When I was teaching AP English in a Chinese high school, I asked my first-year students what sort of jobs they wished their foreign teachers had before coming to China. The first class suggested “lawyer,” “businessman,” “scientist,” and obviously “teacher,” which probably says something about the average quality of ESL teachers in Asia. The other class said “wizard,” “Jedi”, and “super spy.” I then made the off-hand comment that I thought a female James Bond would be like Black Widow from The Avengers. After a split-second delay, which often happened when I used words they needed a moment to remember, the class, which was three fourths girls, broke into cheers and applause.
So, Scarlett Johansson, the next time people get you down, know you have a lot of fans waiting to see you kick ass.
Despite not having super powers (unless the new movie has new revelations), in Avengers she holds her own on a team of super-powered good guys against super-powered bad guys. At the end of Age of Ultron, she is going to help Rogers train the next generation of heroes, including two who are technically a lot more powerful. Near the beginning of Infinity War, she joins Captain America and Falcon in one of my favorite movie entrances and fights super-powered aliens with Olympic-level martial arts.
I will argue that she can do this because while she isn’t a “superhero,” she does fit many, but not all, aspects of Nietzsche’s “higher man,” the term the philosopher used more often for the concept than the more widely used term. Nietzsche’s “higher men” aren’t weighed down by guilt, not necessarily because they don’t have feelings but because they are stronger than their feelings and don’t torture themselves. They achieve self-mastery which is just as important an idea as mastery over others. They can handle multiple perspectives about life and proceed with a journey of self-creation. This “higher” type sees others as a means to an ends (the opposite of Kant’s moral premises), is someone who seeks out heavy responsibilities worthy of their abilities, they are “healthy and resilient,” and honor themselves while are not hedonists. It should be kept in mind that these “higher men” are not political animals, but are loners and the end result of “a severe regimen for the realization of individual potential.”
Let’s begin with how she has broken the lies that bind us, replacing morality with clarity. The other Avengers can afford their stubborn, emotional personality traits that define and limit them because they have superpowers that allow them to get away with it. Captain America is tough enough to survive his purity, the Hulk can lose his cool and rarely suffer consequences himself (except for those his own conscience imposes), and Iron Man has surrounded his insecurities and arrogance with a suit of armor.
Civil War offers us a useful scene for understanding the positions set out by the various characters. “Thunderbolt” Ross tells the Avengers they have to sign the Accords thus accepting government oversight or disband. Different Avengers take various and mostly reasonable positions. The leaders of the pro and con sides are Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, respectively. Stark has been taken over by the fear and self-doubt that resulted from the destruction caused by his accidental creation of Ultron, emotions he struggled with in Iron Man III, while the events of Winter Soldier have caused Rogers to doubt the wisdom of placing himself under anyone’s official authority, because behind any shield could lie another hydra.
But while they argue, Romanoff tells them, and us, that she is “reading the terrain.” She can accept that it makes sense to compromise with the UN. While she doesn’t say why “reading the terrain” leads to her decision to sign, we can assume that she doesn’t want to see the Avengers on the run from world governments, which would make helping people a lot harder. At the same time, she could change sides when she realized Rogers was right about the false charges levied against Bucky. Roger’s principles don’t allow him the same freedom of choice, and his distrust of government organizations is such that he would rather throw the baby out with the bathwater, both his refusing to sign the Accords in Civil War and foreshadowed by his decision to bring down SHIELD to get rid of HYDRA in Winter Soldier. I might argue that Steve Rogers has less free will than the average hero, because the super soldier serum also enhanced his moral matrix (awareness of this side effect was the critical reason he was chosen to receive the serum in The First Avenger).
And while Stark is wallowing in sorrow and guilt, Romanoff can walk forward from her sins cool as a cucumber. Until the last moment, she is trying to talk Stark and Rogers down from fighting it out. She may confess to Hawkeye and Loki in Avengers that she has “red in her ledger,” but she also discourages her friend from letting guilt over what he did while under Loki’s control interfere with doing the only thing they can do to make up for it. Because she is transcendent that way, and that transcendence is why while Rogers and Stark stand firm on their principles and end up punching it out, she is trying to hold the family together with cool, calm reason.
Romanoff’s actions show that despite her habitual use of multiple identities, she believes in clarity. During the climax of Winter Soldier, she dumps all of SHIELD’s records online, giving people the facts, without editorial of her own, so they can come to truth. When Secretary Pierce, the man who publicly oversees Director Fury and secretly leads HYDRA, asks her if she is ready for the world to know who she really is, she throws the question back in his face, but her true answer is that she continues working. HYDRA had hidden behind SHIELD’s own lack of transparency, and she rips away the curtain we all wish we could see behind.
