he thinks the relation of Being to himself emphatically in terms of himself, should also posit himself as "subject" in the modern sense and declare Being to be his representation.
The selfhood of man includes, indeed by necessity, selfishness and egoism as its excess. These do not at all coincide with the Ego constituting the essence of "subjectivity," i.e., the rebellious sovereignty of modern man. But even the essence of the Ego does not consist in the self-isolating exclusion of the individual from the rest of beings (this exclusion is called "individualism"). Metaphysically thought, the essence of the Ego consists rather in its making every other being something standing over against it, its object, its over-and-against, its projected ob-ject. The essence of the Ego (the I) has its distinguishing mark in the experience of all beings as objective and as standing over and against its representations. Thereby the Ego proceeds to the totality of beings and presents this to itself as something to be mastered. Only in the reign of subjectivity does there become historically possible an epoch of cosmic discoveries and planetary conquests, for only subjectivity marks off the essential bounds of an unconditioned objectivity and does so ultimately as a claim of its will. The essence of subjectivity, namely the Ego of the perceptio and representatio, is so essentially distinct from the "egoism" of the individual I that, according to Kant, the essence of the Ego consists precisely in the holding sway of consciousness in general as the essence of a self-posited humanity. Selfhood, in the sense of subjectivity and Ego, unfolds itself later in many forms, which arise historically as nation and people. The concepts of "people" and "folk" are founded on the essence of subjectivity and Ego. Only when metaphysics, i.e., the truth of beings as a whole, has been founded on subjectivity and the Ego do the concepts of "nation" and "people" obtain that metaphysical foundation from which they might possibly have historical relevance. Without Descartes, i.e., without the metaphysical foundation of subjectivity, Herder, i.e., the foundation of the concept of a people, cannot be thought. Whether one can retrospectively establish historiographical relations between these two is a matter of indifference, since historiographical relations are always only the facade, and for the most part the concealing facade, of historical nexuses. As long as we know with insufficient clarity the proper essence of subjectivity as the modern form of selfhood, we are prey to the error of thinking that the elimination of individualism and of the domination of the individual is ipso facto an overcoming of subjectivity. In distinction to the "individualism" of the nineteenth century, which protected the pluralism and the "value" of the unique and had as its counter-essence the distinctionlessness of the herd, Nietzsche sees the emergence of a new form of humanity, characterized by the "typical."
In a note from the year 1888 (Wille zur Macht, 819) Nietzsche says