Nietzsches Revaluation of All Values

Brobjer
Why is Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy still regarded as

relevant today? There are a large number of possible answers
to a question like this, but one of the most important and
persuasive is that Nietzsche questioned and discussed the
nature, character and value of our values. Nietzsche frequently
turns other questions such as epistemological and ontological The Philosophy of
ones into axiological ones, making values pivotal in his thought.
It is possible to argue that the revaluation of all values is both Friedrich Nietzsche
the most important and today the most relevant of Nietzsche’s
main philosophical themes and projects. Furthermore, the
theme is intimately involved with what Nietzsche regarded as
his most important work, his magnum opus (that he called his
Nietzsche’s Revaluation of All Values

Nietzsche’s
Hauptwerk), for a long period called The Will to Power but later
Revaluation of All Values.
Revaluation
About the Series
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most
Series Editors
Kaitlyn Creasy
of All Values
important and influential philosophers California State
of the nineteenth century. This University,
Cambridge Elements series offers
concise and structured overviews of
a range of central topics in his thought,
San Bernardino
Matthew Meyer Thomas H. Brobjer
University of
written by a diverse group of experts Scranton
with a variety of approaches.
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Elements in the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
edited by
Kaitlyn Creasy
California State University, San Bernardino
Matthew Meyer
The University of Scranton
NIETZSCHE’S
REVALUATION OF ALL
VALUES
Thomas H. Brobjer
Uppsala University
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DOI: 10.1017/9781009421652
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Elements in the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
DOI: 10.1017/9781009421652
First published online: November 2024
Thomas H. Brobjer
Uppsala University
Author for correspondence: Thomas H. Brobjer, [email protected]
Abstract: Why is Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy still regarded as

relevant today? There are a large number of possible answers to
a question like this, but one of the most important and persuasive is that
Nietzsche questioned and discussed the nature, character and value of
our values. Nietzsche frequently turns other questions such as
epistemological and ontological ones into axiological ones, making
values pivotal in his thought. It is possible to argue that the revaluation of
all values is both the most important and today the most relevant of
Nietzsche’s main philosophical themes and projects. Furthermore, the
theme is intimately involved with what Nietzsche regarded as his most
important work, his magnum opus (that he called his Hauptwerk), for
a long period called The Will to Power but later Revaluation of All Values.
Keywords: Nietzsche, Revaluation of Values, axiology, values, magnum opus
© Thomas H. Brobjer 2024

ISBNs: 9781009539470 (HB), 9781009421638 (PB), 9781009421652 (OC)
ISSNs: 2976-5722 (online), 2976-5714 (print)
Contents
1 Revaluation of All Values as a Philosophical Project 1
2 Revaluation of All Values as a Four-Volume Literary

Project 35
Notes on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations 60
References 63
Nietzsche’s Revaluation of All Values 1
1 Revaluation of All Values as a Philosophical Project

Nietzsche uses the expression ‘revaluation of all values’ in two different, but for
him related, senses. On the one hand, it refers to a philosophical task or problem
related to the setting of rank of values and the determination of the value of
values. On the other hand, he used it as the title (at first as subtitle) to his planned
philosophical magnum opus in four volumes that he worked on from at least
1884 until his collapse, but never completed. The first time Nietzsche ever used
the expression was as a subtitle to that work. I have here separated these aspects,
and in the first part treat it as a philosopheme and in the second part as a literary
project.
1.1 Introduction to Section 1: Revaluation of Values

as a Philosophical Project
Why is Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy still regarded as relevant today?
There are a large number of possible answers to a question like this, but one of
the most important and persuasive is that Nietzsche questioned and discussed
the nature, character, and value of our values. Nietzsche frequently turns other
questions such as epistemological and ontological ones into axiological ones,
making values pivotal in his thought. It is possible to argue that the revaluation
of all values is both the most important and today the most relevant of
Nietzsche’s main philosophical themes and projects. Furthermore, the theme
is intimately involved with what Nietzsche regarded as his most important
work, his magnum opus (that he called his Hauptwerk), for a long period called
The Will to Power but later Revaluation of All Values.
Revaluation of all values, the critique of Christian and modern values, and
the affirmation of an alternative set of values are generally regarded as one of
Nietzsche’s most important main themes or tropes. Nietzsche refers to the
expression for the first time in his published books in Beyond Good and Evil
(BGE 46), and it is therefore usually regarded as a late trope, as important
during the last years, 1886–88. I will show that it began much earlier, including
that it is important in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), where, surprisingly, it
is usually ignored, probably because he does not yet use the word ‘revaluation’.
I instead argue that its origin should be regarded as occurring in 1880/81.
I thereafter comment on its rather complex context at this time, with no single
obvious thematic textual context outweighing all the others. I will also consider
some of the consequences of this early dating.
Relatively little interest has been directed at Nietzsche’s revaluation of all
values by philosophers and scholars. This is surprising considering the import-
ance the late Nietzsche gives to it and unfortunate since a disregard of it is
2 Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
associated with an overemphasis on Nietzsche’s critical philosophy at the price

of undervaluing his constructive and affirmative alternative. In Ecce Homo (EH
BGE 1 and EH Destiny 1), he suggests that the revaluation is the goal and
purpose of his life.
The revaluation of all values consists of a critique of our present and
Christian values and an affirmation of another set of healthier values. What
some of these alternative values can be I will mention herein. The expression
‘revaluation’ started as a planned subtitle, later the full title, of what Nietzsche
regarded as his most important work, his magnum opus (Hauptwerk).
I will next show that (a) Nietzsche speaks of the revaluation in terms of
a dichotomy of values – in terms of the existence of two paradigms of values; (b)
one revaluation has already occurred, from antiquity to modernity by the means
of Socrates, Plato, and Christianity; (c) a second ‘opposite’ revaluation has been
attempted during the Renaissance but failed: the ‘Renaissance [. . .] The revalu-
ation of Christian values [. . .] my question is its question’, and (d) that Nietzsche
explicitly denies utopian interpretations of the revaluation and affirms the
importance of history for the revaluation: ‘I sought in history the beginning
of the construction of the reverse ideals (the concepts “pagan”, “classical”,
“noble” newly discussed and expounded –).’ Nietzsche also gives some other
more specific clues to his own revaluation. (e) He reverses the conventional
moral statement ‘do this and you will be happy’ by claiming instead ‘a “happy
one” must perform certain acts’, i.e., that character determines actions. (f) He
also refers to his first book (The Birth of Tragedy) and its attempt to revive
tragedy as part of his revaluation: ‘Everything in this essay is prophetic: the
proximity of the return of the Greek spirit, the necessity for counter Alexanders
to retie the Gordian knot of Greek culture after it had been untied.’ Finally, with
his very strong person-oriented approach, (g) he claims that ‘we ourselves, we
free spirits, are already a “revaluation of all values”’.
Important for understanding the revaluation is that Nietzsche constructs a
dichotomy of values. The very explicit use of such expressions as ‘reversing
ideals’, ‘the opposite values’, ‘antithetical evaluations’ ‘stand evaluations on
their head’, ‘inimical value’, and ‘the inverse values’ clearly indicates that there
basically exist only two alternatives. Most emphasis is by Nietzsche placed on
ancient contra Christian values which are seen, for example, by his recurrent
claim that the present values have ruled for two millennia, but many other
versions of essentially the same dichotomy are also mentioned: master-morality
contra slave-morality, noble contra plebeian, Roman contra Jewish, and moral-
ities of self-affirmation contra self-denial. At least one revaluation has already
occurred in the history of European culture, and Socrates, Plato, Jesus, and
Paul are associated with this, and Luther with its revival. Many of Nietzsche’s
statements imply that the revaluation will mean an inversion of values so that
the values held in low esteem today will be held in high, and conversely.
Furthermore, the present Christian values are regarded as anti-natural. On
several occasions, Nietzsche implies that the revaluation has already begun,
and even occurred, through Nietzsche himself and his equals. It follows that
Nietzsche’s affirmative values are the values associated with the healthy side of
the dichotomy. Finally, we are in fact given an example of a revaluation from
decadence to health in the form of the Renaissance, and Nietzsche closely
associates the present revaluation to that of the Renaissance – ‘my question is
its question’.
Apart from these general statements, we are also given three concrete
examples of what Nietzsche means by the revaluation. First, he refers to his
understanding of Greek tragedy as his first revaluation of all values: ‘the soil
out of which I draw all that I will and can’. Second, he claims that the free
spirits already constitute a revaluation of all values. Furthermore, Nietzsche
ends Ecce Homo with the statement: ‘Dionysus against the Crucified’, where
Dionysus represents healthy and life-affirming values, while the Crucified
represents Christian and present values.
1.2 The Interpretation of the Revaluation in Secondary Literature

Surprisingly, studies of the revaluation of all values remain remarkably rare.
This is evident from both bibliographies and the discussions in many book-
length studies of Nietzsche. Many books on Nietzsche discuss will to power,
Übermensch, and eternal recurrence, but say nothing, or almost nothing, about
the revaluation of all values. Others say little. Some examples: Karl Jaspers
seems to understand it as the creation of essentially wholly new values. Tracy
Strong, in his interesting study, has two long chapters on the will to power and
the eternal return, little about the Übermensch but no chapter on the revaluation,
and, in spite of a very detailed index, no entry corresponding to revaluation.
Thiele emphasizes the transvaluation as the creation of new values after the
old ones have been destroyed (nihilism). Schutte, who has written a PhD on
the revaluation, seems to hold a similar view in Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche
without Masks (1986). Philippa Foot, in her ‘Nietzsche: The Revaluation of
Values’, published in Solomon (1973, 1980), emphasizes the critical nature of
the revaluation as an attack on Christian and ‘all morality’.
Walter Kaufmann (1974) has a long chapter in his book on Nietzsche
entitled ‘The Death of God and the Revaluation’ (also republished separately
in Solomon). However, the actual discussion of the revaluation covers only
eight pages. Kaufmann asks if Nietzsche offers us new values, or, expressed
differently, if it is his intention to pour us new wine: ‘The answer is: No. [. . .]
In other words, the “revaluation” was a war against accepted valuations, not
the creation of new values’ (1974: 111). The revaluation is ‘the diagnosis itself’.
However, strangely enough, Kaufmann adds that ‘this consists in nothing
beyond what Socrates did’, referring to Socrates in his role as a ‘gadfly’ and
quoting Nietzsche’s use of him in this sense. This is unfortunate, for Nietzsche
also regarded Socrates as one of the most important revaluators of the first
negative revaluation, the one from antiquity to moralization and Christianity.
Kaufmann’s conclusion is clearly that the revaluation is a critical project: ‘The
revaluation is thus the alleged discovery that our morality is, by its own stand-
ards, poisonously immoral’ (1974: 113). However, he also mentions, but with-
out drawing conclusions or consequences, that ‘The “revaluation” is not a new
value-legislation but reverses prevalent valuations that reversed ancient valu-
ations’ (1974: 111).
Ackermann’s book Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look is one which attempts ‘to
sketch Nietzsche in movement’ in which much of Nietzsche’s later thought is
related back to his earlier writings and to his sympathy with the pre-Socratics.
Without going into details, he nonetheless claims in the preface: ‘I try to show
Nietzsche’s thoughts develop and ramify from his early, concentrated vision of
Greece before Socrates, a vision that Nietzsche never abandons and a vision that
is the source of his shocking new tables of values’ (1989: ix).
One work that does take the ‘revaluation of all values’ as a central thought in
Nietzsche’s philosophy is Beat Kissling’s 400-page PhD dissertation entitled
Die Umwertung der Werte als Pädagogisches Projekt Nietzsches (1992). It also
acknowledges the importance of early Greek thought for Nietzsche, but the
emphasis in the book is on interpretations of Nietzsche’s views by later thinkers,
and on its relevance for pedagogics.
This general lack of discussions about the revaluation is surprising and
unfortunate. It is surprising, considering Nietzsche’s own emphasis, which is
as much, or more, on this theme as on any other. It is unfortunate, since this is
closely associated with Nietzsche’s own affirmative or constructive values. A
disregard of the revaluation is associated with an over-emphasis on Nietzsche’s
critical philosophy at the price of under-valuating his constructive and affirma-
tive alternative. It is also ‘unfortunate’ because we are confused about and lack
understanding of values, and Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers who have
thought profoundly about values.
A work that frequently mentions revaluation is Bernard Reginster’s The
Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (2006), where his main
claim is the truism that according to Nietzsche, for us to overcome nihilism, we
need to revalue the values that leads to nihilism (50). Reginster uses a rather
analytical approach and divides nihilism into two forms, nihilism of despair
and nihilism of disorientation (a dichotomy that Nietzsche does not set up). He
assumes that Nietzsche regarded that ‘the essential inhospitality of this world’
leads to despair (100). However, Nietzsche seems to regard life-affirmation
as being natural (and therefore refers to natural and anti-natural, i.e., decadent,
values), especially before the first revaluation (performed by the Jews,
Christianity, and Plato). Nietzsche emphasizes the richness and superabun-
dance of life, nature, and the world. He thus, counter to Reginster, regards
affirmation as the default view (Nietzsche rejects pessimism as well as nihil-
ism). Nowhere does the book discuss or even mention the first ‘negative’
revaluation nor the four-volume literary project, Revaluation of All Values,
that Nietzsche worked hard on for the last four to five years of his active life.
Reginster bases much of his arguments on the somewhat unreliable collection
of late notes, The Will to Power, rather than on the much more reliable KSA
(which also is much more chronologically reliable).
A full-length study of Nietzsche’s revaluation is E. E. Sleinis’ Nietzsche’s
Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies (1994). His emphasis is ‘on the
theoretical feasibility of such an enterprise’. His main concern is to examine the
apparently impossible attempt to revalue all values. Can values be revalued
without recourse to values? For this purpose, he examines the methods and
strategies Nietzsche uses. He argues that Nietzsche has a naturalistic conception
of value and that the source of all value lies within valuing beings. Further, he
asserts that for Nietzsche there exists an objective measure of value and that this
is power. In four chapters, he deals with truth, moral values, religious values,
and aesthetic values, and their relation to a revaluation. For example, in the
chapter on religious values, Sleinis correctly argues that Nietzsche performs
a meta-revaluation in that he views religions not as an ontological thesis but as
essentially concerned with value. Concretely, he argues that Nietzsche’s higher-
order values are those that result in the invigoration and the enrichment of life.
This book thus contains both more and less than its title seems to promise.
There is no examination of what Nietzsche said or meant when he referred to
revaluation, nor any discussions of the concrete values that Nietzsche referred to
as healthy values. What it does contain is an analytical account of much of
Nietzsche’s philosophy in general and especially regarded values. However, the
gap between what Nietzsche actually says and Sleinis’ analysis is often so great
that the analysis becomes less interesting and all too abstract. Nowhere in the
book is there any reference to, or discussion of, Nietzsche’s many statements
that a revaluation has already occurred between antiquity and Christianity.
These and many other of Nietzsche’s references to revaluation give us important
information about what Nietzsche meant by revaluation. To me, it seems very
clear that it is not an abstract revaluation of all our present values, including all
of Nietzsche’s own values, into something completely new. Instead, the revalu-
ation refers to the change from one set of (life-denying) values to another and
opposing set of (life-affirming) values. Some of these values will be new, but
many will be old in the sense that we are aware of them today and that they were
even more prevalent during antiquity and the Renaissance. With such a view,
many of Sleinis’ investigations appear abstract and irrelevant, but a number of
side issues are clarified and his examination of many of Nietzsche’s strategies
remains relevant and illuminating. A related study is Aaron Ridley’s article
‘Nietzsche and the Re-Evaluation of Values’ (2005) that also, in an analyt-
ical manner, attempts to clarify what a revaluation would entail. Both studies
conclude that a revaluation is at least theoretically feasible.
John Richardson has recently written a valuable study, Nietzsche’s Values
(2020), that contains many interesting and good arguments and insights.
Especially valuable, it seems to me, is his emphasis on value, on truth, and on
using historical approaches. However, oddly enough, revaluation is not much
discussed in the book. There is no chapter or subchapter that discusses it, nor
does he refer to the only full book-length study of revaluation, that of Sleinis
(discussed earlier), and in the index the term ‘Revaluation’ has only five pages
listed, and these pages do not contain much discussion of it. He, like a better
Sleinis, works mostly on a theoretical level. There is little discussion of actual
values Nietzsche revalues, and there is no discussion or even mention of the
four-volume literary project, Revaluation of All Values, that Nietzsche worked
on. Nonetheless, Richardson correctly points out that ‘genealogy is indispens-
able for a revaluation of our values’ (325) because it discloses the origin of our
values and because it creates a necessary distancing effect that history always
has. He further argues that what Nietzsche wants is ‘spiritual’ growth, not
a technological, an economic or one of physical power, but ‘understanding of
itself and especially of its own willing and valuing’ (456). He continues:
What Nietzsche anticipates, I suggest, is another advance in human self-

awareness, comparable to that by which human passed from ‘custom’ into
‘morality’ [. . .] it will happen at the whole societal level: new capacities will
be trained into members generally via new shared norms. These new norms
will be the outcome of the ‘revaluation of values’ Nietzsche so famously calls
for (456).
He further points out that ‘the overall way Nietzsche means to “revalue” our
norms is by “de-moralizing” them’ (457). These, and many other observations,
are valuable, but it seems to over-emphasize the social and long-term aspects
of a revolution of values, and miss the more concrete revaluations (e.g., of
Christian and moral values) Nietzsche most frequently argues for, and his
claims, at least in part, to already have performed.
Andreas Urs Sommer has in his Friedrich Nietzsches ‘Der Antichrist’ (2000)
insightfully discussed several aspects of the theme revaluation, and especially
emphasized Nietzsche’s use of false coinage and fraudulence, e.g., in The
Antichrist, 12, for references to those who argue for the false present values
(from the perspective of the healthy and true early values). He argues that one
of the senses of the hammer, in the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols, is a
‘Prägehammer’, which determines which coins are valid and which are false.
‘Nietzsche’s revaluation reinstalls that, which due to the “false coinage” of
the idealists, Christians and other bad company had been regarded as invalid
coinage’ (155). Joseph Kranak has written an interesting dissertation entitled
Nietzsche’s Revaluation of All Values (Marquette University, 2014), that examines
many different aspects of Nietzsche’s philosopheme as an unfinished concept
(and unfinished work), but without using any German language material.
Much remains to be studied to better understand Nietzsche’s revaluation and
his views of and relation to value. Perhaps it is also possible for us to use
Nietzsche to better understand values and evaluation in general. In a note at the
end of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM I 17, Nietzsche’s
note), he writes, ‘All the sciences have from now on to prepare the way for the
future task of the philosophers: this task understood as the solution of the
problem of value, the determination of the order of rank among values.’
1.3 The Nature, Importance, and Meaning of the

