Before the hammer, there was a cry. Nietzsche spent the last lucid years of his life planning a four-volume magnum opus to be called The Will to Power: Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values. He never finished it. The project collapsed into fragments, notes, and a blaze of unwritten books—yet the phrase survives as one of the most incendiary ideas in moral philosophy. 3 min read.
Direct answer: The transvaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte) is Nietzsche’s call to dismantle the inherited moral framework of the West—chiefly Christian-Platonic morality—and replace it with new values rooted in life-affirmation, power, and creative self-overcoming.
You have been raised inside a value system you did not choose. You call it “good” and “evil” as if those words referred to eternal things. Nietzsche’s wager is that they refer to a history of power, fear, and forgetting. The transvaluation of all values is not a theory to be learned; it is a demolition permit.
What Does “Transvaluation” Actually Mean?
The German term Umwertung aller Werte is often translated as “revaluation of all values.” It is an inversion—but not merely a swapping of labels. Nietzsche wants us to re-experience the history of moral concepts as a human invention with traceable, psychological origins. The word aller (all) signals the scope: no inherited value is exempt. Even kindness, truthfulness, and compassion fall under the hammer.
Nietzsche’s method is genealogical. He does not ask “What is good?” as a static riddle; he asks “In what conditions did this judgment emerge?” and “What kind of life does it serve?” In On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), he draws out the contrast between noble morality and slave morality. The transvaluation of all values is the radical consequence of this genealogy: once you see the origins, you can never unsee the arbitrariness.
The reevaluation is not a kind of and must be repaid in the same coin.
The Critical Target: Christian-Platonic Morality
Nietzsche sees a single moral regime running from Socrates to the nineteenth century. It privileges weakness, humility, pity, and otherworldliness. It lies about its own origin: it claims divine absoluteness, but it is a weapon of the weak against the strong. In The Antichrist (1888), he writes that Christianity is not a counter-movement to decadence; it is the very expression of decadence. The transvaluation of values is a countermove to this decrepit life-denial.
But the target is not only religion. Modern secular morality, with its faith in equality, human rights, and democratic leveling, remains an afterlife of the Platonic-Christian table. Nietzsche insists that the shadow of God still falls across even the most atheistic ethical systems. His revaluation demands that we give up the comforting illusion of objective moral facts.
The Positive Side: Creating New Values
Transvaluation is not an act of destruction for its own sake. It clears ground for the Übermensch, a type who says “yes” to life, fate, and growth. Values are instruments for life’s expansion, not constraints imposed from beyond. The revaluation asks: “What do you have to love, to aspire to, to risk, so that your existence is justified in your own eyes?”
| Hereditary Value | Revalued Measure |
|---|---|
| Humility | Pride in one’s achievements |
| Pity | Hardness that fosters growth |
| Otherworldly hope | Earthly affirmation |
| Equality as a norm | Rank as a natural result of difference |
| Guilt as objective | Innocence of becoming |
This table is not a prescription so much as a map of the direction of Nietzsche’s thought. He never produced a fixed code of new values; he insisted that they must be created by free spirits, not discovered in a cave or a book. The revaluation is an open-ended task.
When you scroll through a social feed and feel the gravitational pull of collective judgment, you are experiencing the afterlife of slave morality. It is the same inversion Nietzsche described—the weak not wanting to be left behind, so they convert their envy into ethics.
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Join NowThe Unfinished Monument
Nietzsche’s promised work, The Will to Power, was never completed. What survived are notebooks, aphorisms, and outlines that editors later assembled into a book he never approved. This unfinishedness is itself philosophically important: the revaluation is not an event that can be completed once and for all. It is a task that each generation must undertake again, because each generation sleeps under a ceiling built by the preceding one.
To understand the transvaluation of all values is not to memorize a doctrine. It is to pick up a hammer and test idols. Some will crack; others will ring with a new sound. The revaluation is a call to become the archaeologist of your own moral certainties.
Referenced Works & Texts
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay & Second Essay (1887).
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers (1886).
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, Aphorisms 7–18 (1888).
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (1968).