The Flame of Eternity by Krzysztof Michalski is a book that I devoured alternately with great pleasure and growing irritation. Congrats! Here's an opportunity to read about Nietzsche, so I won't be fussy, I thought. A sea of nonsense devoted to this author, the ideologization of his thought, patronizing attitude of professional philosophers who live in the tombs of their own speculations—all this puts one in a mood to reach for anything (a book, a lecture, a broadcast) that departs from such trends. In this sense The Flame of Eternity is not confined by the crowd of Nietzschean acolytes. Quite the contrary, it shines against their background, it absorbs rather well. Then what is the reason for my irritation? The same: a careful reading of The Flame of Eternity, a discovery that it is not free (especially its final section) of longueurs and repetitions, that, while nearly Nietzschean at times, the language tends to get bogged down in “descriptions of nature” that are hard to skim, though.

In the first part of the following chapter, I would like to take a closer look at the “arguments” included in the Flame and then, in the second part, to somewhat “criticize” them. As for the “descriptions of nature,” particularly the passages that look like something straight out of a textbook on existentialism (apparently Sartre's slogan “existence precedes essence” has just swapped the owner), I will simply skip them.

Nihilism

It is not a state of inner exhaustion, or an individual's “mental” emptiness. Nihilism is above all an event, but not one that can be grasped and explained historically. It is a situation when the highest values inexplicably lose their value. But what is this thing that loses its value? What is a value itself ? Well, it is all that which signifies the chaos of phenomena with law and order.