## 1. Life and Works



Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rocken (near Leipzig),
where his father was a Lutheran minister. His father died in 1849, and
the family relocated to Naumburg, where he grew up in a household
comprising his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and his younger sister,
Elisabeth. Nietzsche had a brilliant school and university career,
culminating in May 1869 when he was called to a chair in classical
philology at Basel. At age 24, he was the youngest ever appointed to
that post. His teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl wrote in his letter
of reference that Nietzsche was so promising that "He will
simply be able to do anything he wants to do" (Kaufmann 1954:
8). Most of Nietzsche's university work and his early
publications were in philology, but he was already interested in
philosophy, particularly the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich
Albert Lange. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche had
planned to pursue a second Ph.D. in philosophy, with a project about
theories of teleology in the time since Kant.



When he was a student in Leipzig, Nietzsche met Richard Wagner, and
after his move to Basel, he became a frequent guest in the Wagner
household at Villa Tribschen in Lucerne. Nietzsche's friendship
with Wagner (and Cosima Liszt Wagner) lasted into the mid-1870s, and
that friendship--together with their ultimate break--were
key touchstones in his personal and professional life. His first book,
*The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music* (1872), was
not the careful work of classical scholarship the field might have
expected, but a controversial polemic combining speculations about the
collapse of the tragic culture of fifth-century Athens with a proposal
that Wagnerian music-drama might become the source of a renewed tragic
culture for contemporary Germany. The work was generally ill-received
within classical studies--and savagely reviewed by Ulrich
Wilamovitz-Mollendorff, who went on to become one of the leading
classicists of the generation--even though it contained some
striking interpretive insights (e.g., about the role of the chorus in
Greek tragedy). Following the first book, Nietzsche continued his
efforts to influence the broader direction of German intellectual
culture, publishing essays intended for a wide public on David
Friedrich Strauss, on the "use of history for life", on
Schopenhauer, and on Wagner. These essays are known collectively as
the *Untimely Meditations*.



Although he assisted in early planning for Wagner's Bayreuth
project and attended the first festival, Nietzsche was not favorably
impressed by the cultural atmosphere there, and his relationship with
the Wagners soured after 1876. Nietzsche's health, always
fragile, forced him to take leave from Basel in 1876-77. He used
the time to explore a broadly naturalistic critique of traditional
morality and culture--an interest encouraged by his friendship
with Paul Ree, who was with Nietzsche in Sorrento working on
his *Origin of Moral Sensations* (see Janaway 2007:
74-89; Small 2005). Nietzsche's research resulted in
*Human, All-too-human* (1878), which introduced his readers to
the corrosive attacks on conventional pieties for which he became
famous, as well as to a style of writing in short, numbered paragraphs
and pithy aphorisms to which he often returned in later work. When he
sent the book to the Wagners early in 1878, it effectively ended their
friendship: Nietzsche later wrote that his book and Wagner's
*Parsifal* libretto crossed in the mail "as if two swords
had crossed" (*EH* III, *HH*, 5).



Nietzsche's health did not measurably improve during the leave,
and by 1879, he was forced to resign his professorship altogether. As
a result, he was freed to write and to develop the style that suited
him. He published a book almost every year thereafter. These works
began with *Daybreak* (1881), which collected critical
observations on morality and its underlying psychology, and there
followed the mature works for which Nietzsche is best known: *The
Gay Science* (1882, second expanded edition 1887), *Thus Spoke
Zarathustra* (1883-5), *Beyond Good and Evil* (1886),
*On the Genealogy of Morality* (1887), and in the last year of
his productive life *Twilight of the Idols* (1888) and *The
Wagner Case* (1888), along with *The Antichrist* and his
intellectual biography, *Ecce Homo*, which were published only
later. At the beginning of this period, Nietzsche enjoyed an intense
but ultimately painful friendship with Ree and Lou
Salome, a brilliant young Russian student. The three initially
planned to live together in a kind of intellectual commune, but
Nietzsche and Ree both developed romantic interest in
Salome, and after Nietzsche unsuccessfully proposed marriage,
Salome and Ree departed for Berlin. Salome later
wrote an illuminating book about Nietzsche (Salome [1894]
2001), which first proposed an influential periodization of his
philosophical development.



In later years, Nietzsche moved frequently in the effort to find a
climate that would improve his health, settling into a pattern of
spending winters near the Mediterranean (usually in Italy) and summers
in Sils Maria, Switzerland. His symptoms included intense headaches,
nausea, and trouble with his eyesight. Recent work (Huenemann 2013)
has convincingly argued that he probably suffered from a retro-orbital
meningioma, a slow-growing tumor on the brain surface behind his right
eye. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, and
when he regained consciousness he wrote a series of increasingly
deranged letters. His close Basel friend Franz Overbeck was gravely
concerned and travelled to Turin, where he found Nietzsche suffering
from dementia. After unsuccessful treatment in Basel and Jena, he was
released into the care of his mother, and later his sister, eventually
lapsing entirely into silence. He lived on until 1900, when he died of
a stroke complicated by pneumonia.



During his illness, his sister Elisabeth assumed control of his
literary legacy, and she eventually published *The Antichrist*
and *Ecce Homo*, as well as a selection of writing from his
notebooks for which she used the title *The Will to Power*,
following Nietzsche's remark in the *Genealogy*
(*GM* III, 27) that he planned a major work under that title.
The editorial work was not well founded in Nietzsche's surviving
plans for the book and was also marred by Elisabeth's strong
anti-Semitic commitments, which had been extremely distressing to
Nietzsche himself. As a result, *The Will to Power* leaves a
somewhat misleading impression of the general character and content of
the writings left in Nietzsche's notebooks. That writing is now
available in an outstanding critical edition (*KGA*, more
widely available in *KSA*; English translations of selections
are available in *WEN* and *WLN*.)



Nietzsche's life has been the subject of several full-length
biographies (Hayman 1980, Cate 2002, Safranski 2003, Young 2010,
Prideaux 2018), as well as speculative fictional reconstructions
(Yalom 1992); readers can find more details about his life and
particular works in the entry on
 Nietzsche's Life and Works
 and in the articles comprising the first three parts of Gemes and
Richardson (2013), as well as in Meyer (2019), which treats the
publication strategy of Nietzsche's "middle period"
works (*HH*, *D*, *GS*).


## 2. Critique of Religion and Morality



Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of traditional
European moral commitments, together with their foundations in
Christianity. This critique is very wide-ranging; it aims to undermine
not just religious faith or philosophical moral *theory*, but
also many central aspects of ordinary moral consciousness, some of
which are difficult to imagine doing without (e.g., altruistic
concern, guilt for wrongdoing, moral responsibility, the value of
compassion, the demand for equal consideration of persons, and so
on).



By the time Nietzsche wrote, it was common for European intellectuals
to assume that such ideas, however much inspiration they owed to the
Christian intellectual and faith tradition, needed a rational
grounding independent from particular sectarian or even ecumenical
religious commitments. Then as now, most philosophers assumed that a
secular vindication of morality would surely be forthcoming and would
save the large majority of our standard commitments. Nietzsche found
that confidence naive, and he deployed all his rhetorical prowess
to shock his readers out of complacency on this score. For example,
his doubts about the viability of Christian underpinnings for moral
and cultural life are not offered in a sunny spirit of anticipated
liberation, nor does he present a sober but basically confident call
to develop a secular understanding of morality; instead, he launches
the famous, aggressive and paradoxical pronouncement that "God
is dead" (*GS* 108, 125, 343). The idea is not so much
that atheism is true--in *GS* 125, he depicts this
pronouncement arriving as *fresh news* to a group of
atheists--but instead that because "the belief in the
Christian God has become unbelievable", everything that was
"built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it",
*including* "the whole of our European morality",
is destined for "collapse" (*GS* 343). Christianity
no longer commands society-wide cultural allegiance as a framework
grounding ethical commitments, and thus, a common basis for collective
life that was supposed to have been immutable and invulnerable has
turned out to be not only less stable than we assumed, but
incomprehensibly *mortal*--and in fact, already lost. The
response called for by such a turn of events is mourning and deep
disorientation.



Indeed, the case is even worse than that, according to Nietzsche. Not
only do standard moral commitments lack a foundation we thought they
had, but stripped of their veneer of unquestionable authority, they
prove to have been not just baseless but positively harmful.
Unfortunately, the moralization of our lives has insidiously attached
itself to genuine psychological needs--some basic to our
condition, others cultivated by the conditions of life under
morality--so its corrosive effects cannot simply be removed
without further psychological damage. Still worse, the damaging side
of morality has implanted itself within us *in the form of a
genuine self-understanding*, making it hard for us to imagine
ourselves living any other way. Thus, Nietzsche argues, we are faced
with a difficult, long term restoration project in which the most
cherished aspects of our way of life must be ruthlessly investigated,
dismantled, and then reconstructed in healthier form--all while
we continue somehow to sail the ship of our common ethical life on the
high seas.



The most extensive development of this Nietzschean critique of
morality appears in his late work *On the Genealogy of
Morality*, which consists of three treatises, each devoted to the
psychological examination of a central moral idea. In the First
Treatise, Nietzsche takes up the idea that moral consciousness
consists fundamentally in altruistic concern for others. He begins by
observing a striking fact, namely, that this widespread conception of
what morality is all about--while entirely
commonsensical--is not the essence of any possible morality, but
a historical innovation.



To make the case for historical change, he identifies two patterns of
ethical assessment, each associated with a basic pair of evaluative
terms, a good/bad pattern and a good/evil pattern. Understood
according to the good/bad pattern, the idea of goodness originated in
social class privilege: the good were first understood to be those of
the higher social order, but then eventually the idea of goodness was
"internalized"--i.e., transferred from social class
itself to traits of character and other personal excellences that were
typically associated with the privileged caste (for example, the
virtue of courage for a society with a privileged military class, or
magnanimity for one with a wealthy elite, or truthfulness and
(psychological) nobility for a culturally ambitious aristocracy; see
*GM* I, 4-5). In such a system, goodness is associated
with *exclusive virtues*. There is no thought that everyone
should be excellent--the very idea makes no sense, since to be
excellent is to be distinguished from the ordinary run of people. In
that sense, good/bad valuation arises out of a "pathos of
distance" (*GM* I, 2) expressing the superiority
excellent people feel over ordinary ones, and it gives rise to a
"noble morality" (*BGE* 260). Nietzsche shows
convincingly that this pattern of assessment was dominant in ancient
Mediterranean culture (the Homeric world, later Greek and Roman
society, and even much of ancient philosophical ethics).



The good/evil pattern of valuation is quite different. It focuses its
negative evaluation (evil) on violations of the interests or
well-being of others--and consequently its positive evaluation
(good) on altruistic concern for their welfare. Such a morality has
universalistic pretensions: if it is to promote and protect the
welfare of all, its restrictions and injunctions must apply to
everyone equally. It is thereby especially amenable to ideas of basic
human equality, starting from the thought that each person has an
equal claim to moral consideration and respect. These are familiar
ideas in the modern context--so familiar, indeed, that Nietzsche
observes how easily we confuse them with "the moral manner of
valuation *as such*" (*GM* Pref., 4)--but the
universalist structure, altruistic sentiments, and egalitarian
tendency of those values mark an obvious contrast with the valuation
of exclusive virtues in the good/bad pattern. The contrast, together
with the prior dominance of good/bad structured moralities, raises a
straightforward historical question: what happened? How did we get
from the widespread acceptance of good/bad valuation to the near
universal dominance of good/evil thinking?



