Emancipation and Atheism: Nietzsche's Radicalism and its Lessons

A widely popular view, commonly accepted also among scholars, portrays Nietzsche as a revolutionary philosopher, noble ancestor of the good causes bent on overturning deeply established conceptual polarities, such as norm-desire or nature-culture, in order to foster and promote the emancipation of all possible identities. Such image is issued straight from the philosopher's postulated atheism, on whose solid foundations ti rests. Or maybe not: in this paper I wil begin to put such popularised view under close scrutiny, since it is my convincement that not only it proves inconsistent with Nietzsche's carefully chiseled philosophy of spiritual aristocracy-which happens to be the only scope and the meaning of emancipation in his eyes— but even opposed to it. In other words, the German philosopher's commitment to emancipation looks quite hostile to the meaning such term possesses nowadays.