with how these matters might better be evaluated, and with the values by which human beings live and might better do so. Thus he made much of the need for a revaluation of all received values, and for attention to the problems of the nature, status, and standards of value and evaluation. One form of inquiry he took to be of great utility in connection with both of these tasks is genealogical inquiry into the conditions under which various modes of interpretation and evaluation have arisen. It is only one of the kinds of inquiry he considered necessary in both cases, however, serving merely to prepare for others that must be brought to bear before any conclusions are warranted.
Nietzsche further emphasized the perspectival character of all thinking and the merely provisional character of all knowing, rejecting the idea of the very possibility of absolute knowledge transcending all perspectives. However, because he also rejected the idea that things (and values) have absolute existence ‘in themselves’ apart from the relations in which he supposes their reality to consist, he held that, if viewed in the multiplicity of perspectives from which various of these relations come to light, they admit of a significant measure of comprehension. This perspectivism thus does not exclude the possibility of any sort of knowledge deserving of the name, but rather indicates how it is to be conceived and achieved. His kind of philosophy, which he characterizes as fröhliche Wissenschaft (cheerful science), proceeds by way of a variety of such ‘perspectival’ approaches to the various matters with which he deals.
Thus for Nietzsche there is no ‘truth’ in the sense of the correspondence of anything we might think or say to ‘being,’ and indeed no ‘true world of being’ to which it may even be imagined to fail to correspond; no ‘knowledge’ conceived in terms of any such truth and reality; and, further, no knowledge at all – even of ourselves and the world of which we are a part – that is absolute, non-perspectival, and certain. But that is not the end of the matter. There are, e.g., ways of thinking that may be more or less well warranted in relation to differing sorts of interest and practice, not only within the context of social life but also in our dealings with our environing world. Nietzsche’s reflections on the reconceptualization of truth and knowledge thus point in the direction of a naturalistic epistemology that he would have replace the conceptions of truth and knowledge of his predecessors, and fill the nihilistic void seemingly left by their bankruptcy. There is, moreover, a good deal about ourselves and our world that he became convinced we can comprehend. Our comprehension may be restricted to what life and the world show themselves to be and involve in our experience; but if they are the only kind of reality, there is no longer any reason to divorce the notions of truth, knowledge, and value from them. The question then becomes how best to interpret and assess what we find as we proceed to explore them. It is to these tasks of interpretation and ‘revaluation’ that Nietzsche devoted his main efforts in his later writings. In speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche had in mind not only the abandonment of the Godhypothesis (which he considered to be utterly ‘unworthy of belief,’ owing its invention and appeal entirely to naïveté, error, all-too-human need, and ulterior motivation), but also the demise of all metaphysical substitutes for it. He likewise criticized and rejected the related postulations of substantial ‘souls’ and self-contained ‘things,’ taking both notions to be ontological fictions merely reflecting our artificial (though convenient) linguistic-conceptual shorthand for functionally unitary products, processes, and sets of relations. In place of this cluster of traditional ontological categories and interpretations, he conceived the world in terms of an interplay of forces without any inherent structure or final end. It ceaselessly organizes and reorganizes itself, as the fundamental disposition he called will to power gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships. ‘This world is the will to power – and nothing besides,’ he wrote; ‘and you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!’ Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return (or eternal recurrence) underscores this conception of a world without beginning or end, in which things happen repeatedly in the way they always have. He first introduced this idea as a test of one’s ability to affirm one’s own life and the general character of life in this world as they are, without reservation, qualification, or appeal to anything transcending them. He later entertained the thought that all events might actually recur eternally in exactly the same sequence, and experimented in his unpublished writings with arguments to this effect. For the most part, however, he restricted himself to less problematic uses of the idea that do not presuppose its literal truth in this radical form. His rhetorical embellishments and experimental elaborations of the idea may have been intended to make it more vivid and compelling; but he employed it chiefly to depict his conception of the radically non-linear character of events in this world and their fundamental homogeneity, and to provide a way of testing our ability to live with it. If we are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it even on the supposition that it will only be the same sequence of events repeated eternally, we have what it takes to endure and flourish in the kind of world in which Nietzsche believed we find ourselves in the aftermath of disillusionment.
Nietzsche construed human nature and existence naturalistically, in terms of the will to power and its ramifications in the establishment and expression of the kinds of complex systems of dynamic quanta in which human beings consist. ‘The soul is only a word for something about the body,’ he has Zarathustra say; and the body is fundamentally a configuration of natural forces and processes. At the same time, he insisted on the importance of social arrangements and interactions in the development of human forms of awareness and activity. He also emphasized the possibility of the emergence of exceptional human beings capable of an independence and creativity elevating them above the level of the general human rule. So he stressed the difference between ‘higher men’ and ‘the herd,’ and through Zarathustra proclaimed the Übermensch (‘overman’ or ‘superman’) to be ‘the meaning of the earth,’ employing this image to convey the ideal of the overcoming of the ‘all-too-human’ and the fullest possible creative ‘enhancement of life.’ Far from seeking to diminish our humanity by stressing our animality, he sought to direct our efforts to the emergence of a ‘higher humanity’ capable of endowing existence with a human redemption and justification, above all through the enrichment of cultural life.
Notwithstanding his frequent characterization as a nihilist, therefore, Nietzsche in fact sought to counter and overcome the nihilism he expected to prevail in the aftermath of the collapse and abandonment of traditional religious and metaphysical modes of interpretation and evaluation. While he was highly critical of the latter, it was not his intention merely to oppose them; for he further attempted to make out the possibility of forms of truth and knowledge to which philosophical interpreters of life and the world might aspire, and espoused a ‘Dionysian value-standard’ in place of all non-naturalistic modes of valuation. In keeping with his interpretation of life and the world in terms of his conception of will to power, Nietzsche framed this standard in terms of his interpretation of them. The only tenable alternative to nihilism must be based upon a recognition and affirmation of the world’s fundamental character. This meant positing as a general standard of value the attainment of a kind of life in which the will to power as the creative transformation of existence is raised to its highest possible intensity and qualitative expression. This in turn led him to take the ‘enhancement of life’ and creativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values and development of a naturalistic value theory. This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s thinking about morality. Insisting that moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation ought to be assessed ‘in the perspective of life,’ he argued that most of them were contrary to the enhancement of life, reflecting the all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of less favored human groups and types. Distinguishing between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ moralities, he found the latter to have become the dominant type of morality in the modern world. He regarded present-day morality as a ‘herd-animal morality,’ well suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultifying and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule. Accordingly, he drew attention to the origins and functions of this type of morality (as a social-control mechanism and device by which the weak defend and avenge and assert themselves against the actually or potentially stronger). He further suggested the desirability of a ‘higher morality’ for the exceptions, in which the contrast of the basic ‘slave/herd morality’ categories of ‘good and evil’ would be replaced by categories more akin to the ‘good and bad’ contrast characteristic of ‘master morality,’ with a revised (and variable) content better attuned to the conditions and attainable qualities of the enhanced forms of life such exceptional human beings can achieve. The strongly creative flavor of Nietzsche’s notions of such a ‘higher humanity’ and associated ‘higher morality’ reflects his linkage of both to his conception of art, to which he