Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher andcultural critic who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. Heis famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional Europeanmorality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideasand social and political pieties associated with modernity. Many ofthese criticisms rely on psychological diagnoses that expose falseconsciousness infecting people’s received ideas; for thatreason, he is often associated with a group of late modern thinkers(including Marx and Freud) who advanced a “hermeneutics ofsuspicion” against traditional values (see Foucault [1964] 1990,Ricoeur [1965] 1970, Leiter 2004). Nietzsche also used hispsychological analyses to support original theories about the natureof the self and provocative proposals suggesting new values that hethought would promote cultural renewal and improve social andpsychological life by comparison to life under the traditional valueshe criticized.

• 1. Life and Works
• 2. Critique of Religion and Morality
• 3. Value Creation
  • 3.1 Nietzsche’s Meta-ethical Stance and the Nature of Value Creation
  • 3.2 Some Nietzschean Values
    • 3.2.1 Power and Life
    • 3.2.2 Affirmation
    • 3.2.3 Truthfulness/Honesty
    • 3.2.4 Art and Artistry
    • 3.2.5 Individuality, Autonomy, “Freedom of Spirit”
    • 3.2.6 Pluralism
• 4. The Self and Self-fashioning
• 5. Difficulties of Nietzsche’s Philosophical Writing
• 6. Key Doctrines
  • 6.1 The Will to Power
  • 6.2 Perspectivism
  • 6.3 The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature: Works by Nietzsche
    • Nietzsche’s Works in German
    • Nietzsche’s Works in English
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Works

Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken (near Leipzig),where his father was a Lutheran minister. His father died in 1849, andthe family relocated to Naumburg, where he grew up in a householdcomprising 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 classicalphilology at Basel. At age 24, he was the youngest ever appointed tothat post. His teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl wrote in his letterof reference that Nietzsche was so promising that “He willsimply be able to do anything he wants to do” (Kaufmann 1954:8). Most of Nietzsche’s university work and his earlypublications were in philology, but he was already interested inphilosophy, particularly the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and FriedrichAlbert Lange. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche hadplanned to pursue a second Ph.D. in philosophy, with a project abouttheories of teleology in the time since Kant.

When he was a student in Leipzig, Nietzsche met Richard Wagner, andafter his move to Basel, he became a frequent guest in the Wagnerhousehold at Villa Tribschen in Lucerne. Nietzsche’s friendshipwith Wagner (and Cosima Liszt Wagner) lasted into the mid-1870s, andthat friendship—together with their ultimate break—werekey touchstones in his personal and professional life. His first book,The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), wasnot the careful work of classical scholarship the field might haveexpected, but a controversial polemic combining speculations about thecollapse of the tragic culture of fifth-century Athens with a proposalthat Wagnerian music-drama might become the source of a renewed tragicculture for contemporary Germany. The work was generally ill-receivedwithin classical studies—and savagely reviewed by UlrichWilamovitz-Möllendorff, who went on to become one of the leadingclassicists of the generation—even though it contained somestriking interpretive insights (e.g., about the role of the chorus inGreek tragedy). Following the first book, Nietzsche continued hisefforts to influence the broader direction of German intellectualculture, publishing essays intended for a wide public on DavidFriedrich Strauss, on the “use of history for life”, onSchopenhauer, and on Wagner. These essays are known collectively astheUntimely Meditations.

Although he assisted in early planning for Wagner’s Bayreuthproject and attended the first festival, Nietzsche was not favorablyimpressed by the cultural atmosphere there, and his relationship withthe Wagners soured after 1876. Nietzsche’s health, alwaysfragile, forced him to take leave from Basel in 1876–77. He usedthe time to explore a broadly naturalistic critique of traditionalmorality and culture—an interest encouraged by his friendshipwith Paul Rée, who was with Nietzsche in Sorrento working onhisOrigin of Moral Sensations (see Janaway 2007:74–89; Small 2005). Nietzsche’s research resulted inHuman, All-too-human (1878), which introduced his readers tothe corrosive attacks on conventional pieties for which he becamefamous, as well as to a style of writing in short, numbered paragraphsand pithy aphorisms to which he often returned in later work. When hesent the book to the Wagners early in 1878, it effectively ended theirfriendship: Nietzsche later wrote that his book and Wagner’sParsifal libretto crossed in the mail “as if two swordshad 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. Asa result, he was freed to write and to develop the style that suitedhim. He published a book almost every year thereafter. These worksbegan withDaybreak (1881), which collected criticalobservations on morality and its underlying psychology, and therefollowed the mature works for which Nietzsche is best known:TheGay Science (1882, second expanded edition 1887),Thus SpokeZarathustra (1883–5),Beyond Good and Evil (1886),On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and in the last year ofhis productive lifeTwilight of the Idols (1888) andTheWagner Case (1888), along withThe Antichrist and hisintellectual biography,Ecce Homo, which were published onlylater. At the beginning of this period, Nietzsche enjoyed an intensebut ultimately painful friendship with Rée and LouSalomé, a brilliant young Russian student. The three initiallyplanned to live together in a kind of intellectual commune, butNietzsche and Rée both developed romantic interest inSalomé, and after Nietzsche unsuccessfully proposed marriage,Salomé and Rée departed for Berlin. Salomé laterwrote an illuminating book about Nietzsche (Salomé [1894]2001), which first proposed an influential periodization of hisphilosophical development.

In later years, Nietzsche moved frequently in the effort to find aclimate that would improve his health, settling into a pattern ofspending winters near the Mediterranean (usually in Italy) and summersin 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-orbitalmeningioma, a slow-growing tumor on the brain surface behind his righteye. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, andwhen he regained consciousness he wrote a series of increasinglyderanged letters. His close Basel friend Franz Overbeck was gravelyconcerned and travelled to Turin, where he found Nietzsche sufferingfrom dementia. After unsuccessful treatment in Basel and Jena, he wasreleased into the care of his mother, and later his sister, eventuallylapsing entirely into silence. He lived on until 1900, when he died ofa stroke complicated by pneumonia.

During his illness, his sister Elisabeth assumed control of hisliterary legacy, and she eventually publishedThe AntichristandEcce Homo, as well as a selection of writing from hisnotebooks for which she used the titleThe Will to Power,following Nietzsche’s remark in theGenealogy(GM III, 27) that he planned a major work under that title.The editorial work was not well founded in Nietzsche’s survivingplans for the book and was also marred by Elisabeth’s stronganti-Semitic commitments, which had been extremely distressing toNietzsche himself. As a result,The Will to Power leaves asomewhat misleading impression of the general character and content ofthe writings left in Nietzsche’s notebooks. That writing is nowavailable in an outstanding critical edition (KGA, morewidely available inKSA; English translations of selectionsare available inWEN andWLN.)

Nietzsche’s life has been the subject of several full-lengthbiographies (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 andparticular works in the entry onNietzsche’s Life and Works and in the articles comprising the first three parts of Gemes andRichardson (2013), as well as in Meyer (2019), which treats thepublication 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 traditionalEuropean moral commitments, together with their foundations inChristianity. This critique is very wide-ranging; it aims to underminenot just religious faith or philosophical moraltheory, butalso many central aspects of ordinary moral consciousness, some ofwhich are difficult to imagine doing without (e.g., altruisticconcern, guilt for wrongdoing, moral responsibility, the value ofcompassion, the demand for equal consideration of persons, and soon).

By the time Nietzsche wrote, it was common for European intellectualsto assume that such ideas, however much inspiration they owed to theChristian intellectual and faith tradition, needed a rationalgrounding independent from particular sectarian or even ecumenicalreligious commitments. Then as now, most philosophers assumed that asecular vindication of morality would surely be forthcoming and wouldsave the large majority of our standard commitments. Nietzsche foundthat confidence naïve, and he deployed all his rhetorical prowessto shock his readers out of complacency on this score. For example,his doubts about the viability of Christian underpinnings for moraland cultural life are not offered in a sunny spirit of anticipatedliberation, nor does he present a sober but basically confident callto develop a secular understanding of morality; instead, he launchesthe famous, aggressive and paradoxical pronouncement that “Godis dead” (GS 108, 125, 343). The idea is not so muchthat atheism is true—inGS 125, he depicts thispronouncement arriving asfresh news to a group ofatheists—but instead that because “the belief in theChristian 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). Christianityno longer commands society-wide cultural allegiance as a frameworkgrounding ethical commitments, and thus, a common basis for collectivelife that was supposed to have been immutable and invulnerable hasturned out to be not only less stable than we assumed, butincomprehensiblymortal—and in fact, already lost. Theresponse called for by such a turn of events is mourning and deepdisorientation.

Indeed, the case is even worse than that, according to Nietzsche. Notonly do standard moral commitments lack a foundation we thought theyhad, but stripped of their veneer of unquestionable authority, theyprove to have been not just baseless but positively harmful.Unfortunately, the moralization of our lives has insidiously attacheditself to genuine psychological needs—some basic to ourcondition, others cultivated by the conditions of life undermorality—so its corrosive effects cannot simply be removedwithout further psychological damage. Still worse, the damaging sideof morality has implanted itself within usin the form of agenuine self-understanding, making it hard for us to imagineourselves living any other way. Thus, Nietzsche argues, we are facedwith a difficult, long term restoration project in which the mostcherished aspects of our way of life must be ruthlessly investigated,dismantled, and then reconstructed in healthier form—all whilewe continue somehow to sail the ship of our common ethical life on thehigh seas.

The most extensive development of this Nietzschean critique ofmorality appears in his late workOn the Genealogy ofMorality, which consists of three treatises, each devoted to thepsychological examination of a central moral idea. In the FirstTreatise, Nietzsche takes up the idea that moral consciousnessconsists fundamentally in altruistic concern for others. He begins byobserving a striking fact, namely, that this widespread conception ofwhat morality is all about—while entirelycommonsensical—is not the essence of any possible morality, buta historical innovation.

To make the case for historical change, he identifies two patterns ofethical assessment, each associated with a basic pair of evaluativeterms, a good/bad pattern and a good/evil pattern. Understoodaccording to the good/bad pattern, the idea of goodness originated insocial class privilege: the good were first understood to be those ofthe higher social order, but then eventually the idea of goodness was“internalized”—i.e., transferred from social classitself to traits of character and other personal excellences that weretypically associated with the privileged caste (for example, thevirtue of courage for a society with a privileged military class, ormagnanimity for one with a wealthy elite, or truthfulness and(psychological) nobility for a culturally ambitious aristocracy; seeGM I, 4–5). In such a system, goodness is associatedwithexclusive virtues. There is no thought that everyoneshould be excellent—the very idea makes no sense, since to beexcellent is to be distinguished from the ordinary run of people. Inthat sense, good/bad valuation arises out of a “pathos ofdistance” (GM I, 2) expressing the superiorityexcellent people feel over ordinary ones, and it gives rise to a“noble morality” (BGE 260). Nietzsche showsconvincingly that this pattern of assessment was dominant in ancientMediterranean culture (the Homeric world, later Greek and Romansociety, and even much of ancient philosophical ethics).

