficult either."