Nietzsche's famous answer is unflattering to our modern
conception. He insists that the transformation was the result of a
"slave revolt in morality" (*GM* I, 10; cf.
*BGE* 260). The exact nature of this alleged revolt is a matter
of ongoing scholarly controversy (in recent literature, see Bittner
1994; Reginster 1997, 2021; Migotti 1998; Ridley 1998; May 1999:
41-54; Janaway 2007: 90-106, 223-9; Owen 2007:
78-89; Wallace 2007; Anderson 2011; Poellner 2011; Leiter 2015:
155-77; Snelson 2017; Jenkins 2018; Huddleston 2021), but the
broad outline is clear enough. People who suffered from oppression at
the hands of the noble, excellent, (but uninhibited) people valorized
by good/bad morality--and who were denied any effective recourse
against them by relative powerlessness--developed a persistent,
corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred against their enemies,
which Nietzsche calls *ressentiment*. That emotion motivated
the development of the new moral concept *evil*,
purpose-designed for the moralistic condemnation of those enemies.
(How conscious or unconscious--how "strategic" or
not--this process is supposed to have been is one matter of
scholarly controversy.) Afterward, via negation of the concept of
evil, the new concept of goodness emerges, rooted in altruistic
concern of a sort that would inhibit evil actions. Moralistic
condemnation using these new values does little by itself to satisfy
the motivating desire for revenge, but if the new way of thinking
could spread, gaining more adherents and eventually influencing the
evaluations even of the nobility, then the revenge might be
impressive--indeed, "the most spiritual" form of
revenge (*GM* I, 7; see also *GM* I, 10-11). For
in that case, the revolt would accomplish a "radical
revaluation" (*GM* I, 7) that would corrupt the very
*values* that gave the noble way of life its character and made
it seem admirable in the first place.



For Nietzsche, then, our morality amounts to a vindictive effort to
poison the happiness of the fortunate (*GM* III, 14), instead
of a high-minded, dispassionate, and strictly rational concern for
others. This can seem hard to accept, both as an account of how the
valuation of altruistic concern originated and even more as a
psychological explanation of the basis of altruism in modern people,
who are far removed from the social conditions that figure in
Nietzsche's story. That said, Nietzsche offers two strands of
evidence sufficient to give pause to an open-minded reader. In the
Christian context, he points to the surprising prevalence of what one
might call the "brimstone, hellfire, and damnation
diatribe" in Christian letters and sermons: Nietzsche cites at
length a striking example from Tertullian (*GM* I, 15), but
that example is the tip of a very large iceberg, and it is a troubling
puzzle what this genre of "vengeful outbursts"
(*GM* I, 16) is even doing within (what is supposed to be) a
religion of love and forgiveness. Second, Nietzsche observes with
confidence-shaking perspicacity how frequently indignant moralistic
condemnation itself, whether arising in serious criminal or public
matters or from more private personal interactions, can detach itself
from any measured assessment of the wrong and devolve into a
free-floating expression of vengeful resentment against some (real or
imagined) perpetrator. The spirit of such condemnations is
disturbingly often more in line with Nietzsche's diagnosis of
altruism than it is with our conventional (but possibly
self-satisfied) moral self-understanding.



The First Treatise does little, however, to suggest why inhabitants of
a *noble* morality might be at all moved by such condemnations,
generating a question about how the moral revaluation could have
succeeded. Nothing internal to the nobles' value system gives
them any grounds for general altruistic concern or any reason to pay
heed to the complaints of those whom they have already dismissed as
contemptible. The Second Treatise, about guilt and bad conscience,
offers some materials toward an answer to this puzzle.



Nietzsche begins from the insight that guilt bears a close conceptual
connection to the notion of debt. Just as a debtor's failure to
repay gives the creditor the right to seek alternative compensation
(whether via some remedy spelled out in a contract, or less formally,
through general social or legal sanctions), so a guilty party owes the
victim some form of response to the violation, which serves as a kind
of compensation for whatever harm was suffered. Nietzsche's
conjectural history of the "moralized" (*GM* II,
21) notion of guilt suggests that it developed through a transfer of
this structure--which pairs each loss to some
(punishment-involving) compensation--from the domain of material
debt to a wider class of actions that violate some socially accepted
norm. The really important conceptual transformation, however, is not
the transfer itself, but an accompanying *purification* and
*internalization* of the feeling of indebtedness, which connect
the demand for compensation to a source of wrongful action that is
supposed to be entirely within the agent's control. The
condemnation of the violation thereby attaches a negative assessment
to the guilty person's basic sense of personal worth.



The highly purified character of moralized guilt suggests how it might
be a powerful tool for moral revaluation and simultaneously indicates
some of Nietzsche's reasons for skepticism against it. As
Williams (1993a) observes, a purified notion of guilt pertaining to
what is completely under the agent's control (and so entirely
immune from luck) stands in a particularly tight fit with
*blame*: "Blame needs an occasion--an
action--and a target--the person who did the action and goes
on to meet the blame" (Williams 1993a: 10). The pure idea of
moralized guilt answers this need by tying any wrong action
inextricably and uniquely to a blamable agent. As we saw, the impulse
to assign blame was central to the *ressentiment* that
motivated the moral revaluation of values, according to the First
Treatise. Thus, insofar as people (even nobles) become susceptible to
such moralized guilt, they might also become vulnerable to the
revaluation, and Nietzsche offers some speculations about how and why
this might happen (*GM* II, 16-17).



But Nietzsche's main concern in the Second Treatise is the
danger he takes moralized guilt to pose to psychological health. These
criticisms have attracted an increasingly subtle secondary literature;
see Reginster (2011, 2018, 2021), as well as Williams (1993a, b),
Ridley (1998), May (1999: 55-80), Risse (2001, 2005), Janaway
(2007: 124-42), Owen (2007: 91-112), Migotti (2013), and
Leiter (2015: 178-95). One salient thought is that guilt's
very purity makes it liable to turn against the agent
herself--even in cases where it plays no legitimate role in
self-regulation, or in ways that outstrip any such role. For example,
given guilt's intense internalization, no connection to an
*actual* victim is essential to it. Any observer of the
violation (whether real or ideal/imagined) can equally be entitled to
resent the guilty party, and that fact makes space for religious or
ideological systems to attach guilt to practically any kind of rule
violation, even when no one was harmed. In such cases, free-floating
guilt can lose its social and moral point and develop into a
pathological desire for self-punishment.



The *Genealogy*'s Third Treatise explores the
intensification of such self-punishment via the idealization of
asceticism. Ascetic self-denial is a curious phenomenon. (Indeed, on
certain psychological assumptions, like descriptive psychological
egoism or ordinary hedonism, it seems incomprehensible.) But it is
nevertheless strikingly widespread in the history of religious
practice. The *Genealogy* misses no chance to criticize
religious versions of asceticism, but its target is
broader--including, specifically, the more rational form
asceticism takes in Schopenhauer's ethics. What unifies the
different versions is their *extension* of the valorization of
self-discipline in the interest of virtue (which Nietzsche himself
would advocate) into a thoroughgoing form of self-condemnation, in
which self-discipline is turned against the agent herself and comes to
express the person's commitment to her own fundamental
worthlessness. (One obvious route to such a value system, though far
from the only one, is for the moralist to identify a set of drives and
desires that people are bound to have--perhaps rooted in their
human or animal nature--and to condemn those as evil;
anti-sensualist forms of asceticism follow this path.)



As Nietzsche emphasizes, purified guilt is naturally recruited as a
tool for developing asceticism. Suffering is an inevitable part of the
human condition, and the ascetic strategy is to interpret such
suffering as *punishment*, thereby connecting it to the notion
of guilt. Despite turning her own suffering against her, the move
paradoxically offers certain advantages to the agent--not only
does her suffering gain an explanation and moral justification, but
her own activity can be validated by being enlisted on the side of
punishment (self-castigation):



> 
> 
> For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering;
> still more precisely, a perpetrator, still more specifically, a
> *guilty* perpetrator who is susceptible to suffering,
> 
> 
> 



and



> 
> 
> the ascetic priest says to him: "That's right, my sheep!
> Someone must be to blame for it; but you yourself are this someone,
> you alone are to blame for it--*you alone are to blame for
> yourself*!". (*GM* III, 15)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, Nietzsche suggests,



> 
> 
> The principal bow stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself to cause
> the human soul to resound with wrenching and ecstatic music of every
> kind was executed--everyone knows this--by exploiting
> *the feeling of guilt*. (*GM* III, 20)
> 
> 
> 



Given that guilt involves a serious diminution of personal worth, the
effects of this guilt-inflected ascetic self-understanding must be
extremely destructive for the agent's sense of self-worth, and
ultimately for psychological health.



Nietzsche's account places asceticism in an unattractive light,
but the ascetic conception of morality is by no means *refuted by
argument* through these considerations. Consider, for example, the
stance of Schopenhauerian pessimism, according to which human life and
the world have *negative* absolute value. From that standpoint,
the moralist can perfectly well allow that ascetic valuation is
self-punishing and even destructive for the moral agent, but such
conclusions are entirely consistent with--indeed, they seem like
*warranted responses to*--the pessimistic evaluation. That
is, if life is an inherent evil and nothingness is a concrete
improvement over existence, then diminishing or impairing life through
asceticism yields a net enhancement of value. Nietzsche's
concern is not so much to *refute* that view as to
*diagnose* it. He insists that such evaluative commitments are
symptoms of psychological and cultural sickness, and that the ascetic
response is an "instinctive", but ultimately
self-defeating, effort at self-medication (*GM* III, 13, 16).
While asceticism imposes self-discipline on the sick practitioner, it
simultaneously makes the person sicker, plunging her into intensified
inner conflict (*GM* III, 15, 20-21). Thus,
Nietzsche's fundamental objection to asceticism is that it is
psychologically destructive and practically self-defeating, even for
those (the sick) for whom it does its best work--and this is so
*even if* it remains (from a certain perspective) the best they
can do for themselves in their condition.



While this section has focused on the *Genealogy*, it is worth
noting that its three studies are offered only as *examples* of
Nietzschean skepticism about conventional moral ideas. In *The
Antichrist*, Nietzsche extended these criticisms of the
specifically Christian psychological, cognitive, and evaluative
foundations for morality (an extension which has been the subject of
extensive recent discussion; see, e.g., Snelson 2017; Berry 2019; and
the papers included in Conway 2019), and his other works criticize
many other moral ideas. 



To highlight just one example, Nietzsche attacks the value of
compassion (another central element in Schopenhauer's moral
theory). Nietzsche tried out many different arguments against pity and
compassion beginning already in *Human, All-too-human* (1878)
and continuing to the end of his productive life--for discussion,
see Reginster (2000), Janaway (2017a, 2017b), and Nussbaum (1994). At
times, he emphasized the *ad hominem* suggestion that
compassion is less altruistic than it seems, either based on the La
Rochefoucauld-inspired reasoning that apparently altruistic compassion
is in reality just cloaked egoism (*D* 133), or based on the
psychologically subtle point that the satisfactions of pity
essentially involve a feeling of "small superiority" over
others (*GM* III, 18)--(note that Rousseau relies on a
similar observation as part of his *defense* of pity's
role in moral development; Rousseau [1762] 1979: 221). But
Nietzsche's deeper complaints begin from the observation that a
morality of compassion centers attention on the problem of suffering,
presupposing that suffering is bad as such. Nietzsche resists the
hedonistic doctrine that pleasure and pain lie at the basis of all
value claims, which would be the most natural way to defend such a
presupposition. If he is right that there are other values,
independent of consequences for pleasures and pains, that fact raises
the possibility that the ultimate value of any particular incidence of
suffering could depend on the role it plays in the sufferer's
life overall and how it might contribute to those *other*
values; in that case, its badness would not follow immediately from
the bare fact that it is suffering. Nietzsche builds this idea into an
argument against the morality of compassion, suggesting that suffering
may sometimes promote a person's *growth*, or progress
toward excellence (*GS* 338; see also Janaway 2017a). From that
point of view, the morality of compassion looks both presumptuous and
misguided. It is presumptuous because it concludes from the outside
that a person's suffering must be bad, thereby flattening out
"what is most personal" (*GS* 338) in the
person's life and interfering with her deciding for herself on
the value of her suffering. It is misguided both because it runs the
risk of robbing individuals of their opportunity to make something
positive (*individually* meaningful) out of their suffering,
and because the global devaluation of suffering as such dismisses in
advance the potentially valuable aspects of our general condition as
vulnerable and finite creatures (*GS* 338; compare Williams
1973: 82-100).



This survey hits only a few highlights of Nietzsche's
far-reaching critique of traditional moral and religious values, which
extends to many other moral ideas (e.g., sin, otherworldly
transcendence, the doctrine of free will, the value of selflessness,
anti-sensualist moral outlooks, and more). For him, however, human
beings remain valuing creatures in the last analysis. It follows that
no critique of traditional values could be practically effective
without suggesting *replacement* values capable of meeting our
needs as valuers (see *GS* 347; Anderson 2009, esp. at
225-7; Richardson 2020 attempts a systematization of the
replacement values). Nietzsche thought it was the job of philosophers
to create such values (*BGE* 211), so readers have long and
rightly expected to find an account of value creation in his
works.


