Themes · Revaluation

The Revaluation of Values

The revaluation — Umwertung aller Werte — is Nietzsche's name for his own philosophical project. Not an inversion of received values (slave morality already did that), but a reassessment of value as such: a fresh asking of the question what should we want, and why?

The project has two halves. Negatively, it requires the genealogical work — showing that the values we take to be self-evident are historical, contingent, and explicable in terms of the conditions that produced them. Positively, it requires a criterion: a standard against which valuations can be judged. Nietzsche's most consistent candidate is life — does this valuation enhance the form of life that bears it, or does it diminish that form of life — though "life" is doing real philosophical work in the formula and is not self-explanatory.

Read carefully, the revaluation is not relativism. Nietzsche thinks some valuations are better than others, and he thinks he can say why. He also thinks that the project has hardly begun and that the philosophers who could carry it forward — the philosophers of the future — do not yet exist.

Reading path

Start with the project announced, watch the analytical apparatus at work, then read the late polemics that show what the revaluation looks like in pointed form. Move from program to performance.

1. Beyond Good and Evil Preface and §1–23

   The mature philosophical statement of the project. The preface frames the whole as the overcoming of Plato; Part I dismantles the prejudices of philosophers as the precondition of any real revaluation.

2. Beyond Good and Evil §186, §202–203

   The natural history of morals. §186 on the embarrassing situation of moral philosophers; §202 on the herd morality that has come to dominate Europe; §203 on the philosophers of the future who alone could carry out the revaluation.

3. On the Genealogy of Morals Preface §3–6

   The methodological frame. "We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question." The negative half of the project, made explicit.

4. Twilight of the Idols "Morality as Anti-Nature"; "What I Owe to the Ancients"

   Two short, sharp chapters. Why morality (in its dominant Christian-European form) is anti-natural; what Nietzsche finds in the Greeks that points beyond it. The compressed late statement.

5. The Antichrist §1–11; §62 (the closing law)

   The opening sets out the criterion (what is good = what enhances the feeling of power, what raises the type of human being); the closing pronounces the famous "law against Christianity." The most overt revaluation in the corpus, in the most heated rhetoric.

Across the corpus

The reading path concentrates in Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy, Twilight, and The Antichrist — but the revaluation is the project the late work names, not the project the late work invents. The middle books are the long apprenticeship in which Nietzsche learns to read moral judgments as historical and conditional; Zarathustra stages the affirmative half in poetic form; the late polemics execute the project at full intensity; the Nachlass documents what Nietzsche did not finish — the planned four-book Revaluation of All Values, of which only The Antichrist was completed.

Human, All Too Human

The first of the "free-spirit" books and the start of the negative-half work the late revaluation will execute. Nietzsche has not yet named the project, but he has begun the operation: treating moral concepts as historical sediments rather than as natural givens, and looking for the conditions under which they arose. The 1886 preface, written years later, is one of the few places he describes the trajectory of his own thought.

• §1 — "Chemistry of concepts and feelings." The methodological declaration: that what we treat as unitary moral feelings are composites of historical sediments. The programme statement of philosophical critique by genealogy.
• §2 — historical philosophizing as against the "lack of historical sense" Nietzsche identifies as philosophy's hereditary defect.
• §39 — the fable of intelligible freedom; the first careful exposure of how moral responsibility is constructed.
• §107 — irresponsibility and innocence: the incompatibility of moral judgment with a thoroughgoing naturalist psychology. The negative half previewed.
• Preface (1886) §1, §6–7 — Nietzsche's own retrospective: the book in which he separated himself from his early Schopenhauerian-Wagnerian devotions and began the work that would become the revaluation.

Daybreak

The book is subtitled Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, and the 1886 preface is one of the few places in the corpus where Nietzsche names his project before the late polemics. Read it alongside the prefaces to Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy; together they triangulate what the revaluation is and what it is not.

