Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 285was facing "a task that does not allow me to think of myself very much.
... This task has made me ill, and will make me healthy once again—not
only healthy, but also more humanitarian and everything that entails" (B
8,196).
Nietzsche held fast to his plan for a magnum opus until the summer
of 1888. 'The Revaluation of All Values," which was his original subti-
de, evolved into the book's main tide. However, the basic idea of the
plan remained unchanged. The will to power as a basic principle of life
was to lay the groundwork for a revision of all moral ideas. All values
would be revalued. In his rough drafts composed in the last year before
his mental collapse, the central theme of revaluation grew in signifi-
cance. In a great rush, as though foreseeing his impending breakdown,
he hastened to his work and threw himself into the painstaking onto-
logical, scientific, and cosmological interpretations he had plotted out.
Revaluation would be the outcome of a universal interpretation, with
the will to power as a guide. However, Nietzsche ultimately setded for
this outcome without systematic argumentation. He was facing time
pressure. In the fall of 1888, he completed the manuscript of The
Antichrist, which was initially intended as the first book of the
"Revaluation," but wound up becoming the entirety of that text.
Thus, the tide "The Will to Power" was soon abandoned, followed by
the second main tide, 'The Revaluation of all Values." Only The
Antichrist remained. "My revaluation of all values, which has 'The
Antichrist' as its main tide, is finished," Nietzsche wrote to Paul Deussen
on November 26,1888 (B 8,492). However, the original project of "The
Will to Power" was not altogether exhausted in The Antichrist. In fact, the
preliminary sketches for "The Will to Power" found their way, direcdy
or indirecdy, into several other works. Although Nietzsche did not even
come close to using all of the material from the preliminary work in
these books, he did express what he considered the most significant
ideas in Beyond Good and Evil, the fifth book of The Gay Science (1886), the
new prefaces, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, and The