## 3. Value Creation



Unfortunately, neither Nietzsche's ideas about the nature of
value creation nor his suggestions about what specific values should
be "created" have seemed as clear to readers as his
negative critique of traditional values. (The disparity is often
marked in the literature by doubts about whether Nietzsche has a
"positive" ethics to offer.) There is something to this
reaction: Nietzsche's critique has a clear target and is
developed at an extended scale, whereas his suggestions about
alternative values can seem scattered or telegraphic. That said, it is
not as though Nietzsche is the least bit shy about making evaluatively
loaded claims, including "positive" ones. To some extent,
disappointment among commentators in search of "positive
views" arises from our looking for the wrong things--for
example, seeking a systematically organized axiological theory when
Nietzsche himself is skeptical of any such project, or expecting any
"positive" ethics to accommodate certain "moral
intuitions" which Nietzsche is more inclined to challenge than
to save. This section surveys some territory Nietzsche covers under
the heading "value creation". After mentioning different
options for understanding the nature of such "creation",
it explores some of the values he promotes.


### 3.1 Nietzsche's Meta-ethical Stance and the Nature of Value Creation



Nietzsche's talk about the creation of values challenges
philosophical common sense. It is common, if not altogether standard,
to explain *values* by contrasting them against mere
*desires*. Both are positive attitudes toward some object or
state of affairs ("pro-attitudes"), but valuing seems to
involve an element of objectivity absent in desiring. (Consider: If I
become convinced that something I valued is not in fact valuable, that
discovery is normally sufficient to provoke me to revise my value,
suggesting that valuing must be responsive to the world; by contrast,
subjective desires often persist even in the face of my judgment that
their objects are not properly desirable, or are unattainable; see the
entries on
 value theory
 and
 desire.)
 Nietzsche challenges this basic philosophical conception when he
treats value as "created" rather than discovered in the
world:



> 
> 
> We [contemplatives] ... are those who really continually
> *fashion* something that had not been there before: the whole
> eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives,
> scales, affirmations, and negations. ... Whatever has
> *value* in our world now does not have value in itself,
> according to its nature--nature is always value-less--but
> has been *given* value at some time, as a present--and it
> was *we* who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the
> world *that concerns man*! (*GS* 301; see also
> *GS* 78, 109, 139, 143, 276, 289, 290, 299; *Z* I, 17,
> 22, II, 20, III, 12; *BGE* 203, 211, 260, 261, 285; *TI*
> IX, 9, 24, 49)
> 
> 
> 



Passages like *GS* 301 have an unmistakable subjectivist
flavor, tracing value to some source in our own attitudes and/or
agency, but it is a difficult question how this subjectivist strand of
Nietzsche's thought is to be reconciled with his ubiquitous (and
uncompromising, unqualified) insistence that his own value judgments
are *correct* and those he opposes are false, or even rest on
lies. Some scholars take the value creation passages as evidence that
Nietzsche was an anti-realist about value, so that his confident
evaluative judgments should be read as efforts at rhetorical
persuasion rather than objective claims (Leiter 2015), or (relatedly)
they suggest that Nietzsche could fruitfully be read as a skeptic, so
that such passages should be evaluated primarily for their practical
effect on readers (Berry 2011, 2019; see also Leiter 2014). Such
skeptical readings have been thoughtfully challenged by Huddleston
(2014). Others (Hussain 2007) take Nietzsche to be advocating a
fictionalist posture, according to which values are self-consciously
invented contributions to a pretense through which we can satisfy our
needs as valuing creatures, even though all evaluative claims are
(strictly speaking) false. Still others (Richardson 2004; Reginster
2006; Anderson 2005, 2009; Silk 2015, 2018) are tempted to suppose
that Nietzsche's talk of "creation" is meant to
suggest one or another form of "constructivism," according
to which value claims are "attitude-dependent" in some
definite respect that requires careful specification, or
"subjective realism"--a view according to which
values have some basis in subjective attitudes of valuing, but
nevertheless *also* gain some kind of objective standing in the
world once those attitudes have done their work and
"created" the values.



Nietzsche's meta-ethical stance is treated elsewhere (see
Section 3 of the entry on
 Nietzsche's moral and political philosophy),
 but even aside from the meta-ethical status of "created"
values, the very idea of "value creation" is challenging
to understand. This continues to be a very active area of research,
with quite different recent accounts appearing in Richardson (2020:
439-74), Clark (2015b), Dries (2015), and others. In lieu of a
fuller discussion, here are three textual observations. First, while a
few passages appear to offer a conception of value creation as some
kind of legislative fiat (e.g., *BGE* 211), such a view is hard
to reconcile with the dominant strand of passages, which presents
value creation as a difficult achievement characterized by substantial
worldly constraints and significant exposure to luck, rather than
something that could be done at will. Second, a great many of the
passages (esp. *GS* 78, 107, 290, 299, 301) connect value
creation to artistic creation, suggesting that Nietzsche took artistic
creation and aesthetic value as an important paradigm or model for his
account of values and value creation more generally. While some (Soll
2001) attack this entire idea as confused, other scholars have called
on these passages as support for either fictionalist or subjective
realist interpretations. In addition, Huddleston (2019) shows that
investigations into the creation of artistic and cultural value with
real intersubjective purchase was utterly central to Nietzsche's
very conception of philosophy and its proper ambitions. Progress in
this area is likely to come from careful interrogation of
Nietzsche's conception of artistic creation itself. Finally,
Nietzsche's account of "revaluation" remains an
understudied source of examples for what he might mean by "value
creation". After all, the moral revaluation achieved by the
"slave revolt in morality" (see
 section 2)
 is presented as a creation of new values (*GM* I, 10, *et
passim*). In addition to showing that not all value creation leads
to results that Nietzsche would endorse, this observation leads to
interesting questions--e.g., Did Nietzsche hold that all value
creation operates via revaluation (as suggested, perhaps, by
*GM* II, 12-13)? Or is "value creation *ex
nihilo*" also supposed to be a possibility? If so, what
differentiates the two modes? Can we say anything about which is to be
preferred? etc.


### 3.2 Some Nietzschean Values



Aside from issues about what it is to create values in the first
place, many readers find themselves puzzled about what
"positive" values Nietzsche means to promote. One
plausible explanation for readers' persisting sense of unclarity
is that Nietzsche disappoints the expectation that philosophy should
offer a reductive (or at least, highly systematized) account of the
good, along the lines of "Pleasure is the good";
"The only thing that is truly good is the good will";
"The best life is characterized by tranquility"; or the
like. Nietzsche praises many *different* values, and in the
main, he does not follow the stereotypically philosophical strategy of
deriving his evaluative judgments from one or a few foundational
principles. While the resulting axiological landscape is complex, we
can get a sense of its shape by considering six values that play
indisputably important roles in Nietzsche's sense of what
matters.


#### 3.2.1 Power and Life



The closest Nietzsche comes to organizing his value claims
systematically is his insistence on the importance of power,
especially if this is taken together with related ideas about
strength, health, and "life". A well-known passage appears
near the opening of the late work, *The Antichrist*:



> 
> 
> What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man,
> the will to power, power itself.
> 
> 
> 
> What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
> 
> 
> 
> What is happiness? The feeling that power is *growing*, that
> resistance is overcome.
> 
> 
> 
> Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but
> fitness (Renaissance virtue, *virtu*, virtue that is
> moraline-free). (*A* 2)
> 
> 
> 



In the literature, claims of this sort are associated with a
"will to power doctrine", commonly viewed as one of
Nietzsche's central ideas (see
 section 6.1).
 That doctrine seems to include the proposal that creatures like us
(or more broadly: all life, or even all things period) aim at the
enhancement of their power--and then further, that this fact
entails that enhanced power is good for us (or for everything).



In the middle of the twentieth century, many readers (more or less
casually) received this as a deeply unattractive blunt claim that
"Might makes right", which they associated with disturbing
social and political tendencies salient in the era (see, e.g.,
Beauvoir 1948: 72). After the Second World War, Walter Kaufmann
([1950] 1974: 178-333) engaged in a long-term campaign to
recuperate Nietzsche's thought from this unsavory line of
interpretations, largely by insisting on how often the forms of power
emphasized by Nietzsche involve *internally* directed
self-control and the development of cultural excellence, rather than
domination of others. While this account rightly highlighted internal
complexity and nuance that were flattened out by the oversimplified
"might makes right" reception dominant at mid-century,
Kaufmann's approach threatens to sanitize aspects of
Nietzsche's view that were intended to pose a stark challenge to
our moral intuitions. More sophisticated versions of this broad
approach--like Richardson's (1996) development of
Nietzsche's distinction between *tyranny* (in which a
dominant drive wholly effaces what it dominates) and *mastery*
(in which a more dominant drive allows some expression to the less
dominant one but controls and redirects that expression to its own
larger ends)--are rightly inclined to concede the troubling
aspects of Nietzsche's view (e.g., that the doctrine
countenances tyranny as well as mastery, even if it privileges the
latter).



Together with such concessions, recent work has made important
progress in understanding the internal complexities of
Nietzsche's position valorizing power. One of the most important
and influential strands is Bernard Reginster's (2006:
103-47; see also 2018a) emphasis on Nietzsche's conception
of power as *overcoming resistance* (*BGE* 259, 230;
*GM* I, 13; II, 16-17; *A* 2; *KSA* 11[111]
13: 52-3; 14[173] 13: 358-60; 14[174] 13: 360-2;
11[75] 13: 37-8; 9[151] 12: 424). This conception connects power
directly to the person's capacity to reshape her environment in
the service of her ends, and it thereby provides a more intuitive
sense of what, exactly, is supposed to be good about power. In
addition, the interpretation locates Nietzsche's view directly
athwart Schopenhauer's efforts to motivate pessimism by appeal
to a ubiquitous "will to life". By replacing
Schopenhauer's will to life with his will to power (understood
as a drive to overcome resistance, which *wills* the
world's *resistance* along with its overcoming;
*KSA* 9[151] 12: 424), Nietzsche can argue that our basic
condition as desiring, striving creatures can lead to a mode of
existence worthy of endorsement, rather than to inevitable frustration
(as Schopenhauer had it). The same conception has been developed by
Paul Katsafanas (2013), who argues that, *qua* agents, we are
ineluctably committed to valuing power because a Reginster-style will
to power is a constitutive condition on acting at all. (His account
thereby contributes to the constitutivist strategy in ethics pioneered
by Christine Korsgaard (1996) and David Velleman (2000, 2006).). More
recently, Katsafanas (2015, 2019) has extended his view in a way that
places the value of power at the basis of a wider account of
"higher values" in Nietzsche.



A second important strand of recent work emphasizes not a general,
structural feature of power like overcoming resistance, but a
"thicker", more substantive ethical idea. On this view,
what Nietzsche values is power understood as a tendency toward growth,
strength, domination, or expansion (Schacht 1983: 365-88;
Hussain 2011). Brian Leiter (2002: 282-3) criticized what he
called a "Millian" version of this idea, according to
which power is valuable simply because (*per* the alleged
Nietzschean doctrine) power is in fact our fundamental aim. (This is
supposed to be analogous to Mill's strategy for deriving the
principle of utility, based on the thought that we can show
something--viz., pleasure--to be desirable by showing it to
be desired.) Leiter is surely right to raise worries about the Millian
reconstruction. Nietzsche apparently takes us to be committed to a
wide *diversity* of first order aims, which raises *prima
facie* doubts about the idea that for him *all* willing
really takes power as its first-order aim (as the Millian argument
would require). Moreover, Nietzsche's sensitivity to pessimism
as a possible evaluative outlook creates problems for the soundness of
the argument form itself--e.g., even supposing we must aim at
power, maybe that is exactly what makes the world a terrible place,
rather than providing any reason to think that power, or its pursuit,
is valuable.



But Hussain (2011) persuasively argues that if we shift our focus away
from the pursuit of power in any narrow sense to the broader (and
quite Nietzschean) idea that growth, strength, power-expansion, and
the like are all manifestations of *life*, then at least some
of Leiter's philosophical and most of his textual objections can
be avoided. On the resulting picture, Nietzsche's position reads
as a form of ethical naturalism, arguing that expression of these
fundamental life tendencies is good for us precisely because they
*are* our basic tendencies and we are *inescapably* in
their grip (Hussain 2011: 159, *et passim*). It remains unclear
that this view can avoid the objection rooted in the possibility of
pessimism (i.e., that the value of life/power cannot follow from its
inescapability for us, since that might be a state to which we are
*condemned*). Given his engagement with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
should have been sensitive to the worry. But Hussain (2011) shows that
a substantial strand of Nietzschean texts do fit the picture, and that
many other nineteenth-century philosophers who share Nietzsche's
anti-supernaturalist commitments were attracted by such naturalist
arguments from inescapability.