The good/evil pattern of valuation is quite different. It focuses itsnegative evaluation (evil) on violations of the interests orwell-being of others—and consequently its positive evaluation(good) on altruistic concern for their welfare. Such a morality hasuniversalistic pretensions: if it is to promote and protect thewelfare of all, its restrictions and injunctions must apply toeveryone equally. It is thereby especially amenable to ideas of basichuman equality, starting from the thought that each person has anequal claim to moral consideration and respect. These are familiarideas in the modern context—so familiar, indeed, that Nietzscheobserves how easily we confuse them with “the moral manner ofvaluationas such” (GM Pref., 4)—but theuniversalist structure, altruistic sentiments, and egalitariantendency of those values mark an obvious contrast with the valuationof exclusive virtues in the good/bad pattern. The contrast, togetherwith the prior dominance of good/bad structured moralities, raises astraightforward historical question: what happened? How did we getfrom the widespread acceptance of good/bad valuation to the nearuniversal dominance of good/evil thinking?

Nietzsche’s famous answer is unflattering to our modernconception. 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 matterof ongoing scholarly controversy (in recent literature, see Bittner1994; 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 thebroad outline is clear enough. People who suffered from oppression atthe hands of the noble, excellent, (but uninhibited) people valorizedby good/bad morality—and who were denied any effective recourseagainst them by relative powerlessness—developed a persistent,corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred against their enemies,which Nietzsche callsressentiment. That emotion motivatedthe development of the new moral conceptevil,purpose-designed for the moralistic condemnation of those enemies.(How conscious or unconscious—how “strategic” ornot—this process is supposed to have been is one matter ofscholarly controversy.) Afterward, via negation of the concept ofevil, the new concept of goodness emerges, rooted in altruisticconcern of a sort that would inhibit evil actions. Moralisticcondemnation using these new values does little by itself to satisfythe motivating desire for revenge, but if the new way of thinkingcould spread, gaining more adherents and eventually influencing theevaluations even of the nobility, then the revenge might beimpressive—indeed, “the most spiritual” form ofrevenge (GM I, 7; see alsoGM I, 10–11). Forin that case, the revolt would accomplish a “radicalrevaluation” (GM I, 7) that would corrupt the veryvalues that gave the noble way of life its character and madeit seem admirable in the first place.

For Nietzsche, then, our morality amounts to a vindictive effort topoison the happiness of the fortunate (GM III, 14), insteadof a high-minded, dispassionate, and strictly rational concern forothers. This can seem hard to accept, both as an account of how thevaluation of altruistic concern originated and even more as apsychological explanation of the basis of altruism in modern people,who are far removed from the social conditions that figure inNietzsche’s story. That said, Nietzsche offers two strands ofevidence sufficient to give pause to an open-minded reader. In theChristian context, he points to the surprising prevalence of what onemight call the “brimstone, hellfire, and damnationdiatribe” in Christian letters and sermons: Nietzsche cites atlength a striking example from Tertullian (GM I, 15), butthat example is the tip of a very large iceberg, and it is a troublingpuzzle what this genre of “vengeful outbursts”(GM I, 16) is even doing within (what is supposed to be) areligion of love and forgiveness. Second, Nietzsche observes withconfidence-shaking perspicacity how frequently indignant moralisticcondemnation itself, whether arising in serious criminal or publicmatters or from more private personal interactions, can detach itselffrom any measured assessment of the wrong and devolve into afree-floating expression of vengeful resentment against some (real orimagined) perpetrator. The spirit of such condemnations isdisturbingly often more in line with Nietzsche’s diagnosis ofaltruism than it is with our conventional (but possiblyself-satisfied) moral self-understanding.

The First Treatise does little, however, to suggest why inhabitants ofanoble morality might be at all moved by such condemnations,generating a question about how the moral revaluation could havesucceeded. Nothing internal to the nobles’ value system givesthem any grounds for general altruistic concern or any reason to payheed to the complaints of those whom they have already dismissed ascontemptible. 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 conceptualconnection to the notion of debt. Just as a debtor’s failure torepay 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 thevictim some form of response to the violation, which serves as a kindof compensation for whatever harm was suffered. Nietzsche’sconjectural history of the “moralized” (GM II,21) notion of guilt suggests that it developed through a transfer ofthis structure—which pairs each loss to some(punishment-involving) compensation—from the domain of materialdebt to a wider class of actions that violate some socially acceptednorm. The really important conceptual transformation, however, is notthe transfer itself, but an accompanyingpurification andinternalization of the feeling of indebtedness, which connectthe demand for compensation to a source of wrongful action that issupposed to be entirely within the agent’s control. Thecondemnation of the violation thereby attaches a negative assessmentto the guilty person’s basic sense of personal worth.

The highly purified character of moralized guilt suggests how it mightbe a powerful tool for moral revaluation and simultaneously indicatessome of Nietzsche’s reasons for skepticism against it. AsWilliams (1993a) observes, a purified notion of guilt pertaining towhat is completely under the agent’s control (and so entirelyimmune from luck) stands in a particularly tight fit withblame: “Blame needs an occasion—anaction—and a target—the person who did the action and goeson to meet the blame” (Williams 1993a: 10). The pure idea ofmoralized guilt answers this need by tying any wrong actioninextricably and uniquely to a blamable agent. As we saw, the impulseto assign blame was central to theressentiment thatmotivated the moral revaluation of values, according to the FirstTreatise. Thus, insofar as people (even nobles) become susceptible tosuch moralized guilt, they might also become vulnerable to therevaluation, and Nietzsche offers some speculations about how and whythis might happen (GM II, 16–17).

But Nietzsche’s main concern in the Second Treatise is thedanger he takes moralized guilt to pose to psychological health. Thesecriticisms 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), andLeiter (2015: 178–95). One salient thought is that guilt’svery purity makes it liable to turn against the agentherself—even in cases where it plays no legitimate role inself-regulation, or in ways that outstrip any such role. For example,given guilt’s intense internalization, no connection to anactual victim is essential to it. Any observer of theviolation (whether real or ideal/imagined) can equally be entitled toresent the guilty party, and that fact makes space for religious orideological systems to attach guilt to practically any kind of ruleviolation, even when no one was harmed. In such cases, free-floatingguilt can lose its social and moral point and develop into apathological desire for self-punishment.

TheGenealogy’s Third Treatise explores theintensification of such self-punishment via the idealization ofasceticism. Ascetic self-denial is a curious phenomenon. (Indeed, oncertain psychological assumptions, like descriptive psychologicalegoism or ordinary hedonism, it seems incomprehensible.) But it isnevertheless strikingly widespread in the history of religiouspractice. TheGenealogy misses no chance to criticizereligious versions of asceticism, but its target isbroader—including, specifically, the more rational formasceticism takes in Schopenhauer’s ethics. What unifies thedifferent versions is theirextension of the valorization ofself-discipline in the interest of virtue (which Nietzsche himselfwould advocate) into a thoroughgoing form of self-condemnation, inwhich self-discipline is turned against the agent herself and comes toexpress the person’s commitment to her own fundamentalworthlessness. (One obvious route to such a value system, though farfrom the only one, is for the moralist to identify a set of drives anddesires that people are bound to have—perhaps rooted in theirhuman 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 atool for developing asceticism. Suffering is an inevitable part of thehuman condition, and the ascetic strategy is to interpret suchsuffering aspunishment, thereby connecting it to the notionof guilt. Despite turning her own suffering against her, the moveparadoxically offers certain advantages to the agent—not onlydoes her suffering gain an explanation and moral justification, buther own activity can be validated by being enlisted on the side ofpunishment (self-castigation):

For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering;still more precisely, a perpetrator, still more specifically, aguilty 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 foryourself!”. (GM III, 15)

Thus, Nietzsche suggests,

The principal bow stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself to causethe human soul to resound with wrenching and ecstatic music of everykind was executed—everyone knows this—by exploitingthe feeling of guilt. (GM III, 20)

Given that guilt involves a serious diminution of personal worth, theeffects of this guilt-inflected ascetic self-understanding must beextremely destructive for the agent’s sense of self-worth, andultimately for psychological health.

Nietzsche’s account places asceticism in an unattractive light,but the ascetic conception of morality is by no meansrefuted byargument through these considerations. Consider, for example, thestance of Schopenhauerian pessimism, according to which human life andthe world havenegative absolute value. From that standpoint,the moralist can perfectly well allow that ascetic valuation isself-punishing and even destructive for the moral agent, but suchconclusions are entirely consistent with—indeed, they seem likewarranted responses to—the pessimistic evaluation. Thatis, if life is an inherent evil and nothingness is a concreteimprovement over existence, then diminishing or impairing life throughasceticism yields a net enhancement of value. Nietzsche’sconcern is not so much torefute that view as todiagnose it. He insists that such evaluative commitments aresymptoms of psychological and cultural sickness, and that the asceticresponse is an “instinctive”, but ultimatelyself-defeating, effort at self-medication (GM III, 13, 16).While asceticism imposes self-discipline on the sick practitioner, itsimultaneously makes the person sicker, plunging her into intensifiedinner conflict (GM III, 15, 20–21). Thus,Nietzsche’s fundamental objection to asceticism is that it ispsychologically destructive and practically self-defeating, even forthose (the sick) for whom it does its best work—and this is soeven if it remains (from a certain perspective) the best theycan do for themselves in their condition.

While this section has focused on theGenealogy, it is worthnoting that its three studies are offered only asexamples ofNietzschean skepticism about conventional moral ideas. InTheAntichrist, Nietzsche extended these criticisms of thespecifically Christian psychological, cognitive, and evaluativefoundations for morality (an extension which has been the subject ofextensive recent discussion; see, e.g., Snelson 2017; Berry 2019; andthe papers included in Conway 2019), and his other works criticizemany other moral ideas.

To highlight just one example, Nietzsche attacks the value ofcompassion (another central element in Schopenhauer’s moraltheory). Nietzsche tried out many different arguments against pity andcompassion beginning already inHuman, All-too-human (1878)and continuing to the end of his productive life—for discussion,see Reginster (2000), Janaway (2017a, 2017b), and Nussbaum (1994). Attimes, he emphasized thead hominem suggestion thatcompassion is less altruistic than it seems, either based on the LaRochefoucauld-inspired reasoning that apparently altruistic compassionis in reality just cloaked egoism (D 133), or based on thepsychologically subtle point that the satisfactions of pityessentially involve a feeling of “small superiority” overothers (GM III, 18)—(note that Rousseau relies on asimilar observation as part of hisdefense of pity’srole in moral development; Rousseau [1762] 1979: 221). ButNietzsche’s deeper complaints begin from the observation that amorality of compassion centers attention on the problem of suffering,presupposing that suffering is bad as such. Nietzsche resists thehedonistic doctrine that pleasure and pain lie at the basis of allvalue claims, which would be the most natural way to defend such apresupposition. If he is right that there are other values,independent of consequences for pleasures and pains, that fact raisesthe possibility that the ultimate value of any particular incidence ofsuffering could depend on the role it plays in the sufferer’slife overall and how it might contribute to thoseothervalues; in that case, its badness would not follow immediately fromthe bare fact that it is suffering. Nietzsche builds this idea into anargument against the morality of compassion, suggesting that sufferingmay sometimes promote a person’sgrowth, or progresstoward excellence (GS 338; see also Janaway 2017a). From thatpoint of view, the morality of compassion looks both presumptuous andmisguided. It is presumptuous because it concludes from the outsidethat a person’s suffering must be bad, thereby flattening out“what is most personal” (GS 338) in theperson’s life and interfering with her deciding for herself onthe value of her suffering. It is misguided both because it runs therisk of robbing individuals of their opportunity to make somethingpositive (individually meaningful) out of their suffering,and because the global devaluation of suffering as such dismisses inadvance the potentially valuable aspects of our general condition asvulnerable and finite creatures (GS 338; compare Williams1973: 82–100).

