Sure. But how do you "re-evaluate" something when you have no objective scale of "values" left?Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2024 9:06 amNietzsche tried to re-evaluate values in his day in hopes of finding what he termed "life affirming" ones instead of "ascetic ideals."Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2024 3:48 amYeah. Nietzsche tried to sneak his own moralizing in the back door, after claiming to have destroyed all possibility of moralizing.
You can judge the success of that strategy.
Once Nietzsche banished values, or morality -- which even he said he was doing when he banished God -- then logically, he was not merely "transvaluing" things, as people sometimes say of Nietzsche: rather, the implication is that nothing can have any objective "value" at all. And since subjective "value" is no more than preference, all value is gone.
What gives Nietzsche, then, the justification to tell us that his so-called "life affirming" values are deserving of a value? He cannot make that case any longer. And he didn't. He couldn't. All he could do is arbitrarily backdoor them, by asserting them without justification, and hope that nobody noticed.
But we have noticed.
And once we notice, we realize that Nietzsche is not really justifying "will to power," or "life affirming" or "ubermensching" -- instead, he's just claiming they have a value he denies anything can have. He's a Nihilist, essentially. Only he was not consistent enough to go there...
Or he saw the black pit yawning, and ran away. One or the other.