The Revaluation of All Values, Part 6

The will to power as relevance realization.

• Part 1: How Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals foreshadowed the modern fields of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution

• Part 2: Master morality and slave morality in light of cultural group selection

• Part 3: The moral origins of the the meaning crisis

• Part 4: An introduction to the will to power

• Part 5: Nietzsche’s will to power as a process of complexification

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In part 5 of this series I argued, echoing the dissertation of Paul Curtis, that Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power” can be understood scientifically as the process of complexification that underlies the emergence of everything. Since the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, we should expect this process to be apparent in our own cognitive development. In fact, John Vervaeke and collaborators’ work on “relevance realization” describes how this process of complexification manifests in cognitive development.

My claim is that relevance realization simply is the will to power as it manifests in cognitive development. I will support this claim by demonstrating that both the will to power and relevance realization are described as:

1. Emerging at the border between order and chaos.

2. Involving competing interactions (i.e., opponent-processing).

3. Involving descents into chaos followed by a re-emergence into a higher form of order (i.e., self-organized criticality).

4. Associated with simultaneous differentiation and integration (which, for Nietzsche, is equivalent to power).

5. The process by which we become more cognitively powerful over the course of development (with Nietzsche’s description of power being equivalent to the definition of complexity used by Vervaeke, i.e., simultaneous integration and differentiation).

The overlap between the will to power and relevance realization means that Nietzsche’s response to the “meaning crisis” was more similar to John Vervaeke’s response in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series than John may have realized. Exploring that similarity will help to bridge the gap between Nietzsche’s philosophical arguments and modern cognitive science.

Before discussing relevance realization, I will first need to discuss some concepts from the predictive processing framework and how they relate to Nietzsche’s will to power. I can’t introduce these topics without using some technical language, so this will probably be one of the more difficult parts of this series. Hopefully the payoff will be worth it.

Nietzsche explained the functioning of the mind in terms of a single, overarching principle: the will to power. Similarly, the predictive processing framework posits that the sole function of the mind is prediction error minimization. Using philosopher John Richardson’s work describing Nietzsche’s psychological framework, I will show that an increase in the rate at which you are reducing prediction error is equivalent to an increase in power. Both involve an increase in one’s ability to exert control over one’s self and the world in order to achieve biologically relevant goals.

In demonstrating this overlap, we will see that Nietzsche’s characterization of the will to power is the the same, for all intents and purposes, as the process that John Vervaeke calls relevance realization.

Will to Power as Slope-Chasing

Contrary to some misinterpretations, Nietzsche does not understand power in terms of political or interpersonal dominance, though it can certainly take this form. As philosopher John Richardson describes in his three books on Nietzsche, the will to power manifests in biology as the will to increase control over the world (including one’s self) in order to achieve biologically relevant goals (Richardson, 1996, 2004, 2020). Richardson calls this “growth in control”. He states:

Power is drives’ deepest goal because it has been so strongly and widely selected for: causal dispositions that enhance their activity, that try to (not just maintain but) expand its scope, are those that get most often and firmly fixed in the genetic line. BGE.6: “every drive seeks to rule [ist herrschsuchtig].” Each, that is, involves a deep effort at “more,” at growth, by extending its control over other forces; mere survival is pursued only as a second-best. This growth is always in the activity that is the drive’s distinguishing and defining goal. So the sex-drive seeks enhancement in sexual activity… This deep aim at power serves, Nietzsche thinks, as a kind of meta-aim that guides the drive’s relation to its more particular goals. (Richardson, 2020 p. 98)

To use the example Richardson gave, the sex-drive doesn’t merely aim at sex (though it certainly does this), but rather at becoming better at attaining it. This is equivalent to the predictive processing (PP) claim that we are “slope-chasers”, that we do not seek merely to attain biologically relevant goals, but to increase the rate at which we attain those goals, which is conceptualized in the PP framework as an increase in the rate at which we reduce prediction error (Miller et al., 2021).

