Is Nietzsche�s revaluation of all values an ethical stance?

If so, what is its character?

Greg Detre

Saturday, January 27, 2001

Dr Rosen, post-Kantian III

The idea of a �revaluation of all values� dominates Nietzsche�s later writings, and indeed was considered as the title of his last, unfinished book. Quite what he had in mind by the term requires a great deal of unwinding.

It sounds as though he intended almost to hand out a list of that which is to be desired and valued, virtues and vices, a new set of criteria of good and evil � something along the lines of �The Interpretation of the Future�. We might look to the sort of qualities that Nietzsche prized and despised in himself and others. He admired dignity, leadership, art, health, drive and honesty. He despised pity in all its forms, unwillingness to suffer, co-dependency, dogmatism and self-deceit. We could also look to the historical figures that Nietzsche canonises and caricatures as archetypal embodiments of all that will come to be seen as good: Napoleon, Frederick II, Plato, Goethe, and at times, Socrates, Wagner and Schopenhauer.

However, this sort of revised moral price list seems too unjustifiedly prescriptive. Though not strictly a rationalist, Nietzsche sought to defend his assertions through various means. In the case of his revaluation of all values, he is tracing a path from Christianity to the future, through the death of God, pessimism and nihilism, and finally emerging triumphant with our new understanding of value.

This brings us to the cornerstone of Nietzsche�s thought: �God is dead�. When the madman first brings us the news, he throws his lantern down in disgust for �[his] time has not come yet� and we do not know what to make of him. That he is surrounded by �atheists� only heightens the irony of their confusion. For how could God be dead if he never existed? The statement is less about metaphysics than morality. God is the Value-Giver � though we may not appreciate it, our entire moral edifice rests on Him. With his death, Christianity is uprooted and nothing in our system is left standing. But the tremors and ramifications were only barely starting to wash against the shores of our certainty as Nietzsche was writing.

In Schopenhauer we see a call to pessimism, but a self-deceitful pessimism that seeks to uphold Christian values without a Christian God to make sense of them. For, if the author of the Ten Commandments is dead, then they are reduced to scratchings on stone. This is not just a question of punishment: certainly, without God, there can be no heaven or hell, no stick or carrot to advertise the Christian way. But the problem lies deeper, far deeper than this. There can be no justice � no all-seeing eye to judge us, not just when no one else is looking, but nothing against which to judge ourselves. There is no longer an objective measure of value � no longer value. With the death of God, we see the collapse of the moral world order. Schopenhauer is vilified because he seeks to preserve and pickle the slave morality as codified in the �ingenious consolations� of Christianity even as he describes the world in itself as a godless, suffering world.

But pessimism is the forerunner to nihilism, that which Nietzsche is most keen to avoid. He talks of having come through it himself, that it may be a necessary phase the world must go through. This spurred his early fascination with the Greeks as he sought to understand how they had been able to clearly see the �absurdity� and �horror of existence� while affirming life and the world so vigorously. In the Birth of tragedy, he ascribed this phenomenal vitality in the face of suffering as stemming from the �justification of existence � as an aesthetic phenomenon�.

Nietzsche was not trying to create a religion to replace Christianity (though he does talk about the need for myths in a similar tone). In Kaufmann�s eyes, the idea of a revaluation is less a creed than an approach. Its emphasis, at least initially, lies in self-examination. Acknowledging the death of God, or in other words, the illusion perpetrated as Christianity, is the first step. Acknowledging the implications of this psychocultural earthquake comes next. We must emerge from nihilism intact, with the understanding that �in denying � [one learns] again to affirm�, to live in the world as it is to us, as we interpret it successively.

It is important then that we realise that he would not have considered his revaluation concrete and permanent. He intends to shake up our current values, discard the debris of Christianity with wild abandon and bequeath the future this fresh, spare landscape to be populated and filled out with new nobility and unborn heroes to live its code to the full.

In time, the philosophers of the future will add substantive claims of their own. It is important to remember how Nietzsche described and perhaps saw himself relative to the philosophical labourers and the free spirits: he is the �herald and precursor�. Philosophy is the most difficult business of all, that of stepping outside of one�s own time. However, Nietzsche obviously intended to progress further with his quest of self-definition with his last book. Having first understood his epoch, he sought then to escape it, first by inversion, then regressing by �naturalisation�, and finally by some form of normative, substantive revaluation, seemingly with the will to power as the guiding principle. Thus, the revaluation of values is at the same time an evaluation, a devaluation, and a self-creation.