“The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values.”

Nietzsche sets the stage for his study by characterizing the state of philosophy as he sees it: Philosophers up to the present day have seen the world in black and white terms where there are two sides to things—the right side and the wrong side. However, says the author, this is incorrect, for the world is not so simple and the human will is much more complex than previously imagined. No longer are concepts to be viewed as antithetical to one another, but there is to be a new system of values that breaks this traditional way of seeing things.

“A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof.”

Life is about the life-force, and the life-force is the will. The will to power is the self-determining drive to create one’s own reality and one’s own values. Of course, this often and everywhere flows forth in the drive toward self-preservation, one of the strongest instincts of the will, but this will to power can be directed outward as well toward those things the individual determines are valuable and desirable for possession.

“[S]eparate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a Continent […]”

Though distinct and varied philosophical concepts and ideas can seem disconnected or unrelated, this is not the case. Traditional values are all part of a long chain of thinking, brought into being as one cause after another, and this can be traced through a genealogical process.