This survey hits only a few highlights of Nietzsche’sfar-reaching critique of traditional moral and religious values, whichextends to many other moral ideas (e.g., sin, otherworldlytranscendence, the doctrine of free will, the value of selflessness,anti-sensualist moral outlooks, and more). For him, however, humanbeings remain valuing creatures in the last analysis. It follows thatno critique of traditional values could be practically effectivewithout suggestingreplacement values capable of meeting ourneeds as valuers (seeGS 347; Anderson 2009, esp. at225–7; Richardson 2020 attempts a systematization of thereplacement values). Nietzsche thought it was the job of philosophersto create such values (BGE 211), so readers have long andrightly expected to find an account of value creation in hisworks.

3. Value Creation

Unfortunately, neither Nietzsche’s ideas about the nature ofvalue creation nor his suggestions about what specific values shouldbe “created” have seemed as clear to readers as hisnegative critique of traditional values. (The disparity is oftenmarked in the literature by doubts about whether Nietzsche has a“positive” ethics to offer.) There is something to thisreaction: Nietzsche’s critique has a clear target and isdeveloped at an extended scale, whereas his suggestions aboutalternative values can seem scattered or telegraphic. That said, it isnot as though Nietzsche is the least bit shy about making evaluativelyloaded claims, including “positive” ones. To some extent,disappointment among commentators in search of “positiveviews” arises from our looking for the wrong things—forexample, seeking a systematically organized axiological theory whenNietzsche himself is skeptical of any such project, or expecting any“positive” ethics to accommodate certain “moralintuitions” which Nietzsche is more inclined to challenge thanto save. This section surveys some territory Nietzsche covers underthe heading “value creation”. After mentioning differentoptions 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 challengesphilosophical common sense. It is common, if not altogether standard,to explainvalues by contrasting them against meredesires. Both are positive attitudes toward some object orstate of affairs (“pro-attitudes”), but valuing seems toinvolve an element of objectivity absent in desiring. (Consider: If Ibecome convinced that something I valued is not in fact valuable, thatdiscovery 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 thattheir objects are not properly desirable, or are unattainable; see theentries onvalue theory anddesire.) Nietzsche challenges this basic philosophical conception when hetreats value as “created” rather than discovered in theworld:

We [contemplatives] … are those who really continuallyfashion something that had not been there before: the wholeeternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives,scales, affirmations, and negations. … Whatever hasvalue in our world now does not have value in itself,according to its nature—nature is always value-less—buthas beengiven value at some time, as a present—and itwaswe who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created theworldthat concerns man! (GS 301; see alsoGS 78, 109, 139, 143, 276, 289, 290, 299;Z I, 17,22, II, 20, III, 12;BGE 203, 211, 260, 261, 285;TIIX, 9, 24, 49)

Passages likeGS 301 have an unmistakable subjectivistflavor, tracing value to some source in our own attitudes and/oragency, but it is a difficult question how this subjectivist strand ofNietzsche’s thought is to be reconciled with his ubiquitous (anduncompromising, unqualified) insistence that his own value judgmentsarecorrect and those he opposes are false, or even rest onlies. Some scholars take the value creation passages as evidence thatNietzsche was an anti-realist about value, so that his confidentevaluative judgments should be read as efforts at rhetoricalpersuasion rather than objective claims (Leiter 2015), or (relatedly)they suggest that Nietzsche could fruitfully be read as a skeptic, sothat such passages should be evaluated primarily for their practicaleffect on readers (Berry 2011, 2019; see also Leiter 2014). Suchskeptical readings have been thoughtfully challenged by Huddleston(2014). Others (Hussain 2007) take Nietzsche to be advocating afictionalist posture, according to which values are self-consciouslyinvented contributions to a pretense through which we can satisfy ourneeds as valuing creatures, even though all evaluative claims are(strictly speaking) false. Still others (Richardson 2004; Reginster2006; Anderson 2005, 2009; Silk 2015, 2018) are tempted to supposethat Nietzsche’s talk of “creation” is meant tosuggest one or another form of “constructivism,” accordingto which value claims are “attitude-dependent” in somedefinite respect that requires careful specification, or“subjective realism”—a view according to whichvalues have some basis in subjective attitudes of valuing, butneverthelessalso gain some kind of objective standing in theworld once those attitudes have done their work and“created” the values.

Nietzsche’s meta-ethical stance is treated elsewhere (seeSection 3 of the entry onNietzsche’s moral and political philosophy), but even aside from the meta-ethical status of “created”values, the very idea of “value creation” is challengingto 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 afuller discussion, here are three textual observations. First, while afew passages appear to offer a conception of value creation as somekind of legislative fiat (e.g.,BGE 211), such a view is hardto reconcile with the dominant strand of passages, which presentsvalue creation as a difficult achievement characterized by substantialworldly constraints and significant exposure to luck, rather thansomething that could be done at will. Second, a great many of thepassages (esp.GS 78, 107, 290, 299, 301) connect valuecreation to artistic creation, suggesting that Nietzsche took artisticcreation and aesthetic value as an important paradigm or model for hisaccount of values and value creation more generally. While some (Soll2001) attack this entire idea as confused, other scholars have calledon these passages as support for either fictionalist or subjectiverealist interpretations. In addition, Huddleston (2019) shows thatinvestigations into the creation of artistic and cultural value withreal intersubjective purchase was utterly central to Nietzsche’svery conception of philosophy and its proper ambitions. Progress inthis area is likely to come from careful interrogation ofNietzsche’s conception of artistic creation itself. Finally,Nietzsche’s account of “revaluation” remains anunderstudied source of examples for what he might mean by “valuecreation”. After all, the moral revaluation achieved by the“slave revolt in morality” (seesection 2) is presented as a creation of new values (GM I, 10,etpassim). In addition to showing that not all value creation leadsto results that Nietzsche would endorse, this observation leads tointeresting questions—e.g., Did Nietzsche hold that all valuecreation operates via revaluation (as suggested, perhaps, byGM II, 12–13)? Or is “value creationexnihilo” also supposed to be a possibility? If so, whatdifferentiates the two modes? Can we say anything about which is to bepreferred? etc.

3.2 Some Nietzschean Values

Aside from issues about what it is to create values in the firstplace, many readers find themselves puzzled about what“positive” values Nietzsche means to promote. Oneplausible explanation for readers’ persisting sense of unclarityis that Nietzsche disappoints the expectation that philosophy shouldoffer a reductive (or at least, highly systematized) account of thegood, 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 thelike. Nietzsche praises manydifferent values, and in themain, he does not follow the stereotypically philosophical strategy ofderiving his evaluative judgments from one or a few foundationalprinciples. While the resulting axiological landscape is complex, wecan get a sense of its shape by considering six values that playindisputably important roles in Nietzsche’s sense of whatmatters.

3.2.1 Power and Life

The closest Nietzsche comes to organizing his value claimssystematically is his insistence on the importance of power,especially if this is taken together with related ideas aboutstrength, health, and “life”. A well-known passage appearsnear 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 isgrowing, thatresistance is overcome.

Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue butfitness (Renaissance virtue,virtù, virtue that ismoraline-free). (A 2)

In the literature, claims of this sort are associated with a“will to power doctrine”, commonly viewed as one ofNietzsche’s central ideas (seesection 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 theenhancement of their power—and then further, that this factentails that enhanced power is good for us (or for everything).

In the middle of the twentieth century, many readers (more or lesscasually) received this as a deeply unattractive blunt claim that“Might makes right”, which they associated with disturbingsocial 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 torecuperate Nietzsche’s thought from this unsavory line ofinterpretations, largely by insisting on how often the forms of poweremphasized by Nietzsche involveinternally directedself-control and the development of cultural excellence, rather thandomination of others. While this account rightly highlighted internalcomplexity and nuance that were flattened out by the oversimplified“might makes right” reception dominant at mid-century,Kaufmann’s approach threatens to sanitize aspects ofNietzsche’s view that were intended to pose a stark challenge toour moral intuitions. More sophisticated versions of this broadapproach—like Richardson’s (1996) development ofNietzsche’s distinction betweentyranny (in which adominant drive wholly effaces what it dominates) andmastery(in which a more dominant drive allows some expression to the lessdominant one but controls and redirects that expression to its ownlarger ends)—are rightly inclined to concede the troublingaspects of Nietzsche’s view (e.g., that the doctrinecountenances tyranny as well as mastery, even if it privileges thelatter).

Together with such concessions, recent work has made importantprogress in understanding the internal complexities ofNietzsche’s position valorizing power. One of the most importantand influential strands is Bernard Reginster’s (2006:103–47; see also 2018a) emphasis on Nietzsche’s conceptionof power asovercoming 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 powerdirectly to the person’s capacity to reshape her environment inthe service of her ends, and it thereby provides a more intuitivesense of what, exactly, is supposed to be good about power. Inaddition, the interpretation locates Nietzsche’s view directlyathwart Schopenhauer’s efforts to motivate pessimism by appealto a ubiquitous “will to life”. By replacingSchopenhauer’s will to life with his will to power (understoodas a drive to overcome resistance, whichwills theworld’sresistance along with its overcoming;KSA 9[151] 12: 424), Nietzsche can argue that our basiccondition as desiring, striving creatures can lead to a mode ofexistence worthy of endorsement, rather than to inevitable frustration(as Schopenhauer had it). The same conception has been developed byPaul Katsafanas (2013), who argues that,qua agents, we areineluctably committed to valuing power because a Reginster-style willto power is a constitutive condition on acting at all. (His accountthereby contributes to the constitutivist strategy in ethics pioneeredby Christine Korsgaard (1996) and David Velleman (2000, 2006).). Morerecently, Katsafanas (2015, 2019) has extended his view in a way thatplaces 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 hecalled a “Millian” version of this idea, according towhich power is valuable simply because (per the allegedNietzschean doctrine) power is in fact our fundamental aim. (This issupposed to be analogous to Mill’s strategy for deriving theprinciple of utility, based on the thought that we can showsomething—viz., pleasure—to be desirable by showing it tobe desired.) Leiter is surely right to raise worries about the Millianreconstruction. Nietzsche apparently takes us to be committed to awidediversity of first order aims, which raisesprimafacie doubts about the idea that for himall willingreally takes power as its first-order aim (as the Millian argumentwould require). Moreover, Nietzsche’s sensitivity to pessimismas a possible evaluative outlook creates problems for the soundness ofthe argument form itself—e.g., even supposing we must aim atpower, 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 awayfrom the pursuit of power in any narrow sense to the broader (andquite Nietzschean) idea that growth, strength, power-expansion, andthe like are all manifestations oflife, then at least someof Leiter’s philosophical and most of his textual objections canbe avoided. On the resulting picture, Nietzsche’s position readsas a form of ethical naturalism, arguing that expression of thesefundamental life tendencies is good for us precisely because theyare our basic tendencies and we areinescapably intheir grip (Hussain 2011: 159,et passim). It remains unclearthat this view can avoid the objection rooted in the possibility ofpessimism (i.e., that the value of life/power cannot follow from itsinescapability for us, since that might be a state to which we arecondemned). Given his engagement with Schopenhauer, Nietzscheshould have been sensitive to the worry. But Hussain (2011) shows thata substantial strand of Nietzschean texts do fit the picture, and thatmany other nineteenth-century philosophers who share Nietzsche’santi-supernaturalist commitments were attracted by such naturalistarguments from inescapability.

