The specific form of solitude he praises, however, derives its appeal from its dependence on a logically prior ethical community [���] Solitude independent of community is indistinguishable from loneliness. Nietzsche speaks fondly and repeatedly of his unknown ���friends���, precisely because they represent a community from which his self-imposed exile involves only a temporary respite.

���We Europeans of the day after tomorrow��� ��� ���these brave companions and familiars��� served ���as compensation for the friends I lacked���.

��� the pedagogical aim of his writing is neither to convert not to ���improve��� his readers, but to announce himself to kindred spirits and fellow squanderers. His moral pedagogy is designed not to ���cure��� the sick and infirm, but to embolden and encourage the healthy ��� much as his ���friends���, the fictitious free spirits, served as ���brave companions and familiars��� during his own convalescence.

��� Nietzsche depicts friendship as a mutually empowering agon, in which select individuals undergo moral development through their voluntary engagement in contest and conflict. On this agonistic model of friendship, one has no ethical obligations to those who cannot contribute to one���s own quest for self-perfection ���

One ���becomes what one is��� by overcoming oneself, which always involves elements of both self-creation and self-discovery. While his voluntaristic rhetoric suggests the construction of selfhood, his fatalism recommends the discovery of an authentic self.

��� only the combination of self-creation and self-discovery engenders the cruelty ��� both to oneself and to others ��� that endures the nomothetic impact of self-overcoming.

Nietzsche���s model of self-overcoming is strongly Apollonian, insofar as it promotes the mastery within a single soul of as many tensions and contradictions as possible. But this model is undeniably Dionysian, for it promotes internal mastery only as a means of further expanding the capacity of the soul, in an ever-escalating process that must eventually culminate in the destruction of the soul. The philosopher who constantly overcomes himself thus ���builds his city on the slopes of Vesuvius���. For he voluntarily stations himself on the brink of Dionysian excess and disintegration.

��� the philosopher ���creates��� a community only indirectly and unwittingly, through his expenditure of the excess affect required to turn the hammer on himself. He thus becomes a sign unto himself, irrepressibly projecting his self-directed legislations in to the public space that surrounds him.

��� it is the business of politics, Nietzsche believes, to oversee the production of those rare, exotic individuals who, by virtue of their overhuman beauty, excite in others the stirring of eros.

��� such individuals are ���lucky strikes��� ��� culture itself usually arises only as a fortunate accident within the sumptuary economy of nature.

��� askesis begets eros. ���the experimental disciplines developed by the philosopher arouse in (some) others the erotic attachment that alone forges the ���circle of culture���.

Nietzsche often speaks of self-overcoming In terms of self-creation, and thus fecund metaphor conveys his sense of the nomothetic influence of exemplary human beings. Great individuals are always artists in Nietzsche���s sense, for, in the course of their self-overcomings, they inadvertently produce in themselves the beauty that alone arouses erotic attachment.

��� the irresistible public nature of the philosopher���s self-overcomings. Independent of the philosopher���s own aims and aspirations his overflowing will enters the public sphere as a sign, presenting itself for reception by observers and witnesses who do not share his first hand, artist���s perspective.

��� the ethical life of any community is made possible only by the amoral self-creation of the exemplary human beings who found ��� and then desert ��� it.

Lovers ���attach their hearts��� to a great human being and are thereby consecrated to culture, but their love is not reciprocated. Because eros only strives ever upward, these exemplary figures never come to love those whose eros they have inadvertently awakened. Their gaze fixed firmly on the simmering horizon of human perfectibility, great human beings love only themselves and their ���next��� selves, which immediately vanish upon consummation. In a pithy statement of his own tragic view of the human condition, Nietzsche submits that all great love, but its very nature, stands unrequited.

Nietzsche consequently identifies his own self-overcoming as his greatest contribution to the permanent enhancement of humankind: ���my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in enduring that I feel with them. My humanity is a constant self-overcoming��� (Ecce Homo).

Through his self-experimentation, Nietzsche hopes not only to resist his twin temptations, nausea and pity, but also to furnish his unknown ���friends��� with aversive strategies designed to postpone the advent of the will to nothingness.

Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political