#### 3.2.2 Affirmation



A second value commitment prominent in Nietzsche's work (and
arguably related to his positive assessments of life and power) is the
value of affirmation. According to Reginster (2006: 2),
"Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining
philosophical achievement". This theme enters forcefully in Book
IV of *The Gay Science*, which opens with an expression of
dedication to "*amor fati*":



> 
> 
> I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in
> things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
> *Amor fati*: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to
> wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even
> want to accuse those who accuse. *Looking away* shall be my
> only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be
> only a Yes-sayer. (*GS* 276)
> 
> 
> 



After that opening move, Nietzsche develops the idea in several more
sections: *GS* 277 expresses Nietzsche's worries about a
seductive doctrine of "personal providence", according to
which "everything that happens to us turns out for the
best", but such an idea could be tempting at all only because of
a far-reaching (and, Nietzsche thinks, admirable) affirmation of life,
rooted in a talent for self-interpretation that creatively identifies
some description under which things really do have "a profound
significance and use precisely for *us*"; a bit later,
*GS* 304 (entitled, "*By doing we forego*")
recommends against any ethic demanding that we *renounce* this
or that or the other, and in favor of one that demands that one



> 
> 
> do something and do it again, from morning till evening... and to
> think of nothing except doing this *well*, as well as
> *I* alone can do it;
> 
> 
> 



and then in *GS* 321, Nietzsche suggests that we give up on
reproaching others directly and just focus on



> 
> 
> see[ing] to it that our own influence on *all that is yet to
> come* balances and outweighs his.... Let our brilliance make
> them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their
> account, like all those who punish.... Let us look away.
> 
> 
> 



Famously, the book concludes with Nietzsche's first introduction
of his thought of eternal recurrence, which is supposed to place
"*The greatest weight*" on each event through its
suggestion that our life is good only if, upon imagining its return in
every detail, we can affirm it as it is (*GS* 341). After that
penultimate section, Nietzsche quotes the first section of *Thus
Spoke Zarathustra*, which returns repeatedly to the same theme of
affirmation (see, e.g., *Z* I, 1, 5, 17, 21, 22; II, 7, 12, 20;
III, 3, 7, 13, 16; *et passim*; *BGE* 56; *TI*
VIII, 6 and IX, 49).



Some have found Nietzsche's valorization of affirmation ironic,
given the polemical zeal of his negative attacks on Christianity and
traditional morality, but in fact, the value of affirmation meshes
nicely with some key aspects of Nietzsche's critique. That
critique focuses in large measure on aspects of morality that turn the
agent against herself--or more broadly, on the side of
Christianity that condemns earthly existence, demanding that we repent
our earthly life as the price of admission to a different, superior
plane of being. What is wrong with these views, according to
Nietzsche, is that they negate our life, instead of affirming it.
Bernard Reginster (2006), who has made more (and more systematic)
sense of Nietzsche's praise of affirmation than anyone, shows
that the main philosophical problem it is meant to address is the
crisis of "nihilism"--provoked by a process in which
"the highest values de-value themselves" (*KSA*
9[35] 12: 350). Such "de-valuation" may rest either on
some corrosive argument undermining the force of all evaluative claims
whatsoever, or instead, on a judgment that the highest values cannot
be realized, so that, by reference to their standard, the world as it
is ought not to exist. The affirmation of life can be framed as the
rejection of nihilism, so understood. For Nietzsche, that involves a
two-sided project: it should *both* undermine values by
reference to which the world could not honestly be affirmed, while
also articulating the values exemplified by life and the world that
make them affirmable. (Readers interested in these issues about
Nietzschean affirmation and its compatibility (or not) with
Nietzschean critique should also consult Richardson [2020:
353-97] and Huddleston [2022], which reaches a more diffident
conclusion than this entry.)


#### 3.2.3 Truthfulness/Honesty



If we are to affirm our life and the world, however, we had better be
honest about what they are really like. Endorsing things under some
illusory Panglossian description is not affirmation, but
self-delusion. In that sense, Nietzsche's value of
life-affirmation simultaneously commits him to honesty. And arguably,
in fact, no other virtue gets more, or more unqualified, praise in the
Nietzschean corpus: honesty is "*our* virtue, the last
one left to us" (*BGE* 227), and truthfulness is the
measure of strength (*BGE* 39), or even of value as such:



> 
> 
> How much truth does a spirit *endure*, how much truth does it
> *dare*? More and more that became for me the real measure of
> value. (*EH* Pref., 3)
> 
> 
> 



Four strands in Nietzsche's valuation of honesty deserve
mention. Some texts present truthfulness as a kind of personal
commitment--one tied to particular projects and a way of life in
which Nietzsche happens to have invested. For example, in *GS*
2 Nietzsche expresses bewilderment in the face of people who do not
value honesty:



> 
> 
> I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: *the great
> majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience*. ... I
> mean: *the great majority of people* does not consider it
> contemptible to believe this or that and live accordingly, without
> having first given themselves an account of the final and most certain
> reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such
> reasons afterward.
> 
> 
> 



Nietzsche often recommends the pursuit of knowledge as a way of
life:



> 
> 
> No, life has not disappointed me... ever since the day when the
> great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment
> for the seeker for knowledge.... (*GS* 324)
> 
> 
> 



Indeed, he assigns the highest cultural importance to the experiment
testing whether such a life can be well lived:



> 
> 
> A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those
> life-preserving errors now clash for their first fight, after the
> impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.
> Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a
> matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of
> life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer
> the question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure
> incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.
> (*GS* 110)
> 
> 
> 



A second strand of texts emphasizes connections between truthfulness
and *courage*, thereby valorizing honesty as the manifestation
of an overall virtuous character marked by resoluteness,
determination, and spiritual strength. *BGE* 39 belongs here,
as does the passage from the *EH* Preface quoted above. The
same evaluative commitment underwrites Nietzsche's widespread
attacks against what he calls "the Biblical 'proof of
strength'"--a form of argument that purports to
justify belief in some claim because that belief "makes one
blessed" or carries some emotional or practical benefit
(*GS* 347; *GM* III, 24; *TI* VI, 5; *A*
50-51; *KSA* 15[46] 13: 441). Such wishful thinking is
not only *cognitively* corrupt, for Nietzsche, but a troubling
manifestation of irresolution and cowardice.



Given Nietzsche's personal commitment to truthfulness and his
argument that its absence amounts to cowardice, it is no surprise to
find him, third, attacking the alleged mendaciousness and intellectual
corruption of traditional religio-moral consciousness as one of the
very worst things about it. The dishonesty of the moralistic
"slave revolt" is a constant theme (*GM* I, 14; see
also Janaway 2007: 102-4, and *GM* I, 10, 13; II, 11;
III, 26; *TI* V, 5; VI, 7; *A* 15, 24, 26-7, 36,
38, 42, 44, 47, 48-53, 55-6), and it elicits some of
Nietzsche's most extreme and indignant rhetoric:



> 
> 
> Our educated people of today, our "good people", do not
> tell lies--that is true; but that is *not* to their
> credit. ... [That] would demand of them what one *may* not
> demand, that they should know how to distinguish true and false in
> themselves. All they are capable of is a *dishonest* lie;
> whoever today accounts himself a "good man" is utterly
> incapable of confronting any matter except with *dishonest
> mendaciousness*--a mendaciousness that is abysmal but
> innocent, truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous. These "good
> men"--they are one and all moralized to the very depths and
> ruined and botched to all eternity as far as honesty is
> concerned... (*GM* III, 19)
> 
> 
> 



Finally, it is worth noting that even when Nietzsche raises doubts
about this commitment to truthfulness, his very questions are clearly
motivated by the central importance of that value. The
*Genealogy*'s Third Treatise famously closes with the
worry that the unconditional will to truth is a form of asceticism
(*GM* III, 24). As Nietzsche observes, relentless truthfulness
can be corrosive for cherished values that make our lives seem worth
living: one cross-examination of the norm of "truth at any
price" concludes with the exclamation,



> 
> 
> "At any price": how well we understand these words once we
> have offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar!
> (*GS* 344)
> 
> 
> 



But even in the face of such worries, Nietzsche does not simply give
up on truthfulness. Instead, he calls for a "critique"
that will "experimentally" assess its value and legitimacy
(*GM* III, 24). That experiment can be no other than the
"life of the thinker" we met with already--the same
"ultimate question" about the extent to which truthfulness
can "endure incorporation" and be made compatible with
life (*GS* 110). Again and again, in fact, Nietzsche presents
this question, "the question of the *value* of
truth" (*BGE* 1), as *his* distinctive question,
the one centrally driving his philosophy (*BGE* 1; *GM*
III, 24, 27, *GS* 110, 324, 344, 346; see also *BGE*
204-13, 227-30). It can carry such central significance
only because, in Nietzsche's eyes, the honest devotion to truth
was *both* so indispensably valuable *and* (potentially)
dangerous.


#### 3.2.4 Art and Artistry



But if truthfulness is a core value for Nietzsche, he is nevertheless
famous for insisting that we *also* need illusion to live well.
From the beginning of his career to the end, he insisted on the
irreplaceable value of *art* precisely because of its power to
ensconce us in illusion. The idea was a major theme of *The Birth
of Tragedy* (*BT* 1, 3, 4, 7, 15, 25), and although
Nietzsche later came to see the point somewhat differently, he never
gave it up (see *GS* 107, also *TI* IX, 7-9). In a
slogan, "*We possess* *art* lest we perish of the
truth" (*KSA* 16[40] 13: 500).



Art and artistry carry value for Nietzsche both as a straightforward
first-order matter, and also as a source of higher-order lessons about
how to create value more generally. At the higher-order level, he
insists that we should learn from artists "how to make things
beautiful, attractive, desirable for ourselves when they are
not" (*GS* 299; see also *GS* 78). The suggestion
is that artistic methods ("Moving away from things until there
is a good deal that one no longer sees...; seeing things...
as cut out and framed...; looking at them in the light of the
sunset", and so on; *GS* 299) provide a kind of formal
model (Landy 2012: 4, 8-19, *et passim*) for the
development of analogous techniques that could be deployed beyond art,
in life itself--"For with them this subtle power usually
comes to an end when art ends and life begins, but we want to be the
poets of our life" (*GS* 299). But Nietzsche is just as
invested in the first-order evaluative point that what makes a life
admirable includes its aesthetic features. Famously (or notoriously),
Nietzsche argues that to "attain satisfaction with
himself" one should "'give style' to
one's character" (*GS* 290). Here, it is the fact
that the person's character (or her life) has certain aesthetic
properties--that it manifests an "artistic plan",
that it has beauty or sublimity, that its moments of ugliness have
been gradually removed or reworked through the formation of a second
nature, that it exhibits a satisfying narrative (or other artistic)
form--that constitutes its value (*GS* 290, 299, 370;
*TI* IX, 7; *EH* Frontispiece). Alexander Nehamas (1985)
articulates and explores this Nietzschean theme of imposing artistic
structure onto one's individual life in considerable detail, and
many other scholars have built on his view or explored related aspects
of the topic (see Gerhardt 1992; Young 1992; Soll 1998; Ridley 2007a,
2007b, 2018; Anderson 2005, 2009; Anderson and Cristy, 2017;
Huddleston 2019; and the essays in Came 2014).



