is that this picture of the Übermensch, aggressively consuming and
exploiting value, fails to accomodate the receptive side of Nietzsche's
understanding of the human self (and, in particular, ignores the largely
'receptive' characterization of the Übermensch provided by Zarathustra).

The difference here is important. I argue that the person living what
Nietzsche describes as the highest life understands and celebrates the
narrow scope of human autonomy and our limited capacity to posit value.
Heidegger's version of the Übermensch sees the world as a stockpile of
values to be appropriated and mastered, an account that does not recog-
nize the ways in which human beings are themselves constituted by these
habits of life and thought. Heidegger claims that the most powerful activity
in the Nietzschean economy is the overcoming of value; I claim that the
most powerful moments in Nietzsche's texts are those that reveal how it is
that members of a culture are shaped and created by value. Nietzsche
remarks in Daybreak552: "We . . . ought to blow to the wind all pre-
sumptuous talk of willing and creating." He urges us to acknowledge our
debts, to see how much we owe to our language, our parenting, and our
politics. Any act of 'overcoming' is indebted to forces that have made
possible that act of positing and willing.

There are questions about the mechanism that Heidegger attributes to
Nietzsche. How does the will to will posit value and overcome it? Is this
activity essentially reflective, or largely carried out unreflectively, in prac-
tice? What is the nature of this positing?

I do not pursue any of these questions in this book because my objection to
Heidegger's account is more fundamental. Regardless of how it is that the
will to will posits and overcomes value, it is still the case that any account
that places will as our essential activity does not question the source of the
values so posited by will, nor can it acknowledge the ways in which the
person positing value is herself constituted by value. Heidegger's under-
standing of Nietzsche revolves around an activity of will; my account
focuses on the values that have already composed and determined that
activity of willing. ²

My critique of Heidegger's account of the Übermensch contains an
obvious irony (although it is fitting that, in a book about doubleness, one of

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