About How Nietzsche Has Failed

The article examines the efforts of Friedrich Nietzsche to recognize the crisis of Western culture adequately and to find ways of overcoming of this crisis. Nietzsche proposes to consider culture as manifestations of what he calls "life". With this word, he denotes a certain principle of reality, the structure of which is characterized by self-referentiality, suggestive of Aristotle's noeseas noesis, Descartes' cogito or Hegel's "spirit". However, Nietzsche is well aware that "life" goes beyond the framework of traditional forms of thinking, and that the attempts to squeeze it into this framework is the cause of the crisis of culture. This understanding pushes Nietzsche to search for a new form of thinking risky thinking. However, risk is inseparable from possible failure. In recognizing this, Nietzsche ultimately accepts his failure as a nobilitation.