One last point deserves special mention. In Nietzsche's
presentations, the value of art and artistry often seem to stand in
*opposition* to the value of truthfulness--we are supposed
to need art to *save* us from the truth (see Ridley 2007a,
Landy 2002). Significantly, the opposition here is not just the one
emphasized in *The Birth of Tragedy*--that the substantive
truth about the world might be disturbing enough to demand some
artistic salve that helps us cope. Nietzsche raises a more specific
worry about the deleterious effects of the virtue of
honesty--about the *will to* truth, rather than *what
is* true--and artistry is wheeled in to alleviate them, as
well:



> 
> 
> If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the
> untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness
> that now comes to us through science--the realization that
> delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and
> sensation--would be utterly unbearable. *Honesty* would
> lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against
> our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the
> *good* will to appearance. (*GS* 107)
> 
> 
> 



Nietzsche's formulation ("that delusion and error are
conditions of human knowledge and sensation", and that this
insight "comes to us through science") suggests that the
specific error theory he has in mind is rooted in the Kantian and
Schopenhauerian theories of cognition, perhaps as developed in more
naturalistic, psychologically-inflected form by later neo-Kantian and
positivist thinkers. Those views would entail that the basic
conditions of cognition prevent our ever knowing things as they really
are, independently of us (see Anderson 2002, 2005; Hussain 2004; and
the entry on
 Friedrich Albert Lange).
 But while those are the immediate allusions, Nietzsche also endorses
more general ideas with similar implications--e.g., skepticism
against any thought (be it of the theological/metaphysical, or
Hegelian, or more modest, third *Critique* oriented sort) that
the world is purposively suited to fit the needs of our cognitive
faculties.



What is more important, however, is the *structure* of the
thought in *GS* 107. Nietzsche's idea is that
*truthfulness itself*, rigorously pursued through the
discipline of science, has forced us to the conclusion that our
cognitive powers lead us into "delusion and error", so
that those very demands of truthfulness cannot be satisfied. This is
not just one more case of the world's being inhospitable to our
values, but a special instance where the cultivation of a virtue
(honesty) *itself* leads to the unwelcome realization that we
can never live up to its genuine demands. In the face of such results,
Nietzsche suggests, the only way to escape pessimism is the
recognition of another, quite different value, suitable to serve as a
"counterforce" against our honesty by showing that there
can be something valuable about remaining content with appearances.
The cultural value of art in *GS* 107 thus rests on the
opposition to honesty offered by the "*good* will to
appearance". So it seems that the values Nietzsche endorses
*conflict* with one another, and that very fact is crucial to
the value they have for us (Anderson 2005: 203-11). (See Stoll
(2019) for a sophisticated alternative account, arguing that artistic
"semblances" in Nietzsche are not supposed to be deceptive
in any way, and therefore that the conflict between the values of
honesty and artistry is less stark than I have depicted it here.)


#### 3.2.5 Individuality, Autonomy, "Freedom of Spirit"



From the earliest reception, commentators have noted the value
Nietzsche places on individuality and on the independence of the
"free spirit" from confining conventions of society,
religion, or morality (e.g., Simmel [1907] 1920). This strand of
thought continues to receive strong emphasis in recent
interpretations--see, e.g., Nehamas (1985), Thiele (1990),
Gerhardt (1992), Strong ([1975] 2000: 186-217), Reginster
(2003), Richardson (2004: 94-103), Anderson (2006, 2012a),
Higgins (2006), Schacht (2006), Acampora (2013), Meyer (2019),
Ansell-Pearson and Bamford (2021), and the essays in Young
(2015)--and there is an impressive body of textual evidence to
support it (*UM* III, 2, 5-6, 8; *GS* 116, 117,
122, 143, 149, 291, 335, 338, 347, 354; *BGE* 29, 41, 259;
*GM* I, 16, II, 1-3; *TI* IX, 41, 44, 49;
*A* 11). Salient as Nietzsche's praise of individuality
is, however, it is equally obvious that he resists any thought that
every single human person has value on the strength of individuality
alone--indeed, he is willing to state that point in especially
blunt terms: "Self-interest is worth as much as the person who
has it: it can be worth a great deal, and it can be unworthy and
contemptible" (*TI* IX, 33). Scholars have advocated
quite different explanations of what makes a person's
individuality valuable in the privileged cases. Some hold that
valuable individuals must have certain given, natural characteristics
that admit no (or not much) further explanation, and that these
features make them "higher men" manifesting genuine value,
whereas others have no such value--Leiter (2015) offers a
strongly developed naturalistic version of this approach. Other
scholars take the "true" or "higher self" to
be a kind of ideal or norm to which a person may, or may not, live up
(Conant 2001; see also Kaufmann [1950] 1974: 307-16). Still
others attempt to develop a position that combines aspects of both
views (Schacht 1983: 330-38), or hold that Nietzsche's
position on the "overman" or "higher man" is
simply riven by internal contradiction (Muller-Lauter [1971]
1999: 72-83).



A different approach takes its lead from Nietzsche's connection
between individuality and freedom of spirit (*GS* 347;
*BGE* 41-44). As Reginster (2003) shows, what opposes
Nietzschean freedom of spirit is *fanaticism*, understood as a
vehement commitment to some faith or value-set given from without,
which is motivated by a *need* to believe in something because
one lacks the self-determination to think for oneself (*GS*
347). This appeal to *self-determination* suggests that we
might explain the value of individuality by appeal to an underlying
value of *autonomy*: valuable individuals would be the ones who
"give themselves laws, who create themselves" (*GS*
335), who exhibit self-control or self-governance (*TI*, V, 2;
VIII, 6; IX, 38, 49; *BGE* 203), and who are thereby able to
"stand surety" for their own future (*GM* II,
2-3). A variety of scholars have recently explored the resources
of this line of thought in Nietzsche; Anderson (2013) surveys the
literature, and notable contributions include Ridley (2007b, 2018),
Pippin (2009, 2010), Reginster (2012), Katsafanas (2011b, 2012, 2014,
2016), Rutherford (2011, 2018), Anderson (2021), and especially the
papers in Gemes and May (2009).


#### 3.2.6 Pluralism



We have seen that Nietzsche promotes a number of different values. In
some cases, these values reinforce one another. For example,
Nietzsche's emphasis on affirming life could be taken to enhance
or to confirm the value of life itself, *qua* successful
expression of will to power, or conversely, one might trace the value
of affirmation to its acknowledgment of our inescapable condition as
living, power-seeking creatures. Similarly, we saw that both the
virtue of honesty and the value of art and artistry play essential
roles in support of the person's ability to affirm life
(Anderson 2005: 203-11). Nietzsche appeals to the metaphor of a
tree's growth to capture this sort of organic interconnection
among his commitments:



> 
> 
> For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be
> *single* in anything: we may neither err nor hit upon the truth
> singly. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit
> our thoughts grow out of us, our values, our yes's and
> no's and if's and whether's--the whole lot
> related and connected among themselves, witnesses to one will, one
> health, one earthly kingdom, one sun. (*GM* Pref., 2)
> 
> 
> 



However interrelated Nietzsche's values, though, they appear to
remain irreducible to a single common value or principle that explains
them all. For example, the account of honesty and artistry explored in
sections
 3.2.3
 and
 3.2.4
 revealed that the support they provide to the value of affirmation
depends on their *opposition* to one another, as
"counterforces" (*GS* 107): if this is right, then
Nietzsche's various values may interact within an organic whole,
but some of the interactions are oppositional, so they cannot all
arise from a monistic philosophical system.



That very fact, however, fits nicely with another of Nietzsche's
core values, the value of pluralism itself. For Nietzsche, a
person's ability to deploy and be responsive to a multiplicity
of values, of virtues, of outlooks and "perspectives", is
a positive good in its own right. Nietzsche's defense of this
idea is perhaps clearest in the epistemic case, where he insists on
the value of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on any question:
the thinker must "know how to make precisely the
*difference* in perspectives and affective interpretations
useful for knowledge", because



> 
> 
> There is *only* a perspectival seeing, *only* a
> perspectival "knowing"; and *the more* affects we
> allow to speak about a matter, *the more* eyes, different eyes,
> we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much
> more complete will our "concept" of this matter, our
> "objectivity", be. (*GM* III, 12)
> 
> 
> 



As the passage makes clear, however, Nietzschean perspectives are
themselves rooted in affects (and the valuations to which affects give
rise), and in his mind, the ability to deploy a variety of
perspectives is just as important for our practical and evaluative
lives as it is for cognitive life. In *GM* I, 16, for example,
he wraps up a discussion of the sharp opposition between the good/bad
and good/evil value schemes with a surprising acknowledgment that the
best of his contemporaries will need both, despite their
opposition:



> 
> 
> today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the "*higher
> nature*", of the more spiritual nature, than to be
> conflicted in this sense and to be still a real battleground for these
> opposites. (*GM* I, 16; see also *BGE* 212; *TI*
> V, 3; and *EH* I)
> 
> 
> 



While efforts to provide a systematic reconstruction unifying
Nietzsche's philosophy around one fundamental thought or basic
value retain their attraction for many commentators, it is fair to say
that all such efforts have remained controversial. Meanwhile,
Nietzschean pluralism has been a major theme of several landmark
Nietzsche studies (e.g., Nehamas 1985, Schacht 1983, Poellner 1995,
Richardson 2004), and some of the most sophisticated recent treatments
of his value theory have returned evaluative pluralism to the center
of attention (Railton 2012; Huddleston 2017). Huddleston's view
is particularly noteworthy, since he argues that Nietzsche's
conceptions of strength and health--which, as we saw, are
connected to the allegedly foundational value of power--are
themselves disunified "cluster concepts" involving an
internal plurality of separate and irreducible commitments. In fact,
Nietzsche's commitment to pluralism helps us understand how his
diverse positive values fit together. From his pluralistic point of
view, it is a selling point, not a drawback, that he has many other
value commitments, and that they interact in complex patterns to
support, inform, and sometimes to oppose or limit one another, rather
than being parts of a single, hierarchically ordered, systematic
axiology.


## 4. The Self and Self-fashioning



A probing investigation into the psyche was a leading preoccupation
for Nietzsche throughout his career, and this aspect of his thought
has rightly been accorded central importance across a long stretch of
the reception, all the way from Kaufmann (1950) to recent work by
Pippin (2010), Katsafanas (2016), Leiter (2019), Riccardi (2021), and
others. Some of Nietzsche's own programmatic reflections
highlight the centrality of this enterprise: perhaps most famously, he
closes an extended treatment of the shortcomings of previous
philosophy (in Part I of *Beyond Good and Evil*) with a
demand



> 
> 
> that psychology be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for
> whose service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology
> is once again on the path to the fundamental problems. (*BGE*
> 23)
> 
> 
> 



In
 section 2,
 we saw that Nietzsche's critique of morality rests crucially on
psychological analyses that purport to expose the self-destructive
effects of moral attitudes like guilt and ascetic self-denial, as well
as the corrosive mismatch between the official claims of altruistic
morality and its underlying motivation in *ressentiment*. On
the positive side, Nietzsche is equally keen to detail the
psychological conditions he thinks would be healthier for both
individuals and cultures (see, e.g., *GS* Pref. and 382;
*BGE* 212; *TI* V, 3 and VIII, 6-7). Thus,
Nietzsche's psychology is central to his evaluative agenda and
to his projects as a cultural critic. Aside from its instrumental
support for these other projects, Nietzsche pursues psychological
inquiry for its own sake, and also for the sake of the self-knowledge
that it intrinsically involves (*GM* III, 9; *GS* Pref.,
3 and 324; but cf. *GM* Pref., 1). Still, despite widespread
appreciation of Nietzsche's psychological acumen--and
despite the centrality of psychology to his philosophical method, core
questions, and evaluative aims--even the most basic outlines of
his substantive psychology remain a matter of controversy. Debate
begins with the object of psychology itself, the psyche, self, or
soul.



A significant body of Nietzschean texts express extreme skepticism
that there is any such thing as a "self", or
"soul", as well as doubts about the traditional faculties
of the soul and the basic capacities they were supposed to exercise
(thinking, willing, feeling). This passage from the notebooks is
typical--"To indulge the fable of 'unity,'
'soul,' 'person,' this we have forbidden: with
such hypotheses one only covers up the problem" (*KSA*
37[4] 11: 577)--and there are many, probably hundreds, like it
(see *D* 109; *GS* 333; *BGE* 12, 17, 19, 54;
*GM* I, 13; *TI* III, 5 and VI, 3). At the same time,
Nietzsche's own psychological analyses make free appeal not only
to the self, but even to some of the traditional faculties (e.g., the
will) of which he is most skeptical elsewhere: for example, the
"sovereign individual" of *GM* II, 1-3 is
distinctive for developing a "memory of the will" that
underwrites his capacity to keep promises and "vouch for himself
as future" (*GM* I, 13); or again, Nietzsche's
favored strategy of deploying a multiplicity of perspectives in
knowledge (see
 section 3.2.6)
 assumes the existence of a cognitive self that stands back from
particular drives and affects, and so has "the ability to
*control* one's Pro and Con and dispose of them" in
support of the larger cognitive project (*GM* III, 12, see also
*BGE* 284).



