What Did Nietzsche Really Want? A Philosophical Reappraisal

What Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wanted, according to Jochen Kirchhoff, he himself said again and again, “quite unambiguously, namely the revaluation of all values” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 16:08–16:13; cf. 15:52–16:13). Gwendolin Kirchhoff asked her father, the philosopher Jochen Kirchhoff, about Nietzsche in the episode “Was wollte Nietzsche?” (“What Did Nietzsche Want?”) of his Philosophische Gespräche (2019); this essay follows that conversation and two more the two of them held about Nietzsche.

Übermensch. Will to power. God is dead. Phrases repeated so often they have curdled into caricature — into slogans that conceal more than they reveal. An unease accompanies them: that these formulas do not capture what actually drove Nietzsche. That something essential has been lost in how he is received.

Jochen Kirchhoff, who pursued the question of Nietzsche and National Socialism in his book “Nietzsche, Hitler und die Deutschen” (“Nietzsche, Hitler and the Germans”), says he wrote it with great reluctance, convinced there were no connections at all, and then had to accept that there are individual elements that cannot be denied, alongside many contradictions (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 1:35:15–1:35:40; 1:37:56–1:38:03).

#What is Nietzsche’s central idea?

A quite central question for Jochen Kirchhoff is what Nietzsche found problematic in the modern world, in the modern soul; he answers it with Nietzsche’s diagnosis: the modern world, as he renders Nietzsche’s dictum, is basically “in its basic substance, nihilistic”, even if values taken on their own are still more or less upheld (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 07:25–07:28; cf. 07:01–07:37). People have said again and again, Jochen Kirchhoff says, that Nietzsche was a kind of diagnostician of the modern soul (cf. ibid., 07:09–07:16).

How Nietzsche diagnoses is shown by his judgment on Socrates (Nietzsche, 1889, Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates”). He calls the Socratic equation of reason, virtue and happiness “that most bizarre of equations that exists” (ibid., 4). In Socrates’ time, he writes, the instincts were everywhere in anarchy; to this Nietzsche adds a sentence in quotation marks: “The drives want to play the tyrant; one must invent a counter-tyrant who is stronger” (ibid., 9). Socrates, according to Nietzsche, made reason a tyrant (cf. ibid., 10).

What Nietzsche attacks is “rationality at any price”: life “bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct”, which was itself only a sickness, “another sickness” (ibid., 11). Having to fight the instincts, “that is the formula for décadence”, Nietzsche writes; “as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct” (ibid.).

#What Nietzsche Saw in Morality

In the moral world order of the religions, according to Jochen Kirchhoff, Nietzsche saw the will to nothingness at work. Nietzsche distinguishes, he says, the will to nothingness from the inexhaustible, procreating will to life, and he had the feeling that in his own present the will to nothingness in fact prevailed (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 12:40–13:14). He quotes Nietzsche’s Nachlass on this and goes on to say that for Nietzsche the will to nothingness is the entire moral world order of all religions, of Christianity in particular, but not only of Christianity (cf. ibid., 14:15–15:07).

In the SYMPOSIUM conversation “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit” (“Nietzsche and the Great Health”), Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes what Nietzsche sees in the nihilistic will: a depressive impulse that spoils or suppresses the impulses of life; in principle one would rather not be there at all, or one wants, for example, to force certain things on the other because he has impulses in him that one does not want to see (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit”, 19:13–19:30). The priest wants to rule over the other, she says; Nietzsche worked this out like hardly anyone else, this impulse and claim to rule in the priest, “who however thinks he speaks for the good or for God or for someone or other” (ibid., 19:38; cf. 19:30–19:42).

That not every morality is meant, Gwendolin Kirchhoff says in the same conversation: to Jochen Kirchhoff’s remark that Nietzsche tirelessly stressed that morality is also mendacity, she answers: “A particular morality.” (ibid., 22:25; cf. 22:17–22:25). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls the revaluation of all values “my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity” (Nietzsche, 1908, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny”, 1). In On the Genealogy of Morality he sets two modes of valuation against each other: noble morality grows “out of a triumphant saying-Yes to itself”, slave morality says “No from the outset” to an outside (Nietzsche, 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, I 10).