• Preface §3 — values themselves to be called into question; the trust in morality identified as the thing that must be suspended for the project to begin at all.
• Preface §4 — Nietzsche as "underworker" of European morality, burrowing beneath what looks unquestionable. The most vivid early image of his own task.
• Preface §5 — the philosopher's delayed audience; the strange address to readers not yet existing. The temporal condition of the revaluation.
• §103 — "two kinds of deniers of morality." Important here for revaluation specifically: Nietzsche distinguishes himself from mere denial. The revaluation is not anti-moralism but a re-examination of valuation as such.
• §148 — the moral instinct read symptomatically; how a moral judgment shows what kind of person makes it.

The Gay Science

The death of God appears here on the spine of the death-of-God page. For revaluation, those same passages function differently: they are the precondition of the project. When the highest values devalue themselves, the revaluation is not optional — it is already underway. What Nietzsche adds is consciousness of the event and the beginnings of a programme for what follows. Alongside that diagnostic work, The Gay Science contains the constructive counterpart: the call to create new values.

• §108 — "the shadow of God" still on the cave wall. The revaluation is necessary because the death of God is incomplete: the moral residues of theism outlive theism.
• §270 — "What does your conscience say? — You shall become who you are." The personal counterpart to the cultural revaluation.
• §283 — "preparatory human beings." An anticipation of BGE's philosophers of the future: types whose existence the revaluation depends on.
• §335 — "Long live physics!" The famous call against moral self-flattery and toward becoming the creators of one's own values. The constructive half stated in middle-period voice.
• §343 — "the meaning of our cheerfulness." The death of God read explicitly as the precondition of a revaluation, and the cheerfulness as the mood proper to the long task.
• §344 — the will to truth itself in question. The first move toward the self-application of the method that Genealogy III will complete.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The poetic version. Zarathustra's central teaching is that values are created, not found, and that the death of God therefore opens — not closes — the question of what should be valued. The technical vocabulary of the late prose works is mostly absent; the revaluation appears as a dramatic action rather than a programme. Read these speeches as the imaginative counterpart of the later polemics.

• Prologue §3 — the overman as future addressee; values legislated for a humanity yet to exist.
• Prologue §5 — the last man. What happens if the revaluation is not undertaken: comfort, the death of aspiration, the small happiness of the herd.
• Part I, "On a Thousand and One Goals" — probably the single most important Zarathustra speech for this theme. A tour through the valuations of different peoples and the claim that no value has stood without a creator. Closing line: "humankind has yet to set itself a goal."
• Part I, "On the Way of the Creator" — the creator as the figure of the revaluation; the solitude of any genuine valuating.
• Part II, "On Self-Overcoming" — life as that which must overcome itself; will to power as the criterion underneath any valuation. The affirmative-half statement of the criterion the late prose will give in §259 of BGE.
• Part III, "On Old and New Tablets" — Zarathustra's most extended teaching speech, breaking and remaking the moral tablets. The most direct dramatic enactment of revaluation in the corpus.

Beyond Good and Evil — beyond §186, §202–203

Part I (already on the spine) clears the philosophical ground; the remaining parts execute. Most important for revaluation specifically: Part VI, where Nietzsche defines the kind of philosopher who could carry out the project, and Part IX, where he describes the bearing — what he calls "nobility" — that the project aims at.

• §211 — "Genuine philosophers… are commanders and legislators: they say, 'thus it shall be!'" The clearest single statement in the corpus of what the philosopher of the future is for. The distinction between "philosophical laborers" who classify existing values and "real philosophers" who legislate new ones.
• §212 — the philosopher as untimely; the figure who must work against the present rather than with it.
• §213 — what a philosopher is. The requirements of the type, in Nietzsche's most concentrated formulation.
• §253 — the prejudice of the present that holds Europe in place; the resistance the revaluation must overcome.
• §259 — life as appropriation, injury, will to power. The criterion of the late work stated in maximalist form. (Same passage as the master/slave and metaphysics pages, doing different work here: foundational for "what enhances life?")
• §287 — "What is noble?" The image of the bearing the revaluation aims at. Nobility as inner relation, no longer a social category.