To put it simply, complex organisms have not been selected to merely attain the biologically relevant goals of food, sex, status, safety, etc., but to continually improve their ability to attain these goals over time. Instead of just trying to reduce prediction error, we are motivated to increase the rate of global prediction error minimization over time. This is an important distinction because it allows us to understand why we may temporarily increase the rate of local prediction error (e.g., by learning a new skill and making lots of mistakes) so that we can decrease the rate of global prediction error over time. We often allow for short-term prediction error in the service of reducing long-term prediction error.

The perceived rate of global prediction error minimization can be understood as a slope that plots the various speeds that prediction errors are being resolved relative to how fast the organism expects them to be resolved. A slope that is horizontal would indicate that we are resolving prediction errors as fast as expected. An increasing slope means we are doing better than expected. That slope (i.e., the perceived rate of prediction-error minimization) can be understood as our own perceived power.

When we resolve prediction errors faster than expected, we feel positive affect (happy, satisfied, excited, etc.). When we resolve prediction errors slower than expected, we feel negative affect (sad, disappointed, discontented, etc.). Positive and negative affect is therefore determined by the perceived achievement of power. Miller and colleagues (2021) state that:

Error dynamics — the rate of change in error reduction — are registered by the organism as embodied affective states. We can think of an agent’s performance in reducing error in terms of a slope that plots the various speeds that prediction errors are being accommodated relative to their expectations. Positively and negatively valenced affective states are a reflection of better than or worse than expected error reduction, respectively. Valence refers to the organism’s evaluation of how it is faring in its engagement with the environment (i.e., how well or badly things are going for the organism). (p. 9)

If we accept that the rate of error reduction is equivalent to power, Nietzsche’s contention that positive and negative affect track perceived power is vindicated by modern cognitive science:

What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
(The Antichrist, section 2)

I say “perceived” power because we can be mistaken about the rate at which we are reducing prediction error. Some actions, like taking addictive drugs or playing video games, might stimulate the pathways (e.g., dopamine) which signal global prediction error reduction without actually reducing global prediction error. One function of dopamine is to track goal achievement (or prediction error minimization), but dopaminergic pathways can be hijacked by drugs, video games, and other supernormal stimuli. This means that positive affect can become detached from actual growth, leading to addiction, depression, mania, or other pathological mental states.

Nietzsche associated happiness with the feeling that power is growing. Miller and colleagues (2021) associate happiness with perceived increases in the rate at which prediction error is being reduced. In both cases it’s recognized that the feeling of growth can come apart from the actual growth itself. Richardson (2020) describes this recognition in Nietzsche’s work:

The point is important for Nietzsche. It contributes to his arguments against hedonism and utilitarianism, both of which mistake the end as a mere feeling— pleasure or happiness—and fail to see the judgment it involves as to power (growth). The end is that power, and the feeling is a way of judging that the end is achieved: “‘it [everything living] strives for power, for more in power’—pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of achieved power, a difference-consciousness.” But since the judgment involved in this enjoyment can be false, the feeling can be deceptive, the end not really achieved. Thus the feeling of growth can come apart from growth itself. (Richardson, 2020 pp. 59-60)

For Nietzsche, the goal is to actually achieve the underlying growth that positive affect is meant to track. The goal is power, not the mere feeling of power.

Power should not be understood as a steady state, but as an ongoing process. Richardson (2020) states:

…we need to bear in mind that power is not a goal in the most usual sense since it includes a “movement” within it. To be sure, Nietzsche sometimes does speak of a “growth in power,” but I take this as a loose way to remind us that power is itself a growth. It is not a (steady) state or condition, as we usually think a “goal” to be. It is not even the (settled) condition of having grown in control, but rather the process of growing in control. Life’s deep aim is to change in a certain direction, and not to arrive at some point or position in that direction. (Richardson, 2020 p. 61)

This means that, according to Nietzsche, life’s deep aim, and the highest goal we can aspire to, is best understood as a process and not a state. In predictive processing terms, it is the process by which we increase the rate of global error reduction. The ability to increase this rate can be understood simply as power. John Vervaeke and colleagues’ description of relevance realization describes the process by which we become more cognitively powerful.

Precision-weighting —> Relevance Realization —> Will to Power

Relevance realization is a framework for understanding how organisms intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their aims and focus in on the small portion of the world that is relevant. Most famously, this is known as the “frame problem” within cognitive science, although it is related to other lesser-known problems.