‘Revaluation of All Values’
The importance for Nietzsche of the revaluation was great. From Beyond Good
and Evil (BGE 46 and 203), where it is explicitly introduced in his published
writings, it constitutes an outstanding Leitmotif, and it reaches a crescendo in the
last books, promising even more for the near future. In Ecce Homo, he seems to
suggest that the revaluation is the goal and purpose of his life. The Leitmotif is
so strong that it is reflected in most of the book titles from Beyond Good and Evil
onwards. Beyond Good and Evil means beyond our present and Christian moral
values (but not beyond good and bad), and the subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy
of the Future, seems to point to the future epoch with new values Nietzsche
hopes we will enter, as well as to his planned magnum opus in four volumes,
which he had announced as a work in progress on the back cover of the book.
The revaluation of all values includes aesthetical values, but since the strongest
values today are moral values, the centre of gravity concerns a revaluation
of these. Nietzsche, as a philologist, historian, and realist, believes that a
revaluation will only succeed if we understand the power and genesis of present
values. In this sense, On the Genealogy of Morals is a preparatory study for the
revaluation. This is also how Nietzsche describes the three essays that constitute
the book in Ecce Homo after having stated that Christianity is ‘a counter-
movement, the great revolt against the domination of noble values’ and that it
was born out of a spirit of ressentiment: ‘Three decisive preliminary studies of
a psychologist for a revaluation of all values’ (EH ‘Books’ GM). Though not
obvious from the title, The Case of Wagner concerns a revaluation of aesthetic
values, mainly in the sense parallel to Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist,
i.e., in the form of a critique of the decadent values of which Wagner is ‘the most
instructive case’.1 Or as he says in the discussion of the work in Ecce Homo:
‘What is it I suffer from when I suffer from the destiny of music? From this: that
music has been deprived of its world-transfiguring, affirmative character, that it
is décadence music and no longer the flute of Dionysus’ (EH ‘Books’ CW:1).
The title of the next work, Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung), stands for
a testing and smashing of idols – i.e., of old truths and values, and that these
truths and values are on their way out. He presents the book in Ecce Homo with
the words:
Anyone who wants to get a quick idea of how topsy-turvy everything was
before I came along should make a start with this work. What the title page
calls idol is quite simply what till now has been called ‘truth’. Twilight of the
Idols – in plain words: the old truth is coming to an end. (EH ‘Books’ TI:1)
The Antichrist indicates Nietzsche’s severe opposition towards Christianity

(in all its forms). The subtitle of this work was while he wrote the book and for
some time thereafter: Attempt at a Critique of Christianity. Book One of the
Revaluation of All Values. In the preface to his last original book, Nietzsche
explains that the reason for writing Ecce Homo was to avoid mistakes as to
whom he is, considering that he will soon make the heaviest demand that has
ever been made on mankind, i.e., the revaluation, to revalue their values.
1
For aesthetic values, as is also the case in regard to moral values, the healthy values are the
classical ones. This is most evident in the epilogue to The Case of Wagner: “In its measure of
strength every age also possesses a measure for what virtues are permitted and forbidden to it.
Either it has the virtues of ascending life: then it will resist from the profoundest depths the virtues
of declining life. Or the age itself represents declining life: then it also requires the virtues of
decline, then it hates everything that justifies itself solely out of abundance, out of the overflowing
riches of strength. Aesthetics is tied indissolubly to these biological presuppositions: there is an
aesthetics of decline, and there is a classical aesthetics.” The same distinction is discussed in GS,
V, 370 (and reprinted in Nietzsche contra Wagner) under the title: “What is romanticism?” where
he makes the main distinction regarding all aesthetical values concerning whether “it is hunger or
superabundance that has here become creative?” The values associated with an over-fullness of
life are repeatedly referred to as Dionysian.
Since at least 1884 (but really already from 1881), Nietzsche had planned to
write a major magnum opus, that he called his Hauptwerk, from 1886 using the
expression ‘revaluation of all values’ either in the title or in the subtitle, as I will
discuss in Section 2 of this Element. The Antichrist was the first and the only
finished volume of this Hauptwerk, but his notebooks contain plans and notes
for the three following volumes.
1.3.1 Four Possible Interpretations of the Meaning

of the Revaluation of Values
What is the meaning of the expression ‘revaluation of all values’?2 Two evident
preliminary facts can be established. First, the values to be ‘revalued’ are our
present values, whether they be called Christian, modern, nihilistic or European.
Second, there has already, according to Nietzsche, been at least one revaluation
previously in history, between antiquity and Christianity. This will become
more evident as we go into more detail. However, the revaluation is still open
to a number of different interpretations:
1. The first interpretation understands the revaluation as a transvaluation of

old values to something new, i.e., the ancient values were transvalued by
Christianity and Christian values are now to be transvalued into something
new, fundamentally different from both ancient and Christian values. Such
a transvaluation can be regarded as either linear or as being more or less
dialectic and Hegelian. This form of interpretation is likely to be somewhat
‘utopian’ since it will be unable to say much about what these new values
are, apart from being new and different, and will probably concentrate on the
critical side of the revaluation, but still insisting on the existence of new
possibilities. This interpretation is probably also the most common inter-
pretation in general. I will refer to this as the utopian interpretation.
2. The second interpretation emphasizes the questioning, the examining, and
the diagnosis of values. It argues that the revaluation project is an extension
of Nietzsche’s statement in The Gay Science 269: ‘In what do you believe? –
In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.’ This
2
Sometimes Umwerthung is translated, less accurately, as transvaluation. This translation is less
suitable since the meaning of Umwerthung for Nietzsche is closer to revaluation than to trans-
valuation, as will be shown next. This is also shown by the synonyms which he uses for
Umwerthung, such as Umkehrung (= reversal) and umkehren (= turn back) and Umdrehung
(= turn, revolution, rotation) and umdrehen (= turn round, turn over, turn back). Finally, consid-
ering that Nietzsche was no stranger to the coining of words and phrases, it seems likely that
he would have coined the words Transwerthung and transwerthen if transvaluation was what
he meant.
interpretation, which can be called the critical interpretation, has even less
to say about the future revalued values and hence also about Nietzsche’s
affirmative values.
3. The third interpretation understands the revaluation as a reversal of values,
today’s high values will after the revaluation become low values and the low
ones high. This interpretation can be called a reversal interpretation. It
implies that the new values are defined in terms of a reversal of the present
values. It can find support in the texts of Nietzsche but remains problematic
since it is rarely obvious what the opposite of most values are without some
other measure or criterion. This interpretation is probably unusual, at least
among Nietzsche scholars. Some of those critical of Nietzsche’s philosophy
may hold this view.
4. The fourth interpretation understands the revaluation as essentially a
re-valuation, i.e., back to earlier ancient, noble, and healthy values. This
interpretation is the only one with a fairly clear view of what the new values
should be like – with similarity and kinship to the old ancient values – and is
thus perhaps more open to falsification than the other three. This interpret-
ation can be called a dichotomy interpretation for it assumes that there exist
two value-paradigms, the noble and natural contra the anti-natural and
decadent, the ancient contra the modern (Christian). This view has often
been a minor supplement to the utopian and critical interpretations, but
rarely defended as the main interpretation.
It is unlikely that any one of these four interpretations, as ideal types, will alone
yield a complete and perfect interpretation. Rather, each of them has its own
virtues and strengths and a certain degree of mixture is to be expected.
Nonetheless, there are strong arguments that the last, the dichotomy interpret-
ation, is superior to the others.
The dichotomy interpretation does not assume a complete copying of Greek
values, only that there are two opposing sets of fundamental values. A copying
of values would be both undesirable and impossible (compare KSA 8, 7[1]:
‘A culture, which copies a Greek one, can create nothing new’). There is an
important ingredient of something new and something different that possibly is
understated in its name. This can be seen in Nietzsche’s emphasis on creativity,
on the new, and on the future.
The supporters of the utopian interpretation make use of a section in Twilight
of the Idols:
In the ear of the Conservatives. – What was formerly not known, what is
known today or could be known – a reversion, a turning back in any sense and
to any degree, is quite impossible. We physiologists at least know that. But all
priests and moralists have believed it was possible – they have wanted to take
mankind back, force it back, to an earlier standard of virtue. Morality has
always been a bed of Procrustes. (TI ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ 43)
This appears to strongly favour the ‘utopian’ interpretation, or at least falsify the
‘reversed’ and the ‘dichotomy’ interpretations. However, this is not the case. Such
an understanding of this statement would be comparable to viewing Nietzsche’s
critique of liberal theologians and free thinkers such as David Strauss as indicating
that Nietzsche was a Christian. His view is rather that the conservative and the free
thinker are not radical enough. They remain within one value-paradigm and either
dilute these values or attempt to return to older outlived versions of the same
values. A few sections below in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche again makes a
statement that at first appears to confirm the ‘utopian’ interpretation but, after
closer inspection, actually fits the dichotomy interpretation better.
Progress in my sense. – I too speak of a ‘return to nature’, although it is not

really a going-back but a going-up – up into a high, free, even frightful nature
and naturalness, such as plays with great tasks, is permitted to play with them.
(TI ‘Expeditions’ 48)
Nietzsche immediately adds that ‘Napoleon was a piece of “return to nature”

as I understand it’ and Nietzsche regarded Napoleon as a continuation of the
Renaissance. In the following section Goethe is given as another ‘return to
nature’ and also connected with the Renaissance, with healthy values: ‘through
a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance’ (TI ‘Expeditions’ 49). Thus,
rather than being ‘utopian’, Nietzsche is concrete and historical and he has no
problem referring to the Greeks as an example and as remaining ‘the supreme
cultural event of history – they knew, they did what was needed to be done’ –
i.e., inaugurate culture in the body, not the ‘soul’ (TI ‘Expeditions’ 47).
Obviously, Nietzsche is primarily concerned with the present or future
revaluation. However, many of his discussions and references are to the earlier
‘negative’ revaluation from antiquity to Christianity. Such an emphasis would
be inconsistent with an interpretation of the revaluation as a transvaluation into
something new or as mainly being a critique of present values, or at least be
rather irrelevant in view of these interpretations. However, this emphasis is
wholly consistent with the ‘dichotomy’ interpretation, and in its light very
relevant. The ‘utopian’ interpretation ignores both the explicit statements
Nietzsche makes as to the importance of history – recall his critique of philo-
sophers for their lack of historical sense (TI ‘Reason’ 1) – and the many specific
historical examples Nietzsche gives and uses. In the epilogue to The Case
of Wagner, he lists as examples of noble morality and master morality:
Roman, pagan, classical, Renaissance, and the Icelandic saga. The ‘utopian’
interpretations are forced to deny the dichotomy of values since they must
assume at least a third alternative for the future. Considering the prominent
place of the dichotomy in Nietzsche’s discussions of the revaluation, this is
a very serious flaw. This denial also means that they are forced to interpret
Nietzsche’s references to the reversal of values much more metaphorically than
they are intended. They also ignore the hints that the revaluation already has
occurred, with Nietzsche and his equals. In conclusion, this means that they
ignore or under-value many of Nietzsche’s most fundamental affirmative values
associated with, for example, tragedy, antiquity, the Renaissance, and nobility.
The ‘critical’ interpretation is correct in discussing the critique of our present
values. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche writes: ‘Let us
articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these
values themselves must first be called in question [. . .] One has taken the value of
these “values” as given, as factual, as beyond all question’ (GM ‘Pref’ 6). Our
present values are, according to Nietzsche, anti-natural and there is a sense in
which a critique of these values is likely to lead to a return to natural values, i.e.,
noble values, like those of the Greeks and the Renaissance. However, in the
absence of affirmative values, such critique could also lead to a deepened nihilism
or, as was the case with Luther’s criticism, to a revival. However, not only does
the critical interpretation ignore Nietzsche’s affirmative values, but it also ignores
or rejects the dichotomy, and this gives its critique of the present values a false
perspective. It exchanges the utopian aspects of the previous interpretation for an
overly critical interpretation. In ignoring the constructive side of the revaluation,
they lay themselves open to Nietzsche’s critique: ‘Those are my enemies: they
want to overthrow but not to build up. They say: “all that is without value” – but
do not want to create any value’ (KSA 10, 5[1], 218). In what it ignores, the
‘critical’ interpretation has the same flaws as the previous one.
The third interpretation, which regards the revaluation as a reversal of today’s
values, is based on Nietzsche’s many references to a reversion and inversion of
values, and on his critique of our present values. However, this interpretation
makes little sense unless one accepts a dichotomy of values, for the meaning of
a reversal of values generally, without a dichotomy, is not obvious. The second
problem with this interpretation is that it starts with today’s values and attempts
to invert them. This is a reactive response that fails to take Nietzsche’s affirma-
tive ideals into sufficient consideration. When this is done, the interpretation
becomes similar to the fourth one, the ‘dichotomy’ interpretation.
We have seen that the ‘dichotomy’ interpretation is the one most compatible
with Nietzsche’s statements regarding the revaluation of all values. However,
the revaluation need not be regarded as a return to earlier values, for Nietzsche’s
view is probably better described as claiming that there exist two systems of
value – life- and reality-affirming and life- and reality-denying – always and
independently of history.3 However, it remains true that the greatest example of
a life-affirming epoch is that of the early Greeks and that we have much to learn
from them. There need not be any contradiction between Nietzsche’s praise
of antiquity and his emphasis on creating values. A large part of the emphasis
on the creation of values is directed against merely obeying present values,
and choosing values is part of the creation of values. When Nietzsche talks of
Greece as a prototype and example, he is not referring to a slavish copying, but
to a creative inspiration.
1.3.2 The Meaning of Revaluation in Nietzsche’s Books and Notes
Already by the first occurrence of the word revaluation and of the concept
‘revaluation of all values’ in Nietzsche’s published writings, Beyond Good and
Evil 46, he clearly sets up a dichotomy and claims that a revaluation has already
occurred. The dichotomy is between freedom, pride, and self-confidence on one
side and enslavement, self-mockery, and self-mutilation on the other, where the
latter is associated with Christianity. Then Nietzsche states: ‘the paradoxical
formula “god on the cross” [. . .] promised a revaluation of all the values of
antiquity’ (BGE 46), a dichotomy between ancient and Christian values is
constructed. He continues by pointing at the psychology behind the revaluation:
slave-natures with ‘the great hidden suffering’ (BGE 46), i.e., resentment at
those more privileged than themselves, like the Jews against the Roman nobility
with their tolerance. Thus, in this first occurrence, the revaluation referred to is
the earlier and negative one from antiquity to Christianity. The second reference
to the concept, in Beyond Good and Evil 203, now refers to a positive revaluation:
whither must we direct our hopes? Towards new philosophers, we have no

other choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to make a start on
antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse ‘eternal values’ [. . .] a
revaluation of values under whose novel pressure and hammer a conscience
would be steeled, a heart transformed to brass, so that it might endure the
weight of such a responsibility.
Those who are to carry it out would have to be healthy, strong, and hard but it
is still not clear what this revaluation would entail. The emphasis still concerns
a critique of the present set of ‘Christian-European’ values, which has led, and
leads to an ever-greater diminution of man. However, in the previous section,
Nietzsche defined modern morality in the terms: ‘Morality is in Europe today
herd-animal morality’ and we can thus see how Nietzsche strengthens the
3
In KSA 13, 14[25], written in early 1888, Nietzsche says: “the word classical here used not in the
historical sense, but in the psychological one.”
emphasis on the value dichotomy. In On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 7–8,

