Inventing a Life 39in point of the link between fate and freedom. The two concepts blend,
Nietzsche wrote, into the "idea of individuality" (/2,60). The true indi-
vidual stands between a God who would have to be conceived as
absolute freedom and an "automaton" who would be the product of a
fatalistic principle. The individual must not bow to God or nature and
should neither negate nor objectify himself. False spirituality and false
naturalness were the twin dangers of which even the young Nietzsche
was wary.
With thoughts of this sort, the seventeen-year-old schoolboy created
an impressive internal scenario for the heady task of self-configuration.
During his Easter vacation in 1862, Nietzsche contemplated God and the
world, cruised on his "boundless ocean of ideas," and imagined where
the trip would lead him, deciding that it would be crucial to become an
individual who shapes himself to achieve wider horizons and self-
enhancement. He sought to accelerate the process of self-configuration.
In a concluding remark of his train of thought, he attempted to recon-
cile the idea of self-configuration with Christianity, which involved
modifying Christian theology to meet his specific concept. What does
the idea that God became a human being in Christ actually mean? It sig-
nifies that we can be assured that it is worth being a human being. But
we are not humans from the start; we need to become human. Toward
this end, we need the insight "that only we are responsible to ourselves,
that accusations that we have missed our life's calling can be directed
only at us, not at some higher powers" (/2,63). We are in no need of the
delusion of a supernatural world, because the very task of becoming
human is the truly colossal achievement.
In the realm of everyday reality, the schoolboy of Pforta had strict
limitations on his freedom of movement. He was alternately subject to
the rigid regulations of boarding school life, vacations at home with his
mother and sister in Naumburg, an occasional trip to his relatives in
Pobles, and brief weekend excursions, notably to Bad Kösen, where he
drank too much beer, returned inebriated, and was plagued with a bad
conscience for days. Nietzsche broadened his narrow horizons of real-