The Core of Nietzsche's Philosophy: Will to Power, Eternal Recurrence, and the Genealogy of Morals

Few philosophers have been so widely read and so widely misread as Friedrich Nietzsche. Reduced, in certain popular accounts, to a prophet of “anything goes,” or worse, hijacked by Nazi propaganda that his own sister helped fabricate, Nietzsche in fact built one of the most rigorous and most affirmative philosophical structures of the nineteenth century — a thought that does not settle for diagnosing the crisis of Western values but proposes, out of that very crisis, a task: to create new values, to say yes to life as it is, with its suffering and its joy, without the consolation of metaphysical worlds or compensatory afterlives. We have already discussed Nietzsche’s nihilistic diagnosis and its resonance with contemporary society in a separate article — Nietzsche and Nihilism. This piece covers the other side of the same coin: the positive core of his philosophy, from his early writings on Greek tragedy to the most discussed — and most distorted — notions in his thought: will to power, eternal recurrence, and the overman.

1. Apollo and Dionysus: the tragic matrix of The Birth of Tragedy

In 1872, while still a professor of classical philology at Basel, Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, a work dedicated to Richard Wagner and heavily marked by his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer. The book proposes that Greek art — and Attic tragedy in particular — is born from the tension between two fundamental artistic impulses, personified in the gods Apollo and Dionysus.

The Apollonian is the principle of form, measure, and individuation: the plastic arts, sculpture, dream, the beautiful appearance that separates and delimits beings. The Dionysian is the principle of excess, intoxication, and the dissolution of individual boundaries into the primal unity of life — music and dance, the collective ecstasy of the tragic chorus. Great Greek tragedy, for Nietzsche, is the product of a rare balance between these two impulses: Apollonian form gives visible shape to Dionysian terror and suffering, allowing the spectator to bear the sight of existence’s horror without being destroyed by it.

That balance, Nietzsche argues, was destroyed by Socratic rationalism. Socrates, and later Euripides, introduced into Greek culture the “theoretical man” — one who believes reason can correct and explain existence, dissolving tragic mystery into syllogism. From this arises what Nietzsche calls theoretical optimism, the faith that knowledge can redeem suffering — a faith he already, in this early work, treats as a form of cowardice before life. It is a first sketch, still indebted to Schopenhauer’s metaphysical vocabulary (a single “Will” behind phenomena), of a question that will run through his entire mature work: how to affirm existence without needing to deny it or justify it by appeal to some instance outside it — God, Reason, the Good in itself.

2. Beyond Good and Evil: the critique of dogmatic philosophers

Fourteen years later, in 1886, Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, one of the densest texts of his maturity. The book’s target is what he calls “philosophical dogmatism”: the claim of the great metaphysical systems — from Plato to Kant — to have reached universal, disinterested truths, when in fact, Nietzsche argues, all philosophy is the involuntary, sometimes unconscious confession of its author — a kind of autobiography disguised as an impersonal system.

That suspicion extends to the very notion of the “will to truth”: why do we value truth above appearance, error, useful illusion? Nietzsche does not deny that some interpretations of the world are better or worse than others, but he contests the idea of a pure knowledge free of perspective, interest, and body. All knowing is knowing from a point of view, from a configuration of forces and affects — this is the root of what became known as Nietzschean perspectivism, developed with still greater rigor in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals. Perspectivism is not shallow relativism (“anything goes”): for Nietzsche, the more different perspectives we are able to bring to bear on a given question, the more complete and richer our concept of it becomes — the opposite of a skepticism that simply abandons the search for understanding.

Beyond Good and Evil also takes up, still in aphoristic form, the expression that names one of the author’s most discussed concepts — already coined in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) —: the will to power, to which we return below.

3. On the Genealogy of Morals: master morality, slave morality, and ressentiment

If Beyond Good and Evil is the diagnosis, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887) is the historical investigation that supports it. Organized in three essays, the book asks not “what is good?” but “how did we come to call good what we call good?” — a genealogical question, seeking the origin and history of values that conventional morality presents as eternal and self-evident.

In the first essay, Nietzsche reconstructs two distinct genealogies of moral vocabulary. On one side, the ancient warrior nobility created the opposition good/bad out of itself, first affirming its own strength, health, and vitality as “good,” and calling “bad” — in a derivative, secondary sense — the opposite qualities, proper to the weak. This is a morality born of a yes to oneself. On the other side, priests, and later Judeo-Christian morality, unable to defeat the nobles by force, carried out an inversion: what was noble (power, pride, beauty, virility) came to be called evil, and what was weak, humble, and suffering came to be called good. This is the “slave revolt in morality”: a morality born, unlike the noble one, of a “no” to what lies outside it, of a reaction — hence Nietzsche calls it reactive morality, driven by ressentiment (he uses the French term), the rancor of one who cannot act and takes revenge in imagination, creating a system of values in which powerlessness itself becomes virtue.

The second essay investigates the origin of bad conscience: when the aggressive instincts of human beings, once freely discharged against the outside world, are blocked by life in society and by the state, they do not disappear — they turn inward, against the individual, creating the interiority of guilt and self-torment. Here Nietzsche also examines the relationship between guilt (Schuld) and debt (also Schuld in German), and memory as a capacity painfully cultivated to make promising — and the social contract — possible.

The third essay asks “what do ascetic ideals mean?” and shows how the ascetic priest, though seemingly denying life, in fact manages and channels the ressentiment of the suffering masses, giving them a meaning for their suffering (guilt, sin) that keeps them docile. The ascetic ideal is, for Nietzsche, a paradoxical form of willing: even when it denies the body, pleasure, and the world, it is still a willing — what he rejects is not will as such, but the possibility that a human being might simply will nothing. This is the broader backdrop of European nihilism, a theme we develop at greater length in our article on nihilism in Nietzsche.

4. The will to power: an interpretive concept — and a book Nietzsche never wrote

Few Nietzschean terms have been so thoroughly explored, and so thoroughly distorted, as the will to power (Wille zur Macht). A philological distinction is essential here — one that Nietzsche scholarship itself took decades to establish clearly.

In the texts Nietzsche actually published — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy of Morals — the will to power appears as an interpretive principle of life and of the psyche: not the pursuit of political or military domination over others, but a more fundamental impulse toward expansion, growth, the overcoming of resistances, and creative self-affirmation, present even in the most elementary processes of organic life. It is, above all, a hypothesis about the nature of life and value — the idea that whatever promotes the expansion and intensification of life should be reassessed as “good,” against the ascetic morality that prizes self-denial.

The problem is that there also exists a book published under the title The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht), which for decades was treated as Nietzsche’s systematic, unfinished masterwork, his supposed philosophical magnum opus. It must be stated plainly: this book was neither written, organized, nor authorized by Nietzsche. It is a posthumous compilation, assembled by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, with the collaboration of the composer Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz), drawn from an arbitrary selection of loose notes from his literary estate (Nachlass) — working notebooks, sketches, and drafts that Nietzsche never prepared for publication, and which in many cases he himself had discarded or replaced with later formulations. The first edition appeared in 1901, expanded in 1906, both after the philosopher’s mental incapacitation (1889) and after his death (1900).

The critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works, prepared by the Italian philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari starting in the 1960s (the Kritische Gesamtausgabe), reconstructed the literary estate in the real chronological order of the notebooks, undoing the artificial thematic arrangement imposed by Elisabeth and Gast. This reconstruction demonstrated that “The Will to Power” never existed as a closed book project in the terms in which it was published: Nietzsche did, at one point, consider a similar title for a future work, but abandoned the plan before his death. What readers had, for half a century, treated as Nietzsche’s systematic philosophical testament was, in reality, a selective and editorially biased assembly of working fragments. This does not invalidate the will to power as a concept — it stands solidly present in the published works — but it demands extreme caution with any quotation attributed to the posthumous book as if it were Nietzsche’s final, systematic word.

5. Eternal recurrence of the same: “the greatest weight”

If the will to power describes the structure of life, eternal recurrence of the same is, for Nietzsche, the supreme test of how to receive it. Its best-known formulation appears in The Gay Science (1882), in aphorism 341, titled “The Greatest Weight”: Nietzsche imagines a demon who creeps into the reader’s loneliest solitude to announce that they will have to live this life exactly as they have already lived it, and countless times more — every pain, every joy, every thought, in the same sequence and order, nothing new, only identical, infinite repetition. The aphorism’s question is: would this thought crush you with horror, or would you receive it as the greatest possible confirmation of your own life?

The theme returns, in poetic and narrative form, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), especially in the episodes where Zarathustra confronts the vertigo and nausea provoked by the thought of recurrence itself — before finally managing to embrace it. It is worth noting that scholars disagree about the exact status of eternal recurrence: is it a literal cosmological thesis (the universe, finite in possible states and infinite in time, would necessarily repeat the same configurations), a purely ethical and existential thesis (a criterion for evaluating one’s own choices: “would I live this again, unchanged?”), or both at once? Nietzsche never resolved this ambiguity in his published texts, and this is why eternal recurrence remains, among Nietzschean concepts, one of the most debated by commentators. What is uncontested is its function as the supreme criterion of affirmation: to will one’s own life in such a way that one could will it again, without reduction or exception — which Nietzsche links directly to the idea of amor fati, love of one’s fate exactly as it is.

6. The overman: self-overcoming, not race

No Nietzschean concept has suffered such crude appropriation as the Übermensch — translated variously as “superman,” or, more precisely, as “overman” or “beyond-man.” Introduced in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Übermensch is announced by Zarathustra as what must succeed the human being as we know it, just as the human being succeeded the ape on the evolutionary scale — an image that already signals a process of continuous self-overcoming, not a fixed biological or racial category.

It must be said clearly: Nietzsche’s Übermensch has nothing to do with racial purity, eugenics, or the biological domination of one people over another — readings that the Nazi appropriation of Nietzschean vocabulary tried to impose and that later philology dismantled (we return to this in the final section). In Nietzsche’s work, the overman designates instead an existential and creative ideal: one who, having passed through the experience of the death of God and of nihilism, is able to create their own values rather than passively inherit them, and to say yes to existence without the support of external metaphysical guarantees. Zarathustra describes the present human being as something intermediate and transitional — a rope stretched between the animal and the overman, a perilous crossing, not a possession.

Alongside the Übermensch, Zarathustra also introduces the critical figure of the last man (der letzte Mensch): the human type that has renounced all greatness and all risk in exchange for a mediocre comfort, thoroughly satisfied with itself — the exact antithesis of the impulse toward self-overcoming that the overman represents.

7. Transvaluation of all values and amor fati

In his last years of lucid production, especially in The Antichrist and Ecce Homo (both from 1888), Nietzsche announces the project — never completed in systematic form — of a transvaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte): not merely criticizing the moral values inherited from Christianity and Platonic metaphysics, but actually inverting their hierarchy, rehabilitating as virtues what ascetic morality had condemned — strength, instinct, the body, earthly joy — and questioning the value of what that morality had enshrined as virtue — humility, piety, renunciation.

Ecce Homo, the philosophical autobiography written in Nietzsche’s last year of lucidity, carries as its subtitle the formula How One Becomes What One Is (Wie man wird, was man ist). The idea of “becoming what one is” traces back to the Greek poet Pindar, whom Nietzsche had already explicitly cited in The Gay Science (§270), in the form of an imperative: “become who you are.” Far from suggesting the spontaneous expression of an already-given essence, this paradoxical formula — becoming what one already is — condenses the Nietzschean idea that authentic identity is not a starting point but a hard-won achievement, obtained through experimentation, self-discipline, and the capacity to say yes to one’s own life in its entire necessity, including its suffering: it is this full acceptance, free of complaint and of any wish that things had been otherwise, that Nietzsche names amor fati, an ideal he presents, in The Gay Science (§276), as his own formula for living from then on.

8. Reception and distortion: from Nazi appropriation to the philology of Colli-Montinari

No serious discussion of Nietzsche can ignore the troubled history of his work’s reception. After the philosopher’s mental collapse in Turin, in January 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his literary estate and founded the Nietzsche Archive (Nietzsche-Archiv) in Weimar. Elisabeth was married to Bernhard Förster, an antisemitic agitator who, in 1886, had founded the colony “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay, planned as a racially “pure” settlement — a project and an ideological climate Nietzsche himself vehemently rejected. Over the following decades, Elisabeth edited, selected, and at times altered her brother’s letters and manuscripts to bring his public image closer to German nationalism and, later, to the antisemitism that would feed National Socialism — the assembly of the posthumous book The Will to Power, discussed above, is the most visible piece of this editorial operation. The Weimar Archive even received visits from Adolf Hitler himself, who sought there to associate his movement with Nietzsche’s intellectual authority.

This appropriation directly contradicts positions Nietzsche expressed explicitly during his lifetime: his personal break with Richard Wagner was caused in part by the composer’s nationalist and antisemitic turn; in letters and in texts such as Ecce Homo, Nietzsche voiced clear repudiation of German nationalism and of the political antisemitism of his time, and he even cut off relations, for a period, with his own sister over her marriage to Förster. The rigorous philological reconstruction of Nietzsche’s literary estate, undertaken by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari from the 1960s onward, was decisive in undoing this construction: by restoring the notebooks to their original order and integrity, the critical edition exposed the selective and ideologically driven character of Elisabeth and Peter Gast’s compilation, and restored a philologically reliable outline of Nietzsche’s thought.

From the standpoint of philosophical reception proper, the twentieth century produced very different readings of the Nietzschean legacy. Martin Heidegger, in an extensive lecture course given between 1936 and 1940 and later collected in the volume Nietzsche (1961), interprets the will to power as the last stage of Western metaphysics of subjectivity — for Heidegger, Nietzsche is, paradoxically, the “last metaphysician,” the one who carries to its extreme, without overcoming it, the tradition he intended to break with. Gilles Deleuze, by contrast, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) — a work that helped rekindle French interest in Nietzsche, and whose themes we also explore in our article on Deleuze’s philosophy of difference — proposes an opposite reading: the will to power as the differential and genetic principle of values, and eternal recurrence as a selective principle that affirms only what is capable of recurring, distinguishing active (affirmative) forces from reactive (ressentiment-bound) forces. In the United States, the German-American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, with his influential study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), played a decisive role in undoing, in the postwar Anglophone world, the association between Nietzsche and Nazism, defending a reading of the overman as an ideal of individual self-overcoming rather than a racial or political category.

The result of these contrasting readings — made possible with greater confidence by the philological reconstruction that underlies them — is a Nietzsche far more complex and rigorous than any caricature: neither the nihilistic prophet of “anything goes,” nor the involuntary forerunner of totalitarianism that his sister tried to fabricate, but a thinker who made the radical critique of inherited values the very condition for an affirmation of life without precedent in Western philosophy.

References

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. 1872.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–1885.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. 1887.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882.

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. 1888 (published posthumously, 1908).

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. The Antichrist. 1888 (published posthumously, 1895).

COLLI, Giorgio; MONTINARI, Mazzino (eds.). Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967 onward.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 1962.

HEIDEGGER, Martin. Nietzsche. 1961.

KAUFMANN, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 1950.

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