Nietzsche again sets up a strict dichotomy, this time between ‘the aristocratic
value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of
God)’ and one which is the reverse of this, associated with the Jews, who made
a revaluation of the older values and with whom the slave revolt in morality
began. Thus Christianity, Jews, and the slave revolt seem to constitute one side
of the dichotomy, and the values before this were Greek and aristocratic, but the
nature of the values after a revaluation still remains unspecified.
In Twilight of the Idols, we come across the ‘first example of my “revaluation
of all values”’ (TI ‘Errors’ 2). Here he ‘reverses’ the most general formula at
the basis of every religion and morality: ‘Do this and this, refrain from this
and this – and you will be happy! Otherwise . . .’. Nietzsche counters this with
the claim that a well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform
certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions. Character, instincts,
and will determine actions! This is related to Nietzsche’s use of physiology and
to his ethics of character or virtue. The drives are prior to virtue and morality.
This view has much in common with the older Greek view, which can be
exemplified with, for example, Heraclitus: ‘Man’s character is his fate’ and
with Greek ethics of virtue. Nietzsche regards ancient morality as essentially
a master morality.4
In the very last section of Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche again gives a specific
meaning to the present revaluation of all values:
Tragedy [. . .] affirmation of life [. . .] is what I called Dionysian [. . .] the

eternal joy of becoming [. . .] And with that I again return to the place from
which I set out – the Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values:
with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and
can – I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus. – I, the teacher of the
eternal recurrence . . . (TI ‘Ancients’ 5)
Note that he claims that tragedy and the Greeks constitute ‘the soil out of
which I draw all that I will and can’. It is difficult for him to be more explicit as
to where the foundation of his affirmative values lies. He makes a similar claim
in a notebook from 1884: ‘The knowledge of the great Greeks has formed me’
(KSA 11, 26[3]).5
There are three important explicit references to ‘revaluation of all values’
in The Antichrist. The first gives a third description of what this revaluation
4
“This is our difference from the Greeks: their morality grew out of the ruling casts.” KSA 11,
25[163], early 1884.
5
“Die Kenntniß der großen Griechen hat mich erzogen: an Heraclit Empedocles Parmenides
Anaxagoras Democrit ist mehr zu verehren, sie sind voller” [than the great philosophers like
Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Spinoza].
means: ‘Let us not undervalue this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are already
a “revaluation of all values”’ (A 13). This shows that the revaluation is already
occurring and it shows the strong ethics of virtue nature of Nietzsche’s thinking,
i.e., that the personality is primary and values and actions only secondary. The
free spirits are further down in the section associated with realism, scientific
method and scepticism. In the penultimate section of The Antichrist, we are
presented with perhaps the clearest expression of what the revaluation of all
values means. Nietzsche here claims that a second revaluation already has been
attempted and for a time succeeded, but in the end failed:
[. . .] what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of Christian values, the

attempt, undertaken with every expedient, with every instinct, with genius of
every kind, to bring about the victory of the opposing values, the noble
values. . . . Up till now this has been the only great war, there has been no
more decisive questioning than that conducted by the Renaissance – my
question is its question – : [. . .] to set the noble values on the throne, which
is to say to set them into the instincts, the deepest needs and desires of him
who sits thereon [. . .] Christianity would thereby have been abolished! –
What happened? [. . .] Luther restored the Church: he attacked it. . . . The
Renaissance – an event without meaning, a great in vain! – (A 61)
Notice that Nietzsche here, and earlier, refers to ‘the opposing values’ (my
italics), not a set of opposing values or just opposing values, strongly implying that
it is a question of only two alternatives, i.e., a dichotomy of systems of values.
Nietzsche constantly praises the Renaissance highly. Like antiquity, but more
rarely and on a lower level, it constitutes an example and model for him. He refers
to it as the ‘last great age’ (TI ‘Expeditions’ 37) and claims that ‘in the modern
time it is the Italian Renaissance which has brought man the highest’ (KSA 10,
7[44]). Both Goethe and Napoleon are associated with the Renaissance (KSA 12,
9[179] and GS 362). He highly commends its sense of virtù. Modern man is
inferior to the man of the Renaissance but ‘the man of the Renaissance, is inferior
to the man of antiquity’ (KSA 12, 16[111]). The Renaissance is generally regarded
as a rebirth of antiquity and was so viewed also by Nietzsche: ‘There was [. . .]
in the Renaissance an uncanny and glittering reawakening of the classical ideal,
of the noble mode of evaluating all things’ (GM I 16). Thus, when he claims that
‘my question is its question’ (A 61), he refers to the Renaissance revaluation of
Christian values into essentially ancient values.
In the last section of The Antichrist, Nietzsche again reaffirms his attack on
the present values (so concisely and provocatively expressed in the title of the
work itself):
I condemn Christianity [. . .] The Christian Church [. . .] has made every value

a disvalue [. . .] a conspiracy against health, beauty, well-constitutedness,
bravery, intellect, benevolence of soul, against life itself . . . [. . .] And one
calculates time from the dies nefastus [unlucky day] on which this fatality
arose – from the first day of Christianity! Why not rather from its last? – From
today? – Revaluation of all values! (A 62)
The last sentence is equivocal but an important sense is surely ‘all (Christian)
values have been revalued’. Nietzsche has disclosed Christianity (including
secularized Christianity) and shown us the alternative. We shall not forget that
while writing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, he planned three further volumes on
the theme of the revaluation. That last sentence is probably also a (half-hidden)
reference to these three further volumes under the main title of Revaluation of All
Values.
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo was written after The Antichrist but was intended to be
published before it. In the first sentence of the preface, Nietzsche explains the
purpose of the book as a presentation of ‘who I am’ – ‘I am the disciple of the
philosopher Dionysus’ – before he will make the heaviest demand on mankind,
that is, the revaluation of all values. The ‘revaluation of all values’ is the Leitmotif
throughout the work and it contains eleven explicit references to it. In the first
two chapters, ‘Why I am So Wise’ and ‘Why I am So Clever’, Nietzsche seems to
describe the revaluation as the goal and meaning of his life, and he attempts to
show why he is able to see and do what no one else sees or does.
At the end of his discussion of The Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo, without
using the word revaluation, Nietzsche clearly refers to a revival of Greek values:
‘Everything in this essay [The Birth of Tragedy] is prophetic: the proximity of
the return of the Greek spirit, the necessity for counter Alexanders to retie the
Gordian knot of Greek culture after it had been untied . . . Listen to the world-
historic accent with which the concept “tragic disposition” is introduced’ (EH
‘Books’ BT:4). With this, Nietzsche also implies that the ‘revaluation’ is a
theme in his writing from his first book onwards. In the sixth section of his
discussion of Human, All Too Human he states that the revaluation is a conse-
quence of historical knowledge, and hence rejects ‘utopian’ interpretations.
The importance of history for the revaluation, and more concretely, what in
history, is expressed in a note from the first half of 1888: ‘I sought in history
the beginning of the construction of reverse ideals (the concepts “pagan”,
“classical”, “noble” newly discovered and expounded –)’ (KSA 13, 16[32]).
In his discussion of Dawn, he describes the revaluation as ‘an escape from
moral values’ which, of course, is fully consistent with his view of himself and
Zarathustra as immoralists. A bit later in the same section, he refers to morality
as the morality of ‘unselfing’. Almost always when Nietzsche speaks of
morality, he refers to modern and Christian morality. Thus, even though it does
not appear so, the statement ‘an escape from all moral values’ allows for
alternative moral values, for an ancient or master morality. Recall, if you will,
Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates and Plato for having moralized the world.
Nietzsche further in this section describes the positive side of the revaluation:
‘in an affirmation of and trust in all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised,
accused’. This shows, pace the utopian and critical interpretations, that the new
values are not unknown, only at present de-valued. This appears to confirm the
reversal interpretation, but on closer inspection, it fits the dichotomy interpret-
ation of the revaluation better.
In the first section of Nietzsche’s discussion of Beyond Good and Evil in
Ecce Homo, he claims that the affirmative part of his task was already done
after having written Dawn, The Gay Science, and, most importantly, Thus
Spoke Zarathustra – ‘it was the turn of the denying, the No-saying and
No-doing part: the revaluation of existing values themselves, the great war’.
This view of Zarathustra as affirmative and of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an
affirmative book is consistent with all Nietzsche’s statements about Zarathustra –
possessing ‘great health’ and as ‘this most affirmative of all spirits’ – and of his
enormous appraisal of the work. What is the nature of the values and the
Weltanschauung in this work? For Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra is
a tragic work.6 We need to recall that tragedy is for Nietzsche an affirmative art
and Weltanschauung: ‘the affirmative pathos par excellence, I call the tragic
pathos’ (EH ‘Books’ Z:1). When Nietzsche introduces Zarathustra for the first
time, in The Gay Science 342, this section is called ‘Incipit tragoedia’, i.e., ‘the
tragedy begins’, and the section also ends with these words. He uses the same
words when he refers to Thus Spoke Zarathustra after it was written, in The Gay
Science, V, 382. From this section he also quotes in Ecce Homo at length. In his
discussion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo, he refers to it, or aspects of
it, five or six times as the concept Dionysus and as being Dionysian, and he refers
to the language of Zarathustra as dithyrambic. The Weltanschauung is thus,
according to Nietzsche, akin to ancient tragedy. We cannot examine all the values
expounded in Thus Spoke Zarathustra here, but those of ‘that decisive chapter’
(EH ‘Books’ Z:1) ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’, so suitable for a study of the
revaluation of all values, can be commented upon. The theme of this chapter in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is clearly one of revaluation even if the expression is not
used. About half of the thirty sections of this, the longest chapter in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, are critical and give different versions of ‘shatter the old law-tables’.
6
For an excellent work on Nietzsche and tragedy, and of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a tragic work,
see May (1990: especially Ch. 7). See also Higgins (1987: Ch. 2) and Meyer (2024: Ch. 1).
This critique culminates in the command: ‘Shatter, shatter the good and the just!’
The new law-tables are only half-written, lying among the old shattered ones. We
are given a rather long list – in the form of metaphors and similes – of virtues,
descriptions, and imperatives, summarizing most of what has been said earlier in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Nietzsche did not publish part four of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and therefore this section which is placed near the end of part three,
can well be seen as a summary.) The affirmative part of this chapter claims that
what is good and evil depends on the goal, and the goal is the Übermensch. To
this theme, a number of concepts are associated: the future, a new nobility,
wanting to rule, and life and society as an experiment. We are further given
a description of ‘the highest soul’ and a very large number of ‘virtues’ are
described and recommended: the bestowing virtue, honesty (realism), creativity,
courage, dance and laughter, pride and self-love, self-overcoming, and becoming
better than the best (compare Nietzsche’s interest and praise of the Greek
concepts agon and aristeuein), and willingness to sacrifice oneself and one’s
neighbours. It culminates in: ‘This new law-table do I put over you, O my
brothers: Become hard!’ – for the noble and the creative are hard, and the soft
will inevitably adapt themselves to the present values.
The interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the culmination of Nietzsche’s
affirmative values is confirmed a little later in Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche
claims that the domination of Christian values was due to the fact that ‘above all,
a counter-ideal was lacking – until Zarathustra’ (EH ‘Books’ GM). Thereafter
Nietzsche refers to the tremendous task of the revaluation and speaks of it as
a shattering thunderbolt, explaining thereby the title of the last chapter: ‘Why
I am a Destiny.’ In this chapter Nietzsche claims: ‘But my truth is dreadful: for
hitherto the lie has been called truth. – Revaluation of all values: this is my
formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in
me has become flesh and genius’ (EH ‘Destiny’ 1). Nietzsche here suggests, as
he has also done earlier, that the two value systems are not equivalent – not only
are they different and of different value, but one is also natural while the other is
not. Therefore, the turning, or returning, to the ancient paradigm can be regarded
as a ‘supreme coming-to-oneself’. Nietzsche continues: ‘I contradict as has never
been contradicted and am nonetheless the opposite of a negative spirit.’ The same
statement is repeatedly made about Zarathustra. The reason he can make this
apparently paradoxical statement is because he contradicts within one ‘para-
digm’, while praising or pointing at another – or, alternatively, he regards himself
as a philosophical physician who is negating a negation, who is attacking a
disease and thus, by negating, being curative. Nietzsche continues on this theme
in section seven: ‘Indeed, this is my insight: the teachers, the leaders of humanity,
theologians all of them, were also, all of them, decadents: hence the revaluation of
all values into hostility to life, hence morality’ (EH ‘Destiny’ 7).
In section eight, he reconnects to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and gives several
examples of truths and concepts created by Christian morality but absent among
healthy values:
Have I been understood? I have not just now said a word that I could not have
said five years ago through the mouth of Zarathustra – The unmasking of
Christian morality is an event without equal, a real catastrophe. He who
exposes it is a force majeure, a destiny [. . .] The concept ‘God’ invented as
the antithetical concept to life [. . .] The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, finally even
‘immortal soul’, invented so as to despise the body, so as to make it sick [. . .]
The concept ‘sin’ invented together with the instrument of torture which goes
with it, the concept of ‘free will’ [. . .] Finally – it is the most fearful – in the
concept of the good man common cause made with everything weak, sick, ill-
constituted, suffering from itself [. . .] an ideal made of opposition to the
proud and well-constituted, to the affirmative man, to the man certain of the
future and guaranteeing the future – the latter is henceforth called the evil
man . . . And all this was believed in as morality! – Ecrasez l’infâme! (EH
‘Destiny’ 8)
We can note that according to Nietzsche none of these ‘inventions’ (with the
exception of the immortal soul accepted by, for example, Pythagoras and
Empedocles) – the Christian God, sin, free will, and ‘goodness’ – existed in pre-
Socratic Greece. The last section of Ecce Homo, essentially Nietzsche’s last
words, consists of only a few words: ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysus
against the Crucified.’
The first two occurrences of the expression ‘revaluation of all values’ in
Nietzsche’s writings can be found in a notebook covering the period of summer
and autumn 1884, i.e., about one year before Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good
and Evil where it first appeared in print (KSA 11, 26[259] and 26[284]).7 Its very
first appearance is as a catchword, as a subtitle to a planned work: ‘Philosophy of
Eternal Recurrence: An Attempt at the Revaluation of All Values’, that probably
represents an early version of Nietzsche’s plans for a Hauptwerk. The second
occurrence is in a note, consisting of three short numbered sections, outlining the
planned content of this work. First, the idea of eternal recurrence, its presupposi-
tions, and its consequences are to be introduced. Second, discussion of eternal
recurrence as the heaviest thought: and its probable effect if it is not prevented by
means of a revaluation of all values. Third, the revaluation of all values is
introduced as the means of enduring the idea of eternal recurrence. Pleasure at
7
Thereafter come six occurrences in a notebook that covers a full year, from approximately when
Nietzsche started writing Beyond Good and Evil until it was published.
uncertainty (rather than certainty), creativity, power, and pride are associated with
the revaluation.
The expression ‘revaluation of all values’ occurs in two slightly different
senses in Nietzsche’s notebooks. In a first sense, it is used mainly as a catchword
in drafts for titles or subtitles (usually for Nietzsche’s Hauptwerk). The second
sense is more general and similar to how it is used in the published works
already discussed. I have found about two score occurrences, about half of them
as title or subtitle, and half of them as an expression used or discussed.
Of the more general references to revaluation in Nietzsche’s notebooks,
several are more or less duplicates of one another, and several are drafts and
very similar to the published statements already discussed. In several of them,
he emphasizes that the old values necessarily lead to pessimism and nihilism.
He emphasizes the strength and importance of the revaluation by claiming that it
will be very costly, a theme discussed in greater detail in Ecce Homo, and he
asks questions such as ‘How would these men have to be constituted who took
upon themselves this revaluation?’ Only four notes will here be used to supple-
ment the previous discussion. All four discuss the revaluation of moral values
and set up slightly different versions of the same dichotomy, that between
a morality of self-denial and one of self-affirmation. In the first of these,
Nietzsche states: ‘The ignored main fact: There is a contradiction between
‘becoming more moral’ and the lifting up and making stronger the type man’
(KSA 12, 2[131]). In the second: ‘What has been deified? The value instincts in
the community (that which made possible its continued existence). What has
been slandered? That which set apart the higher men from the lower, the desires
that create clefts’ (KSA 13, 16[15]). In the third: ‘Not the “moral corruption” of
antiquity, but precisely its moralization is the prerequisite through which alone
Christianity could become master of it. Moral fanaticism (in short: Plato)
destroyed paganism, by revaluating its values and poisoning its innocence’
(KSA 13, 16[15]). In the last of these four notes, the dichotomy is made most
explicit:
The morality of self-denial is the typical morality of decline par excellence

[. . .] the teachers, the leaders of mankind were décadents: therefore the
revaluation of all values into the realm of the nihilistic (‘the beyond’) [. . .]
to liberate [man] from the morality [. . .] To again raise and set up the egoism
of humankind! (KSA 13, 23[3], October 1888)8
Nietzsche thus wants to see come about, what during the Renaissance most
clearly occurred in the arts: the centre of gravity moved from God, religion,
8
Part of this long note was used in EH “Destiny” 7.
symbolism, and the ‘beyond’ and instead man and individual men were put in its
place.
Nietzsche also uses a large number of synonyms for revaluation. Most frequent
are Umdrehung and Umkehrung, but many others are also used.9 His use of these
is very similar to his use of revaluation and therefore little new information is
contained in these expressions for us here. Only one example will be mentioned
here. There he claims that really great humans are lacking, and the reason is our
herd-animal morality – which ‘in Europe today is simply called “morality” – as if
there were no other morality and could be no other’. He continues:
Whoever has thought profoundly about where and how the plant man has
hitherto grown most vigorously must conclude that this has happened under the
reverse conditions [. . .] A morality [must appear] with such reverse intentions,
which desires to train men for the heights, not for comfort and mediocrity [. . .]
To prepare a reversal of values for a certain strong kind of man of the highest
spirituality and strength of will [. . .] whosoever reflects on this becomes one of
us, the free spirits – to be sure, a different kind of ‘free spirit’ from those before
us; for the latter wanted approximately the opposite of what we do. To us, it
seems to me, belong [. . .] all those critics and historians who courageously
carry forward the happily-begun discovery of the world of antiquity – it is the
work of the new Columbuses of the German spirit (for we stand at the
beginning of this conquest). For in the world of antiquity there reigned
a different, more lordly morality than today; and the man of antiquity, raised
in this morality, was a stronger and deeper man than the man of today – he alone
has hitherto been ‘the man who turned out well’. (KSA 11, 37[8])
Close readings of Nietzsche’s late books and his late notes make it possible to
identify a rather large number of concrete values that he revalues, such as pity,
pride, the ‘good man’, and the herd animal man.10
1.4 The History of the Revaluation Theme in Nietzsche’s Thought

There exist two major misconceptions regarding the theme of revaluation of all
values in Nietzsche’s thought. One concerns its origin (when and in what
context did Nietzsche discover the theme) and the other is its meaning (dis-
cussed earlier). Almost all literature on the revaluation of all values treats it as
having its origin in 1886 or in 1884. To mention just a few examples, Curt Paul
Janz, the by far best Nietzsche biographer (whom almost all other biographies
9
Other synonyms or near synonyms are Umdrehung, Umkehrung, entgegengesetzter Werthe,
Werth-Gegensatz, auf den Kopf, transcendence, Umtaufung, entwerthen, Wandel der Werthe,
and Umsturz.
10
I have discussed such concrete revalued values in some of the late books, in my studies Brobjer,
2021, 2023a and 2023b. In a slightly different context, Richardson discusses the revaluing of pity
and altruism in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (2004: Ch. 5).
are based upon) does not discuss the revaluation of all values before Beyond
Good and Evil (1886), except briefly in regard to Nietzsche’s childhood
essay ‘Fatum und Geschichte’ and regarding a statement in the third Untimely
Meditation. The valuable entry in the Nietzsche Handbuch, written by Andreas
Urs Sommer, mentions nothing before 1884, but his immensely rich commen-
taries Friedrich Nietzsches ‘Der Antichrist’: Ein philosophisch-historischer
Kommentar (2000) and Kommentar zu Nietzsches Der Antichrist, Ecce Homo,
Dionysus-Dithyramben und Nietzsche contra Wagner contain much interesting
and relevant material. Philippa Foot, in her ‘Nietzsche: The Revaluation of
Values’, in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert Solomon
(1973), 156–168, refers to no work earlier than Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Richard
Schacht’s Nietzsche (1983) contains a long chapter on ‘Value and Values’, includ-
ing a long subchapter entitled ‘Toward a Revaluation of Values’, but only uses and
refers to post-Thus Spoke Zarathustra books and the notes published as The Will to
Power (i.e., notes from 1885 to 1888). However, three studies, by Higgins, Ridley,
and Owen, seem, without discussion, to place its beginning significantly earlier, in
the works Dawn (1881) and The Gay Science (1882).
The place and development of the revaluation theme in Nietzsche’s thought
can be summarized as follows.
1880/81 1882 1884 1886 1887/88

