ABSTRACT
Along with remarks like ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’, Nietzsche’s notebooks contain various sketches for the contents page of a prospective book to be called The Will to Power. In some sketches the subtitle Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values is suggested. After Nietzsche’s death, his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche (a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi and friend of Hitler), gathered together a bunch of jottings from Nietzsche’s Nachlass (unpublished papers) written between 1883 and 1888 and published them as The Will to Power. Thanks in no small measure to Heidegger, this posthumous collection came to be viewed as Nietzsche’s masterwork. The view became established that, as Heidegger puts it in the massive, four-volume Nietzsche study he produced during the 1930s and early 1940s,
Nietzsche’s philosophy proper, the fundamental position on the basis of which he speaks in … all the writings he himself published, did not assume a final form and was not itself published in any book. … What Nietzsche himself published during his creative life was always foreground … His philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous, unpublished work.
(N I: 8–9)