d) The Birth of Creative Subjectivism: Nietzsche

Although later authors revive classical subjectivism, their contributions add little to its depiction in Hobbes and Spinoza. I will therefore focus on the emergence of a second form of subjectivism, which profoundly renews the first and ultimately arrives at opposite conclusions: creative subjectivism.

This doctrine finds its most triumphant expression in Nietzsche, displaying the beauty and complexity that define it, particularly in this passage from the Gay Science:
It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not yet here: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations and negations. This poem that we have invented is constantly internalized, drilled, translated into flesh and reality, indeed, into the commonplace, by the so-called practical human beings (our actors).
Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature –nature is always value-less, but has rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and granters! ¹.

This shift leads Nietzsche to reject the paradigm of contemplation in favour of action—or, more precisely, creation. Man perceives himself as contemplative, but is, in truth, the creator of what he claims to observe passively:
The world becomes ever fuller for someone who grows into the height of humanity; ever more baited hooks to attract his interest are cast his way; the things that stimulate him grow steadily in number […] But a delusion remains his constant companion: he thinks himself placed as spectator and listener before the great visual and acoustic play that is life; he calls his nature contemplative and thereby overlooks the fact that he is also the actual poet and ongoing author of life ².

Conversely, if a creator is driven by a negative passion such as resentment, the world, as his creation, undergoes axiological degradation: The Christian decision to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad ³.

Resentment diminishes the world's value because, as a negative passion, it is inherently opposed to creation, which by its very nature is pure affirmation. Nietzsche, by contrast, champions an affirmative ethic—an 'ethic of Yes'. This leads to his celebrated doctrine of amor fati, symbolising pure affirmation and a resentment-free embrace of all that Fate presents: I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things, as what is beautiful in them – thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! ⁴.

This 'ethic of Yes' also rests, however, on a negation—not of the world itself, but of certain doctrines formulated by thinkers about it. These doctrines share a common feature: they deny or condemn the fundamental principle underpinning the world—the will to power: It is my good fortune that after whole millennia of error and confusion I have rediscovered the way that leads to a Yes and a No. I teach the No to all that makes weak--that exhausts. I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that justifies the feeling of strength ⁵.
Nietzsche opposes these theories of negation; this double negation becomes, indirectly, an affirmation.

Creative subjectivism thus arrives at conclusions that stand in direct opposition to those of classical subjectivism, even while issuing from the same premises.

1. The Gay Science, §301
2. Ibid.
3. The Gay Science, IV, §130
4. Ibid., V, §276
5. The European Nihilism, §58