Lacking the strength to stand her ground in the extreme world of supreme powers, she mastered riding the wave to where she wants to go, behaving with a boldness that Nietzsche admired above any moral quality. She disguises herself as a member of the World Security Council to get where she needs to be to face off with the villain in Winter Soldier. In her opening scene in the Avengers she had already allowed herself to be captured and taken to a villain, where letting an arms dealer brag as her interrogation method foreshadows her pretending weakness to trick the imprisoned yet sadistic Loki into trying to rub salt into her wounds. When she uses her signature scissors kick move that keeps showing up in other movies now, she throws men to the ground using her body weight and then they impact with the force of his weight, too, she is using her agility to compensate for their brute strength.
As Nick Fury pointed out in Winter Soldier, Romanoff is “comfortable with everything.” Romanoff is comfortable in her undergarments while getting information from a general. She is comfortable pretending weakness to sucker Loki. In the opening of Winter Soldier, she is comfortable working behind Roger’s back to gather intelligence while he is saving lives, and then later in the movie we believed it when she appeared comfortable kicking a HYDRA agent off a rooftop. In Age of Ultron, she is comfortable pushing Bruce Banner off a ledge to turn him into the Hulk because they need him to fight Ultron, using even the man she loves as a means to an ends if she must.
Yet ironically Romanoff wasn’t part of Project Insight. While HYDRA hasn’t realized their constant need to lie to get what they want suggests they are the bad guys, and an unknown number of SHIELD agents don’t realize going along with Project Insight might mean they are being suckered into helping the bad guys because it is a violation of their principles, Romanoff is getting her job done, helping Nick Fury uncover a conspiracy that Fury unwittingly helped because he was so determined to have the power to keep the world safe, and then she helps Rogers end that conspiracy. Romanoff left the KGB because, with Hawkeye’s help, she learned to see through the brain washing, and then she helped Rogers because their journey led her to see that SHIELD had been corrupted, too, giving her two heroic character arcs, each leading her to a higher step in achieving an independent moral standing. Learning that HYDRA had infiltrated SHIELD was a bummer for her, but she didn’t flinch from it or let it stop her. Yes, she suffered, but as Nietzsche wrote, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” which she does in the end.
Just as her physical balance is so perfect she can perform any move, her inner core is so stable that it can support the weight of any disguise. During Winter Soldier, she tells Rogers as they are driving along in a stolen vehicle that she can be all sorts of people, pretty much anything Rogers needs her to be. In that movie, she plays a giddy fiancé, a woman of political power, and a member of a rescue team. She even plays matchmaker for Rogers; I can’t help but wonder if she is attracted to Rogers but knows they are wrong for each other as lovers, so is trying to fix him up to remove the temptation away from her independence. When Rogers says being so many personas sounds like a hard way to live, she simply says it’s a good way to not to die, yet either way she does make it look easy. Training made her transcendent.
In that very scene in the stolen car, the justification she offers Rogers for living in the moral gray was a paraphrase of Nietzsche, saying that the truth isn’t the same all the time for all people. In that simple insight, she points to the cause of the struggle they are caught up in, for while she may not realize it yet, Alexander Pierce and Nick Fury are acting upon conflicting but honestly held beliefs. Fury’s experience showed him that you needed the biggest gun to be safe, Pierce’s experience showed him that a person should use that gun preemptively. Zola believed humanity misused its freedom so didn’t deserve it. Fury, Pierce, Zola, and Ross are all symbols of what Nietzsche called “the bad conscience,” moralities imposed by organized force, that people like Romanoff and Rogers rebel against.
Rogers believes that freedom is good in of itself and demonstrates his faith in other people. Romanoff actually navigates belief systems, while everyone else, including Rogers and Fury, butt heads and ultimately resolve their issues with violence, while her critical contributions are essentially non-violent and based upon logic, from dumping the naked facts onto the Internet to telling off investigative committees and walking away.
Captain Rogers doesn’t lead the Avengers just because of his intelligence and strength, but because he is the highest achievement of standard morality. This is why people trust him so completely, why when push came to shove so many SHIELD agents in Winter Soldier decided to disobey orders and resist HYDRA on his word alone, even when they couldn’t be sure HYDRA still existed at all. But he wouldn’t have made it across the finish line without Black Widow; his own honesty forces him to see her value despite her lack of super powers and his qualms about her choices. Of all the people in SHIELD for him to trust, he depended upon her, and when the world exploded around them, she took shelter behind his shield.
And she can do all this because unlike the rest of us, who try to stand still on unstable ground, she is hovering just above it. The heroes and villains keep making stands while circumstances kept shifting under their feet. When she is faced off against a government hearing investigating the causes and ramifications of SHIELD’s implosion, she points out that they aren’t going to put her and her allies in jail, because for all their mistakes, the world still needs people like her. This is why she doesn’t need to lift Thor’s hammer; she already knows her own worth, and doesn’t care if it matches a Norse god’s idea of worthiness.
¹Anderson, R. Lanier, "Friedrich Nietzsche", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
²Leiter, Brian, "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
³Nietzsche, Friedrich, “The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals” Anchor Books, 1956, translated by Francis Golffing, p. 175
⁴Nietzsche, Friedrich, “The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals” Anchor Books, 1956, translated by Francis Golffing, p.219