ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values challenges the traditional Platonic good, leading to free spirits beyond good and evil. While Nietzsche is launching an assault on habits as values, it needs to be foregrounded that he is also seeking to uproot habits of emotion and experience. However, he does not address here the diametric spatial habit that is seated throughout his accounts of fundamental experience and thought. Nietzsche perceives the need to move from diametric oppositions (such as good–bad, pleasure–pain, for–against) although not in spatial terms. Interpreting Nietzsche’s accounts of free spirits against the backdrop of his call for a shift in experiential habits and in primitive emotional habits, free spirits are not simply engaged in a process of liberation from thought conditioning, but also from experiential habits, including diametric habitual structures of experience. If values are contingent on emotions and hence experiences, then a shift in values can be developed through a shift in experiences. Nietzsche’s sought for experiential shift in selfovercoming is one beset by diametric space, in diametric spatial terms for experience rather than wider concentric experiential modes of transformation. Key words: Dionysian, transvaluation of values, selfovercoming, experience, suffering, free spirits
