The Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo was known for claiming that he deserved little credit for his beautiful works: they were already there inside the rock, he merely cut them out. ‘Every block of stone,’ he said, ‘has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’
The final product already existed within Michelangelo’s ideals. But it took years of trial and error, practice, and failure to reach the point of being able to give form to it. In a similar sense, Nietzsche would say the ‘you’ that you must become is already there. It’s already inscribed in your values. That which you admire – the preponderance of all your latent virtues – reflects who you are in the truest sense.
The act of becoming who you are is the act of carving your ideal self out of the hard stone of your psyche – of bringing greater and greater refinement to the crude shapes of character that exist in you now. Simultaneously an act of discovery and creation, to become who you are is to bring your virtues to life and synthesise them into a unified whole. Nietzsche proclaims:
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