#What does Nietzsche mean by “beyond good and evil”?

By “beyond good and evil” Nietzsche means a standpoint outside the opposition of good and evil, not outside all valuation: of the slogan of his 1886 book he writes a year later that it “at the very least does not mean ‘Beyond Good and Bad’” (Nietzsche, 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, I 17). In Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future he distinguishes two basic types, master morality and slave morality, which in higher cultures sometimes stand harshly side by side, “even in the same human being, within a single soul” (Nietzsche, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil, § 260). In the first, the opposition good and bad means as much as noble and contemptible; the opposition good and evil is “of a different origin” (ibid.): supposing the oppressed, the suffering and the unfree were to moralise, there would lie “the source of the origin of that famous opposition” (cf. ibid.). Evil, according to On the Genealogy of Morality, comes “out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred” (Nietzsche, 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, I 11); more in the entry Ressentiment.

Why Nietzsche has Zarathustra of all figures speak, he explains in Ecce Homo: “Zarathustra created this most fateful error, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognise it.” (Nietzsche, 1908, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny”, 3). Jochen Kirchhoff says in the conversation “Was wollte Nietzsche?” that Nietzsche takes Zarathustra because, as Nietzsche thinks, Zarathustra invented the good–evil dualism: “That is why he takes him up, in order now to be beyond good and evil.” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 28:15–28:20; cf. 28:01–28:20). “But in fact it is so that he brings in an antagonism, plus minus, again after all, which fights it out in the world” (ibid., 28:20–28:27). A comprehensive affirmation would have to affirm the opponent too, otherwise one falls into a dualism; but Nietzsche does not affirm his opponents at all, and that is “a basic contradiction” (ibid., 28:31–28:33; cf. 27:38–28:33). He himself, says Jochen Kirchhoff, leans towards the view that two basic principles in the cosmos are antagonistic and eternally so; that was not Nietzsche’s view (cf. ibid., 27:50–28:01).

In the SYMPOSIUM conversation, following Jochen Kirchhoff’s remark about ressentiment, Gwendolin Kirchhoff says: those who are at the very bottom “are suddenly the good ones through being at the very bottom”, because they are not the evil ones (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit”, 24:13; cf. 24:11–24:17); one can take this in many ways and in part also criticise Nietzsche for it (cf. ibid., 24:17–24:28). The entry Nietzsche shows the context of his thought.

#The Unknown Natural Philosopher

That Nietzsche was a thinker of nature, Jochen Kirchhoff set out in a conversation of its own with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker” (“Nietzsche as a Critic of Science”, 2022). Physics cannot explain, natural science cannot explain; that, he says there, is also an important critique in Nietzsche (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2022, “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker”, 47:38–47:46). The basic question one can still ask today, he says, is whether natural science can explain nature “or does it only describe it?” (ibid., 47:52–47:54; cf. 47:46–47:54). Finding formulas that more or less hold and making predictions is not yet an explanation; Nietzsche’s answer to the question what an explanation is, Jochen Kirchhoff calls a very beautiful, plain one: the tracing of the unknown back to something known (cf. ibid., 47:54–48:15). The essay Nietzsche as a Critic of Science follows that conversation.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche celebrates the natural philosopher Boscovich, who taught people to renounce the belief in stuff, in matter, “in the earth-residuum and lump-atom”: “it was the greatest triumph over the senses that has so far been won on earth” (Nietzsche, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil, § 12). Jochen Kirchhoff explains that for Boscovich, and for Nietzsche too, atoms are extensionless centres of force, and space becomes the carrier of a continuum of force fields (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2022, “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker”, 34:17–34:56). In a posthumous fragment Nietzsche writes: “I believe in absolute space as the substrate of force: the latter limits and shapes.” (Nietzsche, Nachlass, quoted from Der Wille zur Macht, ed. Brahn, 1917, no. 365). Jochen Kirchhoff calls this a quite central, quite curious sentence and reads it as Nietzsche seeing space “like a bundle of force” (Kirchhoff, J., 2022, “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker”, 55:50–55:52; cf. 55:20–55:54). Gwendolin Kirchhoff interjects: in a container; not necessarily as a container, he answers, but as a container that is a bundle of force. Every space that one thinks of as bounded is ultimately a container, she says; a container, but not an empty one, he answers, and she adds that it can be a full container (cf. ibid., 55:54–56:12).

