 We can better appreciate Nietzsche’s unusual views on this score by looking more closely at the popular, but mistaken, idea that Nietzsche calls on people to “create themselves” (on the general topic, see Leiter 1998). Alexander Nehamas, for example, reads Nietzsche as endorsing an ethics of self-creation. For Nietzsche, Nehamas says, “The people who ‘want to become those they are’ are precisely ‘human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (GS, 335)” (1985, p. 174). Nehamas, however, truncates the quote from The Gay Science at a misleading point. For Nietzsche, in the full passage, continues as follows: