Blackwell Reference Online

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Nietzsche spent most of his productive life trying to identify the foundational conditions that invite love of life and protect against world-denying pessimism. During his short philosophical career, the basic attitudes that he evinced on this matter deviated little from juvenilia to mature thought. He always maintained, for example, that the dreadful aspects of the human and natural worlds call for something like a theodicy, a mode of justification that would allow the troubled soul to accept its place in them, and that a justification of existence was all but impossible if one approached life in the perspective of morality, “because life is […] essentially amoral” (BT, preface, 5); and with the possible exception of his so-called “positivist” period associated with Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche always approached the problem of justification in some measure in terms of art and the concept of the aesthetic.It was primarily with the project of justification in mind that he conducted his famous re-evaluation of values, that is, his assessment of the value of our “moral” values. In Twilight of the Idols, he retrospectively describes his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (BT), as his “first re-evaluation of values” (TI, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” 5; cf. BT, preface, 5). What values are being re-evaluated in this text? And how does the re-evaluation in BT contribute ... log in or subscribe to read full text