Locating Nietzsche's Great Individuals

Between a Philosophical Bestiary and the New Testament

Abstract

Nietzsche’s prominent Christian interlocutors have not treated him as merely one more thinker along the way but rather as the most serious alternative to their own projects whereby he is presented as the rugged individualist for whom only the great individuals matter. This article argues that the individualist reading is in fact a misreading of Nietzsche, and it describes how Nietzsche scholars have recently redefined the role of Nietzsche’s great individuals in the context of culture and community. Ironically, having successfully recast Nietzsche as a deeply collective and therefore religious thinker, the same scholarship has put distance between Nietzsche and the New Testament at precisely the point where they would seem to converge most clearly. Working with individualistic and abstracted notions of “sin” and “salvation” and unaware when Nietzsche borrows metaphors for the collective life directly from the New Testament, the current scholarship has missed how Nietzsche reinscribes prominent features of the Christian narrative with regard to the notion of human nature.