"The feeling for and the pleasure in the nuance (—the proper modernity), in what is not general, goes counter to the drive that has its pleasure and power in the grasp of the typical ..." Nietzsche understands by "type" the subjectivity that, on the basis of the will to power, is installed in unconditioned domination and is hardened in the sense of the "will." The "symptom of the strength" of this subjectivity, i.e., the sign of the drive toward the type, is "the preference for questionable and frightening things" (W.z.M., 852). Nietzsche is not "preaching" here an unbridled morality or a special "philosophy" for the Germans, but instead he is thinking, as the thinker he is, beings in their Being. He thinks what is in world history, what, because it already is, is only coming.1 As soon as we cease to interpret Nietzsche's metaphysics according to the bourgeois ideas of the end of the nineteenth century, and instead conceive it within the historical nexus to which it belongs exclusively, i.e., on the basis of its relation to the metaphysics of "objective" idealism and to Western metaphysics as a whole, we recognize that Nietzsche's concept of the "superman" manifests the counter-essence to the "absolute consciousness" of Hegel's metaphysics. But we will understand neither if we have not adequately understood the essence of subjectivity.
The form of the essence of subjectivity includes in itself a mode of the selfhood of man. But not every way of being a self is necessarily subjectivity.2 As long as we fail to see this, then every time a priority is accorded to the self we will run the risk of misinterpreting it as "subjectivity" or even "subjectivism." The usual presentation of Greek sophistry and Socratism also fell victim to this superficiality of historiographical comparison and amalgamation. Now, insofar as Plato's thinking, as well as Aristotle's metaphysics, already passed through a confrontation with sophistry and Socratism, the selfhood of man and consequently the ground of man's essence received a peculiar privilege at the beginning of metaphysics. This is immediately evident in the way beings, as what appears in unconcealedness, are exclusively determined in relation to perception (νοῦς) and to the ψυχή, the essence of "life." And that leads finally to the proposition asserted by Aristotle in his treatise Περὶ ψυχῆς (Γ 8, 431b21): ή ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι ... "The soul (the essence of 'life') is in a certain way the beings ..." That is, in a certain way the Being of beings, as the perceivedness of the perceived, is founded in the "soul." This sounds like a statement from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, according to which the conditions of the possibility of experience are simultaneously the conditions of
1 Nietzsche. op. cit. XIV, W z M n 852
2 See Sein und Zeit, § 64