ABSTRACT
Scholars have often analyzed Nietzsche as a kind of exit frommodernity and entry into postmodernity. He provides an immensely powerful critique of the modern era, its fascination with science, with metaphysics and morality. In this sense, he is a historian of mentalities. A sharp-eyed observer of his culture and an analyst who critically documents historically anchored changes in the way we see and experience the world. Less visible but equally important are Nietzsche’s astute insights not into
history and the ebb and flow of changes it brings, but also into the temporality of experience, of our relation to what is as a function of what has been. Nietzsche understands and tries to express not only the changes of human culture in time. He studies not only the difference between what is and what has been, but also digs into the far more elusive pathos of that change, the troubling and contradictory experience of what is lived through the thought of what is not, what has been, or what could be. A certain pathos of temporality is thus at the core of Nietzsche’s critique of
values and of valuation. It is not, the regret of nihilism that is Nietzsche’s primary concern – as so many read him – but rather the notion that values are inhabited, even caused, by the possibility of the exhaustion of values. Thus, in a fragment from early 1887, Nietzsche says the following about
what he considers ‘the ambiguous character of our modern world’:
Feelings about values are always behind the times; they express conditions of preservation and growth that belong to times long gone by; they resist new conditions of existence with which they cannot cope and which they necessarily misunderstand: thus they inhibit and arouse suspicion against what is new.
