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. ...