Origin of the Important Becomes Becomes an Becomes
revaluation but brief a major important a major
theme in published theme in theme in theme in
notes. Great statement notes (and published published
concern with in GS 269. a theme in BGE. First works and
values. letters). published use in notes.
Nietzsche coins of the word
the word Umwertung.
Umwertung.
To be able to follow the theme of revaluation in Nietzsche’s thought it is

convenient to go backwards in time. It was Nietzsche who coined the German
word ‘Umwerthung’, revaluation, and he was thus the first thinker to use
the associated expression ‘Umwerthung aller Werthe’ and ‘Umwerthung der
Werthe’ (but he also used a large number of other related synonyms and
expressions).11
11
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, “Umwertung.” However, Andreas Urs Sommer has
shown (private communication) that the word Umwertung existed before Nietzsche, in literature
By 1887, in On the Genealogy of Morals, and especially by 1888, revaluation

had become a major and prominent theme in Nietzsche’s thought – and during
this time he frequently referred to the theme. It has by now also become not only
a Leitmotif and topos, but also a literary project on which he worked intensively
during his final four or five years. This is especially noticeable in Ecce Homo,
which was written to prepare the ground for his next work, the Revaluation of
All Values (discussed in Section 2 of this Element).
The first time he used the word ‘revaluation’ in his published works was in
Beyond Good and Evil (1886), sections 46 and 203, where he explicitly refers to
an earlier revaluation and to the hope for new creative spirits who can ‘provide
the stimuli for opposite valuations and to revalue and invert “eternal values”.’ In
the former section, he claims that Christianity made a revaluation of ancient
values and in the second, he refers to our present need for a new revaluation.
Furthermore, revaluation, without reference to that word, is also discussed in
many other sections of the book and is a general theme in the book, and he uses
many synonyms and alternative expressions for it. From here onwards, it is
a major theme in his published writings – but he had developed the topic earlier.
The first time Nietzsche used the word ‘revaluation’ is in two notes from
1884, where the first is as subtitle to a book project, and the other briefly relates
the revaluation to his idea of eternal recurrence. It is in both these cases closely
associated with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. In the first, it is used as
a subtitle to a planned but never finished book (which later almost certainly
developed into Nietzsche’s attempt to write a magnum opus): ‘Philosophy of
Eternal Recurrence: An Attempt at the Revaluation of All Values’ (KSA 11,
26[259]). The second is a few pages later in the same notebook where he
discusses eternal recurrence and what is necessary to live with that thought,
and twice answers ‘the revaluation of all values’, and thereafter gives some
examples of such revaluations (joy at uncertainty rather than certainty, belief in
creativity rather than in ‘cause and effect’, no longer will to survival but to
power and not to possess defensive but proud subjectivism) (KSA 11, 26[284]).
Shortly before Nietzsche used the word revaluation for the first time, he was
much concerned with values and systems of values. Just a few pages earlier in
his notebook Nietzsche had read and used his friend Paul Deussen’s Vedanta
and Herman Oldenberg’s Buddha to create value-dichotomies (with page-
references to these works), and he several times used the synonym ‘Umkehrung
[. . .] der Werthschätzungen’, reversal of valuation or esteem, or reversal of the
setting of values (KSA 11, 26[221 and 192]). Thus, a contrast with Eastern
dealing with economics, but Nietzsche still seems to be the first to have used it in a philosophically
relevant sense.
systems of values is likely to have aided and worked as a stimulus for

Nietzsche’s development of the idea.
Nietzsche had written the third book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in January
and February 1884 and read the proofs in March. In the first two books of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, the pivotal ideas were the thought of eternal recurrence
(although it remained unannounced within the book) and the Übermensch. The
theme of revaluation is also present, for example, in ‘Of the Three Metamorphoses’,
but perhaps on a more individual rather than social level and not elaborated
upon.
We have thus seen that the first time Nietzsche used the word revaluation was
in 1884, and more importantly, that he at this time was much concerned with this
topic. Should then 1884 be regarded as the year of the birth of the topos of the
revaluation of all values? Moreover, ought we then to emphasize its close link to
the idea of eternal recurrence – which certainly then was an important context?
Maybe, but the topos has a distinct prehistory, and it is even expressed in his
published writings before then. In section 269 of The Gay Science (1882),
Nietzsche clearly expresses it: ‘In what do you believe? – In this, that the
weights of all things must be determined anew.’12 This theme resonates strongly
in Nietzsche, although its context and its meaning is not elaborated on in the
book.
Searching for earlier instances and discussions of the revaluation theme in
Nietzsche’s notebooks yields interesting and specific results – the theme of
revaluation is very present in the notes from 1880/81. I have found over fifty
notes in which Nietzsche clearly elaborates on the revaluation theme, but will
here only present (in a shortened form) the ten most obvious ones in chrono-
logical order:
1. ‘Change of valuation.’
2. ‘One needs, by means of a radical scepticism in regard to values, first of all
to overthrow all value judgments, to have free opportunity.’
3. ‘Everything which we now call immoral has somewhere and sometime
once been moral. What guarantees that it does not yet again change its
name?’
4. ‘Christianity made everything interesting again, by turning upside down
every value judgment.’
5. ‘[A] great task has arisen on the horizon before it, namely the revision of
every valuation: however, before all things are laid on the scales, the scale
itself is necessary – I mean that sort of highest sense of judgment of the
highest intelligence.’
12
The revaluation theme is also, but much more vaguely, visible in sections 115, 116, 301, and 335.
6. ‘For that new values are needed. First a critique and removal of the old.’
7. ‘Either value other things than are valued or value things differently than
they are valued.’
8. ‘For the purpose of changing people: we for once need to assume that our
values about good and evil acts are false and arbitrary, everything needs to
be examined anew.’
9. ‘Main question: according to what is the table of values determined and
changed? So that one property appeared more valuable than another?’
10. ‘Change of valuation – is my task’ (KSA 9, 1[56], 3[54, 66, 116, 158],
5[25], 6[175, 378] and 11[20, 76]).
We can note that all of these statements were made before his ‘discovery’ of
eternal recurrence in August 1881, and that Nietzsche’s concern with values and
the change of values constituted an important context of that discovery. In fact,
one can regard the thought of eternal recurrence as the answer to what he asks
for and discusses in many of his notes in 1880/81 as the thing that can help one
change and evaluate values.
That Nietzsche discovered and developed the theme of revaluation in 1880/
81 is also consistent with his own claims in Ecce Homo, where he, in his
discussion of Dawn, with its motto ‘There are so many daybreaks that have
not yet dawned’ writes: ‘Where does its author seek that new dawn [. . .]? In
a revaluation of all values, in an escape from all moral values, in an affirmation
of and trust in all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised, accused.’ This
could have been an example of how Nietzsche reinterpreted his earlier writings
in line with his later thought, but the notes from 1880/81 show that this claim
was not just a later construction, but was based on, at least in part, views already
present at that time. We can also note that there is a dramatic increase in
Nietzsche’s use of the word ‘value’ and derivations of that word in 1880/81
(as well as an increase in his use of the word morality and its derivations). We
can especially note the increase in his use of the word ‘esteem’, or setting the
value of, ‘Werthschätzung’ and the word value-judgement, ‘Werthurtheil’
(which he had never used before 1880). What happened in 1880/81 is that
Nietzsche became concerned with values and evaluation in general.13
13
It is, of course, possible to go beyond 1880 and find traces of this idea and concern earlier. As any
historian will know, it is almost always possible to find earlier traces of anything and any thought.
However, these earlier traces are merely traces, not signs of a conscious concern with this
concept and idea. Such scattered traces can, for example, be found in Nietzsche’s early Germania
essay “Fate and History” from 1862 and in the third Untimely Meditation, Schopenhauer as
Educator, 3 (1874), and I will discuss a few of them in the chapter “Nietzsche and Ancient
Values.” What happened in 1880/81 is that the problem of value, morality and change of
valuation became a theme or major theme in Nietzsche’s thought.
The ten most immediate references to the revaluation theme from 1880/81,
quoted earlier, fall into four groups. These seem to correspond well to many of
Nietzsche’s later and more well-known statements regarding the revaluation of
all values.
(i) Plain statements, with almost no context.

(ii) Critique of Christianity and its values.
(iii) The questioning of old values for the purpose of opening up new perspectives.
(iv) Philosophical examination of values and how to rank them.
There seems to be no one specific context that proves itself much more
important than several other ones for the development of the revaluation
theme. It is true that the revaluation of all values has a sort of origin in
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, but it is approximately equally true that
it has its origin in the context of a more general critique of contemporary
values, and in the problems of pessimism (in Nietzsche’s important wresting
with Schopenhauer), in the contrast expressed by ancient Greek values, and
by eastern values, in insight into the errors of old values, and by the simple
effect of relativism. Other contexts of these early revaluation-notes include
discussions of the devil (and hence evil), increasing critique of anthropocen-
trism, the debate between egoism and altruism and a general critique of
superstition and metaphysics (which many old values are rooted in, according
to Nietzsche).
One interesting consequence of dating the origin of the revaluation of all
values to 1880/81 is that it affects our view of Nietzsche’s overall thought and
its development. It is common to divide his thought and writing into three
periods: the early (1869–76), the middle (1877–82), and the late (1883–88).
There is truth in this view, and Nietzsche himself emphasized both it and the two
‘breaks’ which it implies. However, in many respects, it is misleading, and
a different view is better, as emphasized by Montinari. This second view
emphasizes primarily two periods: pre-1880, as the time before Nietzsche
fully came into his own (and it can be divided into two further periods,
a more idealistic/romantic and a more positivistic one), and one from c. 1880,
that of the mature Nietzsche. The difference between these views can be seen as
moving the second ‘break’ from 1882/83 to 1879/80/81 (the time he left his
professorship in Basel, began his nomadic period, and made several of his
philosophical ‘discoveries’).14 When referring to Nietzsche’s published
books, both pictures can be regarded as approximately equally accurate, but
14
I discuss many of these “discoveries” or themes on pages 82–89, and in the extensive notes, in
my book Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (2008).
when it comes to his life, thoughts and notes, the latter is in several respects
better since it does not deny the importance of his thought in the early 1880s
(such as his severe critique of morality, Christianity and his new concern with
values), but instead connects it with his later, post-1882 thought. However, one
should be aware that such divisions into two or three periods are constructs, and
although they can aid our understanding of Nietzsche’s thought, one should use
them with care and certainly not as dogma. In important ways, there is, of
course, also a continual development throughout Nietzsche’s life.15
1.5 Values and Revaluation of Values in Thus

Spoke Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be regarded as part of Nietzsche’s revaluation
project, a part that furthermore contains a presentation of a large number of
concrete revaluations of values. There are also in the book some principal
statements about values and the revaluation of values.
It is possible to argue that the theme of revaluation is equally important in and
for Thus Spoke Zarathustra as is the idea of eternal recurrence, the Übermensch
and the death of God (as representing the crisis of values), and all of these themes
are also closely related to one another. While Nietzsche worked on Thus Spoke
Zarathustra in 1883 and early 1884, he wrote extensive notes on values, change
of values, the creation of new values and the destruction of old values, but he had
not yet coined the word ‘revaluation’. There are a large number of alternative
expressions and discussions of the revaluation theme in the notes from 1884, so
many that it must be regarded as a major and explicit theme at this time.
Surprisingly, the prominence of the theme of value and revaluation of values
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra has not generally been noted and discussed. In
almost all discussions and accounts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra three principal
themes are listed; eternal recurrence, Übermensch and will to power, while the
revaluation is ignored or downplayed.
The theme of revaluating values (often in the form of creating new values) is
almost as prominent in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the theme of the Übermensch
(when we simply count how often he uses it), and more so than will to power
and eternal recurrence.
Already in the prologue, two goals within the book (and two purposes of the
book) are presented and emphasized; the striving for the Übermensch and
the task of revaluating values: ‘Fellow creators the creator seeks, those who
inscribe new values on new tablets’ (Z I ‘Prologue’ 9).
15
For a very different periodization of Nietzsche’s works, see the discussion in Matthew Meyer’s
Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients (2014: 277f.).
In the very first section of Zarathustra’s speeches, ‘On the Three Trans-
formations’, he describes the development of the higher soul, from that of
a camel via a lion to a child. These are also the fundamental stages along the
road to revaluation – from being diligent and steadfast (holding on to and
defending values), to rebelling (negating values) to creating new values (revalu-
ation). The creation of new values is emphasized and is that which characterizes
the third stage of the transformation, the ‘child’. This emphasis on revaluation
or creation of new values is then explicitly repeated in two sections in the first
book: ‘The noble man wants to create what is new and a new virtue’ (Z I ‘Tree
on the Mountainside’), and: ‘Around inventors of new values the world
revolves’ (Z I ‘Flies of the Marketplace’). Thereafter it is again strongly
emphasized in the last section, ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’: ‘Verily, this is a
new good and evil! [. . .] and may the value of all things be posited anew by you!
For that you shall be fighters! For that you shall be creators!’
The creation of new values and the revaluation theme is slightly less empha-
sized in the second book, but still explicitly present in several sections. In the
first, it is referred to by the expression ‘and weeds are called wheat’, i.e., that it is
the wrong values that are praised (Z II ‘The Child with the Mirror’). In another,
he repeats the claims from book 1, ‘Not around the inventors of new noise, but
around the inventors of new values does the world revolve; inaudibly it
revolves’ (Z II ‘On Great Events’). He also develops the theme further by
emphasizing the close connection between creating and destroying: ‘And who-
ever must be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must first be an annihilator and
shatter values. Thus does the highest evil belong to the highest good: but this
latter is the creative’ (Z II ‘On Self-Overcoming’).
In the third book the concern with values and new values is again more
explicitly present, especially in ‘Of Old and New Tablets’, the longest section in
all of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which seems to summarize much of the contents
of the first three books, and in which it becomes the main theme:
Each one thought he had long since known what was good and evil for man.
[. . .] But he it is who creates a goal for mankind and gives the earth its meaning
and its future: he it is who creates the quality of good and evil in things. [. . .]
now he [Zarathustra] sits here and waits, old shattered law-tables around him
and also new law-tables – half-written (Z III ‘On Old and New Tablets’).
The revaluation of values in Thus Spoke Zarathustra has only begun; it is

only half-done – with old shattered and new half-written law-tables – as a theme
at the end of the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra makes this text almost
ideal as a preface or introduction (as ‘entrance hall’) to the Umwerthung aller
Werthe, where this work is going to be continued.
The fourth book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (not published by Nietzsche) can
be regarded as primarily dealing with an example of a revaluation of the value of
‘Mitleid’ (pity or compassion).
Nietzsche emphasizes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that it is the human subject,
the I, ‘this creating, willing, valuing I, that is the measure and value of things’
(Z I ‘On Believers in a World Behind’). Later in the text, he defines man as the
valuator:
The human being first put values into things, in order to preserve itself – it
created a meaning for things, a human’s meaning! Therefore it calls itself
‘human’ – that is: the evaluator. Evaluating is creating: hear this, you cre-
ators! Evaluating is itself the treasure and jewel of all valued things. Through
evaluating alone is there value: and without evaluating the kernel of existence
would be hollow. Hear this, you creators! Change of values – that means
change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates. (Z I ‘On
the Thousand Goals and One’)
Humans cannot do otherwise than evaluate, and this is good. He continues

this theme in Beyond Good and Evil, 3.
Closely related to values, as a version of values, is Nietzsche’s discussion of
virtue, i.e., values related to human character. The fact that he was much more
character- and virtue-oriented than concerned with abstract value (this can be re-
formulated as that Nietzsche had more of an ethics of virtue-oriented morality
rather than the more common alternatives in the nineteenth century, deontology
and utilitarianism) is reflected in that he refers to virtue much more frequently,
twice as often as to value in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.16 He, in agreement with
this, speaks more of new conceptions of humans – Übermenschen – rather than of
new utopias or new abstract ideals.
Nietzsche had been immensely concerned with values ever since 1880. This
is reflected in a long note, where he discusses his own intellectual develop-
ment, written for a preface for a re-publication of Human, All Too Human in
August–September 1885, where he describes how he transcended metaphys-
ics. He continues:
But in the background stood a will to a much greater curiosity, yes, to an

enormous attempt: the thought dawned on me if it was not possible to reverse
all values, and always the same questions came up: what really do all human
valuations mean? What do they disclose about the conditions of life, of your
life, furthermore of human life, finally of life itself? – (KSA 11, 40[65])17
16
See Brobjer (2003).
17
Compare also the notes KSA 11, 40[66] and 41[9], also written for a reworking of Human, All
Too Human.
The four major themes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the death of God, eternal
recurrence, revaluation, and Übermensch are closely related and interwoven
with one another. Very briefly and simplified: The death of God reflects a crisis
of value. This crisis is both further recognized, and ways to heal it are suggested,
by the idea of eternal recurrence (which both intensifies our experiences of the
crisis and suggests a solution or way towards a solution) and the revaluation of
values (which makes a fundamental dichotomy of values apparent and presents
more life-affirming values) and the Übermensch represents a concrete living
solution of a new type of human who is able to live and affirm life and reality
without a belief in God and metaphysics.
In Nietzsche’s own discussion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in his last book,
Ecce Homo, it is the two themes of eternal recurrence and revaluation that he
emphasizes.
1.6 Nietzsche and Ancient Greek Values