Nietzsche, according to Jochen Kirchhoff, could draw on a tradition that was quite powerful in German philosophy, the metaphysics of the will; from Schopenhauer he took over the idea that everything that happens in nature has an outside and an inside, and in Schopenhauer the inside is the will (cf. ibid., 1:29:08–1:29:48). Gwendolin Kirchhoff names Spinoza, who set intellect and will as one; Jochen Kirchhoff traces the line further back still, to Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme (cf. ibid., 1:29:48–1:30:11). The Romantics, above all Schelling, provided a highly intelligent critique of science, says Jochen Kirchhoff; Nietzsche mocks Schelling and does not take him seriously at all, “wrongly so”: he does not know at all how much he too stands in this tradition (ibid., 14:35–14:37; cf. 14:18–14:43). Whether Nietzsche’s will to power can be brought together, in a different terminology, with metaphysical philosophy of nature, for which Jochen Kirchhoff names Schelling as an example, he poses as a question and as a thesis of his own: “So I consider that possible.” (ibid., 1:38:06–1:38:09; cf. 1:36:05–1:38:09). Nietzsche would then also belong to a current of German philosophy of nature that does have something to do with Goethe as well (cf. ibid., 1:38:17–1:38:25).

#The Body as Thought

How Nietzsche connects thinking with the body, Jochen Kirchhoff describes in the SYMPOSIUM conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff: Nietzsche, he says, is a great phenomenologist and tries to connect thinking with organic becoming: nature, as it were, thinks too, organic becoming is also a thinking (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit”, 06:29–06:51). Then he reads aloud from Nietzsche’s Nachlass (cf. ibid., 07:04–07:54). There it says that the human body, “in which the whole most distant and most recent past of all organic becoming comes alive and incarnate again, through which, over which and beyond which an immense, inaudible stream seems to flow”, is a more astonishing thought than the old soul (Nietzsche, Nachlass, quoted from Der Wille zur Macht, ed. Brahn, 1917, no. 436).

Nietzsche does not want to abolish the soul itself. In the fight against soul atomism it is “not at all necessary” to get rid of the soul itself in the process, he writes in Beyond Good and Evil; concepts such as “soul as the social structure of the drives and affects” want to have civic rights in science from now on (Nietzsche, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil, § 12). What Nietzsche called inspiration he describes in Ecce Homo as revelation, as a depth of happiness “in which the most painful and gloomy does not act as an opposite” but as a necessary colour within such an abundance of light (Nietzsche, 1908, Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, 3). Jochen Kirchhoff reads the passage aloud in the conversation “Was wollte Nietzsche?” (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 1:16:25–1:18:12).

#Nihilism and the Übermensch

Nietzsche did not invent the term nihilism, says Jochen Kirchhoff, but he placed it in a particular context (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 08:15–08:21). Where the word comes from, Jochen Kirchhoff researched: the word nihilism, so he reads aloud from a book of his own, first appeared to his knowledge a decade and a half after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in deliberate reference to that work (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 08:02–08:07; 08:37–09:08). Kant believed he had proved that metaphysical knowledge is impossible for reason; a completely unknown author named Jenisch called the Kantian critique of reason atheism and nihilism in 1796 (cf. ibid., 09:16–10:15). A separate entry is devoted to metaphysics.

