The Sustainability of Nietzsche’s Will to Affirmation

This paper argues that Nietzsche’s central concern is the diagnosing and overcoming of nihilism. It traces the development of Nietzsche’s thought in order to show how nihilism came to be Nietzsche’s central concern. It then examines the vexing question of what exactly Nietzsche takes to be the core of nihilism. Sometimes Nietzsche treats nihilism as a belief; at other times he seems to treats it as an affective disorder. It is argued that beyond the nihilism of despair and the nihilism of disorientation identified by Bernard Reginster there must be a deeper core nihilism, which is identified as affective nihilism; the drives turned against themselves. The key evidence being that while Nietzsche identifies Christianity as being intrinsically nihilistic, the Christian suffers from neither disorientation or despair. Similarly,regarding Nietzsche’s notion of the affirmation of life, his antidote to nihilism, it remains unclear whether this is a matter of adopting some cognitive attitude, for instance affirming the eternal recurrence of life, or of adopting a form of life that does not involve the repression of our fundamental drives. Throughout the paper the question of Nietzsche’s attitude to the relation between myth, nihilism and affirmation is examined. This sheds light on both his relationship to Wagner and the ambition behind his Thus spoke Zarathustra, the work he took to be his most important.

Dia-Logos, Peter Lang, 2017

Nietzsche’s Futures, 1999

2018

The article aims to show the peculiar relationship in Nietzsche’s moral thought between the notions of will and life, on the one hand, and of conscience and truth, on the other. Central to any understanding of this relation is the concept of world, which represents the manifestation of a founding and unconscious will to power, namely the constant generation of a horizon of sense. Recalling several passages from Nietzsche’s works, the article expounds the possibility of a moral thought focused on a self-interpretation of man as the positing of a real world, neither true nor false. This world might be recognized as a real world only if the will is no longer understood as freedom of conscience, but as enhancement of life, namely as foundation of sense.