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“Becoming who one is” is related to the question of the ‘unity’ or integrity of the
self in Nietzsche's thought. Nehamas puts it succinctly (1985: 182): “The unity of the
self, which... also constitutes its identity, is not something given but something
achieved, not a beginning but a goal.” In other words, for Nietzsche there is no ques-
tion of a unity at the outset of the individual's life; at any given time, there are at best a
multiplicity of countervailing tendencies and forces at work in every human being.
Nor is the goal of being a unified self ever conclusively achieved; even if it is actual-
ized at any given time, this does not preclude the necessity of continuing with the ar-
duous business of fusing new experiences or developments ‘apperceptively’ with what
has gone before (Nehamas, 1985: 185). The task facing everyone is to harness all
those conflicting forces (strengths as well as flaws) and experiences (joys as well as
sufferings) in such a manner that they conspire together to give coherence to the per-
son's life - a task that is never really complete, and has to be actively carried out in a
sustained way, more or less all the time. What makes a true or ‘singular’ individual,
for Nietzsche, is precisely the ability to overcome the tendency towards a kind of dis-
integration of the self into incompatible components, reneging on the (admittedly for-
midable) effort to refuse and conquer this tendency. Such a refusal manifests itself in
harnessing all the divergent traits and characteristics that comprise a personality, art-
fully coordinating their differences towards the goal of being an integrated, self-creat-
ing, self-created person. In The Gay Science Nietzsche depicts it as follows (290;
1984b: 98-99):
One thing is needful. ‘Giving style’ to one's character - a great and rare art! It
is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own na-
tures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as
art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. Here a large mass of second
nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed: both
by long practice and daily labor. Here the ugly which could not be removed is
hidden; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime... It will be the strong
and domineering natures who enjoy their finest gaiety in such compulsion, in
such constraint and perfection under a law of their own...
More succinctly, with an historical slant, he says (in The Will to Power 1014; 1968:
524): ‘It is only a question of strength: to have all the morbid traits of the century, but
to balance them through a superabundant, recuperative strength’. It would appear that
Goethe exemplified, for Nietzsche, this rare kind of individual: ‘Goethe’, he says in
The Will to Power (95; 1968: 60) ‘... seeks to form a totality out of himself, in the faith
that only in the totality everything redeems itself that appears good and justified’. And
elsewhere (in Twilight of the Idols; 1984c: 554), he claims that Goethe ‘... fought the
mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will... he disciplined himself to
wholeness, he created himself.’ In the language of the present hypothesis, Goethe, for
Nietzsche, is ‘immortal’.
If indeed the specific ‘traits’ of an historical era could be said to be condensed in a
person, what role does historical contingency - that is, chance - play in shaping a per-
son into a distinctive individual? And if it does in fact play an important part - as
Nehamas implies where he says of Nietzsche's idea of self-creation (1985: 188) ‘...
that everything that we have done actually constitutes who each one of us is’ - how
could such contingency possibly rhyme with the thought of the ‘eternal recurrence'?
First, one should note what Nietzsche says about duration ‘in vain’ (nihilism, or the