3.2.2 Affirmation

A second value commitment prominent in Nietzsche’s work (andarguably related to his positive assessments of life and power) is thevalue of affirmation. According to Reginster (2006: 2),“Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his definingphilosophical achievement”. This theme enters forcefully in BookIV ofThe Gay Science, which opens with an expression ofdedication to “amor fati”:

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

After that opening move, Nietzsche develops the idea in several moresections:GS 277 expresses Nietzsche’s worries about aseductive doctrine of “personal providence”, according towhich “everything that happens to us turns out for thebest”, but such an idea could be tempting at all only because ofa far-reaching (and, Nietzsche thinks, admirable) affirmation of life,rooted in a talent for self-interpretation that creatively identifiessome description under which things really do have “a profoundsignificance and use precisely forus”; a bit later,GS 304 (entitled, “By doing we forego”)recommends against any ethic demanding that werenounce thisor that or the other, and in favor of one that demands that one

do something and do it again, from morning till evening… and tothink of nothing except doing thiswell, as well asI alone can do it;

and then inGS 321, Nietzsche suggests that we give up onreproaching others directly and just focus on

see[ing] to it that our own influence onall that is yet tocome balances and outweighs his…. Let our brilliance makethem look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on theiraccount, like all those who punish…. Let us look away.

Famously, the book concludes with Nietzsche’s first introductionof his thought of eternal recurrence, which is supposed to place“The greatest weight” on each event through itssuggestion that our life is good only if, upon imagining its return inevery detail, we can affirm it as it is (GS 341). After thatpenultimate section, Nietzsche quotes the first section ofThusSpoke Zarathustra, which returns repeatedly to the same theme ofaffirmation (see, e.g.,Z I, 1, 5, 17, 21, 22; II, 7, 12, 20;III, 3, 7, 13, 16;et passim;BGE 56;TIVIII, 6 and IX, 49).

Some have found Nietzsche’s valorization of affirmation ironic,given the polemical zeal of his negative attacks on Christianity andtraditional morality, but in fact, the value of affirmation meshesnicely with some key aspects of Nietzsche’s critique. Thatcritique focuses in large measure on aspects of morality that turn theagent against herself—or more broadly, on the side ofChristianity that condemns earthly existence, demanding that we repentour earthly life as the price of admission to a different, superiorplane of being. What is wrong with these views, according toNietzsche, 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, showsthat the main philosophical problem it is meant to address is thecrisis of “nihilism”—provoked by a process in which“the highest values de-value themselves” (KSA9[35] 12: 350). Such “de-valuation” may rest either onsome corrosive argument undermining the force of all evaluative claimswhatsoever, or instead, on a judgment that the highest values cannotbe realized, so that, by reference to their standard, the world as itis ought not to exist. The affirmation of life can be framed as therejection of nihilism, so understood. For Nietzsche, that involves atwo-sided project: it shouldboth undermine values byreference to which the world could not honestly be affirmed, whilealso articulating the values exemplified by life and the world thatmake them affirmable. (Readers interested in these issues aboutNietzschean affirmation and its compatibility (or not) withNietzschean critique should also consult Richardson [2020:353–97] and Huddleston [2022], which reaches a more diffidentconclusion than this entry.)

3.2.3 Truthfulness/Honesty

If we are to affirm our life and the world, however, we had better behonest about what they are really like. Endorsing things under someillusory Panglossian description is not affirmation, butself-delusion. In that sense, Nietzsche’s value oflife-affirmation simultaneously commits him to honesty. And arguably,in fact, no other virtue gets more, or more unqualified, praise in theNietzschean corpus: honesty is “our virtue, the lastone left to us” (BGE 227), and truthfulness is themeasure of strength (BGE 39), or even of value as such:

How much truth does a spiritendure, how much truth does itdare? More and more that became for me the real measure ofvalue. (EH Pref., 3)

Four strands in Nietzsche’s valuation of honesty deservemention. Some texts present truthfulness as a kind of personalcommitment—one tied to particular projects and a way of life inwhich Nietzsche happens to have invested. For example, inGS2 Nietzsche expresses bewilderment in the face of people who do notvalue honesty:

I do not want to believe it although it is palpable:the greatmajority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. … Imean:the great majority of people does not consider itcontemptible to believe this or that and live accordingly, withouthaving first given themselves an account of the final and most certainreasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about suchreasons afterward.

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

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

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

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

A second strand of texts emphasizes connections between truthfulnessandcourage, thereby valorizing honesty as the manifestationof an overall virtuous character marked by resoluteness,determination, and spiritual strength.BGE 39 belongs here,as does the passage from theEH Preface quoted above. Thesame evaluative commitment underwrites Nietzsche’s widespreadattacks against what he calls “the Biblical ‘proof ofstrength’”—a form of argument that purports tojustify belief in some claim because that belief “makes oneblessed” or carries some emotional or practical benefit(GS 347;GM III, 24;TI VI, 5;A50–51;KSA 15[46] 13: 441). Such wishful thinking isnot onlycognitively corrupt, for Nietzsche, but a troublingmanifestation of irresolution and cowardice.

Given Nietzsche’s personal commitment to truthfulness and hisargument that its absence amounts to cowardice, it is no surprise tofind him, third, attacking the alleged mendaciousness and intellectualcorruption of traditional religio-moral consciousness as one of thevery worst things about it. The dishonesty of the moralistic“slave revolt” is a constant theme (GM I, 14; seealso Janaway 2007: 102–4, andGM 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 ofNietzsche’s most extreme and indignant rhetoric:

Our educated people of today, our “good people”, do nottell lies—that is true; but that isnot to theircredit. … [That] would demand of them what onemay notdemand, that they should know how to distinguish true and false inthemselves. All they are capable of is adishonest lie;whoever today accounts himself a “good man” is utterlyincapable of confronting any matter except withdishonestmendaciousness—a mendaciousness that is abysmal butinnocent, truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous. These “goodmen”—they are one and all moralized to the very depths andruined and botched to all eternity as far as honesty isconcerned… (GM III, 19)

Finally, it is worth noting that even when Nietzsche raises doubtsabout this commitment to truthfulness, his very questions are clearlymotivated by the central importance of that value. TheGenealogy’s Third Treatise famously closes with theworry that the unconditional will to truth is a form of asceticism(GM III, 24). As Nietzsche observes, relentless truthfulnesscan be corrosive for cherished values that make our lives seem worthliving: one cross-examination of the norm of “truth at anyprice” concludes with the exclamation,

“At any price”: how well we understand these words once wehave offered and slaughtered one faith after another on this altar!(GS 344)

But even in the face of such worries, Nietzsche does not simply giveup 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 truthfulnesscan “endure incorporation” and be made compatible withlife (GS 110). Again and again, in fact, Nietzsche presentsthis question, “the question of thevalue oftruth” (BGE 1), ashis distinctive question,the one centrally driving his philosophy (BGE 1;GMIII, 24, 27,GS 110, 324, 344, 346; see alsoBGE204–13, 227–30). It can carry such central significanceonly because, in Nietzsche’s eyes, the honest devotion to truthwasboth so indispensably valuableand (potentially)dangerous.

3.2.4 Art and Artistry

But if truthfulness is a core value for Nietzsche, he is neverthelessfamous for insisting that wealso need illusion to live well.From the beginning of his career to the end, he insisted on theirreplaceable value ofart precisely because of its power toensconce us in illusion. The idea was a major theme ofThe Birthof Tragedy (BT 1, 3, 4, 7, 15, 25), and althoughNietzsche later came to see the point somewhat differently, he nevergave it up (seeGS 107, alsoTI IX, 7–9). In aslogan, “We possessart lest we perish of thetruth” (KSA 16[40] 13: 500).

Art and artistry carry value for Nietzsche both as a straightforwardfirst-order matter, and also as a source of higher-order lessons abouthow to create value more generally. At the higher-order level, heinsists that we should learn from artists “how to make thingsbeautiful, attractive, desirable for ourselves when they arenot” (GS 299; see alsoGS 78). The suggestionis that artistic methods (“Moving away from things until thereis a good deal that one no longer sees…; seeing things…as cut out and framed…; looking at them in the light of thesunset”, and so on;GS 299) provide a kind of formalmodel (Landy 2012: 4, 8–19,et passim) for thedevelopment of analogous techniques that could be deployed beyond art,in life itself—“For with them this subtle power usuallycomes to an end when art ends and life begins, but we want to be thepoets of our life” (GS 299). But Nietzsche is just asinvested in the first-order evaluative point that what makes a lifeadmirable includes its aesthetic features. Famously (or notoriously),Nietzsche argues that to “attain satisfaction withhimself” one should “‘give style’ toone’s character” (GS 290). Here, it is the factthat the person’s character (or her life) has certain aestheticproperties—that it manifests an “artistic plan”,that it has beauty or sublimity, that its moments of ugliness havebeen gradually removed or reworked through the formation of a secondnature, 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 artisticstructure onto one’s individual life in considerable detail, andmany other scholars have built on his view or explored related aspectsof 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’spresentations, the value of art and artistry often seem to stand inopposition to the value of truthfulness—we are supposedto need art tosave us from the truth (see Ridley 2007a,Landy 2002). Significantly, the opposition here is not just the oneemphasized inThe Birth of Tragedy—that the substantivetruth about the world might be disturbing enough to demand someartistic salve that helps us cope. Nietzsche raises a more specificworry about the deleterious effects of the virtue ofhonesty—about thewill to truth, rather thanwhatis true—and artistry is wheeled in to alleviate them, aswell:

If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of theuntrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousnessthat now comes to us through science—the realization thatdelusion and error are conditions of human knowledge andsensation—would be utterly unbearable.Honesty wouldlead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce againstour honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as thegood will to appearance. (GS 107)

Nietzsche’s formulation (“that delusion and error areconditions of human knowledge and sensation”, and that thisinsight “comes to us through science”) suggests that thespecific error theory he has in mind is rooted in the Kantian andSchopenhauerian theories of cognition, perhaps as developed in morenaturalistic, psychologically-inflected form by later neo-Kantian andpositivist thinkers. Those views would entail that the basicconditions of cognition prevent our ever knowing things as they reallyare, independently of us (see Anderson 2002, 2005; Hussain 2004; andthe entry onFriedrich Albert Lange). But while those are the immediate allusions, Nietzsche also endorsesmore general ideas with similar implications—e.g., skepticismagainst any thought (be it of the theological/metaphysical, orHegelian, or more modest, thirdCritique oriented sort) thatthe world is purposively suited to fit the needs of our cognitivefaculties.