Nietzsche has Zarathustra teach the Übermensch: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome.” (Nietzsche, 1883, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue 3). Jochen Kirchhoff reads the Übermensch as Nietzsche’s term for the true human being; spiritually one could say, “the human being as it is really meant to be”, which he himself calls the cosmic Anthropos (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, “Was wollte Nietzsche?”, 33:00–33:03; cf. 32:50–33:06). In the same conversation Gwendolin Kirchhoff asks: “So the Übermensch here, in this case, perhaps as the counter-concept to the all-too-human?” Jochen Kirchhoff answers: “Yes, exactly.” (ibid., 1:26:34–1:26:39). At the same time he calls the Übermensch “an ambivalent formula”, “a very difficult formula, which of course immediately invites every kind of misuse” (ibid., 39:08–39:16). More in the entry Übermensch.

#Why His Questions Remain Urgent

How far Nietzsche’s questions reach is shown by the conversation about his critique of science. In “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker”, Jochen Kirchhoff says Nietzsche criticises causality as sharply as some of the early quantum theorists did; an acausality in which things simply happen by chance without a cause Nietzsche would, however, also reject (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2022, “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker”, 1:09:28–1:10:04). Gwendolin Kirchhoff carries the critique into the present: she names the confusion of correlation and cause that one keeps encountering (cf. ibid., 1:10:56–1:11:02), and the example of a cold: a cause, a culprit, is fixed on one level, and all the surrounding factors come into it; it is a whole phenomenon (cf. ibid., 1:11:19–1:11:41). That, she says, is what Nietzsche first brings in as a critique: the fixation on this one thing (cf. ibid., 1:11:41–1:11:47).

The idea of pathogenesis, not progress is traced in an entry of its own.

Nietzsche’s own answer was affirmation. In The Gay Science he writes: “Amor fati: let that be my love from now on!” and “I want at some point to be only a Yes-sayer!” (Nietzsche, 1882, The Gay Science, § 276). In the SYMPOSIUM conversation, Jochen Kirchhoff names as what he himself learned from Nietzsche an affirmation as a matter of principle: all the Noes have to flow into a Yes (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit”, 37:07–37:13). How Nietzsche frames the love of fate is traced in the entry Amor Fati; how Jochen Kirchhoff reads Nietzsche’s yes as health, in the entry Great Health.

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#Sources

• Kirchhoff, J. (2019). “Was wollte Nietzsche?” (“What Did Nietzsche Want?”) [Video]. Philosophische Gespräche mit Jochen Kirchhoff, episode 21. YouTube, 14 April 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EcVGcw8LlI (in conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff).
• Kirchhoff, J. (2022). “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker” (“Nietzsche as a Critic of Science”) [Video]. YouTube, 5 November 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP9zNqZG5pI (in conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff).
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nietzsche und die Große Gesundheit – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff – SYMPOSIUM” (“Nietzsche and the Great Health”) [Video]. YouTube, 19 October 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS8vCl4BkvI (in conversation with Jochen Kirchhoff).
• Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft). Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner. Quoted from zeno.org (§ 276).
• Nietzsche, F. (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra). Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner. Quoted from Projekt Gutenberg (Prologue 3).
• Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft). Leipzig: C. G. Naumann. Quoted from Projekt Gutenberg (§ 12, § 260).
• Nietzsche, F. (1887). On the Genealogy of Morality (Zur Genealogie der Moral). Leipzig: C. G. Naumann. Quoted from zeno.org (First Essay, 10, 11, 17).
• Nietzsche, F. (1889). Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung). Leipzig: C. G. Naumann. Quoted from Projekt Gutenberg (“The Problem of Socrates”, 4, 9, 10, 11).
• Nietzsche, F. (1908). Ecce Homo. Written 1888, first published Leipzig: Insel. Quoted from Projekt Gutenberg (“The Birth of Tragedy”, 1–2; “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, 3; “Why I Am a Destiny”, 1, 3).
• Nietzsche, F. Der Wille zur Macht. Eine Auslegung alles Geschehens (The Will to Power). Selected and arranged by Max Brahn. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1917 (nos. 2, 365, 436). A posthumous selection from the Nachlass, not a work authorised by Nietzsche.
• English renderings of the German sources are our own.