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best, one can distance oneself from convention by overcoming it in leonine fashion (as
suggested by the figure of the lion in Zarathustra), and actively (perhaps playfully)
constructing a new set of values for oneself, in this way transforming cultural space. In
other words, his requirements concerning 'true individuals’ are not tantamount to the
impossibility of setting out, at any time, from a cultural tabula rasa. Even if the meta-
phor of the 'innocent’ child may be somewhat misleading, it does not suggest an abso-
lutely new commencement, but - read together with those of the camel and the lion - a
prior appropriation and rejection (or, for that matter, transformation) of old values or
customs, as the metamorphoses of the camel into the lion, and the latter into the child,
suggest.7 Nehamas (1985: 225) formulates this dynamic relation between the individ-
ual and custom in terms of ‘breaking rules’:
A true individual is precisely one who is different from the rest of the world,
and there is no formula, no set of rules, no code of conduct that can possibly
capture in informative terms what it is like to be like that. There are no princi-
ples that we can follow in order to become, as Nietzsche wants us to become,
unique. On the contrary, it is by breaking rules that such a goal, if it is indeed a
goal at all, can ever be reached. And it is as impossible to specify in advance
the rules that must be broken for the process to succeed as it is, say, to specify
in advance the conventions that must be violated for a new and innovative
genre in music or literature to be established.8
From the later perspective of Heidegger's thought - strongly influenced, as is
well-known, by Nietzsche - these insights on Nietzsche's part may be rearticulated in
terms of what Heidegger (in Being and Time) describes as the tripartite, fundamental
ontological structure of Dasein, namely thrownness (finding oneself in a given, histor-
ical, conventional situation), projection (the inalienable human ability or potential to
be one's own ‘pro-ject’, that is, to design or carve a singular place for oneself in cul-
7 Although Nietzsche's approach is arguably more radically agonistic (struggle-oriented) than Gadamer's
in Truth and Method (1982: 238-253), I believe that the latter's stance on the unavoidability of prejudice
or pre-judgement as a prerequisite for understanding or interpretive appropriation, is indebted to this as-
pect of Nietzsche's thought (as well as, of course, Heidegger's notion of 'fore-understanding' in Being
and Time [1978: 188-195]). Nehamas (1985: 187) adduces the example of Nietzsche appropriating the
traditional concept of 'freedom of the will' for his own 'idiosyncratic... purposes', yielding a new mean-
ing of free will, namely ‘... not the absence of causal determination but a harmony among all of a per-
son's preference schemes’. This is not a hermeneutic or epistemological break or hiatus on Nietzsche's
part, but an interpretive appropriation of an existing concept.
8 I should point out that, although Nehamas's study has much to recommend it, some commentators do
not accept his (or Megill's; see 1985: 29-64) radically aestheticist interpretation of the German philoso-
pher's work. For Nehamas (1985: 229-234) Nietzsche's thought is ultimately to be construed as an aes-
thetic production of himself in terms of his criteria of coherence among many countervailing forces.
That is, Nietzsche is finally understood as that 'magnificent character' who emerges, like the narrator in
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, from the totality of his own texts. In this regard Karsten Harries's
remark, a propos of Nehamas's book on Nietzsche, is noteworthy (Harries 1986): 'There is no denying
Nietzsche's estheticism, but we must also hear his call for a redemption from the spirit of revenge, a re-
demption that would overcome every estheticism. We should not forget his sad end when we admire
“the magnificent character” emerging through the books he wrote. To trade even a miserable life for the
grandest delusion is to strike a questionable bargain’. One could question Harries's use of the word ‘de-
lusion’ here, however.