Nietzsche: Foundations

Seven dialogues into the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche

A course on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Course outline

1. The Death of God — The cultural diagnosis the whole philosophy answers to — and why it is a crisis, not a victory.
2. Master and Slave Morality — Values have a history. The genealogical method, and the central distinction between two ways of valuing.
3. Conscience, Guilt, and the Ascetic Ideal — How the slave valuation got inside us — bad conscience — and how suffering was given a meaning that also made us sick.
4. The Will to Power — The interpretive key: life as the drive to grow, expand, and overcome itself — not merely to survive.
5. Eternal Recurrence and Amor Fati — The thought experiment that tests whether you can affirm your life — all of it, exactly as it was, forever.
6. The Übermensch and the Revaluation of Values — The constructive task: creating values rather than inheriting them, and becoming what you are.

Part of the Symposium course library.