Having established that the values that need to be revalued are those that
denigrate reality and life, Christian values and modern values (which are mostly
secularized and moralized Christian values), we need to discuss what sort of
values they need to be revalued into. There seem to be three main alternatives.
Purely personal and individual values, values that are completely new or values
that are related to ancient Greek values, that Nietzsche regarded as more life-
affirming than modern values. If we understand new values as values that are
new to us who live now, all three of these can be combined. The ‘new’ values
need to be personal values, they need to be different from Christian and modern
values and they are likely to have close kinship with ancient Greek values (with
the values that Nietzsche regarded as the most affirmative of life and reality we
know of) – with the values that ruled before the Jewish/Christian/Platonic first
revaluation of values.
Already before The Birth of Tragedy was published, Nietzsche wrote in his
notebooks ‘Socrates, the opponent of Dionysus’ and ‘my philosophy inverted
Platonism’ (KSA 7, 7[101 and 156]). We can here see an early version of
Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche speaks
of Socrates as ‘the precursor of an altogether different culture, art and morality’
from that of the older Greek one (BT 13). Hence, already in his first work,
Nietzsche is aware of the dichotomy of values that later will become one of his
main concerns. Another note from 1870/71 seems to reflect Nietzsche’s discov-
ery that although modern morality is life-denying, this was not true for that of
the Greeks: ‘Ethics also as a mechane [mechanism, contrivance] of the will to
life: not the denial of this will’ (KSA 7, 8[78]).
Nietzsche frequently and explicitly made a value-dichotomy between

antiquity and modernity, which can be regarded as being closely related to
a revaluation, especially in 1875 while working on the never-finished ‘Wir
Philologen’ (‘We Classicists’). To select one pregnant example of this tendency:
‘My aim is: to create complete hostility between our modern “culture” and the
ancient world. Whosoever wants to serve the former must hate the latter’ (KSA
8, 3[68]).
Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values is of course not a simple return to ancient
values and even less to ancient society. Nonetheless, a strong case can be made
for the radical thesis that ancient Greek values are not only the foundation and
starting point of Nietzsche’s revaluation but that to a very large extent the
revaluation is a revival of ancient values. There are many specific ancient values
and attitudes which Nietzsche shared and praised, such as tragedy, virtue as
human excellence (arete), eris (strife), agon (competition), realism and natur-
alistic values. It would be possible to discuss the ancient precursors to all the
major Leitmotifs in Nietzsche’s writings, not just the revaluation.
Almost always when Nietzsche refers to morality, he refers to modern
morality (i.e., from Socrates and Plato onwards). He is not alone in using the
word morality in this ‘restricted’ sense – most philosophers and historians have
used it in this manner. A consequence of this is that Nietzsche has often been
regarded as only criticizing morality – as having or proposing no affirmative
values, at least no moral ones. However, this view is not correct. Instead,
Nietzsche, especially when morality is understood in its original sense of
ethos, of being related to character, holds and proclaims moral values which
are essentially ancient Greek values (including ethics of virtue), although
almost always without referring to them as moral values.
However, occasionally he refers to morality in a positive sense. In Twilight of
the Idols, he refers to ‘all naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality’ and
contrasts it with ‘anti-natural morality, that is virtually every morality that has
hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached’ (TI ‘Morality’ 4). In the epi-
logue to The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche claims that noble morality, master
morality, affirms life and oneself, and that its opposition to Christian morality is
immense. That Greek morality before Socrates for Nietzsche is part of, and the
supreme example of, healthy morality can be seen in the few explicit references
he makes to it. ‘The higher moral nature of the Greeks is shown by their
wholeness and simplicity’ (KSA 8, 6[36]). A common theme in his early
writings, that also echoes in his later writings, is the contrast between the
older and the later Greek morality: ‘The superficiality of all post-Socratic
ethics! The profound Hellenic older ethics did not represent itself in form of
words and concepts’ (KSA 7, 19[60]). Many of his early statements are indirect
in the sense that he refers to the superiority of Greek human beings: ‘Greeks the
genius among the peoples [. . .] The individual raised to his highest powers
through the polis’ (KSA 8, 5[70]) and ‘the verdict of the philosophers of ancient
Greece on the value of existence says so much more than a modern verdict does
because they had life itself before and around them in luxuriant perfection’
(Untimely Meditation III 3). Nietzsche also refers to Greek culture as
a standard: ‘When the Greek body and the Greek soul “bloomed” [. . .] there
arose that mysterious symbol of the highest world-affirmation and transfigur-
ation of existence that has yet been attained on earth. Here we have a standard
by which everything that has grown up since is found too short, too poor, too
narrow’ (KSA 11, 41[7]).18 That the greatness of the Greeks was according to
Nietzsche due, at least partially, to their morality is shown in the following
quotation: ‘For in the world of antiquity there reigned a different, more lordly
morality than today; and the man of antiquity, raised in this morality, was a
stronger and deeper man than the man of today – he alone has hitherto been “the
man that has turned out well”’ (KSA 11, 37[8]). Most explicitly, Nietzsche’s
view is expressed in a note from 1883: ‘I regard Greek morality as the highest so
far’ (KSA 10, 7[44]).
Greek antiquity also frequently occurs as an example in the writings of the
late Nietzsche: ‘The highest types hitherto, the Greeks’ (KSA 11, 35[47]) and
‘the highest type [of ideal]: the classical ideal’ (KSA 13, 11[138]). It would be
easy to add many more examples.19
Occasionally, Nietzsche in line with the revaluation also attempts a valuation
of present phenomena, values, and thought in terms of antiquity or by asking
what would the ancients have thought of it: ‘The ancient world has in fact
always been understood only in terms of the present – and will the present now
be understood in terms of the ancient world?’ (KSA 8, 3[62]) and ‘I do not doubt
that the first thing an ancient Greek would remark in us Europeans of today
would also be self-diminution – through that alone we should be “contrary to his
taste”’ (BGE 267).
Nietzsche’s constant high praise of the Renaissance, including calling it an
attempted revaluation, can and ought also to be regarded as relating to a revival
of antiquity, and to healthier values.
18
This whole note is pertinent. In it, Nietzsche claims that “Dionysus is a judge” in the sense that
antiquity is the judge of modernity.
19
A few other examples of late references to Greece as an example and ideal are: “The best turned
out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the
Greeks” (BT “ASC” 1).“Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live!” (GS “Pref” 4).“The whole
labour of the ancient world in vain: I have no word to express my feelings at something so
dreadful” (A 59).“Den Menschen über sich hinaus steigern, gleich den Griechen” (KSA 10,
9[29]).“Heimisch sein in der griechischen Welt!” (KSA 11, 41[4]).
In the last section of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (GM I 17),
Nietzsche speaks of ‘that greatest of all conflicts of ideals’ and then rhetorically
asks, ‘Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much
longer preparation? More: must one not desire it with all one’s might? even will
it? even promote it?’
1.7 The Relation between the Revaluation and the Idea

of Eternal Recurrence
As we have seen earlier, in Section 1.3, the first time Nietzsche uses and coins
the expression ‘eternal recurrence’, in August 1881, KSA 9, 11[141], was at the
time when he had worked intensively with value, values and valuation for some
time. The first time he used and coined the word ‘Umwerthung’, ‘revaluation’,
after having been much concerned with values, how to evaluate them and with
new values for several years, in the summer of 1884, he actually uses it in a title
of a work which was meant to deal with both eternal recurrence and the
revaluation of all values: ‘Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence: An Attempt at
Revaluation of All Values’ (KSA 11, 26[259]). This work was almost certainly
closely related to, or identical with, the work called Midday and Eternity, that he
soon would refer to as his Hauptwerk. The second time he uses the expression
‘revaluation of all values’ is again related to the idea of eternal recurrence; the
revaluation as a condition to endure this idea (KSA 11, 26[284]). It is clear that
Nietzsche saw a very close relation between eternal recurrence and revaluation
of all values. We would not endure the thought of having to re-live our lives in
identically the same way an infinite number of times with our present values –
with our Christian and modern values – the thought of eternal recurrence
requires us to revalue values.
These two ideas – themes or philosophemes – constitute the central ideas of
his work on the Hauptwerk, as we will discuss in Section 2. The importance of
revaluation can be seen by how often he, already from early on, uses it for
a large number of his drafts of titles of his Hauptwerk. In fact, the fourth time he
uses the expression ‘revaluation’ at all is again, like the first time, for a title of
that work, now from the summer of 1886 in Sils-Maria: ‘The Will to Power:
Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. In four books’, with a brief description of
the four books. Book one about nihilism – ‘as the necessary consequence of the
present valuations’. Book two about a critique of values. Book three about how
humans must be constituted to value in a reverse way. Book 4 (called ‘the
hammer’) about the idea of eternal recurrence (KSA 12, 2[100]).
The fifth time he uses the expression ‘revaluation’ is shortly thereafter in
a four-page-long important note in which he continues to elaborate on the
contents of the Hauptwerk, in line with the previous note, but now with much
more detail (KSA 12, 2[131]). Also, the sixth time he uses it is again in a draft of
a title of the Hauptwerk, in four volumes (KSA 12, 5[75]). In the autumn of
1888, he several times used both these expressions, revaluation and eternal
recurrence, in his draft for the Hauptwerk, both under the title Will to Power and
Umwerthung aller Werthe (KSA 13, 18[17], 19[8] and 22[14]).
We can thus see that the first ten times he uses the term ‘revaluation’ he
almost always does so together with the expression ‘eternal recurrence’, and in
relation to his Hauptwerk.
How are we to understand this close relation between the idea of eternal
recurrence and the revaluation of all values? Normally they are by scholars
and commentators discussed and elaborated on individually and separately,
but Nietzsche connects them. I believe that especially the idea of eternal
recurrence is easier to understand when treated together with the revaluation
of all values.
Already in the first note where Nietzsche discusses the idea of eternal
recurrence, he emphasizes that its effect is the ‘eternal importance’ of our
knowledge, errors, our habits, our lives (he will soon add our values). ‘Now
comes the most difficult knowledge [eternal recurrence] and makes all sorts of
life dreadfully serious.’ Imagine the whole of history eternally repeated, he
writes: ‘Not to be thrown over by that thought, our sense of compassion must
not be great.’ But taking on ourselves all of past and future suffering is too
much for us, Nietzsche argues in this early note, ‘but whether we still want to
live is the question, and how!’ (KSA 9, 11[141]). Immediately thereafter
Nietzsche writes in another note: ‘If you fully accept the thought of thoughts
[i.e. the idea of eternal recurrence] it will transform you. For everything you
want to do, the question becomes: “Is it so that I want to do it infinitely many
times?” this is the greatest weight’ (KSA 9, 11[143]). Shortly thereafter he
writes: ‘Let us press the image of eternity on our life! This thought contains
more than all religions, which teaches this life as a brief contempt and to look
for an undetermined other life’ (KSA 9, 11[159]). Soon Nietzsche argues that
to live with this thought, to affirm this life, we need to get rid of sin and
morality – and to revalue our values.
The main point of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence is not a physical
theory about that everything is repeated, but a thought experiment or hypoth-
esis that forces us to take and experience life as thousandfold more important
than before. This leads us to want to value life so that we want to live again.
For that, we need to take away, revalue, things that reduce our valuation of life
and our desire to live again. Most obviously this means for Nietzsche sin,
morality and Christianity (which makes us seek meaning and value beyond
life), but equally obvious, pessimism (which precisely says that life is not
worth living) and nihilism (which says that nothing matters, nothing has any
value).
2 Revaluation of All Values as a Four-Volume Literary Project

2.1 Introduction to Section 2: Revaluation of All Values
as Nietzsche’s Magnum Opus
There can be no doubt that Nietzsche planned to write a philosophical magnum
opus during a period of many years, almost always in four volumes. He
explicitly states this a very large number of times in his letters, in his notes
and in his published books (including on the back cover of Beyond Good and
Evil), and there are a very large number of notes related to this project among
Nietzsche’s papers, including many draft tables of contents for the four vol-
umes. Nietzsche spent much more time and effort on this project than on any of
his published books and regarded it as much more important. It has been a major
failure of most of Nietzsche research, and even more of the many biographers of
Nietzsche, that it and they have not examined and discussed this more.
The possible controversy about the magnum opus concerns if, and then when,
Nietzsche perhaps gave up on this project. The standard view is that Nietzsche
gave up on it at the end of November 1888, just a little more than a month before
his mental collapse. This view is almost certainly wrong and contains two major
problems.
(i) Nietzsche never stated that he gave up on the project (since he did not).
That he (possibly) did so is a (faulty) conclusion of modern scholars based
merely on that Nietzsche after about 20 November 1888 referred to The
Antichrist in a few letters as ‘the Revaluation of All Values’ rather than as
‘the first book of the Revaluation of All Values’. This does not necessarily
mean that he had given up on the project. On the contrary, there can be
several reasons for this and I will show that he had referred to The
Antichrist as the Revaluation already earlier (when there can be no doubt
that he regarded it as part of his four-volume magnum opus), and, more
importantly, quote two occasions where he as late as in middle of December
1888, just weeks before his mental collapse, still refers to The Antichrist as
‘the first book of the Revaluation of All Values’.
(ii) Even if Nietzsche had given up on the project at the end of November 1888,
almost certainly as a consequence of his impending mental collapse, this
changes almost nothing. First, it still means that he planned and worked
hard to write a four-volume magnum opus for about five years or more,
including while writing his late books, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
onwards. If he changed his mind after having written Twilight of the
Idols, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo in 1888, it is merely of biographical
interest. Second, he did no philosophical work after late November 1888; at
least we have no serious philosophical notes from this time or later. The
work on a philosophical magnum opus remains Nietzsche’s by far largest
and most prolonged philosophical project!
For those who are interested in Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy, this is his
most important and relevant project – far more so than any of his published
books. It has one major drawback for us. Of the four planned volumes, three
remain uncompleted or unfinished. This is a disadvantage, but not only so. It
seems to me that it is quite suitable for a thinker of such dynamic philosophy as
Nietzsche’s that what we have is not merely a static set of finished positions, but
rather ample material for developing many of his most interesting thoughts,
including the revaluation of all values.
I will in this second part of this study show that we possess many hundreds of
pages of interesting and detailed notes and tables of contents for how Nietzsche
planned to develop his thought. We are not only left with The Antichrist and
three further unwritten volumes about which we know little or nothing. We
possess much information about the planned contents of the three unfinished
volumes, and there are things to learn from the first volume, The Antichrist,
about the planned further three volumes. Nietzsche even, immediately after
having finished The Antichrist, began working and drafting large sections of
volume 3, The Immoralist, notes that seem not even to have been translated into
English until very recently. These notes cover approximately ten pages that
he worked on until or near 15 October 1888 (KSA 13, 23[3–7]). Thereafter
Nietzsche’s notebooks only contain another thirty-three pages in the KSA
version. Most of these are filled with notes for Ecce Homo, a few late additions
for Twilight of the Idols and some general notes on other topics.
A great part of Nietzsche’s notes for the Hauptwerk is from, or were revised
in, 1887 and 1888, and thus represents Nietzsche’s last evolving philosophical
views. Furthermore, among these are detailed plans of the contents of the four
planned volumes, plans that Nietzsche used when drafting the contents of
volume 1 during the spring of 1888, then dealing with truth and nihilism.
When he decided in September 1888 that volume 1 instead was to deal with
a critique of Christianity, and the previous volume 1 then became volume 2, he
again used these plans and notes to draft the contents of The Antichrist.
Nietzsche had a remarkably consistent view about the contents of the planned
Hauptwerk. The last three volumes of the magnum opus remain unwritten, but
we have much information about what Nietzsche planned to write in them. We

ought to study, discuss, and use this.
The fact that Nietzsche planned and worked extensively on a magnum opus
has major consequences both for what is included and what he left out of the
books he published in his last years. It also has consequences for how we regard
and treat Nietzsche’s notes (Nachlass).
2.2 The Debate and Controversy about the Planned Magnum Opus
2.2.1 The Status of Nietzsche’s Notes
The most common attitude towards Nietzsche’s late notes today is that they
represent discarded material,20 and that they, when not overlapping with what is
said in his published books, should not be taken as Nietzsche’s view. We see a
similar view in Hollingdale:
The Nachlass can be read with profit only by someone familiar with
Nietzsche’s published works, the reason being the above-mentioned fact
that its content is rejected material [sic] [. . .] the only principle which does
not impose a spurious order upon it is that of comparison and collation with
the published work. It falls into two large divisions: (i) preliminary drafts or
parallel formulations of something already published, and therefore rejected
as superfluous; and (ii) material set aside as being for one reason or another
unacceptable. [. . .] in the latter [case] one must [. . .] exclude the aphorism
from any formulation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, since this is precisely what
Nietzsche himself did. And one must be capable, of course, of distinguishing
between the former kind of material and the latter. The basic consideration to
be kept in mind all the time is that anything in the Nachlass which cannot be
paralleled in the published works is not valid.21
Alan Schrift (2011) summarizes the position as follows:
the Nachlass does present a great deal of philosophical material that never
makes its way into the published texts. [. . .] The status of this material has
been controversial: should it be used to support interpretations of Nietzsche’s
published works? Should its failure to appear in the published works be taken
as evidence that Nietzsche definitively rejected the ideas? In many cases,
especially in the late Nachlass, it is simply impossible to tell whether an idea
was set aside as unworthy or simply never returned to because of Nietzsche’s
collapse. For the Nietzsche scholar, this is, I believe, a reason to be extremely
cautious in terms of presenting the ideas in the Nachlass as Nietzsche’s ideas.
(Had he written something and later added: ‘but this is wrong!’, we would
20
See Magnus (1988: 161), who refers to Nietzsche’s notes as “dustbin manuscripts” (and in the
connecting footnote 23, Nietzsche’s notes are dismissed as “discarded” material). See also
Magnus (1986).
21
Hollingdale (1999: 223).
have a different case, but he rarely does this.) Several years ago, Bernd
Magnus drew a distinction between two approaches to Nietzsche’s
Nachlass, dividing Nietzsche’s principal commentators into ‘lumpers’
(including Heidegger, Jaspers, Danto, Schacht, Deleuze, and Müller-
Lauter), for whom the status of the Nachlass is unproblematic, thus treating
it as on at least a par with Nietzsche’s published writings; and ‘splitters’
(including Alderman, Hollingdale, Strong, Montinari, and himself), who
‘distinguish sharply between published and unpublished writings’. Since
Magnus first drew this distinction, and since the Colli-Montinari edition has
become the canonical edition, the number of scholars who simply lump all of
Nietzsche’s writings together, treating published and unpublished works in
the same way, has dwindled to near zero, especially in the English-speaking
Nietzsche scholarly community.
This is claimed without any motivation, and without showing that this is the
case, for example by showing that much of what can be found in Nietzsche’s
Nachlass is rejected material. Nietzsche, in fact, often did strike out many notes,
unlike what Schrift implies. He struck out about 10 per cent of the notes in
the three notebooks W II 1–3, used in 1887 and 1888, visible in KGW IX,
but not mentioned in KSA or the standard KGW (I-VIII). He seems to have done
this mostly because either he had used them for writing The Case of Wagner,
Twilight of the Idols or The Antichrist, or because he had copied them over into
other later notebooks.
However, oddly enough, Magnus, Hollingdale, Schrift, et al. ignore that
Nietzsche, in the last active five years of his life, had great plans and collected
many notes to be used for his Hauptwerk, but then suddenly collapsed on
3 January 1889. These notes, the majority of which are from the last years,
were obviously not discarded and do not fall into the unfortunate dichotomy
between either published notes (and variants of this) or discarded notes (which
actually seem to be very few). They instead fall into a third category of notes
Nietzsche wrote, collected, organized, and revised for use in his planned four-
volume Hauptwerk.
Jing Huang has recently written an excellent paper on how Nietzsche’s
notes have been viewed in the Anglo-Saxon world, summarizing much of the
debate. She correctly points out that ‘We should not forget that Nietzsche’s
work was interrupted forever in one of the most productive periods of his life’,
and summarizes the fact that Nietzsche wanted some of his notes, a small
amount, burnt in 1888, which ‘neither suggests the abandonment of the
project of the will to power [the Hauptwerk], nor warrants a devaluation of
the Nachlass’.22
22
Huang (2019: 1206 and 1196).
2.2.2 The Debate about Nietzsche’s Planned Magnum Opus