What is more important, however, is thestructure of thethought inGS 107. Nietzsche’s idea is thattruthfulness itself, rigorously pursued through thediscipline of science, has forced us to the conclusion that ourcognitive powers lead us into “delusion and error”, sothat those very demands of truthfulness cannot be satisfied. This isnot just one more case of the world’s being inhospitable to ourvalues, but a special instance where the cultivation of a virtue(honesty)itself leads to the unwelcome realization that wecan never live up to its genuine demands. In the face of such results,Nietzsche suggests, the only way to escape pessimism is therecognition of another, quite different value, suitable to serve as a“counterforce” against our honesty by showing that therecan be something valuable about remaining content with appearances.The cultural value of art inGS 107 thus rests on theopposition to honesty offered by the “good will toappearance”. So it seems that the values Nietzsche endorsesconflict with one another, and that very fact is crucial tothe 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 deceptivein any way, and therefore that the conflict between the values ofhonesty 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 valueNietzsche 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 ofthought continues to receive strong emphasis in recentinterpretations—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 tosupport 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 individualityis, however, it is equally obvious that he resists any thought thatevery single human person has value on the strength of individualityalone—indeed, he is willing to state that point in especiallyblunt terms: “Self-interest is worth as much as the person whohas it: it can be worth a great deal, and it can be unworthy andcontemptible” (TI IX, 33). Scholars have advocatedquite different explanations of what makes a person’sindividuality valuable in the privileged cases. Some hold thatvaluable individuals must have certain given, natural characteristicsthat admit no (or not much) further explanation, and that thesefeatures make them “higher men” manifesting genuine value,whereas others have no such value—Leiter (2015) offers astrongly developed naturalistic version of this approach. Otherscholars take the “true” or “higher self” tobe 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). Stillothers attempt to develop a position that combines aspects of bothviews (Schacht 1983: 330–38), or hold that Nietzsche’sposition on the “overman” or “higher man” issimply riven by internal contradiction (Müller-Lauter [1971]1999: 72–83).

A different approach takes its lead from Nietzsche’s connectionbetween individuality and freedom of spirit (GS 347;BGE 41–44). As Reginster (2003) shows, what opposesNietzschean freedom of spirit isfanaticism, understood as avehement commitment to some faith or value-set given from without,which is motivated by aneed to believe in something becauseone lacks the self-determination to think for oneself (GS347). This appeal toself-determination suggests that wemight explain the value of individuality by appeal to an underlyingvalue ofautonomy: valuable individuals would be the ones who“give themselves laws, who create themselves” (GS335), 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 resourcesof this line of thought in Nietzsche; Anderson (2013) surveys theliterature, and notable contributions include Ridley (2007b, 2018),Pippin (2009, 2010), Reginster (2012), Katsafanas (2011b, 2012, 2014,2016), Rutherford (2011, 2018), Anderson (2021), and especially thepapers in Gemes and May (2009).

3.2.6 Pluralism

We have seen that Nietzsche promotes a number of different values. Insome cases, these values reinforce one another. For example,Nietzsche’s emphasis on affirming life could be taken to enhanceor to confirm the value of life itself,qua successfulexpression of will to power, or conversely, one might trace the valueof affirmation to its acknowledgment of our inescapable condition asliving, power-seeking creatures. Similarly, we saw that both thevirtue of honesty and the value of art and artistry play essentialroles in support of the person’s ability to affirm life(Anderson 2005: 203–11). Nietzsche appeals to the metaphor of atree’s growth to capture this sort of organic interconnectionamong his commitments:

For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to besingle in anything: we may neither err nor hit upon the truthsingly. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruitour thoughts grow out of us, our values, our yes’s andno’s and if’s and whether’s—the whole lotrelated and connected among themselves, witnesses to one will, onehealth, one earthly kingdom, one sun. (GM Pref., 2)

However interrelated Nietzsche’s values, though, they appear toremain irreducible to a single common value or principle that explainsthem all. For example, the account of honesty and artistry explored insections3.2.3 and3.2.4 revealed that the support they provide to the value of affirmationdepends on theiropposition to one another, as“counterforces” (GS 107): if this is right, thenNietzsche’s various values may interact within an organic whole,but some of the interactions are oppositional, so they cannot allarise from a monistic philosophical system.

That very fact, however, fits nicely with another of Nietzsche’score values, the value of pluralism itself. For Nietzsche, aperson’s ability to deploy and be responsive to a multiplicityof values, of virtues, of outlooks and “perspectives”, isa positive good in its own right. Nietzsche’s defense of thisidea is perhaps clearest in the epistemic case, where he insists onthe value of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on any question:the thinker must “know how to make precisely thedifference in perspectives and affective interpretationsuseful for knowledge”, because

There isonly a perspectival seeing,only aperspectival “knowing”; andthe more affects weallow to speak about a matter,the more eyes, different eyes,we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that muchmore complete will our “concept” of this matter, our“objectivity”, be. (GM III, 12)

As the passage makes clear, however, Nietzschean perspectives arethemselves rooted in affects (and the valuations to which affects giverise), and in his mind, the ability to deploy a variety ofperspectives is just as important for our practical and evaluativelives as it is for cognitive life. InGM I, 16, for example,he wraps up a discussion of the sharp opposition between the good/badand good/evil value schemes with a surprising acknowledgment that thebest of his contemporaries will need both, despite theiropposition:

today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the “highernature”, of the more spiritual nature, than to beconflicted in this sense and to be still a real battleground for theseopposites. (GM I, 16; see alsoBGE 212;TIV, 3; andEH I)

While efforts to provide a systematic reconstruction unifyingNietzsche’s philosophy around one fundamental thought or basicvalue retain their attraction for many commentators, it is fair to saythat all such efforts have remained controversial. Meanwhile,Nietzschean pluralism has been a major theme of several landmarkNietzsche studies (e.g., Nehamas 1985, Schacht 1983, Poellner 1995,Richardson 2004), and some of the most sophisticated recent treatmentsof his value theory have returned evaluative pluralism to the centerof attention (Railton 2012; Huddleston 2017). Huddleston’s viewis particularly noteworthy, since he argues that Nietzsche’sconceptions of strength and health—which, as we saw, areconnected to the allegedly foundational value of power—arethemselves disunified “cluster concepts” involving aninternal plurality of separate and irreducible commitments. In fact,Nietzsche’s commitment to pluralism helps us understand how hisdiverse positive values fit together. From his pluralistic point ofview, it is a selling point, not a drawback, that he has many othervalue commitments, and that they interact in complex patterns tosupport, inform, and sometimes to oppose or limit one another, ratherthan being parts of a single, hierarchically ordered, systematicaxiology.

4. The Self and Self-fashioning

A probing investigation into the psyche was a leading preoccupationfor Nietzsche throughout his career, and this aspect of his thoughthas rightly been accorded central importance across a long stretch ofthe reception, all the way from Kaufmann (1950) to recent work byPippin (2010), Katsafanas (2016), Leiter (2019), Riccardi (2021), andothers. Some of Nietzsche’s own programmatic reflectionshighlight the centrality of this enterprise: perhaps most famously, hecloses an extended treatment of the shortcomings of previousphilosophy (in Part I ofBeyond Good and Evil) with ademand

that psychology be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, forwhose service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychologyis once again on the path to the fundamental problems. (BGE23)

Insection 2, we saw that Nietzsche’s critique of morality rests crucially onpsychological analyses that purport to expose the self-destructiveeffects of moral attitudes like guilt and ascetic self-denial, as wellas the corrosive mismatch between the official claims of altruisticmorality and its underlying motivation inressentiment. Onthe positive side, Nietzsche is equally keen to detail thepsychological conditions he thinks would be healthier for bothindividuals 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 andto his projects as a cultural critic. Aside from its instrumentalsupport for these other projects, Nietzsche pursues psychologicalinquiry for its own sake, and also for the sake of the self-knowledgethat it intrinsically involves (GM III, 9;GS Pref.,3 and 324; but cf.GM Pref., 1). Still, despite widespreadappreciation of Nietzsche’s psychological acumen—anddespite the centrality of psychology to his philosophical method, corequestions, and evaluative aims—even the most basic outlines ofhis substantive psychology remain a matter of controversy. Debatebegins with the object of psychology itself, the psyche, self, orsoul.

A significant body of Nietzschean texts express extreme skepticismthat there is any such thing as a “self”, or“soul”, as well as doubts about the traditional facultiesof the soul and the basic capacities they were supposed to exercise(thinking, willing, feeling). This passage from the notebooks istypical—“To indulge the fable of ‘unity,’‘soul,’ ‘person,’ this we have forbidden: withsuch hypotheses one only covers up the problem” (KSA37[4] 11: 577)—and there are many, probably hundreds, like it(seeD 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 onlyto the self, but even to some of the traditional faculties (e.g., thewill) of which he is most skeptical elsewhere: for example, the“sovereign individual” ofGM II, 1–3 isdistinctive for developing a “memory of the will” thatunderwrites his capacity to keep promises and “vouch for himselfas future” (GM I, 13); or again, Nietzsche’sfavored strategy of deploying a multiplicity of perspectives inknowledge (seesection 3.2.6) assumes the existence of a cognitive self that stands back fromparticular drives and affects, and so has “the ability tocontrol one’s Pro and Con and dispose of them” insupport of the larger cognitive project (GM III, 12, see alsoBGE 284).

This apparent conflict in the texts has encouraged competinginterpretations, with commentators emphasizing the strands inNietzsche 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 aboutthe will and the pure soul to reject any Kantian-style source ofagency that can stand apart from and direct the person’s basicdrives or fundamental nature. Somewhat similarly, readers attracted bya Cartesian conception of consciousness as the essence of the mental,but repelled by Cartesian dualism, highlight Nietzsche’semphasis on the importance of the body (GM III, 16;Z I, 4) to suggest that his apparent claims about psychologyshould be heard instead as a kind ofphysiology of drivesthat rejectsmental psychology altogether (for differentversions, see Poellner 1995: 216–29, 174; Haar [1993] 1996: 90,et passim). Riccardi (2018, 2021) argues for a more nuancedview, in which the conscious self runs in parallel to the morefundamental bodily self. Attacking unity rather than mentality, agroup of readers interested in Nietzsche’s agonistic conceptionof politics tends to emphasize his similarly agonistic, internallycontested, conception of the self (Hatab 1995, 2018; Acampora 2013).In a diametrically opposed direction from those first three, SebastianGardner (2009) insists that, while Nietzsche was sometimes tempted byskepticism about a self which can stand back from the solicitations ofinclination and control them, his own doctrines about the creation ofvalue and self-overcoming in fact commit him to something like aKantian transcendental ego, despite his protestations to thecontrary.

