Nietzsche — The Revaluation of All Values

The Misreading Problem

Nietzsche is the most misread philosopher in the Western canon, which is saying something given how badly Plato is misread and how impenetrable Kant is. But Nietzsche’s misreading was catastrophic in a specific way: his sister Elisabeth, after his mental collapse in 1889, controlled his literary estate, forged some of his letters, and eventually presented his work to the Nazi movement as ideological support. The Nazis removed his passionate anti-nationalism, his contempt for antisemitism (he broke with Wagner partly over this), and his critique of the German character, and kept the husk.

To read Nietzsche as a proto-fascist is to read him as the opposite of what he was. He spent much of his career attacking herd morality, conformism, and the politics of national identity. He considered the Germans as a people particularly susceptible to the mediocrity he despised.

God Is Dead — What This Actually Means

“God is dead; and we have killed him” appears in The Gay Science and is the premise for much of what follows. It’s not a triumphant atheist declaration. It’s closer to a diagnosis of a cultural catastrophe.

For centuries, the entire moral framework of European civilization was grounded in God — not just religious belief, but the structure of values, the idea that life has meaning, that the cosmos is ordered toward something, that human beings occupy a special place in it. When the Enlightenment and modern science eroded those foundations — not all at once, but over centuries — they left the moral structure standing without its support. People continued to use the values (equality, compassion, progress) without noticing that the foundation had gone.

Nietzsche’s claim is that this structural collapse hasn’t been fully absorbed yet. We’re living in its aftermath without realizing it. The nihilism that follows — the sense that nothing really matters, that all values are equally groundless — is the predictable result of killing God without replacing the function he served.

The question Nietzsche spends his career on is: what comes next? Can new values be created that don’t require supernatural grounding? Who would be capable of doing this?

Slave Morality and Master Morality

On the Genealogy of Morality traces where European moral values came from, and the argument is genuinely subversive. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of moral thinking.

Master morality starts from the self. The “good” is what the noble person identifies with themselves: strength, generosity, pride, excellence. The “bad” is the negation of this — weakness, cowardice, pettiness. It’s not primarily a morality about treatment of others; it’s an affirmation of the self.

Slave morality starts from resentment. When the weak cannot overcome the strong, they reframe their weakness as virtue. What the strong call “good,” the weak call “evil.” What the strong dismiss as “bad” (weakness, meekness, suffering), the weak reframe as “good” — the meek shall inherit the earth. The slave’s morality is fundamentally reactive; it defines “good” as the negation of the enemy.

Nietzsche’s claim, deeply controversial, is that Christian morality is slave morality — a transvaluation that took place over centuries as the Roman world’s dominated peoples reframed their situation. The values we call universal — humility, pity, equality, selflessness — are, on his account, not eternal truths but historical artifacts of resentment.

This is not an argument that power is good and weakness is bad. Nietzsche is equally contemptuous of brute strength without self-mastery. What he’s attacking is specifically the reactive nature of the slave’s morality — the way it defines itself against rather than from.

Will to Power

The will to power is the most misunderstood of Nietzsche’s concepts. It’s consistently read as a desire for domination over others. Nietzsche means something different and more interesting: the fundamental drive in all living things is toward the expansion of power understood as self-overcoming — growth, mastery, creative expression, the exceeding of one’s current limits.

The artist, the philosopher, the scientist, the ascetic monk who disciplines himself ruthlessly — all are exercising will to power in Nietzsche’s sense. Political domination is a crude and often failed form of it. The philosopher who challenges the assumptions of an entire civilization is exercising a more profound version.

What Nietzsche despises is not weakness per se but the will-lessness that presents itself as virtue — the refusal to affirm oneself that dresses up as humility, the resentment of excellence that dresses up as equality.

The Eternal Recurrence

The eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s most demanding thought experiment, and it functions less as a metaphysical theory than as a test. The question: could you affirm your life if you had to live it exactly as you have lived it, infinitely? Every joy, every suffering, every trivial moment, every bad decision — all of it repeated forever with no variation.

If your life is one you could affirm in these terms, you’re living correctly. If the thought fills you with horror — if there are things you’ve done or failed to do that you couldn’t bear to repeat infinitely — you have work to do.

Nietzsche presented this as a thought experiment in The Gay Science and returned to it in Thus Spake Zarathustra. It’s not necessarily a claim about how time actually works. It’s a demand for the kind of self-examination that forces you to take your life seriously as something you are choosing, rather than something that is happening to you.

The Übermensch

The Übermensch (variously translated as Superman or Overman) is not a racial type. It’s a figure who has completed the revaluation: who has recognized that inherited values have no transcendent grounding, and who creates new values from a position of strength rather than resentment. The Übermensch doesn’t follow the herd’s morality and doesn’t react against it; he creates.

In Zarathustra, the Übermensch is presented as a goal humanity might work toward — a higher type of human being, not biologically but philosophically. Nietzsche is explicit that he’s describing a rare individual who transcends received morality, not a political category. The Nazis converted this into a racial category and used it to justify exactly the kind of herd thinking — the group’s superiority over the individual outsider — that Nietzsche was attacking.

Nietzsche on Writing

He had very specific views on prose. “What you can write in a book I can write in ten sentences.” His aphoristic style in Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science is not laziness or obscurantism — it’s a deliberate choice. The aphorism should be dense enough to require active thought; the reader who understands it too quickly probably hasn’t understood it. “Good writers prefer to be understood rather than admired.”

He was also suspicious of systematic philosophy — the Hegelian tradition of constructing grand architectures of ideas. Life is messier than any system can capture; a philosophy that seems to explain everything probably explains nothing. The aphorism is a more honest form because it doesn’t pretend to completeness.

What’s Landing

The existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Heidegger) were all responding to Nietzsche, and the 20th century’s philosophy of human freedom is largely a continuation of the problem he identified: after God, how do you ground values? Sartre says you create them through radical choice. Camus says you can’t and must live with that honestly. The argument is still going.

The useful core of Nietzsche, stripped of the misreadings, is a persistent question about the provenance of values. Where did the things you believe to be good actually come from? What interests do they serve? What would you believe if you traced your values to their roots rather than accepting them as given?

That question is not comfortable. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. The philosopher who makes you comfortable is probably not doing philosophy.