This apparent conflict in the texts has encouraged competing
interpretations, with commentators emphasizing the strands in
Nietzsche to which they have more philosophical sympathy. For example,
strongly naturalist interpreters like Brian Leiter (2007, 2015, 2019)
and Matthias Risse (2007) focus on Nietzsche's skepticism about
the will and the pure soul to reject any Kantian-style source of
agency that can stand apart from and direct the person's basic
drives or fundamental nature. Somewhat similarly, readers attracted by
a Cartesian conception of consciousness as the essence of the mental,
but repelled by Cartesian dualism, highlight Nietzsche's
emphasis on the importance of the body (*GM* III, 16;
*Z* I, 4) to suggest that his apparent claims about psychology
should be heard instead as a kind of *physiology* of drives
that rejects *mental* psychology altogether (for different
versions, see Poellner 1995: 216-29, 174; Haar [1993] 1996: 90,
*et passim*). Riccardi (2018, 2021) argues for a more nuanced
view, in which the conscious self runs in parallel to the more
fundamental bodily self. Attacking unity rather than mentality, a
group of readers interested in Nietzsche's agonistic conception
of politics tends to emphasize his similarly agonistic, internally
contested, conception of the self (Hatab 1995, 2018; Acampora 2013).
In a diametrically opposed direction from those first three, Sebastian
Gardner (2009) insists that, while Nietzsche was sometimes tempted by
skepticism about a self which can stand back from the solicitations of
inclination and control them, his own doctrines about the creation of
value and self-overcoming in fact commit him to something like a
Kantian transcendental ego, despite his protestations to the
contrary.



Nietzsche's actual psychological explanations rely heavily on
appeals to sub-personal psychological attitudes. As Janaway (2009: 52)
observes, a great many different kinds of attitude enter these
accounts (including not only the standard beliefs and desires of
current-day moral psychology, but also "wills", feelings,
sensations, moods, imaginings, memories, valuations, convictions, and
more), but arguably the core attitudes that do the most work for him
are *drives* and *affects*. These attitude types have
been intensively studied in recent work (see esp. Richardson 1996,
2020; Katsafanas 2011b, 2013, 2016; Alfano 2019; Leiter 2019; and
Riccardi 2021; see also Anderson 2012a, Clark and Dudrick 2015, Creasy
2020). While much remains controversial, it is helpful to think of
drives as dispositions toward general patterns of activity; they aim
at activity of the relevant sort (e.g., an eating drive, a drive for
power), and they also represent some more specific object or occasion
of the activity in a particular case (e.g., this ice cream, or
overcoming a particular problem in the course of writing a paper).
Affects are emotional states that combine a receptive and felt
responsiveness to the world with a tendency toward a distinctive
pattern of reaction--states like love, hate, anger, fear, joy,
etc. Typically, the sub-personal attitudes postulated in
Nietzsche's psychological explanations represent the world in
one way or another. Since he endorses Leibniz's thought that
representation, not consciousness, is the decisive mark of the mental
(*GS* 354; see Simmons 2001, for discussion), it is reasonable
to treat these attitudes as distinctively psychological, whether they
are conscious or not.



But what about a personal-level self to serve as the owner of such
attitudes? It seems that Nietzsche's postulated drives and
affects could not coherently be counted as psychological (and
*sub*-personal) without such a self, and yet, the skeptical
passages canvassed above seem to rule out any such thing. This remains
a controversial problem, but it is clear at least that
Nietzsche's own proposal was to develop a radically reformed
conception of the psyche, rather than to reject the self, or soul,
altogether (see Riccardi 2021). *BGE* 12 provides some
provocative ideas about what such a reformed conception might involve:
there, Nietzsche insists that we should "give the finishing
stroke" to what he calls "the *soul
atomism*", which he goes on to explain as



> 
> 
> the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible,
> eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an *atomon*:...
> Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the
> soul" at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most
> ancient and venerable hypotheses--as happens frequently to clumsy
> naturalists who can hardly touch on "the soul" without
> immediately losing it. But the way is now open for new versions and
> refinements of the soul hypothesis, [including] "mortal
> soul", "soul as subjective multiplicity", and
> "soul as social structure of the drives and
> affects"... (*BGE* 12)
> 
> 
> 



Here Nietzsche alludes to traditional rational psychology, and its
basic inference from the pure *unity* of consciousness to the
*simplicity* of the soul, and thence to its indivisibility and
immortality. As he notes, these moves treat the soul as an indivisible
(hence incorruptible) atom, or monad. Nietzsche's alternative
proposal takes its shape from the rejection of such atomism--the
soul as he understands it will be internally complex, rather than
simple, and therefore subject to disintegration. That idea informs
Nietzsche's striking slogans about the soul's
"mortality", "multiplicity", and internal
"social structure". The "drives and affects"
are evidently supposed to serve as the constituents comprising this
multiplicity. Nietzsche thus construes the psyche, or self, as an
emergent structure arising from such sub-personal constituents (when
those stand in the appropriate relations), thereby reversing the
traditional account, which treats sub-personal attitudes as mere
modes, or ways of being, proper to a preexisting unitary mental
substance--(see Anderson 2012a for an attempt to flesh out the
picture; see also Gemes 2001; Hales and Welshon 2000: 157-82;
Riccardi 2021; Anderson 2021). But however vulnerable, mortal, and
subject to inner division the soul is supposed to be on the reformed
conception, it nevertheless remains (as Nietzsche's rejection of
reductive naturalism makes clear) a genuinely *psychological*
entity over and above its constituent drives and affects. Moreover,
since the drives and affects that constitute it are individuated
largely in terms of what (and how) they *represent*, the
psychology needed to investigate the soul must be an interpretive, and
not merely and strictly a causal, form of inquiry (see Pippin 2010;
Ridley 2018).



In these respects, Nietzsche's psychology treats the self as
something that has to be *achieved* or constructed, rather than
as something fundamentally *given* as part of the basic
metaphysical equipment with which a person enters the world. This idea
of the self as achieved rather than given was noticed already by
Schacht (1983), and was elevated into a central theme in
Nehamas's (1985) influential Nietzsche interpretation. On that
reading, the project of individual self-fashioning, or self-creation,
is located at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical agenda (see
esp. *GS* 290, 335; *TI* IX, 49). Highlighting
Nietzsche's commitments to the values of artistry and
individuality, the interpretation claims that the main goal of
Nietzsche's new philosophers would be to construct novel,
interesting, and culturally resonant individual lives, whose overall
shape they could affirm (despite whatever setbacks they involve) on
the strength of the (broadly) aesthetic value they instantiate. In
Nehamas's version, this agenda was closely bound up with
Nietzsche's project as a writer; he is supposed to have created
himself, in the relevant sense, as an authorial persona through
writing such distinctive books (Nehamas 1985; see esp. 233-4).
While this suggestion, and even the very idea of self-creation, has
remained controversial both textually and philosophically (see, e.g.,
Pippin 2010: 109-11), it has led to much further work--some
directly influenced by Nehamas (1985), some developed in partial or
entire opposition to it--yielding real insights about the nature
of Nietzschean selfhood, and the relations among the key ideas of
self-creation, the creation of value, individuality, and Nietzschean
freedom (see, e.g., Gerhardt 1992; Nehamas 1998: 128-56; Leiter
1998; May 1999: 107-26; Anderson and Landy 2001; Reginster 2003;
Anderson 2005, 2009, 2012a. 2021; Ridley 2007a, 2007b, 2018; Gardner
2009; Gemes 2009a, 2019; Pippin 2009, 2010; Poellner 2009; Richardson
2009, 2020; Acampora 2013; Katsafanas 2016: 164-96,
220-56; Anderson and Cristy 2017; Rutherford 2018).



One especially sustained alternative to Nehamas (1985) is developed by
Elijah Millgram (2007, 2020, 2023). He argues that, so far from using his
authorship to fashion a unified character for himself, Nietzsche was
(on the contrary) a *disunified*, or even disintegrating,
agent. On Millgram's construal, Nietzsche's books develop
a strategy for constructing a meaningful life that is suitable for
people of that sort. This represents an interesting kind of limit case
for the project of self-fashioning, which mounts a sustained critique
against the widespread assumption in modern philosophy that unity of
agency is always desirable or valuable.


## 5. Difficulties of Nietzsche's Philosophical Writing



For all the novelty of Nietzsche's doctrines and the apparent
extremity of his criticisms of traditional morality, religion, and
philosophy, perhaps nothing about his work seems more out of step with
the ordinary procedures of philosophy than the way he writes. The
point is sufficiently obvious that it has by now become an entirely
conventional trope to begin commentaries with remarks about the
*un*conventional character of Nietzsche's style. Despite
the attention it gets, however, we continue to lack anything like a
comprehensive account of Nietzsche's strategies as a writer and
rhetorician. Most of us (this entry included) are defeated by the
bewildering richness of the subject matter and content ourselves with
a few observations of special relevance to our other purposes. Perhaps
Alexander Nehamas (1985: 13-41) comes closest to meeting the
explanatory challenge by highlighting the key underlying fact that
defeats our interpretive efforts--the seemingly endless variety
of stylistic effects that Nietzsche deploys. In doing so, he follows
the lead of Nietzsche's own retrospective assessment from
*Ecce Homo*: "I have many stylistic
possibilities--the most multifarious art of style that has ever
been at the disposal of one man" (*EH* III, 4). This
entry will focus on a few points useful for readers making their early
approaches to Nietzsche's texts.



Nietzsche's most obvious departure from conventional
philosophical writing is the basic plan and construction of his books.
Most philosophers write treatises or scholarly articles, governed by a
carefully articulated thesis for which they present a sustained
argument. Nietzsche's books are nothing like that. Many are
divided into short, numbered sections, which only sometimes have
obvious connections to nearby sections. While the sections within a
part are often thematically related (see, e.g., *GS* Book II or
*BGE* Parts I, V, VI), even then they do not typically fit
together into a single overall argument. Nietzsche himself notes the
briskness with which he treats his concerns, insisting that "I
approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly
out again" (*GS* 381). To the natural complaint that such
telegraphic treatment courts misunderstanding, he replies that



> 
> 
> One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes
> just as surely *not* to be understood. ... [Some authors]
> did not wish to be understood by "just anybody".
> (*GS* 381)
> 
> 
> 



Some of Nietzsche's books (notably *The Birth of
Tragedy*, the *Genealogy*, and the *Antichrist*)
offer greater continuity of argumentation, but even there, he will
often take advantage of section breaks to drop one thread of reasoning
and move on to apparently unrelated points, leaving the reader to
piece together how the various aspects of his case are supposed to fit
together (*GM* II is a notoriously challenging case in point;
see Reginster 2018b, 2021). *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* is unified
by following the career of a central character, but the unity is loose
and picaresque-like--a sequence of episodes which arrives at a
somewhat equivocal (or at a minimum, at a *controversial*)
conclusion that imposes only weak narrative unity on the whole.



This mode of writing is often classified as "aphoristic",
and Nietzsche is rightly granted an honored place within the
distinguished lineage of that form in German philosophy, which goes
back at least to Georg Lichtenberg's *Waste Books*.
Lichtenberg wrote his fragments for himself rather than the public,
but the strategies he developed nevertheless made a serious impact.
His aphorisms revealed how the form could be extended from its
essentially pedagogical origins (providing compressed, memorable form
for some principle or observation) into a sustained, exploratory mode
of reasoning with oneself. Schopenhauer was a particular admirer, and
his pursuit of the form (especially in *Parerga and
Paralipomena*) clearly influenced Nietzsche's use of the
technique to frame his psychological observations--(the French
*moralistes* were also an important influence; see Pippin
2010).



