1.6 Nietzsche’s Highest Value (Affirmation of Life) and its Limits

Abstract

AbstractThe highest value in Nietzsche’s scale of values is without exception life itself. This value asserts itself whenever a subject makes an affirmation (a “Bejahung”), which is the most fundamental expression of willing and of life. To will - to create and affirm value - is simply to affirm life. The most immediate source of this logic is to be found in Schopenhauer, but its conceptual roots go back to the rationalist philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff and then later to Kant, in the form of the determinative predicates and judgments of objects qua real. In this ontology, reality cannot be negated, just as in Nietzsche’s ontology even the negations of the will have an affirmative value that can be neither eliminated nor denied. The consequences of this position create dilemmas for Nietzsche’s subsidiary value-systems: for if no act of will can be seen as a diminution of life, what does it mean to condemn any given volition - any positing of value - by any subject whatsoever? The dilemmas prove to be the source of Nietzsche’s richest and most telling reflections on human agency.