John Vervaeke and colleagues (2012) made the case that relevance realization is achieved through the attempt to balance the competing goals of remaining efficient in the current environment while simultaneously being resilient in the face of environmental changes. This “opponent-processing” relationship is similar to how the body regulates arousal through the opposing actions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These two systems are apparently opposed to each other, but that opposition results in a more functional outcome overall. Similarly, the goals of efficiency and resiliency are apparently opposed to each other, but that opposition results in a more functional overall outcome.

From “Relevance Realization and the Neurodynamics and Neuroconnectivity of General Intelligence” (2013)

In the predictive processing framework, the process by which we determine the relative weight given to both action policies and incoming prediction errors is called “precision-weighting”. This name is based on the Bayesian understanding that more ‘precise’ predictions are more confident predictions, though we don’t need to focus on the technical details here. Mark Miller, John Vervaeke, and I published a paper a few years ago arguing that precision-weighting and relevance realization are describing the same process. In that paper, we stated that:

[The predictive processing framework] suggests that we separate signal from noise by forming expectations about the ‘precision’ (technically the inverse variance) of incoming prediction errors and assigning a higher ‘weight’ to prediction errors which are treated as highly precise. Highly precise prediction errors are then given more influence in driving action and updating predictions. Importantly, the broad criterion which determines how the brain will assign precision is relevance, meaning that signals which are more pragmatically or epistemically relevant to the organism are assigned greater precision and thus have a greater effect on downstream processing. (Andersen, Miller, & Vervaeke 2022)

We used research on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs associated with precision-weighting are the same as the tradeoffs associated with relevance realization (e.g., exploration-exploitation, focusing-diversifying, specialist-generalist). In doing so, we showed that precision-weighting just is the predictive processing account of relevance realization.

I am not going to rehash our argument in this post. It’s enough to say that we established the substantial overlap between the tradeoffs associated with precision-weighting and the tradeoffs associated with relevance realization, concluding that these two concepts are essentially describing the same process. In Nietzsche’s terminology, this would be the process by which “drives” are organized so as to increase overall power. It is no coincidence that the way Nietzsche described that process can be easily mapped onto the way that John Vervaeke and his colleagues have described relevance realization. Both the will to power and relevance realiation are described as a process of complexifcation that occurs through competing interactions at the border between order and chaos.

Power as Complexification

As mentioned in previous parts of this series, complexity can be understood as the simultaneous integration and differentiation of a system (e.g., Tononi et al., 1994). John Vervaeke and colleagues have described relevance realization as a process of complexification involving competing interactions, leading to self-organized criticality (i.e., a descent into chaos), leading to greater complexity:

With its self‐organizing criticality the brain engages in a kind of on‐going opponent processing between integration and differentiation of information processing. This means that the brain is constantly complexifying (simultaneously integrating as a system while [differentiating] its component parts) its processing as a way of continually adapting to a dynamically complex environment[…] The brain is thus constantly transcending itself in its ability to realize relevant information. (Vervaeke & Ferraro, 2013 p. 11)

Although he used different terminology, Nietzsche also clearly describes the will to power in terms of complexification. He understands power in terms of simultaneous integration and differentiation, which is our definition of complexity (Reginster, 2009; Richardson, 1996). Nietzsche also sees differentiation and integration as being in tension with each other, so there is a kind of opponent processing:

Nietzsche’s broad formal aim is to unify the psyche while yet preserving— and even increasing—the diversity of its parts. These two sides to the aim pull against one another. It would be easier to impose unity by reducing diversity—by eliminating minority opposition (i.e., drives that contradict the dominant project)… To unite myself, it seems best to get rid—as much as I can—of habits of feeling that conflict with my unifying aim. But Nietzsche insists on cultivating diversity in one’s affects, too. (Richardson, 2020 pp. 124-125)

Bernard Reginster (2009) described Nietzsche’s ideal similarly:

In the soul of a great individual, many different drives and points of view are unified and organized into a coherent whole. This is indeed the salient characteristic of all those individuals we have come to consider “great,” such as Shakespeare… (Reginster, 2009 p. 192)

And as Nietzsche himself put it:

The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled (Will to Power 966).

