Nietzsche, Nihilism and Spirit

Abstract

In the posthumous notes gathered under the title Will to Power (Nietzsche 1968b) Nietzsche lays out a typology of ‘nihilism’. Nihilism constitutes, first, and foremost, the terms of a diagnosis of metaphysics in general: for Nietzsche, the metaphysical division between the transcendental and the empirical enacts a devaluation of life as such and is motivated at a deep level by the ‘will to nothing’. Nihilism serves, second, as a descriptive term to designate the process of the self-devaluation of metaphysical values (1968, §2): in this second sense, the term marks the historical coming-to-be of metaphysics as the (historical) event of nihilism. Third, bestriding actively this process of self-devaluation, nihilism designates qua ‘radical’ nihilism an active conviction in the untenability of metaphysical values and, therefore, a will to truthfulness. Since this will is still predicated on faith in truth, it is itself vulnerable to further destruction (§3). In the fourth and fifth senses of nihilism, nihilism is situated by Nietzsche as a response to the above three ‘cultures’ of nihilism. This response is couched within what Nietzsche calls a diagnosis of spirit (§7, §12, §14, §22): on the one hand, ‘passive’ nihilism accompanies the second sense of nihilism, the designation of a decadent, exhausted world that has no meaning and no value, it is the nihilism of the spirit of ‘what for?’, the nihilism of taedium vitae; on the other hand, countering passive nihilism, ‘active nihilism’ describes the gesture of active destruction of metaphysical valuation and is seen ‘as a sign of the increased power of the spirit’ (§22), a prelude, that is, to the transvaluation of values.

We must learn to ‘read’.

Heidegger, Nietzsche