The best, the most authoritative, and the most influential text written about
Nietzsche’s notes and his plans for a Hauptwerk since the Second World War
is Mazzino Montinari’s excellent essay ‘Nietzsches Nachlaß von 1885 bis
1888 oder Textkritik und Wille zur Macht’ published in Nietzsche lesen
(1982).23 As a very acute and perceptive scholar, and as the editor of the
critical edition of Nietzsche’s works, his views and arguments must certainly
be taken very seriously. He is very sceptical, critical, and even hostile towards
the idea of a Hauptwerk by Nietzsche, and he claims that ‘Nietzsche’s collapse
in Turin came when he literally was finished with everything’ (Montinari
1982: 102). The same claim is made by the main biographer Curt Paul Janz:
‘with it [Der Antichrist] and by 30 September 1888 his philosophy has come to
an end!’ (Janz 1993 III: 20f.). To me, this claim seems both psychologically
improbable and in regard to what Nietzsche writes simply wrong. The claim
that Nietzsche was ‘finished with everything’ is problematic and misleading.
Primarily, it is problematic because it lets Nietzsche’s purported intention
during the last few weeks of his active life (in spite of his mental state,
including severe megalomania) annul his clearly expressed intention for and
work on a Hauptwerk the previous five years. It is based on two related
premises: a letter from 11 December 1888 in which Nietzsche claims ‘every-
thing is finished’, and other letters from late November 1888 in which he
possibly seems to refer to The Antichrist as his complete Hauptwerk (KSB
8:1187 and 1159).
It is not clear what Nietzsche refers to when he says that ‘everything is
finished’ in a letter to Carl Fuchs – it is possible or probable that he is just
referring to the work at hand, the first volume of his Hauptwerk, as well as the
two preparatory texts Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo.24
23
This essay has also been published, in slightly different forms, in several other publications,
including in the commentary volume to Nietzsche’s works, KSA 14, as well as translated into
English in Reading Nietzsche (2003), 80–102.
24
The difficulty to know exactly what Nietzsche meant is made more difficult by the fact that this
is stated at the very beginning of the letter, which is likely to be a response to a letter by Fuchs
that is no longer extant, so that we lack a context to the claim, or to Nietzsche’s previous letter
(that probably is lost). If Fuchs in his letter discussed The Antichrist and/or Nietzsche’s life
(Ecce Homo) and/or critique of Christianity, Nietzsche’s statement would seem to refer to
these works. In his last pervious extant letter to Fuchs, 9 September 1888 (KSB 8:1104),
Nietzsche speaks about Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner and then adds: “the next that
then comes is the Revaluation of All Values (which first book is almost finished).” When
Nietzsche later in the letter from 11 December (KSB 8:1187) says that one can now say things
about him that two years later will seem like silliness, it seems possibly to refer to the further
three volumes of the Hauptwerk that will need time to be written and published. Furthermore,
Nietzsche’s statement can be influenced by his request that Fuchs should write something
The second part, that Nietzsche gave up the idea of publishing a four-volume
Hauptwerk, is based on the fact that Nietzsche refers to The Antichrist as
the Umwerthung aller Werthe, and no longer only as the first volume of
the Umwerthung in two letters from late November 1888. Furthermore, he
sometime in December wrote a new title page with the subtitle, instead of
the original ‘the First Book of the Revaluation of All Values’ with only
‘Revaluation of All Values’. However, he kept the original title page so there
are thus two slightly different title pages in the printer’s manuscript copy, so it
is not certain that he changed his mind. The changed subtitle may not neces-
sarily reflect a change in the number of volumes, but merely that each of them
could be read in any order, and independently of the others (and all four could
then have the latter subtitle, Revaluation of All Values), which is consistent
with how The Antichrist is written. The standard interpretation is thus mainly
based on a few of Nietzsche’s letters, the earliest to Brandes, 20 November and
to Deussen, 26 November 1888 (KSB 8:1151 and 1159). It is not altogether
unlikely that what Nietzsche referred to in these letters was his present work,
and that he simply decided not to speak of the three remaining forthcoming
volumes. Nietzsche had, in fact, in letters already before mid-November
seemingly referred to The Antichrist as the complete Umwerthung aller
Werthe in that manner, by not referring to it as the first volume, though,
clearly, he regarded it as only the first volume at that time. Furthermore, the
fact that Nietzsche twice thereafter, in the second half of December, refers to
The Antichrist as the first book of the Revaluation seems to nullify Montinari’s
and the standard interpretation, as well as that interpretation of the letter to
Fuchs.
Montinari’s interpretation of this, that Nietzsche had decided not to go on
and write the remaining three books of the planned Hauptwerk, seems perhaps
possible, but it is not the only interpretation. Against this stands the fact that
Nietzsche referred to The Antichrist as the first book of the Revaluation in
several letters as late as in mid-November 1888 (to Overbeck and Meta von
Salis, 13 and 14 November 1888, KSB 8:1143 and 1144), after which there are
no philosophical notes and work. Nietzsche had for over five years been
planning and working on a four-volume work, and he had also promised in
print, as we will see, in most of his late books to publish such a work. There is
nothing in Nietzsche’s few notes or in his many letters from mid-November
that seems to reflect such a major change in his thought as giving up these
plans would be. Furthermore, in the proofs for the Ecce Homo manuscript
about him (and then it is obviously better if things are finished), and the letter is obviously
influenced by Nietzsche’s impending collapse.
(as well as in an unused note for Nietzsche contra Wagner), The Antichrist is
referred to as ‘the first book of the Revaluation of All Values’ in the second half
of December (as I will show). We also know that after he had finished The
Antichrist, he set to work on The Immoralist, and worked on that until he in
mid-October decided that he needed to write Ecce Homo as preparatory to the
Revaluation.
Alan Schrift, in ‘Nietzsche’s Nachlass’ (quoted earlier), while discussing
Nietzsche’s plans for a Hauptwerk, follows Montinari in every detail.
Julian Young, in his Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (2010),
does not really discuss Nietzsche’s plans and work on a Hauptwerk during five
years. However, he has a separate chapter dealing with Nietzsche’s plans for
a Hauptwerk, placed after he had finished dealing with Nietzsche’s active life,
including 1888, chapter 26: ‘The Rise and Fall of “The Will to Power”.’ He
limits his discussions exclusively to the plans for the Hauptwerk while it was
entitled Der Wille zur Macht, that is from August 1885 to August 1888, and
closely associates it with Nietzsche’s philosopheme will to power. He argues
that Nietzsche gave up on this theme (although Nietzsche actually continues to
refer to it also in Ecce Homo), and therefore also on the Hauptwerk. Young
thereby fails to see the larger picture and ends up discussing a pseudo-problem,
why Der Wille zur Macht was never completed rather than why the planned
magnum opus was never completed and why it was renamed (534). Nonetheless,
Young admits that ‘the Revaluation [can be seen] as a continuation of the
‘masterwork’ project’ (541), but argues like Montinari, without referring to
him, that the two letters from the end of November show that it ‘in the end
abbreviated itself into The Antichrist’ (542). He does not refer to Nietzsche’s
later references to The Antichrist as the first book of the Hauptwerk, nor to the
degree that the decision was influenced or determined by Nietzsche’s mental
state. However, he does, I believe correctly, reject Nietzsche’s very late change
of the subtitle of The Antichrist to Curse on Christianity, because ‘Nietzsche
was almost certainly insane when he created it’ (542).
However, to repeat, the second problem with Montinari’s interpretation (if it
was to be correct) is that it accepts the collapsing of Nietzsche’s statements
as annulling his earlier view, which is much more relevant, for that was when he
worked as a philosopher, from 1884 to late in 1888, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
to Ecce Homo. The Montinari interpretation uses a few statements from when
Nietzsche was mentally unstable to interpret backwards. Throughout Nietzsche’s
late period, he intended and worked on a Hauptwerk, which was never com-
pleted, but nonetheless affected the contents of all of his late books and late notes.
Even if Nietzsche changed his mind, during the end of November or December
1888, just weeks before his total collapse (at a time when he no longer wrote any
philosophical notes, and his judgement was clearly affected by the impending
collapse) it does not change that while he was healthy and wrote his late books
and notes he planned to write a four-volume Hauptwerk. At a minimum, one
needs to be aware of this when discussing these books and these notes. Actually,
there are good grounds to assume that there is much interesting material in
Nietzsche’s late notes that is not present or developed in his published books,
since he saved it for the Hauptwerk. There is much material that awaits closer
examination and discussion in the future.
2.3 The History of Nietzsche’s Planned Magnum Opus

It seems psychologically unlikely that Nietzsche was finished with everything
when he collapsed forty-four years old. The evidence seems also to show that
this was not the case. For many years, he had planned and worked hard to write a
major work beyond what we have today, and at least as late as November 1888,
he still planned to write and publish the three remaining volumes of his
Hauptwerk. Even if he perhaps gave up the idea of writing a Hauptwerk during
the last weeks before the mental collapse (and it seems in that case reasonable to
regard this, in large part, as due to his mental state), it seems more interesting
and relevant to take into consideration his intention and work during the last five
years when he wrote all the books of the late phase and when most of his life was
directed towards writing the Hauptwerk.
The Nietzsche scholar and editor Mazzino Montinari, and almost all com-
mentators thereafter, have regarding the question concerning Nietzsche’s mag-
num opus ‘interpreted backwards’, that is, from the fact that no Hauptwerk was
finished (for few accept The Antichrist as such), and possibly strengthened by
the interpretation that Nietzsche perhaps gave up the idea of a Hauptwerk during
the last weeks of his active life, they have concluded that Nietzsche’s final
position was that he had said all he wanted to say. This view became even more
entrenched due to the exposure of the problematic nature of Elisabeth’s and
Peter Gast’s selection of notes under the title Der Wille zur Macht (1901, 1906),
which by many was wrongly understood to constitute this planned Hauptwerk.
In the debate about its status, the claim that Nietzsche at the end had no intention
to write such a work was an effective argument.
It is surprising that Elisabeth’s and Peter Gast’s Der Wille zur Macht has
received so much attention and that it is essentially the only attempt at construct-
ing – or seriously discussing – the content of Nietzsche’s planned Hauptwerk.
There ought to be ample room for discussion, speculation, and for producing
interesting editorial versions of his notebooks, and thus for examining the relation
between the late notes and the published works.25 The only exception seems to be
Friedrich Würzbach’s attempt Umwertung aller Werte: Aus dem Nachlass zusam-
mengestellt und herausgegeben (München, second ed. 1969). In fact, both of
these versions are more like subjective selections from Nietzsche’s notes and
attempts at organizing them (and thus really not all that different from the many
shorter and more random selections from the late Nietzsche’s notebooks that have
been published) rather than attempts to follow Nietzsche’s own intentions. It is, in
fact, at least in outline, possible to follow Nietzsche’s intentions, but this has not
been done.
Still more surprising, considering that it coloured and partly determined much
of Nietzsche’s life and work during the last five years of his active life, is that the
question of his attempt to write a Hauptwerk has received almost no in-depth
discussion in the many biographies of Nietzsche. It is, for example, only briefly
discussed by Janz, and hardly mentioned at all in most other ones, by, e.g.,
Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: Biographie seines Denkens (2000), Josef Rattner,
Nietzsche: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (2000), Curtis Cate, Friedrich Nietzsche
(2002), Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (2010),
and Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite (2018).
Essentially, all discussions of the question of whether Nietzsche intended to
write a magnum opus, or of the relevance of his late notebooks, have exclu-
sively focused on the project ‘Der Wille zur Macht’, and inevitably got bogged
down in discussions of Elisabeth’s and Peter Gast’s selection of notes. That has
been a serious mistake, for Nietzsche’s intention to write a Hauptwerk influ-
enced and shaped what he published (and did not publish) during his whole late
period.
Many readers of Nietzsche find it surprising and frustrating that he himself
claims that the idea of eternal recurrence is so profound and fundamental, but
that he hardly elaborates on it at all. In fact, his most comprehensive published
‘discussion’ of it is in its very first presentation in The Gay Science and more
poetically in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Thereafter he frequently alludes to it –
see, for example, the last sentence of Twilight of the Idols – but he does not carry
out any discussion of it or its consequences. There was, however, a reason for
this, and that was that he saved it to constitute the pinnacle of his Hauptwerk, as
is shown in almost all of his drafts. The same frustrated expectation can be held
about several other aspects or topics of Nietzsche’s late thought, especially
regarding the revaluation of all values and nihilism. In fact, for the latter case,
Nietzsche has even at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals promised that
25
There is not even an entry for discussions of Nietzsche’s planned Hauptwerk in the most
extensive of Nietzsche bibliographies, the Weimarer Nietzsche-Bibliographie.
he would elaborate more extensively on ‘the history of European nihilism’ in

his Hauptwerk (and there are ample notes on this theme among his late
notebooks).26 To deny that Nietzsche had such intentions, and to ignore the
late Nietzsche’s many interesting notes, has been a failure and a sign of poverty
in Nietzsche research over the last decades, in fact, ever since Montinari’s
critical edition (KSA and KGW) made such studies feasible. Now, when the
facsimile and diplomatic edition of Nietzsche’s late notebooks have been
published as KGW IX in fourteen volumes (2001–23), such an approach can
be performed under better conditions than ever before. A thorough examination
and study of the late notes, and a comparison of them with his published works,
ought to be one of the major tasks of Nietzsche’s research today.
Did Nietzsche intend and plan to write a magnum opus, a Hauptwerk? I will
show that this was indeed the case, that he for at least the last five years of his
active life, 1884–88, planned, projected, and worked hard to write such
a work. Actually, the project seems to have begun much earlier, already in
1881, but from this time we have much less relevant notes extant. This plan
and intention were part of the reason that he felt that he was moving into a new
third phase of his development in 1881/82. Nietzsche’s plans for and work on
his Hauptwerk have consequences that we ought to take into consideration.
For example, an awareness that he avoided to use the material intended for the
Hauptwerk when writing Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of
Morals, and that the subtitle to the former work, ‘Prelude to a Philosophy of
the Future’ actually refers to that it should be regarded as a prelude to the
projected four-volume Hauptwerk (which was also listed as a work in progress
on the back cover). Further, a consequence of an awareness that Nietzsche
worked intensively on writing a magnum opus the last five years of his life, is
that the relevance and importance of some topics – such as eternal recurrence,
nihilism, values and evaluation – that are present in the late Nietzsche’s
published books, but which he intended to elaborate on much more in his
magnum opus, ought to be given more attention and greater weight. This then
also becomes true of his late notes generally. His work on a Hauptwerk shows
that the late Nietzsche had intentions, and a sense of mission, that went beyond
what can be found in the published works since he never finished the said
Hauptwerk. Not only Beyond Good and Evil, but also On the Genealogy of
Morals, Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo, he regarded, and stated in letters,
as preludes to that planned Hauptwerk. Furthermore, Nietzsche was hardly
a systematic philosopher, but he intended to write this Hauptwerk in a more
26
My argument is not so much that Nietzsche had an exoteric and an esoteric philosophy – but that
he alluded to things that he was going to make public, but in the end did not due to his mental
collapse.
systematic manner than most Nietzsche scholars assume or are aware of, as he
stated, and as we can see by the first and only finished volume, The Antichrist.
I will show herein that we are able to know fairly much about the intended
content of the Hauptwerk.
At least from 1884, he stated in several letters that Thus Spoke Zarathustra
only represented a ‘Vorhalle’ or ‘entrance hall’ to his philosophy, the ‘main
building’ he planned to work through in the next years. From 1886, he began to
explicitly refer to that projected work as a Hauptwerk. The evidence for this
intention to write a Hauptwerk can be seen in his published works, in his letters
and in his notebooks. Let us examine the evidence in more detail.
The intention of writing a Hauptwerk is visible in all of Nietzsche’s books
after Thus Spoke Zarathustra (and perhaps also in Zarathustra, with its incon-
clusive ending), but this presence has been ignored or gone unnoticed by almost
all commentators. He avoided using the material intended for the Hauptwerk
when he wrote and put together his first book after Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and also On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), as
stated by Montinari (KSA 14, 346). As we have seen, the subtitle of Beyond
Good and Evil refers to the Hauptwerk, and it was also announced as a work in
progress on the back cover. At the end of On the Genealogy of Morals he
explicitly refers to his future intention: ‘I shall probe these things more thor-
oughly and severely in another connection (under the title “On the History of
European Nihilism”; it will be contained in a work in progress: The Will to
Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values)’ (GM III 27).27 Shortly after
having finished writing the three essays of On the Genealogy of Morals, he
writes to Gast, on 15 September 1887, that he has more to say than what is
written in them, with obvious reference to his forthcoming Hauptwerk. He
planned a second volume of On the Genealogy of Morals, with at least three
further essays, that later was merged with the plans for the third volume of the
Hauptwerk, The Immoralist. After having finished On the Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche intended to work more or less exclusively on his Hauptwerk for
a longer period of time – and this was largely what happened. However, he made
two short ‘pauses’ to write The Case of Wagner and Twilight of the Idols during
the following year, both of which he regarded as resting places in the midst of
the greater and much more difficult task of writing his Hauptwerk. In The Case
of Wagner (1888), he again explicitly refers to the content of his coming
27
As a typical example of how Nietzsche’s intention and work on this Hauptwerk is assumed to be
irrelevant (since no such work was finished) and is associated with the problematic selection of
Elisabeth and Gast, and thus, it is implied, is best ignored; see Maudemarie Clark and Alan
Swensen’s translation of and comments to this work (1998: 167).
Hauptwerk: ‘I shall have an opportunity (in a chapter of my main work [meines

