Nietzsche's final, incomplete, catastrophically ambitious project was a book called The Revaluation of All Values. He worked on it for years. He died without finishing it. His sister published fragments of it posthumously under the title The Will to Power, in an arrangement that does not match anything Nietzsche himself left behind, which muddied the reception of the work for a century. The project's scope was audacious even by Nietzsche's standards. He intended to examine the foundational values of Western civilization — the values underlying morality, knowledge, health, politics, and religion — and ask of each one whether it had been chosen deliberately or inherited by default. Where the answer was default inheritance, he intended to propose replacement values, developed from first principles rather than from tradition.
The project was theoretical when Nietzsche wrote it. The tools to actually execute a revaluation of the underlying biology of value — to modify the physiological and cognitive substrates that shape what human beings find valuable — did not exist. He could argue that the values needed revision. He could not modify the machinery that produced the values. The project remained within the domain of philosophical argument. It inspired a century of subsequent philosophy but did not produce operational change in the species.
The tools now exist. That is the situation nobody talks about in quite these terms. The revaluation of all values is no longer exclusively a philosophical project. It is now also a laboratory project. The substrates that produce human values — the neurological architectures that generate feelings of good and bad, the hormonal profiles that shape what feels worth pursuing, the metabolic states that determine what kinds of pleasure are accessible — are increasingly modifiable through specific interventions. A revaluation that was once confined to argument can now be pursued partly through biology.
Let me make this concrete. The values a human being holds are not floating in abstract space. They emerge from a specific substrate. The substrate has a specific neurochemistry. When the neurochemistry changes, the values tend to change with it. A person in a state of chronic low-grade depression has different values than the same person in a state of robust neurological function. The depressed version of you finds fewer things worth pursuing, considers more effort to be wasted effort, and interprets ambiguous situations more pessimistically. The robust version of you experiences the same situations with different evaluations. The world has not changed. The substrate has.
This observation has been well documented in the psychiatric literature for fifty years. What has been less widely discussed is its implication for ethics. If a person's values are substantially shaped by their neurochemistry, and their neurochemistry is modifiable, then the values they hold are not fixed features of their selfhood. They are contingent outputs of a biological configuration, and that configuration is itself subject to modification. The usual interpretation of this observation is that we should be suspicious of values produced by pathological states. The radical interpretation, the one Nietzsche's project points toward, is that all values are produced by biological states, and the question is which biological states we want our values to be produced by.
Here is the claim in its strongest form. The values currently considered normal in most of the world are produced by a human biological substrate that is often suboptimal. The average person is sleep-deprived, inflamed, metabolically compromised, cognitively under-loaded, and socially isolated. Their values are downstream of that condition. When you ask the average person what matters to them, you are not getting a report from a fully functional biological system. You are getting a report from a system operating at 60 or 70 percent of its capacity, with the compromised operating condition shaping the output. The values are not revealing some deep truth about human nature. They are the values that a mildly unwell body tends to produce.
Now consider what happens when the same body is restored to full function. When the sleep is adequate and consistent. When the inflammation is down. When the metabolic function is optimized. When the cognitive system is loaded enough to stay sharp but not overloaded. When there is adequate social engagement with people who challenge and support. The same person in this state reports different values. More things feel worth pursuing. Effort feels more rewarding. Ambiguous situations are interpreted more generously. Long-term projects feel more feasible. Collaboration with others feels more attractive than competition. The person has not been philosophically converted. Their substrate has been restored. The restoration produces a different set of values.
This is where the project of revaluation intersects with the project of self-modification. The values you will hold ten years from now depend substantially on the biological state of the substrate you are running on ten years from now. If you do nothing to maintain the substrate, the substrate will degrade in predictable ways, and your values will degrade along with it. You will become more cautious, more defensive, more narrowly self-interested, more resistant to effort, more oriented toward short-term comfort over long-term flourishing. This is not a moral failure. It is what happens to values when the substrate is in decline. Everyone you know over sixty who has not maintained their substrate is operating on a different value system than they did at thirty, and the change is not primarily the result of accumulated wisdom. It is the result of accumulated biological compromise.
The reverse is also true. The person who deliberately maintains and improves their substrate across decades tends to hold a different set of values at sixty than they did at thirty. More ambitious. More generous. More intellectually open. More willing to take on difficult projects. More capable of long-term collaboration. This also is not primarily the result of accumulated wisdom. It is the result of accumulated biological improvement. The substrate is better. The values it produces are better. The two changes are coupled.
