Nihilism as an opportunity to affirm life in Nietzsche

This thesis focuses on the strategies of Nietzsche as a cultural physician to diagnose and overcome the disease of nihilism that characterizes the Western intellectual tradition. On the one hand, nihilism is an inevitable consequence of logic inherent in the historical adventure of Western metaphysics; on the other hand, it is existentially related to the human relationship with life. The question the study pursues is whether nihilism as a disease itself also contains an opportunity to affirm and justify life. In this sense, the concepts of value, genealogy, naturalization, psychophysiology, and the will to power will be discussed, which are the tools Nietzsche uses to diagnose this ambivalent and multi-layered structure of nihilism. To undermine the values that cover up the nihilism problem of Western metaphysics and destabilize its conceptual framework, Nietzsche primarily conducts an investigation based on the grounds of the creation of values. Thus, in a naturalistic framework, Nietzsche analyzes the psychological and physiological structure of human beings who evaluate values through a genealogical study. Throughout this thesis, it will be problematized how Nietzsche takes nihilism as an opportunity by resorting to these tools.