Hauptwerks], entitled ‘Toward a Physiology of Art’) to show in more detail how
this over-all change of art into histrionics is no less an expression of physio-
logical degeneration’ (CW 7).
Nietzsche regarded his next work, the short Twilight of the Idols (1888), as
a summary or rather as a collection of extracts of his philosophy so far (he
considered giving it the subtitle ‘My Philosophy in Extract’). That this work
was written in the shadow of his projected Hauptwerk is visible in the title,
preface, general contents and the last sentence of the book as well as the last
sentence of the penultimate chapter. Until the very end, the proof-reading stage
of the manuscript, Nietzsche had a different and much less belligerent title for
the work: Müßiggang eines Psychologen (The Idle Hours of a Psychologist),
implying, as he also states in the preface, that he here takes a pause from the
difficult task of writing his Hauptwerk – for the purpose of giving extracts of his
philosophy so far. The subtitle to the new title, ‘or How to Philosophize with the
Hammer’, is somewhat misleading and its primary meaning has not been
understood by most readers. As one can see from Nietzsche’s notebooks, the
hammer is for him a symbol for the idea of eternal recurrence, and the title thus
first and foremost means: how to philosophize from the perspective of eternal
recurrence, that is, how to philosophize from the perspective of examining
whether these ideas and values increase or decrease your will and ability to
affirm life and reality.28 The subtitle is in part misleading since he does not
explicitly discuss the idea of eternal recurrence in the book (since he saves that
for the Hauptwerk), but Twilight of the Idols consists largely of severe critique
of decadence and pessimism – that is, of views that reduce the value of life and
reality. On the other hand, Nietzsche felt that his thinking from 1881 onwards
had been shaped by this idea, so the subtitle is perhaps not inappropriate (apart
from the fact that very few of his readers could have been able to realize the
primary meaning of it – at least until the fourth book of his Hauptwerk or the
contents of his notebooks had been published).
In the preface to Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche explicitly says that he
is working on his Hauptwerk, at this late stage titled Revaluation of All
Values:
To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible

business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than
cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part. Only
excess of strength is proof of strength. – A revaluation of all values [or
Revaluation of All Values], this question-mark so black, so huge it casts
28
See Brobjer (1999) and (2023a).
a shadow over him who sets it up – such a destiny of a task [i.e. writing the
Hauptwerk and revaluing values] compels one every instant to run out into
the sunshine so as to shake off a seriousness grown all too oppressive. Every
expedient for doing so is justified, every ‘occasion’ a joyful occasion [i.e., this
book, as well as his previous book, The Case of Wagner, are welcomed pauses
in that much more difficult task].
Furthermore, he ends the short preface by explicitly stating that he had

just finished the first volume of the Hauptwerk, i.e., The Antichrist: ‘Turin,
30 September 1888, on the day the first book of the Revaluation of All Values
was completed.’29
The content of Twilight of the Idols is highly interesting and he allowed
himself to use material and notes that he had set aside for his Hauptwerk, but he
nonetheless – intentionally – avoided many of the themes he planned to cover in
his Hauptwerk, such as eternal recurrence and nihilism. Other topics, such as the
physiology of aesthetics, higher human beings, the revaluation of all values, and
amor fati he only alluded to.
The last sentence of the book (with the exception of the quotation from Thus
Spoke Zarathustra placed on a separate page at the end) – with references to
revaluation of all values (the title of his Hauptwerk), Dionysus and eternal
recurrence – surely is meant to point forward to his coming Hauptwerk (just as
the end of The Gay Science promised Thus Spoke Zarathustra): ‘the Birth of
Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in
the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can – I, the last disciple of the
philosopher Dionysus – I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence . . .’. This
pointing forwards to his coming Hauptwerk is still more obvious at the end of
the penultimate chapter of the book, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, which
originally was meant to constitute the end of the book:30 ‘I have given mankind
the most profound book it possesses, my Zarathustra: I shall shortly give it the
most independent [i.e., his Hauptwerk].’
That Twilight of the Idols did not constitute the end of Nietzsche’s intention to
philosophize is clear from letters in which Nietzsche speaks of the book as
preparatory and preparing the way for his Hauptwerk. In a letter to Gast,
12 September 1888 (KSB 8:1105), written immediately after having finished
the manuscript, he states that: ‘the book [Twilight of the Idols] can serve the
purpose of initiating and whetting the appetite for my Revaluation of All Values
29
Nietzsche writes the German Umwerthung aller Werthe in exactly the same way in the two
quoted texts from the preface, while in English one is forced to choose between a statement in
italics or a title.
30
Nietzsche at a very late stage during the proofreading added the final chapter “What I Owe to the
Ancients” (which actually was written for Ecce Homo) to the manuscript.
(which first book is almost completed)’. Two days later, he writes to Deussen
(KSB 8:1111):
My publisher already has another manuscript, which is a very stringent and

subtle expression of my whole philosophical heterodoxy – hidden behind
much gracefulness and mischief. It is called ‘Müssiggang eines Psychologen’.
In the last analysis, both these works [The Case of Wagner and Twilight of the
Idols] are only recuperations in the midst of an immeasurably difficult and
decisive task which, when it is understood, will spit humanity into two halves.
Its aim and meaning is, in four words: the revaluation of all values.
In December 1888, just weeks before his mental collapse, after having just
received the printed book, he refers to it in a letter to H. Taine, 8 December
(KSB 8:1179), as: ‘in relation to that which it prepares, almost a piece of fate’,
and on a postcard to Naumann, 20 December 1888 (KSB 8:1202), as ‘short and
in the highest degree preparatory’. That for which it was meant to be preparatory
was his forthcoming Hauptwerk.
When Nietzsche wrote The Antichrist (in September 1888, although it was not
published until 1895) it constituted the first volume of four of his Hauptwerk.
This was stated, as we have seen, in the preface of Twilight of the Idols, as well as
in the subtitle to The Antichrist: ‘The first book of the Revaluation of All Values.’
In the preface to the work, Nietzsche states that this book belongs to (i.e., can only
be understood by) the very few, possibly those who understood his Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, thus connecting his Hauptwerk to his previous masterpiece.31 The
first fourteen sections of the book are more general and say something about the
overall Hauptwerk. He there emphasizes the importance of being willing and
creating higher human beings, which so far have only been ‘lucky hits’. This
should be seen as a parallel to his Übermensch-theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Still more importantly, in these sections, he makes a strong dichotomy between
ancient (healthy) and modern and Christian (decadent) values, which much of his
attempt at a revaluation relates to. By section 15, he begins to more concentrate
on the main theme of the first book of his Hauptwerk, a revaluation of Christian
values and a harsh critique of religion and Christianity.
It is surprising – and unfortunate – that these first fourteen sections have
never been read and discussed as representing part of his greater Hauptwerk,
rather than just being part of The Antichrist. Such an analysis (especially in
combination with an examination of the late Nietzsche’s notes for that work)
would yield much interesting material for the direction of the late Nietzsche’s
thought. In section six, for example, he speaks explicitly of a theme he planned
31
I have discussed of the relationship between the projected Hauptwerk and Thus Spoke
Zarathustra in Brobjer (2023b).
to discuss in a volume of his Hauptwerk relating to his revaluation of values: ‘A

history of the “higher feelings”, of the “ideals of mankind” – and it is possible
that I shall have to narrate it – would almost also constitute an explanation of
why man is so depraved.’ There is, however, no space here for such an analysis
of the contents of the beginning of The Antichrist.
Nietzsche decided that for his Hauptwerk to be read and understood, he
needed to prepare the ground – and especially explain why he has been able
to see what no one else has seen or realized for two thousand years – by writing
his Ecce Homo (written in October and the first days of November, with mostly
minor revisions added in late November and December 1888) and meant to be
published before his Hauptwerk (including The Antichrist). Nietzsche refers to
it as ‘a in the highest degree preparatory text’ to his Hauptwerk in a letter to
Naumann, 6 November 1888 (KSB 8:1139), and it contains continual references
to his future Hauptwerk. Just to mention a few examples: The very first sentence
of the book announces his future work: ‘Seeing that I must shortly approach
mankind with the heaviest demand that ever has been made on it [i.e., the
revaluation], it seems to me indispensable to say who I am.’ At the end of the
preface, as a separate paragraph, is a short text originally dated on Nietzsche’s
birthday, 15 October 1888, in which he again refers to The Antichrist as the first
book of his Hauptwerk: ‘The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the
Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with
the hammer – all of them gifts of this year, of its last quarter even!’ When
Nietzsche revised this text in November and December, he struck out the date,
but – significantly – continued to refer to The Antichrist as the first volume of the
Hauptwerk. When Nietzsche carefully read the manuscript of Ecce Homo
during the first week of December – ‘weighing each word on a gold scale’
(letter to Gast, 9 December 1888, KSB 8:1181) – and again when he read the
proofs during the middle of the month,32 he still kept referring to The Antichrist
as ‘the first book of the Revaluation’ (my emphasis). He lets this description
remain, although he made a number of other changes in the prologue, when he
returned the proofs of the first part of Ecce Homo to his publisher Naumann with
the words ‘druckfertig / N’ (‘ready to print / N’), and dated by Nietzsche as
‘Turin, den 18. Dez. 1888’.33 This makes the claim that The Antichrist had
become the complete Revaluation of All Values already a month earlier highly
unlikely or incorrect. It is clearly stated here, and ready for publication, on
32
Compare Montinari (1982: 122) “Der erste und zweite Bogen des Ecce homo waren von
Nietzsche am 18. Dezember 1888 ‘Druckfertig’ nach Leipzig zurückgeschickt worden.”
Compare Nietzsche’s letter to Naumann, 18 December 1888 (KSB 8:1198).
33
KSA 14, 459. See also the first page of the proofs which are extant.
18 December 1888, that The Antichrist is ‘das erste Buch der Umwerthung aller
Werthe’.34 When Nietzsche revised his Nietzsche contra Wagner, which he had
begun writing and compiling on 12 December, in the middle part of December
(before 22 December), he then again refers to The Antichrist as the ‘first book of
the Revaluation of Values’ in a revision of this text that he eventually did not
use.35 This again severely contradicts any claim that The Antichrist had become
the whole Revaluation of All Values already in November.
The last book Nietzsche discussed in Ecce Homo was The Case of Wagner,
and at the very end of the discussion, he explicitly refers to his coming
Hauptwerk: ‘And so, about two years before the shattering thunder of the
Revaluation which will set the earth into convulsions, I sent the “Wagner
Case” into the world.’ He thus planned to publish the Hauptwerk in or near
1890. In a letter to Overbeck, 13 Nov. 1888 (KSB 8:1143), he writes: ‘At the end
of next year, the first book of the Revaluation will be published. It lies here
finished.’
The last chapter of Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, is to a large part
centred upon his coming work: ‘Revaluation of All Values: this is my formula
[and also the title of his coming Hauptwerk] for an act of supreme coming-to-
oneself on the part of mankind [. . .] I am a bringer of good tidings such as there
has never been’ (section 1).
Nietzsche’s intention to write a Hauptwerk is still more prominent in his
letters than in his published books. In them, we also get some hints as to the
nature of the Hauptwerk. He explicitly refers to such a work as his Hauptwerk in
a number of letters between 1886 and 1888, but an intention to write such a
work is clear already from at least 1884 onwards.
Nietzsche began to feel a new and intensive sense of purpose with his
‘discovery’ of the idea of eternal recurrence (and other related ‘discoveries’
34
I have included a picture of the proofs of this page of Ecce Homo, with Nietzsche’s handwritten
comments from 18 December 1888, and with his statement that the text is now ready to be
printed (with the text: “The first book of the Revaluation of All Values,” etc.), on p. 93 of my
Nietzsche’s ‘Ecce Homo’ and the Revaluation of All Values (2021). According to Montinari, just
days before Nietzsche’s mental collapse, 30 or 31 of December 1888, he apparently sent
instructions (on a not extant postcard) to his publisher to strike out the words “the first book
of” and changed the text to: “The Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, and, as
relaxation, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with the hammer – all of them
gifts of this year, of its last quarter even!” (KSA 14, 462f).
35
In this planned addition to Nietzsche contra Wagner, “Wir Antipoden,” Nietzsche wrote (some-
time near the middle of December): “Dieser Satz, hart und schneidig geworden unter dem
Hammerschlag der historischen Erkenntniß (– lisez: erstes Buch der Umwerthung der
Werthe –),” and so on. Montinari does not refer to it in his essay “Nietzsches Nachlaß von
1885 bis 1888 oder Textkritik und Wille zur Macht,” in Nietzsche lesen (1982). However, as
a reliable editor, he gives the text as an eventually not used addition to “Wir Antipoden” (KSA
14, 525f).
made near that time) in early August 1881. He then began to refer to his ‘task’, ‘life-
task’, ‘fundamental task’, and ‘main task’ (Aufgabe, Lebensaufgabe, Hauptsache,
and Hauptaufgabe), and similar expressions, and that he will require several years’
time to develop it.36
The intention to write a Hauptwerk becomes explicit in five letters from the
spring of 1884 where Nietzsche speaks of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as merely an
‘entrance hall’ to his philosophy, and that he was working on the main building.
In the second of these letters, to Meysenbug, end of March 1884 (KSB 6:498),
he writes that he has finished his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and thereafter calls
that work ‘an entrance hall to my philosophy – built for me, to give me courage’,
and he hints at that he is working on ‘the main building’.
In three further letters, he refers to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as merely the
‘Vorhalle’ to his philosophy, and he refers to his strong sense of purpose and
mission. It seems clear that he had in mind a more philosophical (and less
metaphorical) work than Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but which, in all likelihood,
would elaborate on similar fundamental ideas.
If I get to Sils Maria in the summer, I mean to set about revising my

metaphysical and epistemological views. I must now proceed step by step
through a series of disciplines, for I have decided to spend the next five
years on an elaboration of my ‘philosophy’, the entrance hall of which
I have built with my Zarathustra. (Letter to Overbeck, 7 April 1884, KSB
6:504)
A month later, he repeats the intention to work on a Hauptwerk, then referred

to as ‘Haupt-Bau’, i.e., ‘main building’.
Now, after that I for me have built this entrance hall to my philosophy, I will
have to start again and not grow tired until the main building also stands
finished before me. (Letter to Meysenbug, early May 1884, KSB 6:509)
In fact, this was not only an intention, for during much of 1884 Nietzsche
actually planned and worked on this Hauptwerk or ‘main building’ of his
philosophy. In early autumn, Nietzsche seems to confirm that he had fulfilled
his plans.
I have practically finished the main task which I set myself for this summer;
the next six years will be for working out a scheme which I have sketched for
my ‘philosophy’. It has gone well and looks hopeful. (Letter to Gast,
2 September 1884, KSB 6:529)
36
See, for example, letter to Elisabeth, 18 August 1881 (KSB 6:138), to Overbeck, 20/21 August 1881
(KSB 6:139), to Ida Overbeck, 19 January 1882 (KSB 6:188), to Gast, 3 September 1883 (KSB
6:461), and to Overbeck, 12 February 1884 (KSB 6:488).
After having finished On the Genealogy of Morals (summer 1887), he writes

that his whole life continues to be determined by ‘the nowadays completely
absorbing main task [Hauptpensum] of my life’, that is, his work on the
Hauptwerk. During 1887 and most of 1888, Nietzsche was also intensively
engaged in this work on the Hauptwerk as can be confirmed when one examines
his notes.
It is primarily with the aid of Nietzsche’s notebooks that we can see and
discuss the planned contents of his Hauptwerk. However, already from the
letters, it is clear that it was planned to be a four-volume work, which was
meant to present and elaborate his thoughts in a more structured and theoretical
manner than is done in any of his other books. Not only does Nietzsche refer to
the planned work as a Hauptwerk, a ‘main building’, ‘my lifework’, “my main
task’, etc., suggesting, not only that it was to be a magnum opus, but also that it
was going to be a more ‘complete’, structured, and theoretical work than his
other books. It seems likely that he considered its form to be something treatise-
like, perhaps akin to the essays in On the Genealogy of Morals.37 Already in
1883, he speaks of wanting to construct something more ‘theoretical’, thereafter
he refers to his Hauptwerk as a ‘conception’ as ‘a coherent construction of
thought’, ‘my conception as a whole’, that he will perform a ‘working through
of my ‘philosophy’, ‘work through a scheme, with which I have outlined
my “philosophy”’, ‘work through my complete system of thought’, and in
September 1888 he refers to its ‘very strict and earnest character’.38 That
those descriptions are accurate is confirmed by the first volume, The
Antichrist, which is written as a sort of polemical treatise.
The most important source of information about Nietzsche’s projected
Hauptwerk and its planned contents can be found in his notebooks.39 It is possible
to find a very large number of outlines of titles of planned books related to
Nietzsche’s Hauptwerk in them from the later 1880s. Nietzsche’s work on and
notes for the Hauptwerk 1884–88 can be divided into several periods, and during
this time there are several more extensive collections of notes for, and correspond-
ing tables of contents of, that work, but we can here concentrate on only the last one.
37
Nietzsche re-read his On the Genealogy of Morals during July–August 1888, shortly before he
wrote The Antichrist, and Montinari has suggested that these essays constituted a model and
stimulus for how he was to write his Umwerthung aller Werthe. I agree that this seems likely.
38
See letters to Gast, 3 September 1883 (KSB 6:461), Seydlitz, 17 August 1886 (KSB 7:737), to
Overbeck, 24 March 1887 (KSB 8:820), to Brandes, 4 May 1888 (KSB 8:1030), to Overbeck,
7 April 1884 (KSB 6:504), to Gast, 2 September 1884 (KSB 6:529) and to Naumann,
7 September 1888 (KSB 8:1103).
39
Here only a superficial overview of this information can be given since they cover about 1,500
printed pages in the KSA-version. Actually, in the new KGW IX-version, they cover about 4,000
pages.
The final period covers the autumn 1887 until the late autumn 1888, when he
worked intensively on his projected Hauptwerk, but taking two resting-breaks
and writing The Case of Wagner and Twilight of the Idols. He then began to use
three large bound notebooks exclusively for collecting notes for his Hauptwerk.40
He during the first half of this period wrote and copied down from earlier
notebooks in legible handwriting a large number of notes into them, which led
to over 500 notes on over 450 printed pages of notes for the project. He later
returned to them, organized, and numbered 374 of them. These notes can be
regarded as Nietzsche’s most extensive draft for his Hauptwerk. This is obviously
not a finished work to be published by Nietzsche, but together with his later
revisions of these notes and his later notes, this constitutes an important source for
anyone interested in Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy.
This work on his Hauptwerk he refers to in a letter to Elisabeth, 15 October 1887
(KSB 8:925):
On the other hand, there is not the slightest chance once my magnum opus
[mein Hauptwerk] is finished to bring it to the world other than through ‘self-
print’. [. . .] Forgive me, if I due to these worries about the future (that is about
making my magnum opus possible, in which the problem and the task of my
life is concentrated) now behave in regard to financial questions with unwill-
ing worry and hesitation.
In February 1888, he began using a new fourth notebook,41 and filled half of it
with an ‘index’ to the three previous notebooks, in which these notes are briefly,
usually in one sentence, summarized and numbered 1–372 (the same as in the
other notebooks). The first three hundred of these summaries are also attributed
to the four volumes of his Hauptwerk by using Roman numerals. There is also
a plan for the whole Hauptwerk, in four volumes divided into twelve chapters
(KSA 13, 12[2]).42 These notes can be regarded as Nietzsche’s most extensive
and consistent draft for his Hauptwerk. In letters to Overbeck and to Gast, from
mid-February 1888, he calls this extensive collection of notes ‘the first written
40
“W II 1” (KSA 12, 9), “W II 2” (KSA 12, 10), and “W II 3” (KSA 13, 11). These are large
hardcover notebooks. The contents of them have been published in facsimile and diplomatic
transcription in KGW IX.6 and IX.7.
41
“W II 4” (KSA 13, 12[1 and 2]), a bound notebook of originally 127 pages. Used as “index” for
the three notebooks “W II 1, 2, 3” (listing with a one-line summary of each of the numbered notes
intended for use in his Hauptwerk) on sixty handwritten pages in the notebook and in the 17-page
-long note KSA 13, 12[1], written in February 1888. As with almost all of the notebooks,
Nietzsche wrote in them from back to front. In this notebook, about twenty pages have been
ripped or cut out – possibly because Nietzsche wanted to use the notes somewhere else (?).
Between the “index,” 12[1], which is written on every second page, and the table of contents of
the four books of the Hauptwerk, 12[2], there are a fairly large number of pages and cut out
pages, not visible in KSA 13.
42
This note is published in diplomatic transcription in KGW IX.7, W II 4, p. 4.
version of my ‘Umwerthung aller Werthe’ is finished’.43 We can also note that