Nietzsche’s actual psychological explanations rely heavily onappeals to sub-personal psychological attitudes. As Janaway (2009: 52)observes, a great many different kinds of attitude enter theseaccounts (including not only the standard beliefs and desires ofcurrent-day moral psychology, but also “wills”, feelings,sensations, moods, imaginings, memories, valuations, convictions, andmore), but arguably the core attitudes that do the most work for himaredrives andaffects. These attitude types havebeen intensively studied in recent work (see esp. Richardson 1996,2020; Katsafanas 2011b, 2013, 2016; Alfano 2019; Leiter 2019; andRiccardi 2021; see also Anderson 2012a, Clark and Dudrick 2015, Creasy2020). While much remains controversial, it is helpful to think ofdrives as dispositions toward general patterns of activity; they aimat activity of the relevant sort (e.g., an eating drive, a drive forpower), and they also represent some more specific object or occasionof the activity in a particular case (e.g., this ice cream, orovercoming a particular problem in the course of writing a paper).Affects are emotional states that combine a receptive and feltresponsiveness to the world with a tendency toward a distinctivepattern of reaction—states like love, hate, anger, fear, joy,etc. Typically, the sub-personal attitudes postulated inNietzsche’s psychological explanations represent the world inone way or another. Since he endorses Leibniz’s thought thatrepresentation, not consciousness, is the decisive mark of the mental(GS 354; see Simmons 2001, for discussion), it is reasonableto treat these attitudes as distinctively psychological, whether theyare conscious or not.

But what about a personal-level self to serve as the owner of suchattitudes? It seems that Nietzsche’s postulated drives andaffects could not coherently be counted as psychological (andsub-personal) without such a self, and yet, the skepticalpassages canvassed above seem to rule out any such thing. This remainsa controversial problem, but it is clear at least thatNietzsche’s own proposal was to develop a radically reformedconception of the psyche, rather than to reject the self, or soul,altogether (see Riccardi 2021).BGE 12 provides someprovocative ideas about what such a reformed conception might involve:there, Nietzsche insists that we should “give the finishingstroke” to what he calls “thesoulatomism”, which he goes on to explain as

the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible,eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as anatomon:…Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “thesoul” at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the mostancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to clumsynaturalists who can hardly touch on “the soul” withoutimmediately losing it. But the way is now open for new versions andrefinements of the soul hypothesis, [including] “mortalsoul”, “soul as subjective multiplicity”, and“soul as social structure of the drives andaffects”… (BGE 12)

Here Nietzsche alludes to traditional rational psychology, and itsbasic inference from the pureunity of consciousness to thesimplicity of the soul, and thence to its indivisibility andimmortality. As he notes, these moves treat the soul as an indivisible(hence incorruptible) atom, or monad. Nietzsche’s alternativeproposal takes its shape from the rejection of such atomism—thesoul as he understands it will be internally complex, rather thansimple, and therefore subject to disintegration. That idea informsNietzsche’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 thismultiplicity. Nietzsche thus construes the psyche, or self, as anemergent structure arising from such sub-personal constituents (whenthose stand in the appropriate relations), thereby reversing thetraditional account, which treats sub-personal attitudes as meremodes, or ways of being, proper to a preexisting unitary mentalsubstance—(see Anderson 2012a for an attempt to flesh out thepicture; see also Gemes 2001; Hales and Welshon 2000: 157–82;Riccardi 2021; Anderson 2021). But however vulnerable, mortal, andsubject to inner division the soul is supposed to be on the reformedconception, it nevertheless remains (as Nietzsche’s rejection ofreductive naturalism makes clear) a genuinelypsychologicalentity over and above its constituent drives and affects. Moreover,since the drives and affects that constitute it are individuatedlargely in terms of what (and how) theyrepresent, thepsychology needed to investigate the soul must be an interpretive, andnot merely and strictly a causal, form of inquiry (see Pippin 2010;Ridley 2018).

In these respects, Nietzsche’s psychology treats the self assomething that has to beachieved or constructed, rather thanas something fundamentallygiven as part of the basicmetaphysical equipment with which a person enters the world. This ideaof the self as achieved rather than given was noticed already bySchacht (1983), and was elevated into a central theme inNehamas’s (1985) influential Nietzsche interpretation. On thatreading, the project of individual self-fashioning, or self-creation,is located at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical agenda (seeesp.GS 290, 335;TI IX, 49). HighlightingNietzsche’s commitments to the values of artistry andindividuality, the interpretation claims that the main goal ofNietzsche’s new philosophers would be to construct novel,interesting, and culturally resonant individual lives, whose overallshape they could affirm (despite whatever setbacks they involve) onthe strength of the (broadly) aesthetic value they instantiate. InNehamas’s version, this agenda was closely bound up withNietzsche’s project as a writer; he is supposed to have createdhimself, in the relevant sense, as an authorial persona throughwriting such distinctive books (Nehamas 1985; see esp. 233–4).While this suggestion, and even the very idea of self-creation, hasremained controversial both textually and philosophically (see, e.g.,Pippin 2010: 109–11), it has led to much further work—somedirectly influenced by Nehamas (1985), some developed in partial orentire opposition to it—yielding real insights about the natureof Nietzschean selfhood, and the relations among the key ideas ofself-creation, the creation of value, individuality, and Nietzscheanfreedom (see, e.g., Gerhardt 1992; Nehamas 1998: 128–56; Leiter1998; May 1999: 107–26; Anderson and Landy 2001; Reginster 2003;Anderson 2005, 2009, 2012a. 2021; Ridley 2007a, 2007b, 2018; Gardner2009; Gemes 2009a, 2019; Pippin 2009, 2010; Poellner 2009; Richardson2009, 2020; Acampora 2013; Katsafanas 2016: 164–96,220–56; Anderson and Cristy 2017; Rutherford 2018).

One especially sustained alternative to Nehamas (1985) is developed byElijah Millgram (2007, 2020, 2023). He argues that, so far from using hisauthorship to fashion a unified character for himself, Nietzsche was(on the contrary) adisunified, or even disintegrating,agent. On Millgram’s construal, Nietzsche’s books developa strategy for constructing a meaningful life that is suitable forpeople of that sort. This represents an interesting kind of limit casefor the project of self-fashioning, which mounts a sustained critiqueagainst the widespread assumption in modern philosophy that unity ofagency is always desirable or valuable.

5. Difficulties of Nietzsche’s Philosophical Writing

For all the novelty of Nietzsche’s doctrines and the apparentextremity of his criticisms of traditional morality, religion, andphilosophy, perhaps nothing about his work seems more out of step withthe ordinary procedures of philosophy than the way he writes. Thepoint is sufficiently obvious that it has by now become an entirelyconventional trope to begin commentaries with remarks about theunconventional character of Nietzsche’s style. Despitethe attention it gets, however, we continue to lack anything like acomprehensive account of Nietzsche’s strategies as a writer andrhetorician. Most of us (this entry included) are defeated by thebewildering richness of the subject matter and content ourselves witha few observations of special relevance to our other purposes. PerhapsAlexander Nehamas (1985: 13–41) comes closest to meeting theexplanatory challenge by highlighting the key underlying fact thatdefeats our interpretive efforts—the seemingly endless varietyof stylistic effects that Nietzsche deploys. In doing so, he followsthe lead of Nietzsche’s own retrospective assessment fromEcce Homo: “I have many stylisticpossibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has everbeen at the disposal of one man” (EH III, 4). Thisentry will focus on a few points useful for readers making their earlyapproaches to Nietzsche’s texts.

Nietzsche’s most obvious departure from conventionalphilosophical writing is the basic plan and construction of his books.Most philosophers write treatises or scholarly articles, governed by acarefully articulated thesis for which they present a sustainedargument. Nietzsche’s books are nothing like that. Many aredivided into short, numbered sections, which only sometimes haveobvious connections to nearby sections. While the sections within apart are often thematically related (see, e.g.,GS Book II orBGE Parts I, V, VI), even then they do not typically fittogether into a single overall argument. Nietzsche himself notes thebriskness with which he treats his concerns, insisting that “Iapproach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quicklyout again” (GS 381). To the natural complaint that suchtelegraphic treatment courts misunderstanding, he replies that

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishesjust as surelynot to be understood. … [Some authors]did not wish to be understood by “just anybody”.(GS 381)

Some of Nietzsche’s books (notablyThe Birth ofTragedy, theGenealogy, and theAntichrist)offer greater continuity of argumentation, but even there, he willoften take advantage of section breaks to drop one thread of reasoningand move on to apparently unrelated points, leaving the reader topiece together how the various aspects of his case are supposed to fittogether (GM II is a notoriously challenging case in point;see Reginster 2018b, 2021).Thus Spoke Zarathustra is unifiedby following the career of a central character, but the unity is looseand picaresque-like—a sequence of episodes which arrives at asomewhat equivocal (or at a minimum, at acontroversial)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 thedistinguished lineage of that form in German philosophy, which goesback at least to Georg Lichtenberg’sWaste 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 itsessentially pedagogical origins (providing compressed, memorable formfor some principle or observation) into a sustained, exploratory modeof reasoning with oneself. Schopenhauer was a particular admirer, andhis pursuit of the form (especially inParerga andParalipomena) clearly influenced Nietzsche’s use of thetechnique to frame his psychological observations—(the Frenchmoralistes were also an important influence; see Pippin2010).

Some of Nietzsche’s efforts consist in straightforwardpsychological analysis, like this—“Egoism is the law ofperspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large andweighty, and as one moves further away size and weight decrease”(GS 162)—while others encapsulate a point Nietzsche hasbeen developing through the section (see, e.g., “We are alwaysonly 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 isthen controverted or deepened by a thought-provoking reversal in thesecond part. Occasionally, these aphorisms are even set up asmini-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 onthe type of cynicism typical inmoralistes like LaRochefoucauld, but however much he learned from the French, Nietzschebrought larger ambitions to the form; he is equally willing to leavecynicism behind and deploy the twist form simply to provoke activereflection in the reader, as he does here: “Every habit lendsour hand more wit but makes our wit less handy” (GS247). Kaufmann ([1950] 1974: 72–95) famously suggested thatNietzsche coined his aphorisms in the service of an“experimentalist” mode of philosophizing, and there issomething to the idea. But the reader should take care, for not everyNietzschean aphorism is an experiment, and not every short section isan aphorism. Indeed, many multi-sentence sectionsbuild up toan aphorism, which enters only as a proper part included within thesection, perhaps serving as its culmination or a kind of summativeconclusion (rather than an experiment).

A particularly important case in point is the “aphorism placedbefore this [Third] treatise” of theGenealogy, whichNietzsche’s Preface (GM Pref., 8) offers to the readeras an especially good example of the densely summative power of theform—the entire Third Treatise is supposed to be just aninterpretation of that aphorism. Maudemarie Clark (1997), John Wilcox(1997), and Christopher Janaway (1997) showed convincingly that theaphorism in question appears in section 1 of the Third Treatise, andis not the Treatise’s epigram. But the first section itself isnot simply one long aphorism. Instead, the aphorism that requires somuch interpretation is the compressed, high-impact arrival point ofGM III, 1; the section begins by noting a series of differentthings that the ascetic ideal has meant, listed one after another andserving as a kind of outline for the Treatise, before culminating inthe taut aphorism:

That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, isan expression of the basic fact of the human will, itshorrorvacui:it needs a goal,—and it would rather willnothingness thannot will. (GM III, 1)

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

Nietzsche’s proclivity for aphorisms is responsible for some ofthe difficulty of his writing; these formulations stand out from theirbackground context, making it harder to integrate Nietzsche’sdiscourse from one section to the next. But the aphoristic form isonly one challenge among many. As has been widely noted (by everyreader, I suppose, but see Blondel [1971] 1977; Derrida 1978; de Man1979; Kofman [1983] 1993; Nehamas 1985; Higgins 1987, 2000; Thomas1999), Nietzsche’s writing is full of figures of speech andliterary tropes, and decoding these modes of indirection demandsactive engagement and subtlety from the reader. Indeed, some ofNietzsche’s most favored and widespread figures (e.g.,hyperbole, litotes, irony) involve purposely saying something more, orless, or other than one means, and so forcing the reader to adjust.What is more, Nietzsche makes heavy use of allusions to bothcontemporary and historical writing, and without that context one isvery likely to miss his meaning—BGE 11–15 offersa 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 willgo on to qualify or reject (BGE 2 is a clear example), so itcan be a steep challenge just to keep track of the various voices inaction within the text.

