In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.

The aim of dis-incumbence is a hubristic one, for it requires confidence in the ability of men and women to live in the belief that nothing they do can, in the end, be justified by anything. That's a belief that it is easy to proclaim in seminar rooms or pubs, but not one that people could actually live with.

In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, our lives in effect.

I was keen to dispel a familiar misunderstanding: that existentialists somehow relish the alienation of human beings from the world. This may have been Camus's attitude, but it was certainly not that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, each of whom tried to show that we can only experience the world in relation to our own projects and purposes. The world is initially one of 'equipment', said Heidegger: it is a world of 'tasks', said Sartre.

It is hubris, claim the critics of 'absolutism', to suppose that we could ever even approximate to a true description of how the world anyway is. It is bad faith or 'bullshit', respond 'absolutists', to suppose - as the rhetoric of postmodernism implies - that we could seriously live and act with the thought that truth and value are simply our own projections. An attractive feature of 'ineffabilism', as I see it, is that it evades these accusations.

The Overman will himself be a nihilist in the (good) sense of rejecting any metaphysical or religious grounding for truth and value, but instead of curling up in despair, or simply going along with the crowd like the 'passive' nihilist, he will recognize himself as the sole source of truths and values to live by.