From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Nietzsche’s talk about the creation of values challenges philosophical common sense. It is
common, if not altogether standard, to explain values by contrasting them against mere desires.
Both are positive attitudes toward some object or state of affairs (“pro-attitudes”), but valuing
seems to involve an element of objectivity absent in desiring. (Consider: If I become convinced
that something I valued is not in fact valuable, that discovery is normally sufficient to provoke
me to revise my value, suggesting that valuing must be responsive to the world; by contrast,
subjective desires often persist even in the face of my judgment that their objects are not
properly desirable, or are unattainable; see the entries on value theory and desire.) Nietzsche
challenges this basic philosophical conception when he treats value as “created” rather than
discovered in the world:
We [contemplatives] … are those who really continually fashion something that had not
been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents,
perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. … Whatever has value in our world
now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less—
but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and
bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man. . . .
[This has] an unmistakable subjectivist flavor, tracing value to some source in our own attitudes
and/or agency, but it is a difficult question how this subjectivist strand of Nietzsche’s thought is
to be reconciled with his ubiquitous (and uncompromising, unqualified) insistence that his own
value judgments are correct and those he opposes are false, or even rest on lies. Some scholars
take the value creation passages as evidence that Nietzsche was an anti-realist about value, so
that his confident evaluative judgments should be read as efforts at rhetorical persuasion rather
than objective claims (Leiter 2015), or (relatedly) they suggest that Nietzsche could fruitfully be
read as a skeptic, so that such passages should be evaluated primarily for their practical effect
on readers (Berry 2011, 2019; see also Leiter 2014). Such skeptical readings have been
thoughtfully challenged by Huddleston (2014). Others (Hussain 2007) take Nietzsche to be
advocating a fictionalist posture, according to which values are self-consciously invented
contributions to a pretense through which we can satisfy our needs as valuing creatures, even
though all evaluative claims are (strictly speaking) false. Still others (Richardson 2004;
Reginster 2006; Anderson 2005, 2009; Silk 2015, 2018) are tempted to suppose that
Nietzsche’s talk of “creation” is meant to suggest one or another form of “constructivism,”
according to which value claims are “attitude-dependent” in some definite respect that requires
careful specification, or “subjective realism”—a view according to which values have some
basis in subjective attitudes of valuing, but nevertheless also gain some kind of objective
standing in the world once those attitudes have done their work and “created” the values.
Nietzsche’s meta-ethical stance is treated elsewhere (see Section 3 of the entry on Nietzsche’s moral
and political philosophy), but even aside from the meta-ethical status of “created” values, the very idea
of “value creation” is challenging to understand. This continues to be a very active area of
research, with quite different recent accounts appearing in Richardson (2020: 439–74), Clark
(2015b), Dries (2015), and others. In lieu of a fuller discussion, here are three textual
observations. First, while a few passages appear to offer a conception of value creation as some
kind of legislative fiat (e.g., BGE 211), such a view is hard to reconcile with the dominant
strand of passages, which presents value creation as a difficult achievement characterized by
substantial worldly constraints and significant exposure to luck, rather than something that
could be done at will. Second, a great many of the passages (esp. GS 78, 107, 290, 299, 301)
connect value creation to artistic creation, suggesting that Nietzsche took artistic creation and
aesthetic value as an important paradigm or model for his account of values and value creation
more generally. . . . Huddleston (2019) shows that investigations into the creation of artistic and
cultural value with real intersubjective purchase was utterly central to Nietzsche’s very
conception of philosophy and its proper ambitions. Progress in this area is likely to come from
careful interrogation of Nietzsche’s conception of artistic creation itself. Finally, Nietzsche’s
account of “revaluation” remains an understudied source of examples for what he might mean
by “value creation”. After all, the moral revaluation achieved by the “slave revolt in morality”
(see section 2) is presented as a creation of new values (GM I, 10, et passim). In addition to
showing that not all value creation leads to results that Nietzsche would endorse, this
observation leads to interesting questions—e.g., Did Nietzsche hold that all value creation
operates via revaluation (as suggested, perhaps, by GM II, 12–13)? Or is “value creation ex
nihilo” also supposed to be a possibility? If so, what differentiates the two modes? Can we say
anything about which is to be preferred? etc.
