Nietzsche: Value Transmutation and Nihilism
Transmutation of Values
With the concept of “transmutation of values,” Nietzsche refers to the need to replace traditional values (particularly Christian and bourgeois values) with a new table of values centered on this life and the desire to live fully and intensely. Nietzsche advocates a strong, creative morality based on the affirmation of life, giving supreme value to the affirmation and fulfillment of man, and rejecting moral resentment against the Western tradition. Nietzsche does not intend for us to live without values (he even considers this impossible); what he really proposes is to invert the table of traditional values, to overcome Western morals, a moral of resignation and resentment toward life in the hope of finding an afterlife.
Nihilism
The term ‘nihilism’ comes from the Latin “nihil,” meaning “nothing.” It is the negation of every belief, every value. This theory emerged in Russia in the nineteenth century, being, in principle, an attitude, a state of despair only for those who do not know what to do with their lives. It later became a doctrine whose immediate goal was to end all ideas and acquired social prejudices, bringing it closer to anarchist principles.
The idea of nihilism in Nietzsche is quite complex. On the one hand, nihilism for Nietzsche expresses the vital decline of the Western tradition, which has committed to creating an absolute reality where target values, Truth, and Good are located. To the extent that Christianity focuses absolute reality on the figure of God, which opposes the world of natural things, and to the extent that the ‘superior’ world is pure nothingness, Christian culture, and ultimately all Western culture, is nihilistic. It directs all its passion and hope toward something nonexistent (the Christian God, the ideal and Wise of the philosophers), neglecting the only existing reality: the reality of the world that is offered to the senses, the reality of life.
Apparent World vs. Real World
With these concepts, Nietzsche refers to the division of reality into two worlds fixed by traditional metaphysics and religion: a “true” upper world and an underworld, whose reality is only apparent. Nietzsche believed that this division should be reversed. We should consider the real world what has so far been labeled the “apparent” world, and the non-existent and false world what has hitherto been regarded as the superior and true.
The split between being real and being apparent, between the world of ideas and the sensible world of traditional metaphysics, is a judgmental trial about life, a negative opinion, because it gives more importance to the world of ideas than to the world of the senses, which is described as unreal and apparent. Moreover, actually, says Nietzsche, there is no other apparent and real world, but the constant evolution of things. The distinction between the true world and the apparent world has serious consequences in the moral realm. Distinguishing between a false and apparent world and a real world entails, morally, renunciation and sacrifice in this life for the benefit of another in the afterlife.