Rejuvenation: Renewal, Self-Assertion, and the Revaluation of Values

What Rejuvenation Names

Rejuvenation names a recurring human capacity: the renewal of forms of life, value, and orientation when inherited frameworks no longer match the powers we have acquired. It is not a return to origins, nor a therapeutic response to anxiety, but a forward movement through periods of historical transition—when fate becomes something increasingly shaped rather than endured.

In this sense, rejuvenation belongs to the long arc of human self-assertion. From tool-making to symbolic culture, from agriculture to computation, every expansion of human capacity has required corresponding transformations in how we understand responsibility, value, and action. Rejuvenation is the work of that transformation.

Modernity as Legitimate Renewal

This project takes its bearings from the insight—associated most clearly with Hans Blumenberg—that modernity is not a fall from transcendence but a legitimate response to historical pressure. Human beings did not abandon older moral and metaphysical frameworks out of decadence or despair; they outgrew them under the weight of newly acquired powers.

The disorientation we experience today is not evidence of nihilism. It is evidence of responsibility arriving faster than our moral vocabularies can accommodate. Artificial intelligence, gene editing, and planetary-scale systems extend a lineage as old as Homo itself: attempts to gain leverage over contingency, to redirect fate, and to live with the consequences of doing so.

Revaluation of Values, Not a Meaning Crisis

This is where this work diverges sharply from accounts of a “meaning crisis.” While those diagnoses rightly register disorientation and loss of coherence, they often interpret these conditions through an existential lens: as a deficit to be repaired, a wound to be healed, or a void to be filled.

The perspective here is different. What we are living through is not primarily a loss of meaning, but a revaluation of values—a term drawn from Nietzsche. Values formed under earlier conditions strain when agency expands, when consequences propagate farther, and when responsibility can no longer be localized. Meaning does not disappear; it migrates. The difficulty lies in learning to recognize and inhabit its new forms.

Ressentiment and the Refusal of Rejuvenation

Periods of revaluation are never smooth. They generate resentment, nostalgia, and moral backlash—what Nietzsche called ressentiment. Ressentiment arises not because change occurs, but because change is denied. When new powers emerge without corresponding transformations in valuation, moral life hardens into accusation, withdrawal, or reactive critique.

Many of the essays gathered here take ressentiment seriously—not as a moral failing, but as a historical symptom. They ask how ressentiment can be metabolized into renewed forms of judgment, responsibility, and confidence, rather than allowed to ossify into cynicism or despair.

Essays as a Path Through Renewal

The essays in this section are arranged as a conceptual progression rather than a chronology. They move from diagnosing disorientation and moral stagnation, through encounters with fragility and accelerated change, toward rejuvenation understood as a practice: a way of moving forward without illusion, nostalgia, or abdication.

Read together, they treat renewal not as optimism and not as escape, but as a disciplined confidence in humanity’s capacity to reorient itself—to assume responsibility for its powers and to invent forms of life adequate to the futures it is already bringing into being.