What is the transvaluation of all values?

Friedrich Nietzsche, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Friedrich Nietzsche answers

The revaluation of all values — Umwertung aller Werte (the transvaluation of all values) — is not a single doctrine but a deed, and the first thing to understand is that it has already happened once. The Jews accomplished it. With an awe-inspiring consistency, they dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation — good equals noble equals powerful equals beautiful equals happy — and hang on to this inversion with the teeth of the most abysmal hatred, the hatred of impotence, until the wretched were declared the good and the powerful the evil.1

That was a revaluation. Christianity inherited it and universalized it across two thousand years until the inversion became invisible precisely because it had been victorious.2 What I call for is the revaluation of that revaluation — not a simple return to aristocratic values, but something more difficult: a becoming-conscious of what has been achieved under false names, a liberation from the slovenly routine of old valuations that dishonor us in the best and strongest things we have done.3

Moral values have hitherto been the highest values; remove them from that position and you alter all values, overthrowing the principle of their order of rank.4 This is not mere skepticism. It is surgery. The instrument is genealogy. Moral evaluation is an Auslegung — an exegesis, a way of interpreting — and the exegesis is itself a symptom of physiological conditions, of a particular spiritual level of prevalent judgments.5

When I ask what our evaluations are worth, the answer must be: for life. And life is Wille zur Macht (will to power).6 So the question becomes: which valuations serve ascending life, and which express its decline, its exhaustion, its need to make a virtue of weakness? Against Schopenhauer I insist on this: the will need not be condemned because it is no longer God.

There can be an infinite variety of ways of being different, even of being god.7 What Schopenhauer could not do — because he remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal — was deify the will, affirm it without the escape hatch of negation. My formula for what he could not reach was Dionysian: a justification of life even at its most terrible, ambiguous, and mendacious.8

But the revaluation is not achieved by argument alone. Every doctrine for which all accumulated energies and explosives are not yet ready at hand is superfluous.9 The revaluation requires men with new needs, who suffer from the old values without yet having become conscious of that suffering — who carry the tension in their bodies before they carry it in their minds. The task is to give that suffering a name, and then a direction.

Sources

  1. It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying 'the wretched alone are the good.'
    On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 42
  2. with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because it—has been victorious.
    On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 42
  3. A courageous becoming-conscious and affirmation of what has been achieved—a liberation from the slovenly routine of old valuations that dishonor us in the best and strongest things we have achieved.
    The Will to Power, pp. 521–522
  4. Moral values have hitherto been the highest values: would anybody call this in question?— If we remove these values from this position, we alter all values: the principle of their order of rank hitherto is thus overthrown.
    The Will to Power, pp. 521–522
  5. moral evaluation is an exegesis, a way of interpreting. The exegesis itself is a symptom of certain physiological conditions, likewise of a particular spiritual level of prevalent judgments: Who interprets?— Our affects.
    The Will to Power, pp. 148–149
  6. What are our evaluations and moral tables really worth? What is the outcome of their rule? For whom? in relation to what?— Answer: for life. But what is life? Here we need a new, more definite formulation of the concept 'life.' My formula for it is: Life is will to power.
    The Will to Power, pp. 148–149
  7. he failed to grasp that there can be an infinite variety of ways of being different, even of being god.
    The Will to Power, pp. 521–522
  8. my instinct went into the opposite direction from Schopenhauer's: toward a justification of life, even at its most terrible, ambiguous, and mendacious; for this I had the formula 'Dionysian.'
    The Will to Power, pp. 521–522
  9. Every doctrine for which all accumulated energies and explosives are not yet ready at hand, is superfluous. A revaluation of values is achieved only when there is a tension of new needs, of men with new needs, who suffer from the old values without attaining this consciousness.
    The Will to Power, pp. 521–522