Nehamas (1988: 46–51) offers perhaps the best description of thecomplexities of the resulting reading experience: our attention isfixated by certain brilliant, striking passages, or even wholesections, but because their connections to nearby sections are notspecified, and because the text seems to switch from one voice toanother, the reader simply moves on, taking each new section on itsown terms; in short order, one forgets the details, the points, thecautions, or even the subject matter of passages several sectionsback—except, perhaps, for a few, especially memorablehighlights, which we then call “aphorisms”. In this way,it is all too easy to fail to read Nietzsche’s booksasbooks at all. Nevertheless, such comprehensive readings are thereto be had. Clark and Dudrick (2012) offer a a sustained, albeitcontroversial, close reading exploring the unity of Part I ofBeyond Good and Evil; their efforts reveal the scope of thedifficulty—they needed an entire book to explain the allusionsand connections involved in just twenty-three sections of Nietzsche,covering some couple-dozen pages! Attacking the same problem in adifferent spirit, Nehamas (1988) calls attention to the loose,“train of thought”-type connections that connect onesection to another through large swaths of works likeBeyond Goodand Evil orThe Gay Science. Following such connections,he proposes, allows us to understand the books asmonologuespresented by a narrator. For Nehamas, the creation of such a narrativepersona is central to Nietzsche’s larger project of authorialself-fashioning. By contrast, Millgram (2023) counter-proposes thatNietzsche deploysdifferent “voices”, differentnarrators, in his different books (see also Millgram 2007, 2020); andrelated papers available in the Other Internet Resources). On thisless unified picture, the sort of “persona-inhabiting”effect noted above for the obvious case ofBGE 2 is a muchmore widespread and destabilizing feature of Nietzsche’swriting. It becomes a precondition for adequately understanding eachparticular book that we first work out in what voice Nietzsche meansto be speaking—and what attitude he, and we, are supposed tohave toward that character—before we can assess the work’sfirst-order claims and effects.

While Millgram’s view is extreme in the demands it takesNietzsche’s writing to place on the reader, demands of the broadsort he indicates—a demand, for example, to hearNietzsche’s interventions in the right tone, or“spirit”, if they are to be understood—doseem to be imposed by some rather straightforward features of thetexts. Consider, for instance, what the point could be of that mostobvious feature of Nietzsche’s rhetoric—the heat andvitriol with which his condemnations of traditional values arepresented. TheGenealogy of Morality advertises itself as“a Polemic”, but even in that genre, it is an outlier forrhetorical intensity; Nietzsche passes up no opportunity foremotionally charged attacks, he repeatedly blasphemes what is heldmost sacred in the culture, he freely deploys offensive anti-Semitictropes (turned back, ironically, against anti-Semitic Christiansthemselves), he fairly shouts, he sneers between scare quotes, herepeatedly charges bad faith and dishonesty on the part of hisopponents, and on and on. It is impossible to conclude that the workis notdeliberately designed to be as offensive as possibleto any earnest Christian believer. Why? Given Nietzsche’sexpressed conviction that many Christians ought to remain ensconcedwithin their ideology because it is the best they can do forthemselves (that “the sense [Sinn] of the herd shouldrule in the herd”;KSA 7[6], 12: 280), perhaps theright way to understand this much rhetorical overkill is that itoperates as a strategy foraudience partition. InNietzsche’s mind, those who cannot do without Christianity andits morality would only be harmed by understanding how destructive andself-defeating it is; Nietzsche wants to explain those terribleeffects, but he also wants to protect Christianity-dependent readersfrom harm. He achieves both at once by ensuring that exactly thosereaders will be so offended by his tone that their anger will impairunderstanding and they will fail to follow his argument. If this isright, the very vitriol of theGenealogy arises from an aimto be heard only by the right audience—the one it canpotentially aid rather than harm—thereby overcoming the problemthat

There are books that have opposite values for soul and health,depending on whether the lower soul… or the higher and morevigorous ones turn to them. (BGE 30; compareBGE26–7, 40 andGS 381)

That such an interpretation of Nietzsche’s intentions is evenpossible shows how great a challenge these explosive, carefullycrafted texts pose to their readers.

6. Key Doctrines

This entry has focused on broad themes pursued throughoutNietzsche’s writing, but most philosophically sophisticatedcommentary on his work has been devoted to the explication of certaincore doctrinal commitments, which Nietzsche seems to rely uponthroughout, but which he does not develop systematically in hispublished works in the way typical for philosophers. Some of thesedoctrines, like the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, aredescribed as “fundamental” by Nietzsche himself(EH III,Z, 1), but are formulated in surprisinglycryptic or metaphorical ways—and discussed, or even mentioned atall, much more rarely than one would expect given the importanceNietzsche placed on them. Others are alluded to more frequently, butraise theoretical questions that would normally call for carefulphilosophical development that is largely absent in Nietzsche’sbooks. Commentators have therefore expended considerable effortworking out rational reconstructions of these doctrines. This sectionoffers brief explanations of three of the most important: the will topower, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism.

6.1 The Will to Power

The will to power doctrine seems to claim that everything that existsrests fundamentally on an underlying basis of“power-centers”, whose activity and interactions areexplained by a principle that they pursue the expansion of theirpower. But it is far from obvious what these“power-centers” are supposed to be, and much scholarlycontroversy concerns what kind of doctrine Nietzsche intended toadvance in the first place. Some readers take it as Nietzsche’sversion of a foundational metaphysics (see Heidegger 1961, Jaspers[1936] 1965, and for a sophisticated recent approach in the same broadvein, Richardson 1996; see also alternative accounts by Doyle 2019 andRemhof 2017). Others receive it as an anti-essentialist rejection oftraditional metaphysical theorizing in which abstract and shiftingpower-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 doctrinein theoretical philosophy, Maudemarie Clark (2000, see also 1990:205–44) reads the will to power as a strand of thought thatmakes no claim about the world, but instead expressesNietzsche’s values. As we saw (3.B.i.), the idea that theexpansion of power is good does have a better claim than otherprinciples to systematize Nietzsche’s various value commitments,and different evaluative interpretations have been developed byReginster (2006), Katsafanas (2013), Hussain (2011), and Richardson(2020: 53–80). But there are also a large number of other textssuggesting that Nietzsche’s main agenda was to argue that thepsychological world—or the world as a whole—isfundamentally composed of centers of power exerting force against oneanother (seeGS 13;BGE 23, 36, 259;GM II,16–17; III, 13–15; as well as many passages from thenotebooks). Nietzsche’s description of such “powercenters” is sometimes fairly abstract, evoking mathematicallycharacterized “force-centers” like those sometimespostulated in nineteenth century physics, but at other times, concretepsychological or biological entities (people, drives, organisms) arethe things exerting will to power.

Reginster’s (2006, 2018a) account of the will to power as adrive toward overcoming resistance can marshal a large body of textualsupport (particularly from the notebooks), and it also has someparticular philosophical advantages. From a dialectical point of view,Reginster’s reading substantially clarifies the target and thephilosophical point of Nietzsche’s views about power: they areaimed against Schopenhauer’s ideas about the will to life andhis use of those ideas to motivate pessimism. The will to powerthereby contributes directly to Nietzsche’s program ofcombatting nihilism (in its guise as the evaluative claim that theworld ought not to exist). Reginster’s reading also makes goodsense of the apparent centrality of the will to power inNietzsche’s psychology. In the same passage where he claims thatpsychology should “be recognized again as the queen of thesciences”, Nietzsche proposes to understand psychology “asthe morphology and development-theory of the will topower” (BGE 23). Some commentators take this tosuggest a monistic psychology in which all drives whatsoever aim atpower, and so count as manifestations of a single underlying drive (ordrive-type). That interpretation makes a poor fit for the prodigiousdiversity of Nietzsche’s actual psychological explanations (andfor his pluralist leanings), but Reginster’s view redirectsattention away from drives’ first-order aims toward a generalstructural feature of drives—their tendency to overcomeresistance in the course of pursuing whatever first-order activitiesthey pursue. (It thereby builds on a productive earlier line ofthought from Richardson (1996), according to which the drives’willing power is not a matter of their taking power as a first-orderaim, but concerns themanner of their pursuit of variousfirst-order aims.) The Reginster account thereby permits the will topower to retain an important centrality within Nietzsche’spsychology, without needing to claim that no one (or no drive) everaims at anything else besides power.

Other scholars have emphasized Nietzsche’s speculations thatbiological and physical phenomena could be explained by a postulatedsystem of interacting power centers (Abel 1984; Müller-Lauter1999a; Moore 2002; Gemes 2013). Abel (1984) offers a particularlysystematic and carefully argued version of the approach, whichhighlights important resonances between Nietzsche’s ideas andelements of Leibniz’s dynamical physics and metaphysics, whereasMoore (2002) pursues a fascinating line of connections betweenNietzsche’s thoughts about power and certain physiological ideasadvanced by Wilhelm Roux (1881). Moore’s reading emphasizes thebiologized 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 locatesNietzsche’s philosophy within a wider intellectual trend toward“biologism” prevalent at the end of the nineteenthcentury.

6.2 Perspectivism

Much of Nietzsche’s reaction to the philosophy of hispredecessors is mediated through his interest in the notion ofperspective. He thought that past philosophers had largely ignored theinfluence of their own perspectives on their work, and had thereforefailed to control those perspectival effects (BGE 6; seeBGE I more generally). Commentators have been both fascinatedand perplexed by what has come to be called Nietzsche’s“perspectivism”, and it has been a major concern in anumber of large-scale Nietzsche commentaries (see, e.g., Danto 1965;Kaulbach 1980, 1990; Schacht 1983; Abel 1984; Nehamas 1985; Clark1990; Poellner 1995; Richardson 1996; Benne 2005). There has been asmuch contestation over exactly what doctrine or group of commitmentsbelong under that heading as about their philosophical merits, but afew points are relatively uncontroversial and can provide a useful wayinto 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 frequentlycriticizes “dogmatic” philosophers for ignoring theperspectival limitations on their theorizing, but as we saw, hesimultaneously holds that the operation of perspective makes apositive contribution to our cognitive endeavors. Speaking of (what hetakes to be) the perversely counterintuitive doctrines of some pastphilosophers, he writes,

Particularly as knowers, let us not be ungrateful toward such resolutereversals of the familiar perspectives and valuations with which thespirit has raged against itself all too long… : to seedifferently 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 andabsurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one’s Pro andContrain one’s power, and to shift them in and out, sothat one knows how to make precisely thedifference inperspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge.(GM III, 12)

This famous passage bluntly rejects the idea, dominant in philosophyat least since Plato, that knowledge essentially involves a form ofobjectivity that penetrates behind all subjective appearances toreveal the way things really are, independently of any point of viewwhatsoever. Instead, the proposal is to approach“objectivity” (in a revised conception) asymptotically, byexploiting the difference between one perspective and another, usingeach to overcome the limitations of others, without assuming thatanything like a “view from nowhere” is so much aspossible. There is of course an implicit criticism of the traditionalpicture of a-perspectival objectivity here, but there is equally apositive set of recommendations about how to pursue knowledge as afinite, limited cognitive agent.