Some of Nietzsche's efforts consist in straightforward
psychological analysis, like this--"Egoism is the law of
perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and
weighty, and as one moves further away size and weight decrease"
(*GS* 162)--while others encapsulate a point Nietzsche has
been developing through the section (see, e.g., "We are always
only in our own company"; *GS* 166). More distinctively,
however, many Nietzschean aphorisms rely on a "twist"
effect--the first part sets up a certain expectation, which is
then controverted or deepened by a thought-provoking reversal in the
second part. Occasionally, these aphorisms are even set up as
mini-dialogues:



> 
> 
> A: "One is praised only by one's peers."
>   
> 
> B: "Yes, and whoever praises you says: I am your peer".
> (*GS* 190)
> 
> 
> 



Many aphorisms exhibiting this sort of "twist" trade on
the type of cynicism typical in *moralistes* like La
Rochefoucauld, but however much he learned from the French, Nietzsche
brought larger ambitions to the form; he is equally willing to leave
cynicism behind and deploy the twist form simply to provoke active
reflection in the reader, as he does here: "Every habit lends
our hand more wit but makes our wit less handy" (*GS*
247). Kaufmann ([1950] 1974: 72-95) famously suggested that
Nietzsche coined his aphorisms in the service of an
"experimentalist" mode of philosophizing, and there is
something to the idea. But the reader should take care, for not every
Nietzschean aphorism is an experiment, and not every short section is
an aphorism. Indeed, many multi-sentence sections *build up* to
an aphorism, which enters only as a proper part included within the
section, perhaps serving as its culmination or a kind of summative
conclusion (rather than an experiment).



A particularly important case in point is the "aphorism placed
before this [Third] treatise" of the *Genealogy*, which
Nietzsche's Preface (*GM* Pref., 8) offers to the reader
as an especially good example of the densely summative power of the
form--the entire Third Treatise is supposed to be just an
interpretation of that aphorism. Maudemarie Clark (1997), John Wilcox
(1997), and Christopher Janaway (1997) showed convincingly that the
aphorism in question appears in section 1 of the Third Treatise, and
is not the Treatise's epigram. But the first section itself is
not simply one long aphorism. Instead, the aphorism that requires so
much interpretation is the compressed, high-impact arrival point of
*GM* III, 1; the section begins by noting a series of different
things that the ascetic ideal has meant, listed one after another and
serving as a kind of outline for the Treatise, before culminating in
the taut aphorism:



> 
> 
> *That* the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is
> an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its *horror
> vacui*: *it needs a goal*,--and it would rather will
> *nothingness* than *not* will. (*GM* III, 1)
> 
> 
> 



(It is to this compressed formulation, not the entirety of the
section, that Nietzsche returns when he wraps up his interpretation in
*GM* III, 28.)



Nietzsche's proclivity for aphorisms is responsible for some of
the difficulty of his writing; these formulations stand out from their
background context, making it harder to integrate Nietzsche's
discourse from one section to the next. But the aphoristic form is
only one challenge among many. As has been widely noted (by every
reader, I suppose, but see Blondel [1971] 1977; Derrida 1978; de Man
1979; Kofman [1983] 1993; Nehamas 1985; Higgins 1987, 2000; Thomas
1999), Nietzsche's writing is full of figures of speech and
literary tropes, and decoding these modes of indirection demands
active engagement and subtlety from the reader. Indeed, some of
Nietzsche's most favored and widespread figures (e.g.,
hyperbole, litotes, irony) involve purposely saying something more, or
less, or other than one means, and so forcing the reader to adjust.
What is more, Nietzsche makes heavy use of allusions to both
contemporary and historical writing, and without that context one is
very likely to miss his meaning--*BGE* 11-15 offers
a particularly dense set of examples; see Clark and Dudrick (2012:
87-112) for one reading to which Hussain (2004), Anderson
(2002), and Riccardi (2011) propose alternatives. Almost as often,
Nietzsche invents a persona so as to work out some view that he will
go on to qualify or reject (*BGE* 2 is a clear example), so it
can be a steep challenge just to keep track of the various voices in
action within the text.



Nehamas (1988: 46-51) offers perhaps the best description of the
complexities of the resulting reading experience: our attention is
fixated by certain brilliant, striking passages, or even whole
sections, but because their connections to nearby sections are not
specified, and because the text seems to switch from one voice to
another, the reader simply moves on, taking each new section on its
own terms; in short order, one forgets the details, the points, the
cautions, or even the subject matter of passages several sections
back--except, perhaps, for a few, especially memorable
highlights, which we then call "aphorisms". In this way,
it is all too easy to fail to read Nietzsche's books *as
books* at all. Nevertheless, such comprehensive readings are there
to be had. Clark and Dudrick (2012) offer a a sustained, albeit
controversial, close reading exploring the unity of Part I of
*Beyond Good and Evil*; their efforts reveal the scope of the
difficulty--they needed an entire book to explain the allusions
and connections involved in just twenty-three sections of Nietzsche,
covering some couple-dozen pages! Attacking the same problem in a
different spirit, Nehamas (1988) calls attention to the loose,
"train of thought"-type connections that connect one
section to another through large swaths of works like *Beyond Good
and Evil* or *The Gay Science*. Following such connections,
he proposes, allows us to understand the books as *monologues*
presented by a narrator. For Nehamas, the creation of such a narrative
persona is central to Nietzsche's larger project of authorial
self-fashioning. By contrast, Millgram (2023) counter-proposes that
Nietzsche deploys *different* "voices", different
narrators, in his different books (see also Millgram 2007, 2020); and
related papers available in the Other Internet Resources). On this
less unified picture, the sort of "persona-inhabiting"
effect noted above for the obvious case of *BGE* 2 is a much
more widespread and destabilizing feature of Nietzsche's
writing. It becomes a precondition for adequately understanding each
particular book that we first work out in what voice Nietzsche means
to be speaking--and what attitude he, and we, are supposed to
have toward that character--before we can assess the work's
first-order claims and effects.



While Millgram's view is extreme in the demands it takes
Nietzsche's writing to place on the reader, demands of the broad
sort he indicates--a demand, for example, to hear
Nietzsche's interventions in the right tone, or
"spirit", if they are to be understood--*do*
seem to be imposed by some rather straightforward features of the
texts. Consider, for instance, what the point could be of that most
obvious feature of Nietzsche's rhetoric--the heat and
vitriol with which his condemnations of traditional values are
presented. The *Genealogy of Morality* advertises itself as
"a Polemic", but even in that genre, it is an outlier for
rhetorical intensity; Nietzsche passes up no opportunity for
emotionally charged attacks, he repeatedly blasphemes what is held
most sacred in the culture, he freely deploys offensive anti-Semitic
tropes (turned back, ironically, against anti-Semitic Christians
themselves), he fairly shouts, he sneers between scare quotes, he
repeatedly charges bad faith and dishonesty on the part of his
opponents, and on and on. It is impossible to conclude that the work
is not *deliberately designed* to be as offensive as possible
to any earnest Christian believer. Why? Given Nietzsche's
expressed conviction that many Christians ought to remain ensconced
within their ideology because it is the best they can do for
themselves (that "the sense [*Sinn*] of the herd should
rule in the herd"; *KSA* 7[6], 12: 280), perhaps the
right way to understand this much rhetorical overkill is that it
operates as a strategy for *audience partition*. In
Nietzsche's mind, those who cannot do without Christianity and
its morality would only be harmed by understanding how destructive and
self-defeating it is; Nietzsche wants to explain those terrible
effects, but he also wants to protect Christianity-dependent readers
from harm. He achieves both at once by ensuring that exactly those
readers will be so offended by his tone that their anger will impair
understanding and they will fail to follow his argument. If this is
right, the very vitriol of the *Genealogy* arises from an aim
to be heard only by the right audience--the one it can
potentially aid rather than harm--thereby overcoming the problem
that



> 
> 
> There are books that have opposite values for soul and health,
> depending on whether the lower soul... or the higher and more
> vigorous ones turn to them. (*BGE* 30; compare *BGE*
> 26-7, 40 and *GS* 381)
> 
> 
> 



That such an interpretation of Nietzsche's intentions is even
possible shows how great a challenge these explosive, carefully
crafted texts pose to their readers.


## 6. Key Doctrines



This entry has focused on broad themes pursued throughout
Nietzsche's writing, but most philosophically sophisticated
commentary on his work has been devoted to the explication of certain
core doctrinal commitments, which Nietzsche seems to rely upon
throughout, but which he does not develop systematically in his
published works in the way typical for philosophers. Some of these
doctrines, like the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, are
described as "fundamental" by Nietzsche himself
(*EH* III, *Z*, 1), but are formulated in surprisingly
cryptic or metaphorical ways--and discussed, or even mentioned at
all, much more rarely than one would expect given the importance
Nietzsche placed on them. Others are alluded to more frequently, but
raise theoretical questions that would normally call for careful
philosophical development that is largely absent in Nietzsche's
books. Commentators have therefore expended considerable effort
working out rational reconstructions of these doctrines. This section
offers brief explanations of three of the most important: the will to
power, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism.


### 6.1 The Will to Power



The will to power doctrine seems to claim that everything that exists
rests fundamentally on an underlying basis of
"power-centers", whose activity and interactions are
explained by a principle that they pursue the expansion of their
power. But it is far from obvious what these
"power-centers" are supposed to be, and much scholarly
controversy concerns what kind of doctrine Nietzsche intended to
advance in the first place. Some readers take it as Nietzsche's
version of a foundational metaphysics (see Heidegger 1961, Jaspers
[1936] 1965, and for a sophisticated recent approach in the same broad
vein, Richardson 1996; see also alternative accounts by Doyle 2019 and
Remhof 2017). Others receive it as an anti-essentialist rejection of
traditional metaphysical theorizing in which abstract and shifting
power-centers replace stable entities (Nehamas 1985: 74-105,
Poellner 1995: 137-98), or else as a psychological hypothesis
(Kaufmann [1950] 1974, Soll 2015; Clark and Dudrick 2015), or a
(quasi-)scientific conjecture (Schacht 1983; Abel 1984; Anderson 1994,
2012b). Opposing all such readings of the will to power as a doctrine
in theoretical philosophy, Maudemarie Clark (2000, see also 1990:
205-44) reads the will to power as a strand of thought that
makes no claim about the world, but instead expresses
Nietzsche's values. As we saw (3.B.i.), the idea that the
expansion of power is good does have a better claim than other
principles to systematize Nietzsche's various value commitments,
and different evaluative interpretations have been developed by
Reginster (2006), Katsafanas (2013), Hussain (2011), and Richardson
(2020: 53-80). But there are also a large number of other texts
suggesting that Nietzsche's main agenda was to argue that the
psychological world--or the world as a whole--is
fundamentally composed of centers of power exerting force against one
another (see *GS* 13; *BGE* 23, 36, 259; *GM* II,
16-17; III, 13-15; as well as many passages from the
notebooks). Nietzsche's description of such "power
centers" is sometimes fairly abstract, evoking mathematically
characterized "force-centers" like those sometimes
postulated in nineteenth century physics, but at other times, concrete
psychological or biological entities (people, drives, organisms) are
the things exerting will to power.



Reginster's (2006, 2018a) account of the will to power as a
drive toward overcoming resistance can marshal a large body of textual
support (particularly from the notebooks), and it also has some
particular philosophical advantages. From a dialectical point of view,
Reginster's reading substantially clarifies the target and the
philosophical point of Nietzsche's views about power: they are
aimed against Schopenhauer's ideas about the will to life and
his use of those ideas to motivate pessimism. The will to power
thereby contributes directly to Nietzsche's program of
combatting nihilism (in its guise as the evaluative claim that the
world ought not to exist). Reginster's reading also makes good
sense of the apparent centrality of the will to power in
Nietzsche's psychology. In the same passage where he claims that
psychology should "be recognized again as the queen of the
sciences", Nietzsche proposes to understand psychology "as
the morphology and *development-theory of the will to
power*" (*BGE* 23). Some commentators take this to
suggest a monistic psychology in which all drives whatsoever aim at
power, and so count as manifestations of a single underlying drive (or
drive-type). That interpretation makes a poor fit for the prodigious
diversity of Nietzsche's actual psychological explanations (and
for his pluralist leanings), but Reginster's view redirects
attention away from drives' first-order aims toward a general
structural feature of drives--their tendency to overcome
resistance in the course of pursuing whatever first-order activities
they pursue. (It thereby builds on a productive earlier line of
thought from Richardson (1996), according to which the drives'
willing power is not a matter of their taking power as a first-order
aim, but concerns the *manner* of their pursuit of various
first-order aims.) The Reginster account thereby permits the will to
power to retain an important centrality within Nietzsche's
psychology, without needing to claim that no one (or no drive) ever
aims at anything else besides power.