On the Genealogy of Morals — beyond Preface §3–6

The three essays are the substantive execution of the negative half. Essay I shows the first inversion (master to slave); Essay II shows the second (the internalization of cruelty as bad conscience); Essay III shows the third (the ascetic ideal as the dominant valuation under which we still live, including in our science). The cumulative argument is that the moral world we inhabit is the long product of identifiable revaluations — and that the revaluation Nietzsche proposes is therefore not unprecedented but the next move in a sequence.

• Essay I §16–17 — the open question of which morality wins, posed at the close of the slave-revolt argument. Whether master and slave can compound into a higher order, or whether the slave inversion is final, is left undecided here.
• Essay II §11–12 — the methodological core: "the value of these values themselves must be called into question." The long passage on history as the play of forces is the most direct statement in the corpus of the historicity of moral meaning.
• Essay II §16–22 — bad conscience as the internalization of cruelty: a second great moral revaluation, after the slave revolt of Essay I. (Cited on master/slave; here as one stage in a sequence.)
• Essay III §11–14 — the ascetic priest; the systematic "no" said to life by the dominant valuation. The diagnosis the revaluation must answer.
• Essay III §24–28 — the will to truth as the latest form of the ascetic ideal; truthfulness destroying its own ground. (Same passage as the death-of-God, nihilism, Christianity, and metaphysics pages — here doing this work: the moment in which the genealogical method becomes self-applied. Science is Christianity completing itself by destroying itself.)
• Essay III §27 — "All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it." The Genealogy's most direct statement of the methodological self-application the revaluation requires.

Twilight of the Idols — beyond the spine chapters

The spine takes the ethical chapter ("Morality as Anti-Nature") and the closing return to the Greeks ("What I Owe to the Ancients"). The chapters between them are the corpus's most concentrated worked examples of revaluation in operation — each takes a founding figure or doctrine of the Western tradition and runs the analytical apparatus on it in compressed form.

• Foreword — the book as "a great declaration of war." Read alongside the Antichrist preface and Ecce Homo: the late self-presentation as the philosopher of the revaluation.
• "The Problem of Socrates" §1–12 — the late genealogical reading of Socrates as a symptom of decadence. Revaluation applied to the founding figure of Western philosophy. Read this for what the method looks like when it is fully in operation.
• "'Reason' in Philosophy" §1–6 — the metaphysical clearing operation. "The true world" gone, but values still need somewhere to stand. The negative half made compact.
• "The Four Great Errors" §1–8 — the analytical core: cause, agency, free will, and moral responsibility as retroactive interpretations of psychology. The error-analysis the revaluation rests on.
• "Skirmishes" §35–40 — the late critique of modern moral progressivism: equality, pity, and the "improvement" of humanity read as decadence.

The Antichrist — beyond §1–11; §62

The spine takes the opening criterion and the closing law. The long polemic against Christian morality (§24–§43) is the page's central argument; a few passages outside the spine state the criterion and the comparative method even more compactly than the spine does.

• §12–14 — the criterion stated most directly in the late voice: what damages life, what enhances it. Read these together with BGE §259 and Twilight's "Morality as Anti-Nature."
• §17–19 — the conception of God itself read evaluatively: a god is a function of the type that produces it.
• §24 — the Jewish-priestly inversion of values, read at full historical scale. (Same passage as the master/slave and Christianity pages; here as the negative-half engine the late polemic is bringing to a close.)
• §57 — the comparative move: Christian moral law set beside the Indian Code of Manu to show that moralities are legislated, not natural. The most explicit comparative-anthropological moment in the late work.

Ecce Homo

The retrospective. The book's subtitle — How One Becomes What One Is — is itself a revaluation programme: the project that determines value also determines the kind of self that bears it. "Why I Am a Destiny" is Nietzsche's most direct self-presentation as the philosopher of the revaluation.