Let me walk through some specific values that turn out to be physiologically contingent in ways that are often not recognized. Consider the value people place on novelty versus stability. Someone who gets good sleep and has adequate dopamine function tends to value novelty in measured doses. They seek out new experiences but also invest in long-term structures. Someone with chronic sleep deprivation and dysregulated reward systems tends to develop extreme preferences in one direction or the other — either a compulsive need for constant novelty to stimulate a flattened reward system, or a rigid avoidance of novelty because the compromised system cannot handle the adjustment costs. The person's apparent preference about novelty looks like a personality trait. It is partly a readout of their biological state.
Consider the value people place on collaboration versus competition. This one is heavily modulated by oxytocin, by testosterone, by the chronic stress state of the body, and by sleep quality. The same person in a well-rested, low-stress, metabolically healthy state tends toward collaboration because collaboration produces better outcomes and they have the cognitive bandwidth to coordinate. The same person in a sleep-deprived, inflammatory, stressed state tends toward defensive competition because their system is running in threat mode and other people look like potential threats rather than potential partners. The value looks like an ideological position. It is partly a report on the person's physiology.
Consider the value people place on the long-term future versus the present. This one is tightly coupled to prefrontal cortex function, which in turn is tightly coupled to sleep, to inflammation, to metabolic function, and to stress exposure. A person with a well-functioning prefrontal cortex naturally weights long-term consequences against short-term gratification in a way that looks like self-discipline. A person with a compromised prefrontal cortex naturally discounts the future in a way that looks like impulsivity. The difference is not primarily a moral one. It is a neurological one. The moralized interpretation — calling the first person disciplined and the second undisciplined — hides what is actually happening.
The implication of all of this is the key point of this essay. If you want to hold certain values, it is not sufficient to argue for them. You have to maintain the biological substrate that produces them. The philosopher who argues for long-term thinking while living on four hours of sleep is going to have a difficult time actually executing long-term thinking, no matter how persuasive the argument is in the abstract. The activist who argues for generous collaboration while running on chronic inflammation is going to have a difficult time being generous in practice. The researcher who argues for intellectual honesty while operating at cognitive half-capacity due to poor metabolic health is going to have a difficult time noticing when they are rationalizing. The values and the substrate have to be maintained together. Otherwise the values become aspirational statements that the body cannot actually execute.
This is the revaluation project in its operational form. Not just arguing for different values. Building the substrate that can actually hold them. The camel phase is the work of learning what the substrate requires. The lion phase is the work of refusing the cultural defaults that compromise the substrate — the inadequate sleep, the dysregulated food environment, the chronic low-grade stress, the sedentary lifestyle, the social isolation. The child phase is the work of building a life structured around the maintenance of the substrate, so that the substrate can produce the values you have chosen rather than the values that compromised conditions produce by default.
Now this reframing has a sharp political implication that Nietzsche would have recognized. If the values people hold are partly a function of their biological state, and their biological state is heavily determined by their material conditions — food, sleep, work hours, stress exposure, social environment — then the politics of biology becomes the politics of values. A culture that creates conditions that produce compromised substrates is a culture that produces compromised values. A culture that creates conditions that produce robust substrates is a culture that produces robust values. The political fight about values is not exclusively a fight about ideology. It is also a fight about what conditions the population is going to live in. The conditions shape the substrates. The substrates shape the values.
This is why the wellness industry is not the right target for a serious political project around values. The wellness industry offers individual solutions to what are often systemic problems, and the individual solutions are available only to people who can afford them. A serious project would address the conditions themselves. Adequate sleep as infrastructure. Adequate nutrition as infrastructure. Adequate movement as infrastructure. Adequate social engagement as infrastructure. Adequate cognitive engagement as infrastructure. Each of these, at the population scale, produces a different biological substrate across the population. The population with the better substrate produces different values than the population with the worse substrate. The politics are about whether the conditions get built at scale.
The revaluation of all values, in Nietzsche's original sense, was a project of arguing for different values. The revaluation of all values in the operational sense is a project of building the biological conditions that produce different values. The first is philosophy. The second is biology and politics. Neither one works without the other. Arguing for values without building the substrate produces aspirational talk that nothing can execute. Building the substrate without articulating the values produces healthy populations that do not know what to do with their health. Both projects have to run simultaneously. The philosophy directs the biology. The biology makes the philosophy operational.
Step back and look at the actual shape of the project. Values come from somewhere. The somewhere is biological. The biological substrate is modifiable. Therefore values are, in a deep sense, modifiable through modification of the substrate. This does not reduce values to biology. It recognizes that values and biology are coupled, and that the coupling runs in both directions. You can argue for values, which will, over time, shape the biology of the people who hold them. You can modify biology, which will, over time, shape the values that emerge from the modified system. The project Nietzsche started in the 1880s is now operational. The argument continues. The laboratory work is joining it. We are the species which modifies itself, and the modification of the values follows from the modification of the body, and the modification of the body is available to anyone willing to do the work.