Wills to Power, Genealogy: Which Ones are at War?

Abstract

Nietzsche’s fundamental philosophical problem is the problem of morality, the problem of the origin of our concepts of good and evil, the conditions under which our values have been formed, whom they have conserved and whom suppressed. This fundamental problem is formalized by Nietzsche under the rubric of a critique of moral values, values which have been taken for unconditional and eternal, and a psychology of morals, through which morality is deduced as the ’unconscious disguise of physical needs’, as an interpretation of the body. As Nietzsche writes, ’answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as the symptoms of certain bodies’ (GS P 2). This critique intends ’an actual history of morality’ (GM P 7), or a genealogy of morals, but is also symptomatology and typology, and is accompanied by the imperative to revalue all values.