• Subtitle — "How One Becomes What One Is." Self-formation as the personal counterpart of the cultural project. Read alongside Gay Science §270.
• on Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche's own retrospective account of BGE as the critical preparation for the revaluation; useful for understanding why Part I and Part VI are spine reading.
• on Genealogy of Morals — his retrospective on the negative-half book: the three essays as preparatory writings for the revaluation proper.
• "Why I Am a Destiny" §1 — the most concentrated late statement of the revaluation as philosophical task: "I am no man, I am dynamite."
• "Why I Am a Destiny" §7–8 — the self-presentation as the philosopher who finally puts Christian morality on trial. Read these in close conjunction with the Antichrist spine; they are the personal frame around the impersonal polemic.

The Nachlass and the so-called Will to Power

Standard caveat: the notebooks are working notes, not a book Nietzsche wrote, and the compilation that circulates as The Will to Power was assembled posthumously with significant editorial intervention. For the revaluation theme, the Nachlass matters more than for most: the project Nietzsche did not finish — the planned four-book Revaluation of All Values — is most extensively documented in the late notebooks. The Antichrist was originally Book One. The other three were never written. Quote the notebook passages with caution and cross-check against the published works.

• WP Book One (§1–134) — "European Nihilism." The planned diagnostic prelude; partly absorbed into Antichrist, partly left as notes. The most extended technical treatment of nihilism in the corpus.
• WP Book Three (§455–§544) — "the criterion of value" notes. The most extended working-out in the corpus of what "life" means as a standard, and how it stands up against alternatives.
• WP Book Four (§1057–§1067) — the closing notes on revaluation as a project; eternal recurrence as its psychological test; will to power as its metaphysical name.
• The plans and outlines for the four books — Nietzsche drafted several, and they shifted across 1887 and 1888. Useful for understanding what the project would have been; misleading if read as the project itself.

Expanded reading path

A sequence that traces the project across the whole corpus rather than concentrating on the spine. It moves from the middle-period apprenticeship through the dramatic poetic statement, the mature philosophical articulation, the methodological execution, and the late polemics to the retrospective frame.

1. Human, All Too Human §1, §107

   The chemistry of moral concepts and the incompatibility of moral judgment with naturalism. The methodological declaration.

2. Daybreak Preface §3–4

   The project named: Nietzsche as "underworker" of European morality, calling values themselves into question.

3. The Gay Science §270, §335, §343

   The death of God read as the precondition of revaluation; the call to create one's own values; the personal counterpart of the cultural task.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part I "On a Thousand and One Goals"; Part II "On Self-Overcoming"

   Values as created, not found; will to power as the criterion underneath any valuation. The affirmative half in poetic form.

5. Beyond Good and Evil §211, §259

   The philosopher of the future as legislator of values; life-as-will-to-power as the criterion at its most maximal.

6. On the Genealogy of Morals II §11–12; III §27

   "The value of these values themselves must be called into question"; great things destroying themselves through self-overcoming as the law of life. The methodological self-application.

7. Twilight of the Idols "The Problem of Socrates" §1–12

   Revaluation in worked operation, applied to the founding figure of Western philosophy. The clearest single example of what the method looks like in motion.

8. The Antichrist §12–14

   The criterion stated most directly: what damages life, what enhances it. The late voice at its most compact.

9. Ecce Homo "Why I Am a Destiny" §1

   The philosopher of the revaluation in his own retrospective frame: the project as personal destiny.

The arc reads: in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak Nietzsche learns the method and names the target; in The Gay Science and Zarathustra he states the project's preconditions and its affirmative half; in Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy he formulates the philosophical and methodological apparatus; in Twilight and The Antichrist he executes the polemic at full intensity; in Ecce Homo he frames himself as the philosopher whose destiny is to have done it. The Nachlass records the parts the late illness left unwritten.

Submissions

Reader essays on this theme. Submissions are independent pieces of writing, not part of the editorial reading paths above.

None yet.

Connections

• Genealogy as method The negative half of the project — clearing ground.
• Master and slave morality The most worked-out instance of the genealogical analysis the revaluation depends on.
• Will to power As the criterion that lets Nietzsche say what is "higher."
• Overman The figure for whom the revaluation makes sense — the future addressee.
• Amor fati The personal counterpart: revaluation lived rather than argued.

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