In working out his perspective optics of cognition, Nietzsche built oncontemporary developments in the theory ofcognition—particularly the work of non-orthodox neo-Kantianslike Friedrich Lange and positivists like Ernst Mach, who proposednaturalized, psychologically-based versions of the broad type oftheory of cognition initially developed by Kant and Schopenhauer (seeClark 1990; Kaulbach 1980, 1990; Anderson 1998, 2002, 2005; Green2002; Hill 2003; Hussain 2004). The Kantian thought was that certainvery basic structural features of the world we know (space, time,causal relations, etc.) were artifacts of our subjective cognitivefaculties rather than properties or relations of things in themselves;but where Kant and Schopenhauer had treated these structures asnecessary, a priori conditions of any possible experience whatsoever,the more naturalistically oriented figures who influenced Nietzschesought to trace them to sources in human empirical psychology, whichwould of course be contingent. The potential of these ineliminablesubject-side influences tovary suggests the idea of treatingthem as a kind ofperspective, which Nietzsche founddeveloped in an idealist version by Gustav Teichmüller (1882).Leaving Teichmüller’s idealism to one side, Nietzschedevelops the idea by tying cognitively important perspectives back tohis own psychology. In particular, theGenealogy passageemphasizes that for him, perspectives are always rooted inaffects and their associated patterns of valuation. For thatreason, Nietzsche holds that “every great philosophy sofar” has been “the personal confession of its author and akind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” (BGE 6).Thus, theoretical claims not only need to be analyzed from the pointof view of truth, but can also bediagnosed as symptoms andthereby traced back to the complex configurations of drive and affectfrom the point of view of which they make sense. Nietzsche’sperspectivism thus connects to his “genealogical” programof criticizing philosophical theories by exposing the psychologicalneeds 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 beyondepistemology, or the “theory of cognition”(Erkenntnistheorie), as it was practiced in the broadlyKantian milieu of his contemporary philosophy. (One should say, they“go beyond” the theory of cognitionat least;Gemes (2009c, 2013) argues that epistemological interpretations ofperspectivism are altogether mistaken, and that it should be takeninstead as fundamentally a doctrine within moral psychology, about thedrives and affects.) Nietzsche makes perspectivist claims not onlyconcerning the side of the cognitive subject, but also about the sideof the truth, or reality, we aim to know. His views on this topic havebeen highly controversial, with some scholars emphasizingNietzsche’s apparent denials of truth (either skeptical denialsthat any truth is ever knowable, or more radical claims that the veryidea of truth is somehow incoherent), and others highlighting his ownfrequent and routine claims for the truth of his own views, as well asthe valorization of truthfulness and honesty we saw above (3.B.iv.). Anumber of different strategies have been proposed for reconciling thetensions between these different strands of text, including thesupposition that at least some of Nietzsche’s own claims mustfall outside the scope of his denials of truth (Hales and Welshon2000), the idea that Nietzsche distinguished different senses of“truth” (Schacht 1983; Anderson 1998, 2005), and thedevelopmental proposal that Nietzsche eventually gave up on hisdenials of truth late in his career (Clark 1990, 1998). (See recentexchanges on this topic between Clark (2018) and Nehamas (2015, 2017,2018).) In addition to work focused on Nietzsche’s understandingof truthper se, a good deal of scholarly effort has exploredthe way Nietzsche attempts to build his perspectivism down into theontology of the world by understanding reality itself as a system ofever-shifting force-centers which themselves constitute a variety ofpoints of view on the whole (notable contributions include Deleuze[1962] 1983; Abel 1984; Poellner 1995; Richardson 1996;Müller-Lauter 1999a; Hales and Welshon 2000; Gemes 2013). Theseefforts argue for strong connections between perspectivism and thewill to power doctrine (section 6.1).

6.3 The Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his mostimportant thought, but that has not made it any easier forcommentators to understand. Nietzsche’s articulations of thedoctrine all involve hypothesizing—(or inducing the reader toimagine, or depicting a character considering)—the idea that allevents in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through aneternal series of cycles. But the texts are difficult to interpret.All Nietzsche’s official presentations of the thought inpublished work are either presented in hypothetical terms (GS341), or extremely elliptical and allusive (e.g.,GS 109), orhighly metaphorical and quasi-hermetic (Z III, 2, 13), or allthree together. Most allusions to the idea, in fact, assume that onealready knows what it means—even the claims inEcceHomo that it is the “fundamental conception” or“basic idea” ofZarathustra have this character.In the early reception, most readers took Nietzsche to be offering acosmological hypothesis about the structure of time or of fate (seeSimmel [1907] 1920; Heidegger 1961; Löwith [1935] 1997; Jaspers[1936] 1965), and various problems have been posed for the thesis, sounderstood (Simmel [1907] 1920: 250–1n; Soll 1973; Anderson2005: 217 n28). Many later commentators have focused instead on theexistential or practical significance of the thought (Magnus 1978;Nehamas 1980, 1985), or its “mythological” import (Hatab2005).

In the aftermath of Nehamas (1985), an influential line of readingshas argued that the thought to which Nietzsche attributed such“fundamental” significance was never a cosmological ortheoretical claim at all—whether about time, or fate, or theworld, or the self—but instead a practicalthoughtexperiment designed to test whether one’s life has beengood. The broad idea is that oneimagines the endless returnof life, and one’s emotional reaction to the prospect revealssomething about how valuable one’s life has been, much as(quoting Maudemarie Clark’s memorable analogy) a spouse’squestion about whether one would marry again evokes—and indeed,fairly demands—an assessment of the state of the marriage (seeClark 1990: 245–86; Wicks 1993; Ridley 1997; Williams 2001;Reginster 2006: 201–27; Anderson 2005, 2009; Risse 2009;Huddleston 2022). Naturally, the threat of emergingscholarly consensus around this line of interpretation has promptedpushback, and Paul Loeb (2006, 2013, 2021) has recently offeredvigorous defense of a cosmological interpretation of Nietzsche’sidea, building on earlier work by Alistair Moles (1989, 1990).

Skeptics like Loeb are correct to insist that, if recurrence is to beunderstood as a practical thought experiment, commentators owe us anaccount of how the particular features of the relevant thoughts aresupposed to make any difference (Soll 1973 already posed a stark formof this challenge). Three features seem especially salient: we aresupposed to imagine 1) that the pastrecurs, so that what hashappened in the past will be re-experienced in the future; 2) thatwhat recurs is thesame in every detail; and 3) that therecurrence happens not just once more, or even many times more, buteternally. The supposedrecurrence (1) plausiblymatters as a device for overcoming the natural bias toward the futurein practical reasoning. Since we cannot change the past but think ofourselves as still able to do something about the future, ourpractical attention is understandably future directed. But if thequestion is about the value of our lifeoverall, events inthe past matter just as much as those in the future, and disregardingthem is a mistake, at best, and a case of motivated reasoning ordishonesty, if we are exploiting future-bias to ignore aspects ofourselves we would rather not own up to (General form: “Whew! Atleast I’ll never have to go throughthatagain…”). By imaginatively locating our entire life onceagain in the future, the thought experiment can mobilize the resourcesof our practical self-concern to direct an evaluative judgment ontoour life as a whole. Similar considerations motivate the constraint ofsameness (2). If my assessment of myself simplyelided any events or features of my self, life, or world withwhich I was discontent, it would hardly count as an honest, thoroughself-examination. The constraint that the life I imagine to recur mustbe the same in every detail is designed to block any suchelisions.

As Reginster (2006: 222–7) observes, it is more difficult toexplain the role of the third constraint,eternity. It isnevertheless clear that it does make a practical difference: to put asharp point on it, return to Clark’s marriage analogy; one mightwell be very happy to live one’s marriage again (once, or twice,or even several times), but still prefer some variation in spousalarrangements over the course of eternity—indeed, Milan Kundera(1991) seems to be putting his character Agnes in something like thatsituation in his use of the Nietzschean thought experiment early on inImmortality. Reginster proposes that the eternity constraintis meant to reinforce the idea that the thought experiment calls foran especially wholehearted form ofaffirmation—joy—whose strength is measured by theinvolvement of a wish that our essentially finite lives could beeternal. More modestly, one might think that Nietzsche considered itimportant to rule out as insufficient a particular kind ofconditional affirmation, suggested by the Christianeschatological context, which would leave in place the judgment thatearthly human life carries intrinsically negative value. After all,the devout Christian might affirm her earthly lifeas a test offaith, which is to be redeemed by an eternal heavenly rewardshould one pass that test—all the while retaining her commitmentthat, considered by itself, earthly life is a sinful condition to berejected. Imagining that my finite life recurseternallyblocks this avenue (and returns the focus of assessment to the finitefeatures of real life) by supposing that there will never be a pointat which one could pretend that finite life is once and for all“over and done with” (Anderson 2005: 198, 203; 2009:237–8).

Bibliography

Primary Literature: Works by Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s Works in German

Nietzsche’s works have now been published in an outstandingcritical edition (theKritische Gesamtausgabe) under thegeneral editorship of Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari. It is heldin many university libraries and is typically cited by volume and pagenumber using the abbreviationKGA. This entry cites publishedworks in the English translations listed below, and for theunpublished writing, it cites the useful abridged version of thecritical edition, prepared for students and scholars (theKritische Studienausgabe,KSA). Those referencesfollow standard scholarly practice, providing volume and page numbersof theKSA, preceded by the notebook and fragment numbersestablished for the overall critical edition. English translationshave now appeared containing selections from the unpublished writingincluded inKSA, and those volumes (WEN,WLN) are listed among the translations in the next section.The full bibliographical information for the German editions is

Nietzsche’s Works in English

Nietzsche’s published works are cited by his original sectionnumbers (or larger part plus section numbers together), which are thesame in all editions. Citations follow the North American NietzscheSociety system of abbreviations for reference to English translations.For each work, the primary translation quoted in the entry is listedfirst, followed by other translations that were consulted. (N.B.: theentry occasionally departs from the quoted translation, usually in thedirection of greater literalness, without separate notice.) Originaldate of German publication is given in parentheses at the end of eachentry.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Rachel Cristy for exchanges that helped me work outbasic ideas for the structure and contents of this entry. JoshuaLandy, Andrew Huddleston, Christopher Janaway, and Elijah Millgramprovided helpful feedback on a late draft, and each saved me fromseveral errors.