NIETZSCHE'S WORD: "GOD IS DEAD"

its forms: we live right in their midst. The attempts to escape nihilism without revaluing the former values: they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute."

We can grasp Nietzsche's thoughts about incomplete nihilism more clearly and acutely by saying: incomplete nihilism indeed replaces the former values by others, but it always puts them in the old place, which is, as it were, preserved as the ideal region of the supersensory. Complete nihilism, however, must eliminate even the place of value itself, the supersensory as a realm; and it must accordingly alter and revalue values differently.

It is clear, then, that the "revaluation of all values" is indeed part of the complete, fulfilled, and consequently classic nihilism, but the revaluation does not merely replace old values by new ones. The revaluing becomes a reversal of the nature and manner of valuing. The dispensation of value requires a new principle, i.e., something that provides it with a point of departure and the place to maintain itself. The dispensation of value requires another realm. No longer can the principle be the world of the supersensory, now grown dead. Therefore, nihilism aiming at revaluation (understood in this way) will seek out what is most alive. So nihilism itself turns into the "ideal of the most abundant life" (The Will to Power, no. 14, from 1887). In this new highest value is concealed another estimation of life, i.e., of the basis of the determining essence of all living things. So let us now ask what Nietzsche understands by life.

The allusion to different stages and forms of nihilism demonstrates that in Nietzsche's interpretation nihilism is always a history dealing with values: dispensing values, dispensing with values, revaluing values; with dispensing values anew; and ultimately, actually with the differently valuing establishment of the principle behind every dispensation of values. The highest goals, the grounds and principles of beings, ideals and the supersensory, God and the gods — they are all conceived in advance as value. Therefore, we will not grasp Nietzsche's concept of nihilism adequately until we know what he understands by value. Only then will we understand "God is dead" as it is thought. A sufficiently clear elucidation of what Nietzsche thinks with the word "value" is the key to understanding his metaphysics.

In the nineteenth century, talk of values became frequent, and it became customary to think in values. However, it was only as a consequence of the broadcasting of Nietzsche's writings that talk of values has become popular. People speak of life-values, of cultural values, of eternal values, of the hierarchy of values, of spiritual values which, for example, are believed to be found in antiquity. With scholarly activity in philosophy and with the recasting of

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