3.2 Some Nietzschean Values
Aside from issues about what it is to create values in the first place, many readers find
themselves puzzled about what “positive” values Nietzsche means to promote. One plausible
explanation for readers’ persisting sense of unclarity is that Nietzsche disappoints the
expectation that philosophy should offer a reductive (or at least, highly systematized) account of
the good, along the lines of “Pleasure is the good”; “The only thing that is truly good is the
good will”; “The best life is characterized by tranquility”; or the like. Nietzsche praises
many different values, and in the main, he does not follow the stereotypically philosophical
strategy of deriving his evaluative judgments from one or a few foundational principles. While
the resulting axiological landscape is complex, we can get a sense of its shape by considering
six values that play indisputably important roles in Nietzsche’s sense of what matters.
3.2.1 Power and Life
The closest Nietzsche comes to organizing his value claims systematically is his insistence on
the importance of power, especially if this is taken together with related ideas about strength,
health, and “life”. A well-known passage appears near the opening of the late work, The
Antichrist:
What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the
will to power, power itself.
What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is
overcome.
Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but
fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtù, virtue that is moraline-free). (A 2)
In the literature, claims of this sort are associated with a “will to power doctrine”, commonly
viewed as one of Nietzsche’s central ideas (see section 6.1). That doctrine seems to include the
proposal that creatures like us (or more broadly: all life, or even all things period) aim at the
enhancement of their power—and then further, that this fact entails that enhanced power is
good for us (or for everything).
In the middle of the twentieth century, many readers (more or less casually) received this as a
deeply unattractive blunt claim that “Might makes right”, which they associated with disturbing
social and political tendencies salient in the era (see, e.g., Beauvoir 1948: 72). After the Second
World War, Walter Kaufmann ([1950] 1974: 178–333) engaged in a long-term campaign to
recuperate Nietzsche’s thought from this unsavory line of interpretations, largely by insisting on
how often the forms of power emphasized by Nietzsche involve internally directed self-control
and the development of cultural excellence, rather than domination of others. While this
account rightly highlighted internal complexity and nuance that were flattened out by the
oversimplified “might makes right” reception dominant at mid-century, Kaufmann’s approach
threatens to sanitize aspects of Nietzsche’s view that were intended to pose a stark challenge to
our moral intuitions. More sophisticated versions of this broad approach—like Richardson’s
(1996) development of Nietzsche’s distinction between tyranny (in which a dominant drive
wholly effaces what it dominates) and mastery (in which a more dominant drive allows some
expression to the less dominant one but controls and redirects that expression to its own larger
ends)—are rightly inclined to concede the troubling aspects of Nietzsche’s view (e.g., that the
doctrine countenances tyranny as well as mastery, even if it privileges the latter).
...
A second important strand of recent work emphasizes not a general, structural feature of power
like overcoming resistance, but a “thicker”, more substantive ethical idea. On this view, what
Nietzsche values is power understood as a tendency toward growth, strength, domination, or
expansion (Schacht 1983: 365–88; Hussain 2011). Brian Leiter (2002: 282–3) criticized what
he called a “Millian” version of this idea, according to which power is valuable simply because
power is in fact our fundamental aim . . .
But Hussain (2011) persuasively argues that if we shift our focus away from the pursuit of
power in any narrow sense to the broader idea that growth, strength, power-expansion, and the
like are all manifestations of life, then at least some of Leiter’s philosophical and most of his
textual objections can be avoided. On the resulting picture, Nietzsche’s position reads as a form
of ethical naturalism, arguing that expression of these fundamental life tendencies is good for us
precisely because they are our basic tendencies and we are inescapably in their grip (Hussain
2011: 159, et passim). . . .
3.2.2 Affirmation
A second value commitment prominent in Nietzsche’s work (and arguably related to his
positive assessments of life and power) is the value of affirmation. According to Reginster
(2006: 2), “Nietzsche regards the affirmation of life as his defining philosophical achievement”.
..
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall
be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do
not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to
accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on
the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer. (GS 276)
After that opening move, Nietzsche develops the idea in several more sections: GS 277
expresses Nietzsche’s worries about a seductive doctrine of “personal providence”, according to
which “everything that happens to us turns out for the best”, but such an idea could be tempting
at all only because of a far-reaching (and, Nietzsche thinks, admirable) affirmation of life,
rooted in a talent for self-interpretation that creatively identifies some description under which
things really do have “a profound significance and use precisely for us”; a bit later, GS 304
(entitled, “By doing we forego”) recommends against any ethic demanding that
we renounce this or that or the other, and in favor of one that demands that one do something
and do it again, from morning till evening… and to think of nothing except doing this well, as
well as I alone can do it; and then in GS 321, Nietzsche suggests that we give up on reproaching
others directly and just focus on see[ing] to it that our own influence on all that is yet to
come balances and outweighs his…. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not
become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish…. Let us look away.
