Abstract

In contrast to the Christian concept of justice as moral virtue, defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as “an attitude with the power of which one is fortified and acknowledges the rights of others of one’s own accord”, Nietzsche identifies the origin of justice in equalisation or an agreement between forces of approximately equal powers, as well as in the compulsion of the less powerful to agree. In support of this standpoint, founded on the claim that life itself is essentially appropriation, i.e. that the will to power is the will of life itself, Nietzsche made use of Thucydides’s imagery of the Athenians and Melians. The author, however, concludes that what Nietzsche does is not only think about power, but that he also seeks a novel understanding of justice, which he strives to expound from the totality of his thought