"Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities"

Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that “Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities” confronts the human impulse to pronounce definitive moral or existential evaluations about life. When people deem life “good” or “bad,” “worthwhile” or “worthless,” these assessments are not registers of objective truth about existence, but rather expressions springing from personal temperament, psychological health, or cultural background. For Nietzsche, such judgments are fundamentally ungrounded, there is no absolute standpoint outside of life itself from which one can determine life’s value with finality.

Nietzsche draws an analogy from medicine to elucidate this point: symptoms are not themselves diseases, but express or signify underlying conditions. Similarly, what people proclaim about life’s value exposes something about the judge, not about life itself. A person who condemns life as meaningless or suffering-laden reveals his own weakened vitality, resentment, and malaise. By contrast, one who affirms life and finds joy in existence radiates strength, affirmation, and creative energy. From this vantage, value judgments become diagnostic tools. They help us understand the judge’s existential or cultural position rather than judge existence itself.

This radical subjectivism undermines the pretensions of philosophers, moralists, or religions that claim either to condemn or redeem life on absolute grounds. Their pronouncements are, for Nietzsche, reflections of their own capacities, needs, or psychological dispositions, not universal truths. They are “stupidities” in the sense that they are misguided or naïve attempts to measure life from a standpoint imagined as separate from life itself. Such positions fail to recognize their own conditional, symptomatic character and pretend to speak for something beyond subjective perspective. Ultimately, the only genuine philosophical insight comes from analyzing these judgments as evidence of the judge, not as verdicts on the nature of existence itself.