“Choice” or “Gift”? “Choice” and “Gift”? Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Ricoeur in a text by Georges Canguilhem on becoming oneself

In the early post-war period, Georges Canguilhem deals with Nietzsche’s maxim “Become who you are!”. In his analysis of this “apparently contradictory formula of a philosopher full of contradictions”, the concept of “gift” plays a pivotal role, as it can be understood either in the naturalist sense of then contemporary psychology (giftedness, talent) or in the existential sense it takes on in Jaspers’s philosophy (“Sichgeschenktwerden”). Canguilhem’s philosophical inquiry into “Become who you are!” not only sheds new light on the ambivalence in his privileged relationship to Nietzsche and on the latter’s specific importance for him, but also reveals Canguilhem’s engagement with Jaspers’s philosophy of Existenz as well as with its French interpreters, Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur. Canguilhem’s hitherto unpublished text, which involves a sustained discussion with Jaspers’s Nietzsche, reveals a perhaps somewhat unexpected consonance between Canguilhem’s vitalism-friendly standpoint and the philosophy of Existenz.