Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s terminology has been widely distorted, so Individua uses his concepts in their original psychological and existential sense. Will-to-power refers to inner expansion and the strengthening of one’s capacity to act, not domination over others. Master and slave moralities describe motivational structures, not social groups or hierarchies. Eternal recurrence is treated as a thought experiment that tests the degree of one’s self-affirmation, not a cosmological doctrine. His critique of the herd targets unexamined conformity rather than people themselves. Nietzsche’s work is anti-nationalist, anti-authoritarian, and explicitly opposed to anti-Semitism; the later political misuse of his ideas came from selective manipulation by others, not from his philosophy. Within Individua, his concepts support sovereignty, authorship, and self-overcoming without importing any of the twentieth-century distortions attached to his name.
Friedrich Nietzsche enters Individua not as a mere influence but as a force of destabilization and reconstruction. His presence in the system is narrative, architectural, and catalytic: he is the one who tears down the inherited scaffolding of morality so that a person can build something of their own.
Nietzsche dismantles the moral frameworks that Europe had taken for granted for centuries. In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes, “Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.” That single line captures the entire problem Individua is designed to solve: the unconscious adoption of values that were never chosen, only absorbed. Nietzsche exposes ressentiment as the psychological engine behind much of what passes for virtue, revealing how often weakness disguises itself as moral superiority.
His analysis of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals is especially central. He describes it as “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge,” a dynamic in which the powerless redefine their limitations as ethical triumphs. Individua uses this insight as a diagnostic tool: whenever a person finds themselves moralizing instead of acting, Nietzsche’s voice is the one asking whether they are disguising impotence as righteousness.
Within Individua, Nietzsche provides the architecture for transcending social conditioning. His conception of the will-to-power is not a political doctrine but a psychological and existential dynamic. In The Gay Science, he writes, “What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man.” Individua interprets this as the strengthening of one’s capacity to act, choose, and shape one’s life. It becomes the engine of sovereignty: the movement from passive identity to active authorship.
His perspectivism reinforces this shift. In Beyond Good and Evil, he asserts, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” This is not relativism but a demand for intellectual honesty. It forces the practitioner to recognize that every worldview, including their own, is a lens rather than a revelation. Individua uses this to break the spell of absolute truths and to encourage conscious value selection rather than inherited obedience.
Eternal recurrence then becomes the existential test. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche imagines a demon whispering: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” Individua treats this as a psychological crucible. If one cannot affirm their life as something they would willingly repeat forever, then something fundamental must change. Eternal recurrence becomes a measure of alignment between one’s values and one’s lived reality.
At the center of it all is self-overcoming. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche declares, “Man is something that shall be overcome.” Individua takes this as a structural principle: individuality is not a static identity but a continuous process of surpassing one’s previous limitations. The individual is not a finished product but a becoming.
No account of Nietzsche’s role in Individua can ignore the catastrophic misreading that later attached itself to his name. Nietzsche despised nationalism, rejected anti-Semitism, and warned against the very herd-ideologies that totalitarian regimes depend on. In Ecce Homo, he remarks with characteristic sharpness, “I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, least of all German.” He also condemned anti-Semites as “the greatest danger to culture.”
The Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche was not an organic reading but an act of manipulation, largely orchestrated by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who curated and distorted his unpublished notes to align with her own nationalist and racist ideology. Individua treats this historical episode as a cautionary tale: philosophical tools meant for inner transformation can be weaponized when torn from their context and pressed into the service of collective delusion.
Nietzsche’s actual project is the opposite of fascism. It is a rebellion against mass identity, ideological hypnosis, and the surrender of one’s inner authority to any collective. His work is a call to sovereignty, not domination; to self-authorship, not obedience.
Representative works include Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo.