We will fill your Fields with Salt. Reflections on War and Nihilism

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims the advance of nihilism in Also sprach Zarathustra with the phrase “The desert grows (die Wüste wächst)†and thereby puts the entire metaphysical tradition in check, for nihilism is not the fruit of political, social and cultural movements, but has belonged to the West since its own Greek dawn. Nihilism is imbricated in the history of the forgetting of being, but it only becomes visible when a transmutation of values takes place. War, for its part, can be interpreted either as an imposition of new values or as a defence of old ones, but in the end it is still part of the nihilistic game, since the space occupied by these values is located in the metaphysical framework that favours the forgetfulness of being. This punishment, the imposition of a desert, can serve as a metaphor with which to establish a relationship between war and nihilism, not because war is another form of nihilism, but rather to show that, from its origin, established as a Heraclitean war of opposites, nihilism is part of a tradition condemned to the oblivion of being.