Nietzsche's Orientation toward the Future

Abstract

Nietzsche assumed that the time to understand him was yet to come, perhaps after one or two centuries. We cannot say whether this time has come yet because nobody can say that he or she understands Nietzsche as he wanted to be understood. But we can track what he wrote about his future and then draw our own conclusions. Although he often spoke about it, Nietzsche's future has rarely become a topic in Nietzsche research. It might however be especially important for younger generations. After a short review of Nietzsche's future in the twentieth century, which is already behind us, I thus unfold his semantics of the future and orientation toward the future. Then, I outline the future of thinking as announced by him in the fifth book of the Gay Science. Here, he speaks of the “music of life,” which philosophers and especially those philosophers committed to or fully lost in idealism are no longer able to hear. In a subsequent note, he expands the horizon of this music of life to a “music of the future” in “labyrinths of the future,” in which we have to learn to orient ourselves. The future of Nietzsche's thinking in the twenty-first century might be decided depending on Nietzsche's utmost enhancement of value orientation, with which he eventually breaks in his amor fati sign that no longer needs or wants a future.

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