...
Some have found Nietzsche’s valorization of affirmation ironic, given the polemical zeal of his
negative attacks on Christianity and traditional morality, but in fact, the value of affirmation
meshes nicely with some key aspects of Nietzsche’s critique. That critique focuses in large
measure on aspects of morality that turn the agent against herself—or more broadly, on the side
of Christianity that condemns earthly existence, demanding that we repent our earthly life as the
price of admission to a different, superior plane of being. What is wrong with these views,
according to Nietzsche, is that they negate our life, instead of affirming it. Bernard Reginster
(2006), who has made more (and more systematic) sense of Nietzsche’s praise of affirmation
than anyone, shows that the main philosophical problem it is meant to address is the crisis of
“nihilism”—provoked by a process in which “the highest values de-value themselves”
(KSA 9[35] 12: 350). Such “de-valuation” may rest either on some corrosive argument
undermining the force of all evaluative claims whatsoever, or instead, on a judgment that the
highest values cannot be realized, so that, by reference to their standard, the world as it is ought
not to exist. The affirmation of life can be framed as the rejection of nihilism, so understood.
For Nietzsche, that involves a two-sided project: it should both undermine values by reference
to which the world could not honestly be affirmed, while also articulating the values
exemplified by life and the world that make them affirmable. . . .
3.2.3 Truthfulness/Honesty
If we are to affirm our life and the world, however, we had better be honest about what they are
really like. Endorsing things under some illusory Panglossian description is not affirmation, but
self-delusion. In that sense, Nietzsche’s value of life-affirmation simultaneously commits him
to honesty. And arguably, in fact, no other virtue gets more, or more unqualified, praise in the
Nietzschean corpus: honesty is “our virtue, the last one left to us” (BGE 227), and truthfulness
is the measure of strength (BGE 39), or even of value as such:
How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became
for me the real measure of value. (EH Pref., 3)
Four strands in Nietzsche’s valuation of honesty deserve mention. Some texts present
truthfulness as a kind of personal commitment—one tied to particular projects and a way of life
in which Nietzsche happens to have invested. For example, in GS 2 Nietzsche expresses
bewilderment in the face of people who do not value honesty:
I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an
intellectual conscience. … I mean: the great majority of people do not consider it
contemptible to believe this or that and live accordingly, without having first given
themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without
even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward.
Nietzsche often recommends the pursuit of knowledge as a way of life:
No, life has not disappointed me… ever since the day when the great liberator came to
me: the idea that life could be an experiment for the seeker for knowledge…. (GS 324)
Indeed, he assigns the highest cultural importance to the experiment testing whether such a life
can be well lived:
A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors
now clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-
preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter
of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here,
and we confront the first attempt to answer the question by experiment. To what extent
can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment. (GS 110)
A second strand of texts emphasizes connections between truthfulness and courage, thereby
valorizing honesty as the manifestation of an overall virtuous character marked by resoluteness,
determination, and spiritual strength. . . . The same evaluative commitment underwrites
Nietzsche’s widespread attacks against what he calls “the Biblical ‘proof of strength’”—a form
of argument that purports to justify belief in some claim because that belief “makes one
blessed” or carries some emotional or practical benefit . . . .
Given Nietzsche’s personal commitment to truthfulness and his argument that its absence
amounts to cowardice, it is no surprise to find him, third, attacking the alleged mendaciousness
and intellectual corruption of traditional religio-moral consciousness as one of the very worst
things about it. The dishonesty of the moralistic “slave revolt” is a constant theme . . . and it
elicits some of Nietzsche’s most extreme and indignant rhetoric:
Our educated people of today, our “good people”, do not tell lies—that is true; but that is not to
their credit. … [That] would demand of them what one may not demand, that they should know
how to distinguish true and false in themselves. All they are capable of is a dishonest lie;
whoever today accounts himself a “good man” is utterly incapable of confronting any matter
except with dishonest mendaciousness—a mendaciousness that is abysmal but innocent,
truehearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous. These “good men”—they are one and all moralized to the
very depths and ruined and botched to all eternity as far as honesty is concerned… (GM III, 19)
Finally, it is worth noting that even when Nietzsche raises doubts about this commitment to
truthfulness, his very questions are clearly motivated by the central importance of that
value. . . .
