discovered instead an individual quite different from this initial naïve
rendering. With a perverse pleasure (surely the concomitant affect of
every investigation of Nietzsche), I began to catalogue the ways in which
this superior individual was also passive, self-effacing, ecstatic, and su-
premely receptive.

Nietzsche's account of the self has both 'active' and 'receptive' ele-
ments. The 'active' qualities are the usual objects of critical inquiry. For
example, Nietzsche's 'free spirits' are highly reflective, intensely skeptical
of the beliefs and practices of their culture, and calling these practices into
question is their perspicuous 'activity'. I argue that this reflective activity is
founded on a host of practices, largely unreflected upon, that in turn
constitute the free spirits. Awareness of the self as a cultural product, as "a
necessary chain of rings of culture," ¹ is an equally important dimension of
Nietzsche's understanding of human nature, one that is often ignored by
the traditional interest in Nietzsche's active dismantling (and indeed his
praise of such dismantling) of these cultural values.

Heidegger's is perhaps the most important -- certainly the most influen-
tial -- of these traditional accounts. He has been a disturbing presence in
my thinking about Nietzsche; this book is in many ways a response to
Heidegger's claims about Nietzsche's 'metaphysics of value'. In his lec-
tures on Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that a value is an articulation of a
particular set of forces posited by the will to power: value is the 'voice' of
will to power. These values are 'metaphysical' because they are the essen-
tial components of Being; human life is grounded in the creation and
establishment of these values. The will to power marshals that set of values
that can maintain and enhance it as a particular configuration of forces, so
the criteria for choosing and promoting a particular value turn on its ability
to sustain whatever form the will to power has currently adopted. No
value can be preferred as such over any other, and the 'essence' of human
existence turns out to be an incessant activity of taking up value in order to
expand and promote the powers it makes available: one configuration of
power is as worthwhile as the next. The person who sees this, and who is
able to master this metaphysical machinery of the taking up and overcom-
ing of value is, claims Heidegger, the Übermensch, the highest achieve-
ment of humanity.

Is this rather depressing account of human life really what Nietzsche
proposes? I will return to this question in various ways, but my main claim

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