Other scholars have emphasized Nietzsche's speculations that
biological and physical phenomena could be explained by a postulated
system of interacting power centers (Abel 1984; Muller-Lauter
1999a; Moore 2002; Gemes 2013). Abel (1984) offers a particularly
systematic and carefully argued version of the approach, which
highlights important resonances between Nietzsche's ideas and
elements of Leibniz's dynamical physics and metaphysics, whereas
Moore (2002) pursues a fascinating line of connections between
Nietzsche's thoughts about power and certain physiological ideas
advanced by Wilhelm Roux (1881). Moore's reading emphasizes the
biologized rhetoric Nietzsche often uses in his talk about power
(together with its connections to health and sickness, degeneration,
etc.) as part of a case that the will to power idea locates
Nietzsche's philosophy within a wider intellectual trend toward
"biologism" prevalent at the end of the nineteenth
century.


### 6.2 Perspectivism



Much of Nietzsche's reaction to the philosophy of his
predecessors is mediated through his interest in the notion of
perspective. He thought that past philosophers had largely ignored the
influence of their own perspectives on their work, and had therefore
failed to control those perspectival effects (*BGE* 6; see
*BGE* I more generally). Commentators have been both fascinated
and perplexed by what has come to be called Nietzsche's
"perspectivism", and it has been a major concern in a
number of large-scale Nietzsche commentaries (see, e.g., Danto 1965;
Kaulbach 1980, 1990; Schacht 1983; Abel 1984; Nehamas 1985; Clark
1990; Poellner 1995; Richardson 1996; Benne 2005). There has been as
much contestation over exactly what doctrine or group of commitments
belong under that heading as about their philosophical merits, but a
few points are relatively uncontroversial and can provide a useful way
into this strand of Nietzsche's thinking.



Nietzsche's appeals to the notion of perspective (or,
equivalently in his usage, to an "optics" of knowledge)
have a positive, as well as a critical side. Nietzsche frequently
criticizes "dogmatic" philosophers for ignoring the
perspectival limitations on their theorizing, but as we saw, he
simultaneously holds that the operation of perspective makes a
positive contribution to our cognitive endeavors. Speaking of (what he
takes to be) the perversely counterintuitive doctrines of some past
philosophers, he writes,



> 
> 
> Particularly as knowers, let us not be ungrateful toward such resolute
> reversals of the familiar perspectives and valuations with which the
> spirit has raged against itself all too long... : to see
> differently in this way for once, *to want* to see differently,
> is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future
> "objectivity"--the latter understood not as
> "disinterested contemplation" (which is a non-concept and
> absurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one's Pro and
> Contra *in one's power*, and to shift them in and out, so
> that one knows how to make precisely the *difference* in
> perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge.
> (*GM* III, 12)
> 
> 
> 



This famous passage bluntly rejects the idea, dominant in philosophy
at least since Plato, that knowledge essentially involves a form of
objectivity that penetrates behind all subjective appearances to
reveal the way things really are, independently of any point of view
whatsoever. Instead, the proposal is to approach
"objectivity" (in a revised conception) asymptotically, by
exploiting the difference between one perspective and another, using
each to overcome the limitations of others, without assuming that
anything like a "view from nowhere" is so much as
possible. There is of course an implicit criticism of the traditional
picture of a-perspectival objectivity here, but there is equally a
positive set of recommendations about how to pursue knowledge as a
finite, limited cognitive agent.



In working out his perspective optics of cognition, Nietzsche built on
contemporary developments in the theory of
cognition--particularly the work of non-orthodox neo-Kantians
like Friedrich Lange and positivists like Ernst Mach, who proposed
naturalized, psychologically-based versions of the broad type of
theory of cognition initially developed by Kant and Schopenhauer (see
Clark 1990; Kaulbach 1980, 1990; Anderson 1998, 2002, 2005; Green
2002; Hill 2003; Hussain 2004). The Kantian thought was that certain
very basic structural features of the world we know (space, time,
causal relations, etc.) were artifacts of our subjective cognitive
faculties rather than properties or relations of things in themselves;
but where Kant and Schopenhauer had treated these structures as
necessary, a priori conditions of any possible experience whatsoever,
the more naturalistically oriented figures who influenced Nietzsche
sought to trace them to sources in human empirical psychology, which
would of course be contingent. The potential of these ineliminable
subject-side influences to *vary* suggests the idea of treating
them as a kind of *perspective*, which Nietzsche found
developed in an idealist version by Gustav Teichmuller (1882).
Leaving Teichmuller's idealism to one side, Nietzsche
develops the idea by tying cognitively important perspectives back to
his own psychology. In particular, the *Genealogy* passage
emphasizes that for him, perspectives are always rooted in
*affects* and their associated patterns of valuation. For that
reason, Nietzsche holds that "every great philosophy so
far" has been "the personal confession of its author and a
kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" (*BGE* 6).
Thus, theoretical claims not only need to be analyzed from the point
of view of truth, but can also be *diagnosed* as symptoms and
thereby traced back to the complex configurations of drive and affect
from the point of view of which they make sense. Nietzsche's
perspectivism thus connects to his "genealogical" program
of criticizing philosophical theories by exposing the psychological
needs they satisfy; perspectivism serves both to motivate the program,
and to provide it with methodological guidance.



But Nietzsche's perspectivism and his arguments for it go beyond
epistemology, or the "theory of cognition"
(*Erkenntnistheorie*), as it was practiced in the broadly
Kantian milieu of his contemporary philosophy. (One should say, they
"go beyond" the theory of cognition *at least*;
Gemes (2009c, 2013) argues that epistemological interpretations of
perspectivism are altogether mistaken, and that it should be taken
instead as fundamentally a doctrine within moral psychology, about the
drives and affects.) Nietzsche makes perspectivist claims not only
concerning the side of the cognitive subject, but also about the side
of the truth, or reality, we aim to know. His views on this topic have
been highly controversial, with some scholars emphasizing
Nietzsche's apparent denials of truth (either skeptical denials
that any truth is ever knowable, or more radical claims that the very
idea of truth is somehow incoherent), and others highlighting his own
frequent and routine claims for the truth of his own views, as well as
the valorization of truthfulness and honesty we saw above (3.B.iv.). A
number of different strategies have been proposed for reconciling the
tensions between these different strands of text, including the
supposition that at least some of Nietzsche's own claims must
fall outside the scope of his denials of truth (Hales and Welshon
2000), the idea that Nietzsche distinguished different senses of
"truth" (Schacht 1983; Anderson 1998, 2005), and the
developmental proposal that Nietzsche eventually gave up on his
denials of truth late in his career (Clark 1990, 1998). (See recent
exchanges on this topic between Clark (2018) and Nehamas (2015, 2017,
2018).) In addition to work focused on Nietzsche's understanding
of truth *per se*, a good deal of scholarly effort has explored
the way Nietzsche attempts to build his perspectivism down into the
ontology of the world by understanding reality itself as a system of
ever-shifting force-centers which themselves constitute a variety of
points of view on the whole (notable contributions include Deleuze
[1962] 1983; Abel 1984; Poellner 1995; Richardson 1996;
Muller-Lauter 1999a; Hales and Welshon 2000; Gemes 2013). These
efforts argue for strong connections between perspectivism and the
will to power doctrine
 (section 6.1).


### 6.3 The Eternal Recurrence of the Same



Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his most
important thought, but that has not made it any easier for
commentators to understand. Nietzsche's articulations of the
doctrine all involve hypothesizing--(or inducing the reader to
imagine, or depicting a character considering)--the idea that all
events in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through an
eternal series of cycles. But the texts are difficult to interpret.
All Nietzsche's official presentations of the thought in
published work are either presented in hypothetical terms (*GS*
341), or extremely elliptical and allusive (e.g., *GS* 109), or
highly metaphorical and quasi-hermetic (*Z* III, 2, 13), or all
three together. Most allusions to the idea, in fact, assume that one
already knows what it means--even the claims in *Ecce
Homo* that it is the "fundamental conception" or
"basic idea" of *Zarathustra* have this character.
In the early reception, most readers took Nietzsche to be offering a
cosmological hypothesis about the structure of time or of fate (see
Simmel [1907] 1920; Heidegger 1961; Lowith [1935] 1997; Jaspers
[1936] 1965), and various problems have been posed for the thesis, so
understood (Simmel [1907] 1920: 250-1n; Soll 1973; Anderson
2005: 217 n28). Many later commentators have focused instead on the
existential or practical significance of the thought (Magnus 1978;
Nehamas 1980, 1985), or its "mythological" import (Hatab
2005).



In the aftermath of Nehamas (1985), an influential line of readings
has argued that the thought to which Nietzsche attributed such
"fundamental" significance was never a cosmological or
theoretical claim at all--whether about time, or fate, or the
world, or the self--but instead a practical *thought
experiment* designed to test whether one's life has been
good. The broad idea is that one *imagines* the endless return
of life, and one's emotional reaction to the prospect reveals
something about how valuable one's life has been, much as
(quoting Maudemarie Clark's memorable analogy) a spouse's
question about whether one would marry again evokes--and indeed,
fairly demands--an assessment of the state of the marriage (see
Clark 1990: 245-86; Wicks 1993; Ridley 1997; Williams 2001;
Reginster 2006: 201-27; Anderson 2005, 2009; Risse 2009;
Huddleston 2022). Naturally, the threat of emerging
scholarly consensus around this line of interpretation has prompted
pushback, and Paul Loeb (2006, 2013, 2021) has recently offered
vigorous defense of a cosmological interpretation of Nietzsche's
idea, building on earlier work by Alistair Moles (1989, 1990).



Skeptics like Loeb are correct to insist that, if recurrence is to be
understood as a practical thought experiment, commentators owe us an
account of how the particular features of the relevant thoughts are
supposed to make any difference (Soll 1973 already posed a stark form
of this challenge). Three features seem especially salient: we are
supposed to imagine 1) that the past *recurs*, so that what has
happened in the past will be re-experienced in the future; 2) that
what recurs is the *same* in every detail; and 3) that the
recurrence happens not just once more, or even many times more, but
*eternally*. The supposed *recurrence* (1) plausibly
matters as a device for overcoming the natural bias toward the future
in practical reasoning. Since we cannot change the past but think of
ourselves as still able to do something about the future, our
practical attention is understandably future directed. But if the
question is about the value of our life *overall*, events in
the past matter just as much as those in the future, and disregarding
them is a mistake, at best, and a case of motivated reasoning or
dishonesty, if we are exploiting future-bias to ignore aspects of
ourselves we would rather not own up to (General form: "Whew! At
least I'll never have to go through *that*
again..."). By imaginatively locating our entire life once
again in the future, the thought experiment can mobilize the resources
of our practical self-concern to direct an evaluative judgment onto
our life as a whole. Similar considerations motivate the constraint of
*sameness* (2). If my assessment of myself simply
*elided* any events or features of my self, life, or world with
which I was discontent, it would hardly count as an honest, thorough
self-examination. The constraint that the life I imagine to recur must
be the same in every detail is designed to block any such
elisions.



As Reginster (2006: 222-7) observes, it is more difficult to
explain the role of the third constraint, *eternity*. It is
nevertheless clear that it does make a practical difference: to put a
sharp point on it, return to Clark's marriage analogy; one might
well be very happy to live one's marriage again (once, or twice,
or even several times), but still prefer some variation in spousal
arrangements over the course of eternity--indeed, Milan Kundera
(1991) seems to be putting his character Agnes in something like that
situation in his use of the Nietzschean thought experiment early on in
*Immortality*. Reginster proposes that the eternity constraint
is meant to reinforce the idea that the thought experiment calls for
an especially wholehearted form of
affirmation--*joy*--whose strength is measured by the
involvement of a wish that our essentially finite lives could be
eternal. More modestly, one might think that Nietzsche considered it
important to rule out as insufficient a particular kind of
*conditional* affirmation, suggested by the Christian
eschatological context, which would leave in place the judgment that
earthly human life carries intrinsically negative value. After all,
the devout Christian might affirm her earthly life *as a test of
faith*, which is to be redeemed by an eternal heavenly reward
should one pass that test--all the while retaining her commitment
that, considered by itself, earthly life is a sinful condition to be
rejected. Imagining that my finite life recurs *eternally*
blocks this avenue (and returns the focus of assessment to the finite
features of real life) by supposing that there will never be a point
at which one could pretend that finite life is once and for all
"over and done with" (Anderson 2005: 198, 203; 2009:
237-8).