Nietzsche’s Two-Tiered Conception of ‘Good’

David Rowe (La Trobe University)

In Antichrist, section 2, Nietzsche says the following: ‘What is good? - All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man’. This importance of this line has been downplayed in the literature as being merely three ways to express one idea, namely that what is good is power. I argue that it can be helpfully understood as expressing three different power norms, namely the feeling of power, will to power, and power itself. I utilise this reading of A 2 to make sense of Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values, which doesn’t attribute to Nietzsche some idiosyncratic conception of ‘good’, held only by him and like-minded people. Rather, I argue that Nietzsche has a two-tiered conception of ‘good’, where there are (at least) two, live, value-standards.

David Rowe completed his PhD at La Trobe University in 2014. His dissertation constructs a Nietzschean opponent to contemporary analytic metaethics. He has an article in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, titled "Nietzsche's 'anti-Naturalism' in 'The Four Great Errors'" (2013).