already at this time, in several letters, he refers to his Hauptwerk as the
Revaluation of All Values rather than as The Will to Power.
Nietzsche extensively worked through and revised many of the full 374 notes
again in the summer of 1888, that is, just before he wrote Twilight of the Idols
and The Antichrist, and later some of them, but much less than ten per cent of
them, he used for writing these two books (and usually he then struck the note
out – not visible in KSA). However, the great majority of these notes were
certainly not discarded.
Examining these notes and notebooks, we are looking into Nietzsche’s work-
shop. Many English-language philosophers use only the texts in Nietzsche’s
published books, and simply disregard his notes and regard them as ‘discarded
material’. This is false and sad indeed, and a reflection that they have never
visited ‘Nietzsche’s workshop’ and seen how intensively he developed and
worked with his ideas and texts.
This collection of notes can be used as a reasonable starting point for an
attempt to provisionally construct the contents of the four volumes of the
Umwerthung aller Werthe. Furthermore, we know that Nietzsche returned to
this collection of notes at least four times after February 1888, and revised and
added to them, obviously because he continued to regard them as valid. Even
more important is that we know that he used them in and for drafting large part
of his work on the first volume of the Umwerthung aller Werthe, The Antichrist,
in September 1888. In a note, from September 1888, KSA 13, 22[2], Nietzsche
is drafting major parts of The Antichrist (covering material discussed in sections
41–55 of the finished The Antichrist). This is the only extant note in which he
drafts the contents of major parts of The Antichrist. He there explicitly uses his
‘index’ from February 1888 (KSA 13, 12[1], where he had summarized the 374
notes that he had written for the Umwerthung aller Werthe), and adds where ten
of these notes should be added to the text. Some of the other brief texts in the
note seem also to have been created from this selection of notes.44 He thus
obviously still regarded this selection of notes and summaries as valid in
September 1888, and as a useful source of stimulus, notes, and information,
and it seems likely that it can, with some care, also be used for information about
the planned contents of the further three volumes.
43
In letters to Overbeck and to Gast, both dated 13 February 1888 (KSB 8:990 and 991): “die erste
Niederschrift meiner ‘Umwertung aller Werthe’ ist fertig.” In the letter to Gast he expresses it
similarly: “Ich habe die erste Niederschrift meines ‘Versuchs einer Umwertung’ fertig.”
44
He had done likewise, in his earlier outline of the Hauptwerk (for what seems to be volume 1
about nihilism and truth in three chapters, in May–June 1888, that later becomes volume 2), KSA
13, 17[1], from May 1888, which also contains seven references to that index and these 374
notes.
Furthermore, we know which notes of the 300 are allocated to which volumes
(but not to which chapters Nietzsche intended them, with a few exceptions). In
one note, where he takes an overview of the whole project, he plans 50 pages per
chapter and thus 150 pages per volume (KSA 13, 13[4], from the early part of
1888), and we can see that the attributed full notes in notebooks W II 1–3
constitute a substantial working material for writing such chapters.
During September, Nietzsche in several letters expressed his optimism and
sense of achievement, but thereafter, in November and December 1888, there
were few notes and none of them philosophical. These last two months before
the collapse, Nietzsche was busy writing, editing, correcting, proofreading
a number of works, including Ecce Homo, and he wrote well over a hundred
letters. However, that which prevented the completion of the Hauptwerk was, in
my view, apart from the mental collapse, less that he was busy, but more that
there was no hurry. He had decided to write, finish, and publish Ecce Homo
before and as preparatory, and thus the work on the Hauptwerk could and had to
wait. Still more important were the signs of mental instability during these two
last months, visible especially in his letters. We have no evidence that he
consciously decided to give up the plan for a Hauptwerk. Between 1881 and
1885, there are many different titles used, but from the summer of 1885, there
are only two, used consecutively, first Will to Power and then Revaluation of All
Values, the latter that earlier had been the subtitle to the former.
2.4 The Planned Contents of the Revaluation of All Values

We will in this section examine and summarize Nietzsche’s plans for the
Hauptwerk on two levels. First by briefly reviewing his plans for the title of
the work (summarized in Table 1), thereafter the planned titles of the four books
or volumes and their planned chapter titles (summarized in Table 2). One could
go further and discuss the very large number of extant notes explicitly written
for the Hauptwerk among his notebooks but there is no space for that here.45
Many of the late notes discussing themes planned to be discussed in the future
three volumes of the Hauptwerk, such as truth, nihilism, immoralism, and
eternal recurrence are highly relevant and need to be examined not as discarded
texts but as working material for Nietzsche’s last unfinished project.
There are a very large number of drafts of titles for the Hauptwerk project in
Nietzsche’s notebooks, far more than for any other projected or realized book.
There are good reasons to regard these different titles as referring to essentially
the same planned Hauptwerk.
45
I have done a partial such study in my book The Close Relationship between Nietzsche’s Two
Most Important Books (2023b).
Table 1 The evolution of the planned titles of Nietzsche’s magnum opus, from
autumn 1881 to December 1888
Autumn 1881– Aug. 1885–Aug.

Summer 1885 → 1888 → Sept.–Dec. 1888
3−5 books (but Consisting of 4 4 books
mostly 4) books
Many different titles Consistent title Consistent title (earlier
subtitle)
Not called Hauptwerk, Called Hauptwerk Called Hauptwerk
but,
e.g., ‘Haupt-Bau’ (in
g
1884)
The New Order of Rank

The Eternal Recurrence
Philosophy of Eternal
Recurrence
Midday and Eternity
The Will to Power → Revaluation of All Values
The Innocence of
Becoming
Dionysus
Philosophy of the
Future
We can get much further information by examining the titles of the planned
four books, and the chapters they were planned to contain. When we limit
ourselves to the final situation, from September 1888 onwards, we can observe
that we possess seven drafts for or lists of titles of the books of the Umwerthung
aller Werthe, from after he began writing The Antichrist, all very similar.46
However, these contain no listing of chapter titles, as some of the earlier listings
do. Using the consistent divisions into four books after that The Antichrist was
decided upon; we can go back to the more detailed divisions from earlier in
1888 and classify these chapter titles according to these new book divisions. It
turns out that this is relatively straightforward using the three most detailed
chapter divisions. This information is presented in Table 2 and gives us
a reasonably detailed view of Nietzsche’s plans for the three remaining volumes
of the Umwerthung aller Werthe.
46
KSA 13, 19[2 and 8], 11[416], 22[14 and 24], and 23[8 and 13].
Table 2 Planned Chapter Titles for Nietzsche’s Hauptwerk from earlier in 1888, here classified and organized according to the book divisions
from September to December 1888
Umwerthung aller Table of contents from early Table of contents from May or June Table of contents from
Werthe 1888 of 1888 26 August 1888
Sept.–Dec. 1888 KSA 13, 12[2] KSA 13, 16[51] KSA 13, 18[17]
.............................. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Book 1
The Anti-Christ: Critique of the Christian ideals The religious man as typical décadent The homines religiosi
Attempt at a Critique
of Christianity
The pagan in religion Thoughts about Christianity
.............................. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Book 2
The Free Spirit: Nihilism, considered to its final The true and the apparent world The psychology of errors
Critique of conclusion
Philosophy as ‘Will to truth’ The philosopher as typical décadent The value of truth and error
a Nihilistic Culture, Civilization, the Science against philosophy The will to truth
Movement ambivalence of the ‘modern’
Nihilism [and its opposite] The metaphysicians
To the history of European nihilism
Table 2 (cont.)
Umwerthung aller Table of contents from early Table of contents from May or June Table of contents from
Werthe 1888 of 1888 26 August 1888
.............................. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Book 3
The Immoralist: The origin of ideals The good human being as typical The good and the improvers
Critique of Morality How virtue becomes victorious décadent
as the Most Herd-instincts
Dangerous Kind of Morality as the Circe of the
Lack of Knowledge philosophers
Psychology of the ‘will to power’
.............................. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
Book 4
Dionysus: The Life-prescriptions for us The will to power as life: Peak of the The principle of life: ‘Order of rank’
Philosophy of historical self-consciousness
‘Eternal recurrence’ The two ways
Eternal Recurrence The will to power: as discipline
Great politics The eternal recurrence
It is further possible to get a much more detailed view of how Nietzsche

envisaged the contents of the Umwerthung aller Werthe by using the 374
numbered notes in the notebooks W II 1–4 and placing them into Table 2, or
into a similar structure. Such a scheme can be further improved by including
notes written for the Hauptwerk in the following notebooks, W II 5–8. However,
there is no room for such detailed treatment here.
Notes on Texts, Translations,
and Abbreviations
The following abbreviations and translations of Nietzsche’s works are used in

this volume. In the references to Nietzsche’s works, Roman numerals generally
denote the volume number of a set of collected works or the standard subdiv-
ision within a single work, and Arabic numerals denote the relevant section
number. ‘Pref’ is the abbreviation for the preface to a given work (except for the
preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth). Page numbers are added when sections
are long, providing more precise information about the location of the relevant
text. In citing Nietzsche’s notes in KGW and KSA, references provide the
volume number (and part for KGW) followed by the relevant fragment number.
The one exception is KSA 14, in which case the page number is provided. In
citing KGB, these numbers are given as well as the relevant letter number (same
as in KSB). Corresponding references to The Will to Power (WP) will be given
only when deemed important to do so. In citing KSB, the volume number is
followed by the number of the letter.
Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Collected Works in the Original

German
KGW Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edition founded

by G. Colli and M. Montinari, continued by V. Gerhardt, N. Miller,
W. Müller-Lauter and K. Pestalozzi. Berlin, NY: Walter de Gruyter
(1967ff.).
KSA Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, eds.
G. Colli and M. Montinari, 15 vols. Berlin: De Grutyer (1999).
KSB Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe, eds.
G. Colli and M. Montinari, 8 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (1986).
Quoted texts from Nietzsche’s letters and notes have been translated by me,
unless otherwise stated.
Abbreviations and Translations for Titles of Published Works*
BGE Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886): translated as Beyond Good and Evil. In
Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin (1990).
* Dates are years of publication.
Notes on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations 61
BT Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872/1886); translated as The Birth of

Tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans.
W. Kaufmann, 15–151. New York: Vintage (1967). The ‘Attempt at
a Self-Criticism’ added to the 1886 edition is cited as ‘ASC’ followed by
the relevant section number.
CW Der Fall Wagner (1888); translated as The Case of Wagner. In The Birth
of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann, 153–192.
New York: Vintage (1967).
D Morgenröthe (1881/1887); translated as Daybreak. In Daybreak, ed.
M. Clark and B. Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press (1997).
GM Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887); translated as On the Genealogy of
Morals. In On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans.
W. Kaufmann, 13–163. New York: Random House (1989).
GS Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882/1887); translated as The Gay Science.
In The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books
(1974).
HH Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878/1886); translated as Human,
All Too Human. In Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale,
5–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996). References to
the two-volume 1886 edition are indicated by Roman numerals (HH
I and HH II).
SE Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen III) (1874);
translated as Schopenhauer as Educator (Untimely Meditation IV). In
Untimely Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 125–
194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997).
TI Götzen-Dämmerung (1888); translated as Twilight of the Idols. In Twilight
of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin
(1990). References include an abbreviated chapter title and section number.
UM Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1873–1876); translated as Untimely
Meditations. In Untimely Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997).
Z Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–1885; part IV was only distributed pri-
vately during Nietzsche’s lifetime); translated as Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. G. Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University
Press (2005). References include part number (I–IV), abbreviated
chapter title, and section number if relevant.
62 Notes on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations
Abbreviations and Translations for Private Publications,

Authorized Manuscripts, and Unpublished Works**
A Der Antichrist (1888); translated as The Antichrist. In Twilight of the Idols

and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin (1990).
EH Ecce homo (1888); translated as Ecce Homo. In Ecce Homo, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin (1980). References include abbrevi-
ated chapter title and section number; in the chapter ‘Books’, the section
number is preceded by the abbreviation of the relevant book title.
Abbreviations and Translations for Nietzsche’s Unpublished

Notebooks
WP Der Wille zur Macht (1883–1888); translated as The Will to Power. In The
Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
New York: Vintage (1968). Der Wille zur Macht was originally put together
from Nietzsche’s notes by E. Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast in 1901, with
an enlarged second edition in 1906.
** Dates are years of composition.
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For Anna
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Kaitlyn Creasy
California State University, San Bernardino
Kaitlyn Creasy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, San
Bernardino. She is the author of The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche (2020) as well
as several articles in nineteenth-century philosophy and moral psychology.
Matthew Meyer
The University of Scranton
Matthew Meyer is Professor of Philosophy at The University of Scranton. He is the author of
three monographs: Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming,
Perspectivism, and The Principle of Non-Contradiction (2014), Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A
Dialectical Reading (Cambridge, 2019), and The Routledge Guidebook to Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (2024). He has also co-edited, with Paul Loeb, Nietzsche’s Metaphilosophy: The
Nature, Method, and Aims of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2019).
About the Series

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the
nineteenth century. This Cambridge Elements series offers concise and structured
overviews of a range of central topics in his thought, written by a diverse group of
experts with a variety of approaches.
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Elements in the Series

Thomas H. Brobjer
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EPFN

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Brobjer

Why is Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy still regarded as

Nietzsche’s Revaluation of All Values

Cover image: Adapted from clu/DigitalVision

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

Elements in the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract: Why is Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy still regarded as

Keywords: Nietzsche, Revaluation of Values, axiology, values, magnum opus

© Thomas H. Brobjer 2024

1 Revaluation of All Values as a Philosophical Project 1

2 Revaluation of All Values as a Four-Volume Literary

Notes on Texts, Translations, and Abbreviations 60

1 Revaluation of All Values as a Philosophical Project

1.1 Introduction to Section 1: Revaluation of Values

associated with an overemphasis on Nietzsche’s critical philosophy at the price

1.2 The Interpretation of the Revaluation in Secondary Literature

What Nietzsche anticipates, I suggest, is another advance in human self-

1.3 The Nature, Importance, and Meaning of the

The Antichrist indicates Nietzsche’s severe opposition towards Christianity

1.3.1 Four Possible Interpretations of the Meaning

1. The ﬁrst interpretation understands the revaluation as a transvaluation of

Progress in my sense. – I too speak of a ‘return to nature’, although it is not

Nietzsche immediately adds that ‘Napoleon was a piece of “return to nature”

1.3.2 The Meaning of Revaluation in Nietzsche’s Books and Notes

whither must we direct our hopes? Towards new philosophers, we have no

emphasis on the value dichotomy. In On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 7–8,

Tragedy [. . .] afﬁrmation of life [. . .] is what I called Dionysian [. . .] the

[. . .] what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of Christian values, the

I condemn Christianity [. . .] The Christian Church [. . .] has made every value

The morality of self-denial is the typical morality of decline par excellence

1.4 The History of the Revaluation Theme in Nietzsche’s Thought

1880/81 1882 1884 1886 1887/88

To be able to follow the theme of revaluation in Nietzsche’s thought it is

By 1887, in On the Genealogy of Morals, and especially by 1888, revaluation

systems of values is likely to have aided and worked as a stimulus for

(i) Plain statements, with almost no context.

1.5 Values and Revaluation of Values in Thus

The revaluation of values in Thus Spoke Zarathustra has only begun; it is

Humans cannot do otherwise than evaluate, and this is good. He continues

But in the background stood a will to a much greater curiosity, yes, to an

1.6 Nietzsche and Ancient Greek Values

Nietzsche frequently and explicitly made a value-dichotomy between

1.7 The Relation between the Revaluation and the Idea

2 Revaluation of All Values as a Four-Volume Literary Project

we have much information about what Nietzsche planned to write in them. We

Alan Schrift (2011) summarizes the position as follows:

2.2.2 The Debate about Nietzsche’s Planned Magnum Opus

2.3 The History of Nietzsche’s Planned Magnum Opus

he would elaborate more extensively on ‘the history of European nihilism’ in

Hauptwerk: ‘I shall have an opportunity (in a chapter of my main work [meines

To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible

Furthermore, he ends the short preface by explicitly stating that he had

My publisher already has another manuscript, which is a very stringent and

to discuss in a volume of his Hauptwerk relating to his revaluation of values: ‘A

If I get to Sils Maria in the summer, I mean to set about revising my

A month later, he repeats the intention to work on a Hauptwerk, then referred

After having ﬁnished On the Genealogy of Morals (summer 1887), he writes

version of my ‘Umwerthung aller Werthe’ is ﬁnished’.43 We can also note that

2.4 The Planned Contents of the Revaluation of All Values

Autumn 1881– Aug. 1885–Aug.

Cover image: Adapted from clu/DigitalVision