3.2.4 Art and Artistry
But if truthfulness is a core value for Nietzsche, he is nevertheless famous for insisting that
we also need illusion to live well. From the beginning of his career to the end, he insisted on the
irreplaceable value of art precisely because of its power to ensconce us in illusion. . . . In a
slogan, “We possess art lest we perish of the truth” (KSA 16[40] 13: 500).
Art and artistry carry value for Nietzsche both as a straightforward first-order matter, and also
as a source of higher-order lessons about how to create value more generally. At the higher-
order level, he insists that we should learn from artists “how to make things beautiful, attractive,
desirable for ourselves when they are not” (GS 299; see also GS 78). The suggestion is that
artistic methods (“Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer
sees…; seeing things… as cut out and framed…; looking at them in the light of the sunset”, and
so on; GS 299) provide a kind of formal model (Landy 2012: 4, 8–19, et passim) for the
development of analogous techniques that could be deployed beyond art, in life itself—“For
with them this subtle power usually comes to an end when art ends and life begins, but we want
to be the poets of our life” (GS 299). But Nietzsche is just as invested in the first-order
evaluative point that what makes a life admirable includes its aesthetic features. Famously (or
notoriously), Nietzsche argues that to “attain satisfaction with himself” one should “‘give style’
to one’s character” (GS 290). Here, it is the fact that the person’s character (or her life) has
certain aesthetic properties—that it manifests an “artistic plan”, that it has beauty or sublimity,
that its moments of ugliness have been gradually removed or reworked through the formation of
a second nature, that it exhibits a satisfying narrative (or other artistic) form—that constitutes its
value (GS 290, 299, 370; TI IX, 7; EH Frontispiece). . . .
One last point deserves special mention. In Nietzsche’s presentations, the value of art and
artistry often seem to stand in opposition to the value of truthfulness—we are supposed to need
art to save us from the truth (see Ridley 2007a, Landy 2002). Significantly, the opposition here
is not just the one emphasized in The Birth of Tragedy—that the substantive truth about the
world might be disturbing enough to demand some artistic salve that helps us cope. Nietzsche
raises a more specific worry about the deleterious effects of the virtue of honesty—about
the will to truth, rather than what is true—and artistry is wheeled in to alleviate them, as well:
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the
realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science
—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and
sensation—would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But
 now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences:
art as the good will to appearance. (GS 107)
Nietzsche’s formulation (“that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and
sensation”, and that this insight “comes to us through science”) suggests that the specific error
theory he has in mind is rooted in the Kantian and Schopenhauerian theories of cognition,
perhaps as developed in more naturalistic, psychologically-inflected form by later neo-Kantian
and positivist thinkers. Those views would entail that the basic conditions of cognition prevent
our ever knowing things as they really are, independently of us. . . .
What is more important, however, is the structure of the thought in GS 107. Nietzsche’s idea is
that truthfulness itself, rigorously pursued through the discipline of science, has forced us to the
conclusion that our cognitive powers lead us into “delusion and error”, so that those very
demands of truthfulness cannot be satisfied. This is not just one more case of the world’s being
inhospitable to our values, but a special instance where the cultivation of a virtue
(honesty) itself leads to the unwelcome realization that we can never live up to its genuine
demands. In the face of such results, Nietzsche suggests, the only way to escape pessimism is
the recognition of another, quite different value, suitable to serve as a “counterforce” against
our honesty by showing that there can be something valuable about remaining content with
appearances. The cultural value of art in GS 107 thus rests on the opposition to honesty offered
by the “good will to appearance”. So it seems that the values Nietzsche endorses conflict with
one another, and that very fact is crucial to the value they have for us (Anderson 2005: 203–11).
(See Stoll (2019) for a sophisticated alternative account, arguing that artistic “semblances” in
Nietzsche are not supposed to be deceptive in any way, and therefore that the conflict between
the values of honesty and artistry is less stark than I have depicted it here.)
3.2.5 Individuality, Autonomy, “Freedom of Spirit”
From the earliest reception, commentators have noted the value Nietzsche places on
individuality and on the independence of the “free spirit” from confining conventions of
society, religion, or morality . . . Salient as Nietzsche’s praise of individuality is, however, it is
equally obvious that he resists any thought that every single human person has value on the
strength of individuality alone—indeed, he is willing to state that point in especially blunt
terms: “Self-interest is worth as much as the person who has it: it can be worth a great deal, and
it can be unworthy and contemptible” (TI IX, 33). . . .
