How much alien, how much human, how much...?

[Adekis]

I mean what kind of personality and mindset constitutes as alien as opposed to human.

I think Miracle Monday has some pretty good claims about this.

The boy grew up in a universe of macrocosm and microcosm. To visit the other side of the world was, to him, what swinging on a vine across a creek was for other boys. He could see the unending dramas of underground ant colony wars and stratospheric weather front competitions as easily as he saw the mail truck barreling past the farm into town twice a day. He could alter his visual perceptions to detect waves on the entire electromagnetic spectrum, seeing alpha particles or cosmic rays as easily as he saw the visible light - but in colors that ordinary humans were incapable of imagining. He could feel the level of the day's sunspot activity when he woke up in the morning in much the same way that those around him could tell if it was raining
before they opened the shades. He could hold a conversation in one room while he listened to another one a mile away and to a radio broadcast as it flew through the air around him in microwaves. The world was his playground and campus, superhuman senses his teachers, the anonymity of the Kent home his womb and protection. He was alone in all this sense and knowledge, monumentally alone; but no less alone, he realized, than were those other Earthmen, glued to their work and trapped inside bodies that could do no more than touch the outsides of other bodies. The boy was alone, but he was never bored.

I mean I've got serious reservations with the way Maggin bends time and physics in order to make super-hearing work on a global scale, but fundamentally I think Maggin makes his point. Kal-El is socialized to act like a human, but he isn't one. Nothing with that range of experiences- of looking at quarks, of feeling sunspots, of listening to the radio in the airwaves simultaneously with having a conversation and reading a book in the next room- can really have a human mindset or perspective.

I recently started watching the television show Hannibal, and couldn't help but catch similarities between Dr. Lecter and Superman. No, Superman is not a serial killer, but like Hannibal, he wears a finely tuned "person suit" and pretends to be a normal man, even to his closest friends, while he subtly influences them to be more like his own true, secret self. Like Hannibal, Superman occasionally makes sly comments, meaningless to everyone but the audience, insinuating his true nature (okay, so I've also been watching Reeves' Adventures of Superman). Hannibal Lecter's "person suit" is named Hannibal Lecter, only his actions make him different. Superman's, obviously is named Clark Kent.

Superman cares deeply for Clark. Hannibal's person suit is designed to help him continue his existence, without it he couldn't maintain his luxurious lifestyle. That's very much not what interests the alien Superman about Clark Kent, who's more like an in-depth thought experiment, like a hobby he's incredibly invested in. Perhaps the way that we're invested in Superman comics, haha!.

"What is it like to be human?" he wonders, and so takes many elaborate steps to find out. I think Superman must share Doctor Who's attitude toward humanity. Sure, we're stupid, we're stubborn, we do awful things, but we're also capable of such wonders, such beauty, such small compassion, that the Doctor says "I think you look like giants". So Superman studies us, but he also tries to see what it's like, as far as he's able, to be one of us. Clark Kent's such a well-maintained, lovingly maintained simulacrum of humanity that he's as close to real as possible. He knows he can't really be human, nor would he want to be if it meant giving up being Superman, but to a certain extent he can be and is a human being.

Still, in the end for me the fact that Kal experiences the world so incredibly differently from us means that he's never really going to be human, only to approximate it as best he can.