Words

The sixth chapter continues the analysis of our human valuing by treating a second key innovation: the formulation of values in words. Language belongs to the uniquely social character of human life. It is the community that “means” things when we speak and not individual selves, as we suppose. By this way that language “makes common,” it falsifies: our concepts equate unequals and are also false to our individual drives and affects. Language thereby changes how we have values: as worded, we hold them in common as “norms.” We accept them as “what one values” in our community. So they serve a “herding” function, which strengthens the group at the expense of members’ individuality. Nietzsche’s problem is how, given that his own words have “common” meanings, he can use them to express his individual thoughts. We will see the grounds but also the limits to his critique of our sociality.

Human

The fifth chapter turns to Nietzsche’s analysis of the distinctively “human” values that our species has superimposed upon bodily values. It treats the innovation that most made us human: what we call our “agency.” Our conceptions of ourselves as subjects and agents are largely mistaken, but the very thinking of ourselves in these ways makes a key difference. Nietzsche here develops a naturalistic alternative to Kant’s transcendental arguments: positing ourselves as agents is not a possibility-condition but a life-condition. We examine his account of the genealogy and functions of this self-conception. It makes us able to use a new kind of value-sign, which we steer by consciously. This human valuing also presumes that its values should be “true”—should be grounded in reasons and not just in what we happen to want. This demand gives humans truth as a kind of meta-value competing with the deeper bodily value of power.

Dionysus

The twelfth chapter treats the religious dimension of Nietzsche’s values, expressed in his ideas of Dionysus and eternal return. It might have seemed that he wants to replace gods with the superhuman or Übermensch. He attacks belief in gods as false and as spoiling our relation to values: we view them as commanded by gods, whereas our task is to make them for ourselves. Nevertheless Nietzsche still has use and need for gods and for religion more broadly. The universal Yes amounts to a “sanctification” of the world, demanding a strong affective response that is the positive core of religion that he wants to save. Its disadvantages for belief and will are outweighed by its support for a special feeling that is crucial to his new values. His evocations of Dionysus play this role, as does his thought of eternal return. We conclude with this most evocative of Nietzsche’s ideas.

Freedom

The eighth chapter shows why Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the will to truth as ascetic doesn’t lead him to reject that will: he sees it as the path to better values. Nor are his critiques of science—here reviewed—in the end dismissive of it. He thinks he brings the sciences of history and psychology to a maturity in which they can explain the most important fact about us, the character of our values; we analyze his new conceptions of these sciences. By exposing the functions in our values, we can begin to free ourselves from the forces that have all along controlled us through these values. We find, through this truth about morality, a more genuine freedom than Kant found within morality. Those sciences give us the truth about freedom itself, in a genealogy of it as an evolving practice. Nietzsche offers his freedom-through-genealogy as an advance in this development.

Affects

The fourth chapter completes the account of bodily valuing by treating its second dimension: how we value in our “affects.” In these we feel the world’s impacts upon us and evaluate, in this feeling, how they strengthen or weaken us. Here we value not by steering toward goods (as in our drives), but reactively and retrospectively. These feelings serve as signs in a different way: as signs of how we have been growing—or declining. This backward turn in our affects opens up a great problem for Nietzsche, here called his “problem of the past.” We humans are unhealthily preoccupied with our past, as he argues in his critiques of memory, history, ressentiment, and guilt. Our affectivity also raises the problem of suffering, whose felt judgment against life Schopenhauer uses to ground pessimism—a conclusion that Nietzsche denies and reverses: we are to embrace life even in its tragic aspect.

Value

The first chapter introduces Nietzsche’s notion of value; this metaethics orients the book’s later discussions. He speaks of values both descriptively, as objects of study, and valuatively, as what he values; only in the latter sense does he see them as good. The chapter argues that the first, naturalistic view of values, in which they are simply objects of valuing, has priority for him. A value is really just a sign used by a will, which values precisely by steering by that sign. Since all organisms use signs in this way, all of them value. Nietzsche challenges us to “incorporate” this metaethical truth into our own valuing and to recognize that our own values are likewise only “perspectival” goods (i.e., goods internal to our valuing perspective). The chapter articulates twelve “principles” he holds regarding values and locates his metaethical position in relation to those attributed to him by other interpreters.

Creating

The eleventh chapter turns to the social or political ambitions Nietzsche has for his ideas. He doesn’t only want to show exceptional individuals how to “create” values for themselves. He also wants to “found” his values as norms for a new society—a new kind of herd. He wants this despite his frequently expressed disdain for herds, and stress on breaking from them. Humanity’s experience with nihilism can teach it to improve the norms that structure societies. Nietzsche anticipates healthier, de-moralized norms that will spread through the herd as much of his honesty in valuing as possible. The new herd can sustain this honesty by recognizing the rank-order of values, previously antithetical to herds. This herd will see the high rank its honesty gives it—how its norms are higher than those of the old morality. These hopes for new norms are the gist to Nietzsche’s (very abstract) “political philosophy.”

Self

The tenth chapter shows how incorporating the truth about values lets one “become who one is”: an individual and self, crystallized from the herd identity one has in living by norms. Nietzsche’s idea of the self grounds it in our reflexivity or self-relation; to “be a self” is to be adequately reflexive. The chapter gives a genealogy of this selfhood, showing it as the culmination of a reflexivity intrinsic to will to power itself and progressively improved in higher forms of this will. Our better self-understanding makes possible a fuller selfhood, one achieved by distinguishing oneself both from one’s parts—one’s drives and affects—and from the group of which one is part. It’s by unifying one’s drives (overcoming fragmentation) and individuating from one’s herd (overcoming assimilation) that one becomes a full-fledged self. This enables one to have values “of one’s own” and to be “selfish” in the way Nietzsche advocates.

The Yes

The ninth chapter begins presenting the values Nietzsche offers as lesson from his critiques of our values so far. It treats the center-piece of these new values, “the Yes.” He sets the goal of a “universal affirmation”: viewing everything, even the ugly, the weak, the sick as good. The bad is a way of being good. This amounts to a “value monism,” denying “opposite values,” which he thinks are presumed in morality’s dualist distinction between good and evil. This Yes is expressed in some of his most famous ideas, including eternal return and amor fati. He tries out ways to “prove” this value monism given what values are. But ultimately he doesn’t offer it as required or true because he wants us to value it “honestly”—as just a valued. We are to value it in a way that engages not just our belief, but our willing and feeling, too.

Drives

The third chapter continues the account of the bodily valuing Nietzsche attributes to all living things. It makes this valuing more concrete by developing the primary way it occurs—in our drives. These are the principal explainers in Nietzsche’s psychology; he offers this “drive psychology” in opposition to our prevailing “agent psychology.” Our drives are the ways we press ahead toward goals, with the underlying aim of power or growth. We value, often unconsciously, in the signs by which these drives steer. Each of us consists of many such drives, synthesized by relations of command and obedience. This drive-synthesis gives each body a system of values: the web of signs it aims toward or away from. The chapter examines how Nietzsche thinks we have access to these largely unconscious drives, how they interact with one another, and what practical lessons he draws (i.e., what new relation to our drives he recommends).