Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z) appeared at a critical juncture in Nietzsche's life. Focusing on the biographical context, Mazzino Montinari has explained Nietzsche's Übermensch, introduced for the first time in Z, as a form of psychological compensation for the personal humiliations he had suffered at the hands of Lou Salomé and his friend Paul Rée. According to Düsing, Montinari's interpretation helps to counterbalance the uncomfortable impression that Nietzsche had intended the Übermensch to represent the prototype of a master race. Such a straightforward biographical explanation, while comforting and persuasive on the surface, fails on two important counts. First, it implies that Z reflected psychological debility and a quest for compensation when in fact it embodied a sense of wholeness and completeness unique to his writings. Second, it ignores the work's relationship to Nietzsche's successful transvaluation of Darwinism in the middle period – a great personal victory on his part requiring a visionary literary and stylistic expression.

Nietzsche's problem by the end of the middle period was twofold. He had not only rejected the conception of “man” presented in the works of the great moralists, philosophers, and scientists. He had also lost confidence in the terminology used to characterize that conception. After undermining the altruism–egoism distinction at its core (rather than merely valuing the one over the other) and exposing the type of “man” he wished to overcome, Nietzsche needed a new terminological platform and storehouse of metaphors that could affirm his higher, fuller human type: the Übermensch.