A different approach takes its lead from Nietzsche’s connection between individuality and
freedom of spirit (GS 347; BGE 41–44). As Reginster (2003) shows, what opposes Nietzschean
freedom of spirit is fanaticism, understood as a vehement commitment to some faith or value-
set given from without, which is motivated by a need to believe in something because one lacks
the self-determination to think for oneself (GS 347). This appeal to self-determination suggests
that we might explain the value of individuality by appeal to an underlying value of autonomy:
valuable individuals would be the ones who “give themselves laws, who create themselves”
(GS 335), who exhibit self-control or self-governance (TI, V, 2; VIII, 6; IX, 38, 49; BGE 203),
and who are thereby able to “stand surety” for their own future (GM II, 2–3). . . .
3.2.6 Pluralism
We have seen that Nietzsche promotes a number of different values. In some cases, these values
reinforce one another. For example, Nietzsche’s emphasis on affirming life could be taken to
enhance or to confirm the value of life itself, qua successful expression of will to power, or
conversely, one might trace the value of affirmation to its acknowledgment of our inescapable
condition as living, power-seeking creatures. Similarly, we saw that both the virtue of honesty
and the value of art and artistry play essential roles in support of the person’s ability to affirm
life (Anderson 2005: 203–11). Nietzsche appeals to the metaphor of a tree’s growth to capture
this sort of organic interconnection among his commitments:
For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be single in anything: we
may neither err nor hit upon the truth singly. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree
bears its fruit our thoughts grow out of us, our values, our yess and nos and ifs and
whethers—the whole lot related and connected among themselves, witnesses to one will,
one health, one earthly kingdom, one sun. (GM Pref., 2)
However interrelated Nietzsche’s values, though, they appear to remain irreducible to a single
common value or principle that explains them all. For example, the account of honesty and
artistry explored in sections 3.2.3 and 3.2.4 revealed that the support they provide to the value of
affirmation depends on their opposition to one another, as “counterforces” (GS 107): if this is
right, then Nietzsche’s various values may interact within an organic whole, but some of the
interactions are oppositional, so they cannot all arise from a monistic philosophical system.
That very fact, however, fits nicely with another of Nietzsche’s core values, the value of
pluralism itself. For Nietzsche, a person’s ability to deploy and be responsive to a multiplicity
of values, of virtues, of outlooks and “perspectives”, is a positive good in its own right.
Nietzsche’s defense of this idea is perhaps clearest in the epistemic case, where he insists on the
value of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on any question: the thinker must
know how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations
useful for knowledge, because There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival
“knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes,
different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more
complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity”, be. (GM III, 12)
As the passage makes clear, however, Nietzschean perspectives are themselves rooted in affects
(and the valuations to which affects give rise), and in his mind, the ability to deploy a variety of
perspectives is just as important for our practical and evaluative lives as it is for cognitive life.
In GM I, 16, for example, he wraps up a discussion of the sharp opposition between the
good/bad and good/evil value schemes with a surprising acknowledgment that the best of his
contemporaries will need both, despite their opposition:
today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the “higher nature”, of the more spiritual
nature, than to be conflicted in this sense and to be still a real battleground for these
opposites. (GM I, 16; see also BGE 212; TI V, 3; and EH I)
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6.1 The Will to Power
The will to power doctrine seems to claim that everything that exists rests fundamentally on an
underlying basis of “power-centers”, whose activity and interactions are explained by a
principle that they pursue the expansion of their power. But it is far from obvious what these
“power-centers” are supposed to be, and much scholarly controversy concerns what kind of
doctrine Nietzsche intended to advance in the first place. . . . Nietzsche’s description of such
“power centers” is sometimes fairly abstract, evoking mathematically characterized “force-
centers” like those sometimes postulated in nineteenth century physics, but at other times,
concrete psychological or biological entities (people, drives, organisms) are the things exerting
will to power.
. . . From a dialectical point of view, Reginster’s reading substantially clarifies the target and
the philosophical point of Nietzsche’s views about power: they are aimed against
Schopenhauer’s ideas about the will to life and his use of those ideas to motivate pessimism.
The will to power thereby contributes directly to Nietzsche’s program of combatting nihilism
(in its guise as the evaluative claim that the world ought not to exist). Reginster’s reading also
makes good sense of the apparent centrality of the will to power in Nietzsche’s psychology. In
the same passage where he claims that psychology should “be recognized again as the queen of
the sciences”, Nietzsche proposes to understand psychology “as the morphology
and development-theory of the will to power” (BGE 23).