Here we see the clear overlap between John Vervaeke’s description of relevance realization (i.e., simultaneous integration and differentiation) and Nietzsche’s ideal (i.e., the marriage of unity and diversity). The similarity is far from a coincidence.

It is also not a coincidence that both the “will to power” and relevance realization are associated with competing interactions leading to a descent into chaos (i.e., self-organized criticality), leading to increasing complexity. See my post “Intimations of a New Worldview” for a discussion of the ubiquity of this process in nature.

With relevance realization, John Vervaeke has referred to the work of Stephen and Dixon (2009) to make this case. They showed that insights are characterized by an increase in behavioral entropy (i.e., a descent into chaos) followed by a decrease in entropy such that there is less entropy than before the insight.

Nietzsche also described his process in terms of competing interactions leading to a state of chaos, followed by a higher synthesis. One example of this process, for Nietzsche, is in his analysis of the origins of modern nihilism (depicted below), but he describes a similar process for individual development.

In individuals, these competing interactions could involve a conflict of drives, beliefs, or values. For Nietzsche, neither of the competing forces are destroyed in this process, but integrated into a new synthesis.

For the growth Nietzsche has in mind, the competing force is not simply destroyed—this wouldn’t improve the capacity—but incorporated by having its different abilities adapted to serve the living thing’s projects. It’s by this incorporation [Einverleibung] of something foreign that the old life is disrupted and outgrown, and the jump to a new level occurs. (Richardson, 2020 p. 57)

In sum, Nietzsche characterizes the will to power as a process involving competing interactions, which lead to a state of chaos, which then can lead to a higher level of complexity (i.e., the combination of unity and diversity). This is exactly how the process of relevance realization is understood (see this older post for details).

Overman as Exemplar of the Will to Power

Self-organized criticality, which Vervaeke has claimed is characteristic of relevance realization, occurs at the border between order and chaos in complex systems. Scientists studying criticality have likewise argued that systems function optimally at this narrow window between order and chaos. A system with too much order is too rigid for optimal functioning. A system with too much chaos lacks stability and cohesion. Roli and colleagues (2015) explain:

The peculiar properties of critical systems enlightened in thermodynamics and statistical physics are at the roots of a conjecture stating that systems at the phase transition achieve the highest level of computational capability. The rationale behind this hypothesis is that ordered regimes are too rigid to be able to compute complex tasks, as changes are rapidly erased and the flow of information among the units of the system is rather low. Conversely, disordered regimes are too erratic to provide a reliable response to inputs, as perturbations and noise spread unboundedly, preventing effective information transmission and storage. Critical regimes may indeed provide the optimal trade-off between reliability and flexibility, i.e. critical regimes make the system able to react consistently with the inputs and, at the same time, capable to provide a sufficiently large number of possible outcomes. (p. 4)

Thus, self-organized criticality is proposed to characterize the optimal functioning of biological systems. In his 2022 book The Cortex and the Critical Point, neuroscientist John Breggs describes what happens at this narrow window between order and chaos in the brain:

… it is like when water, at just the right pressure, changes into steam. For a moment it is both a flowing liquid and individual molecules zipping around through the air. Neurons can act that way too, firing synchronously and then breaking off to improvise by themselves. Just at this transition, they are paradoxically both independent and interdependent with all other neurons. Right here, near what we will call the critical point, information flows easily, computations are most facile, and the brain is exquisitely sensitive to inputs. Here, intricate patterns of waves, oscillations, and avalanches of activity arise most readily. Slip too far below this point, and neurons fall into the abyss of silence. Nudge above it, and they get swept up into the fatal storm of seizures. Right around the critical point there is a narrow passage that opens to an expanse of complexity and emergence that is wider than the sky and deeper than the sea. (pp. 34-35).

Nietzsche’s ideal, the overman, also occurs at the border between order and chaos, a fact that was demonstrated by John Richardson’s discussion of the overman in his 1996 book Nietzsche’s System. Richardson’s discussion is important for the purposes of this post because it demonstrates that Nietzsche’s ideal occurs at the border between order and chaos and is characterized by simultaneous differentiation and integration, which is exactly how relevance realization is characterized. Nietzsche was intuitively picking up on the patterns associated with self-organized criticality (i.e., the process which occurs at the border between order and chaos in complex systems) and complexity (i.e., simultaneous differentiation and integration) long before we had a scientific understanding of these concepts.

