Durch den falschen Anderen hindurch

Abstract This article argues that Nietzsche’s analyses of affect disclose a structural mechanism through which the other is misrecognized and constituted in and through practice as a “false other.” Rather than treating affects as private inner states or merely moral sentiments, the paper reconstructs specific forms of empathy (Mitempfindung) as relational techniques of power that generate and stabilize asymmetrical relations through projection, homogenization, and surrogate appropriation. On this basis, the “false other” appears not as a mere cognitive error but as an affective-hermeneutic mechanism that reproduces social orders while obscuring alterity. The article then rereads self-overcoming as a practice that interrupts these reifying relational loops. Self-overcoming thus names neither autarky nor moral self-perfection, but an ongoing labor of rendering one’s own evaluative and relational grammars contestable again, thereby reopening the possibility of responsive, non-objectifying relations to others.