In order to demonstrate this pattern, we will need to discuss the psychological characterization of three types of persons: the master type, the slave type, and the overman. Richardson makes the case that the overman is best understood as a synthesis of the two other types of human: the master type and the slave type.

The master type is associated with order, being characterized by a simple but well-organized psyche. In contrast to the slave type’s passivity, the master type is active, but this active disposition is only maintained because of the simplicity of his psyche. On this point it’s best to quote Richardson at length:

Both the dependence of the master on his group and this 'conservative' temporal stance… make him fall short of Nietzsche's highest ideal. As preformed into a synthesis by the natural bias of his simple drives, the master identifies with, and strives to enhance, an activity that was settled before him and is little open to revision now. He values only variations on this activity itself; it's something necessary for him, embedded as he is in habits or customs. He does indeed will power actively — 'from abundance', loving his past and striving to improve it — but this self-improvement is 'better playing the game' and not refashioning current practices into new ones. His effort is mainly at continuing just such a life as his own; what's foreign is not worth doing, and he keeps it away or makes it simply serve his existing practice.

This means that the master has no experience of creating, which is the fullest type of growth or power. His straightforward health stands in his way. His preset simplicity of drives leaves him little acquaintance with that flux of perspectives — that worrying oscillation between opposing viewpoints, that upsetting of any attitude temporarily uppermost — which most spurs effort at change. (Richardson, 1996, section 2.5.1)

The master type is depicted as a conservative creature, devoted to the norms and values instilled by his culture. The master type falls short of Nietzsche’s ideal because of a lack of diversity in his drives and viewpoints. The master type is too simple. The slave type has the opposite problem, being associated with chaos. The slave type has many drives and viewpoints to draw upon, but is reactive because he lacks an overarching goal which can unify his drives. In contrast to the master, the slave type is complicated but disorganized:

… the Nietzschean slave is at once uglier — sicker and more malevolent — but also more fruitful and promising. Indeed, far from embodying the animal in man, it's in this type that humanity becomes 'sicker and more interesting' than the animals, hence more itself. The slave type is largely responsible for the 'spiritualizing' of society and species. Hence, whereas for Plato the degeneration of persons and societies toward this type is an unalloyed evil, Nietzsche thinks of this movement 'dialectically', as a retreat that could allow a great advance, as this sickness is taken up into a 'higher health’…

The decadent [slave type] is jostled constantly from one view of how to live to another, taking them all as democratically equal. In this flux of the drives and perspectives, he experiences becoming more vividly than the master does. He suffers from this flux, and this is even the overwhelming feature of all his experience: shift in perspective occasioned by the uncontrolled play of his drives…

The evolution of the slave type has a final stage, however — a decadence of its own, in the slide toward nihilism. By leveling society, these values based in resentment tend to undercut themselves at their source; that focusing resentment fades. So the slave or slave society tends to lose its will and coherence just as the master did. Drives and persons are freed again from constraint; practice and experience are splintered again. In fact, the sway of those reactive values has multiplied the stock of drives or activities of which persons are composed; it has made them more complex and spiritual. So an even greater diversity now unfolds. (Richardson, 1996, section 2.5.2)

Unlike the master type, the slave type does not have a unified psyche. He is instead characterized by psychic chaos, in which many different drives and viewpoints compete within him. This psychic chaos means that the slave holds more potential than the master, and is better able to empathize with viewpoints that are different from his own. The lack of unity, however, means that the slave type lacks the will to engage in long-term projects. The slave is reactive instead of proactive.

The overman is the synthesis of master and slave. The overman is able to take the diverse drives and viewpoints of the slave and bring them together in the service of a single, overarching project. This means that the overman is both differentiated and integrated, which is our definition of complexity (Tononi et al., 1994). Richardson explains:

We've seen how the overman is one among many who bear, microcosmically, this nihilistic age's exceptional richness of conflicting drives. He's the very rare one of these able to accomplish a healthy synthesis of them; most such inclusive persons collapse under the stress of this task. In succeeding, the overman imposes a masterlike activeness on a slavelike diversity. He unifies the opposite forces he bears, ordering the flux that the slave, too, suffers but can't overcome. Thus he meets a challenge unknown to the master, whose drives (concerns and practices) are a simple fit with one another. In the person of Zarathustra, "all opposites are bound to a new unity" [EH/TSZ/6]; he frames a richest synthetic whole. (Richardson, 1996 section 2.5.3)

Unlike the master type, the overman is characterized by the same ‘sickness’ that the slave suffers from. This sickness is Nietzsche’s way of describing the ongoing conflict between the diverse drives and viewpoints within him. Unlike the slave type, the overman does not wallow in his sickness, but instead uses it to continually propel himself towards greater levels of complexity. The overman even values his sickness, and may bring it upon himself voluntarily so as to become even more complex and powerful.

The overman must accept, as a welcomed part of himself, sickness as well as health; in doing so, he wills the interinvolvement of opposites, 'difference', even in the essential valuative dimension of the active-reactive, the most testing place to do so. It might seem he can't will so. Mustn't the ideal person be most purely healthy? But although the overman's values do favor health — and indeed pick sides in all the other oppositions he bears — he sees in each case the worth of the other. Above all, he sees the value of sickness in health: how the highest activeness isn't purely so but has taken reactivity up into itself.

The overman acts on this lesson: he finds and even cultivates sickness in himself as a necessary stage in his self-creation. So GM/III/9 describes the self-experimentation of modern thinkers: "Afterward we heal ourselves: being-sick is instructive". The overman loves his own past sickness and wills that it recur, because he sees its role in a higher health that incorporates it. This is his Dionysian health, unlike the master's Apollonian in not being uniform, not a health that wills only health. Nietzsche also calls it "the great health — that one does not merely have, but also continually still acquires and must acquire, because one always again gives it up and must give it up" [GS382; quoted EH/TSZ/2]. He gives it up by becoming reactive again and again, and then struggling to create a still more comprehensive health beyond that illness. This shows a still stronger sense in which the overman is, as we saw before, a synthesis of both master and slave. (Richardson, 1996 section 2.5.3)

And so we see that the overman, who emerges at the border between order and chaos, is characterized by the same process that occurs at the border between order and chaos in the brain, i.e., continual descents into chaos (described by Richardson as a reoccurring sickness) and re-emergences into a higher level of complexity (described by Richardson as a new health).

But of course, this is the same process that characterizes relevance realization, as described above. Not coincidentally, it also characterizes the “meta-mythology” described by Jordan Peterson in his first book Maps of Meaning, a process that he also claims occurs at the border between order and chaos

The Point

None of this is particularly surprising. There is a general process that describes the optimal functioning of complex systems, which is also the process by which those systems complexify over time. That process occurs at the border between order and chaos and involves a descent into chaos (i.e., an increase in the entropy of the system) followed by an emergence into a higher level of complexity. This process is described by John Vervaeke as relevance realization, Jordan Peterson as the meta-mythology, and Nietzsche as the will to power. That these thinkers converged on the same pattern isn’t that surprising simply because the pattern is everywhere. It can be found in the functioning of the brain, in the life stories of highly functional human beings (e.g., the work of Abraham Maslow), within cognitive science (e.g., relevance realization and the cognitive science of insight), in ancient mythological narratives (as described by Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning) and in Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power (as argued by Paul Curtis in his recent dissertation).

This process of complexification provides the basis for making objective value judgements because participation in this process is optimal. Everything works better at the border between order and chaos, including you and me.

This process of complexification explains the overlap between Nietzsche’s characterization of the will to power and John Vervaeke’s characterization of relevance realization. In their attempts to understand the “meaning crisis” (which Nietzsche referred to as nihilism), they attempted to understand the most fundamental processes of human cognition, and the principle they converged on (relevance realization, the will to power) was the same principle by a different name.

In part 7 we will explore the metaphysical implications of this process of complexification, which will help us to gain a better understanding of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power. We will see how one modern theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) vindicates Nietzsche’s contention that the mind and the world are fully continuous, a claim which philosopher Tsarina Doyle argues is necessary for Nietzsche’s response to nihilism to be valid.