# Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter XV

CHAPTER XV
ULTIMATE REALITY AS WILL TO POWER
I have considered Nietzsche's general view of the world and of the law of recurrence in it—it remains now to state his conclusions as to its ultimate nature. They were reached (so far as they were reached) by a complicated process of arguing with himself, which it is not altogether easy to resolve. The way is labyrinthine—I have come near being lost in it myself. We have only notes preparatory to his final systematic treatise, not the treatise itself. I can only give the best results which I have been able to attain—perhaps even so I make him more consistent than he really was. The essential logic of his procedure (I do not mean the temporal order) appears to have been something like the following—at least I can best present his varying judgments or attributes under these heads:.
(1) The world (the world as we commonly understand it) is not real—the world of "science" as little as that of common sense.
(2) We make the world real, i.e., posit it as such, have to for life, and none the less delude ourselves.
(3) Is there any reality?
(4) Reality conceived as power and will to power.
I
The first proposition, the world is not real, is only a restatement and amplification of the view which was taking shape in his first period. The world of colors, sounds, resistances, etc., exists only in our mind or feeling. Abstract the sensibilities of sentient beings, and it would disappear. We have no reason to suppose that our images of tree, stone, water, etc., faithfully reflect things outside us. They are our creation, in response to stimuli that come to us: to one stimulus we respond with color, ​to another with sound, and so on. We may think that we can account for the stimulus by saying that it comes from an object, but all the objects we have any acquaintance with are resolvable themselves into sensations and groups of sensations like the preliminary ones we set out to explain. If we say, for example, that green comes from a tree, we soon become aware that the tree itself (so far as it is separable from its greenness) is but a cluster of other, perhaps more elementary, sensations of the same general kind, such as hardness, resistance, pressure, or weight. If we abstract from all the sensations, no tree is left. As Nietzsche puts it, the known outer world is born after the effect, of which it is supposed to be the cause. Our bodies themselves are, as we know them, groups of sensations like everything else—what they really are in their intimate nature we have not the slightest idea.
Nor if we consider the more refined world of science, do we leave the subjective sphere. The world of atoms and their movements, which physicists conceive of as a true world in contrast with the ordinary world of sense-perception, is not essentially different from the ordinary world; its molecules or atoms are only what we should see or handle had we finer senses,—they and their movements are entirely of a sensational nature. Moreover, the supposition that there are ultimate, indivisible, unalterable units like molecules or atoms is pure invention; it is convenient to have them for purposes of reckoning, and, as we do not find them, we proceed to create them—this is all we can say. Mechanics is purely a practical or regulative science. (I may remark in passing that Nietzsche thinks that the Dalmatian Boscovitch put an end to materialistic atomism, as the Pole Copernicus had done to the notion of a fixed earth). It is the same with "force" or "forces," in the purely mechanical sense. We know only effects—no one has ever got hold of a force, as mechanical philosophy pictures it. Force, in this sense, is really a piece of abstraction, a more or less arbitrary creation. We ourselves have a certain feeling of ​force (of tension, of overcoming opposition) in muscular exertion, and the physicist proceeds to take this force apart from the consciousness and feeling that it is and all its human accompaniments and to put it into the external world—really there it is an empty word. Similarly fictitious are the purely mechanical push and pull, attraction and repulsion, imagined to exist between the atoms. Without an aim, an attraction or a repulsion is an unintelligible thing. The will toward something and to get it into our power, or against something to repel it, is something we can understand; but the physicist's "attraction" and "repulsion" are words simply. So as to necessity in the world: we put it there—we add it to the facts, for, because something acts definitely and always so acts, it does not follow that it is forced to. Equally mythological are the laws which things are supposed to obey. Sometimes scientific men give up attempts at explaining things, and content themselves with description—reducing phenomena perhaps to mathematical terms, and causality to relations of equivalence between them; but this mathematizing of things brings us no nearer objective reality, perhaps takes us further away from it—the abstract quantities and their relations being still essentially sensible things, though eviscerated and ghost-like forms of them.
Although Nietzsche does not question the reality of the psychological world itself, he finds that fictitious elements are more or less introduced here. A subject, for example, in the sense of something added to the feelings and thoughts themselves, is fictitious. He criticises "I think," suggesting that "it thinks" would be a more proper expression, but adding that the "it," too, must in the end go: there is no "I" or "it" separate from the thinking—no constant unchanging reality of that sort. ​A "substance" of mind goes in the same way; indeed the body comes nearer to being a substantial reality than the mind, though to neither is "substance" really applicable.
In the same way "things," as any wise distinct from their attributes or activities, are not real; object taken as a "thing" is no more real than subject, matter no more real than mind. A "thing" is only a certain sum of activities bound together by a concept or image. "Things," "objects," "subjects," "substance," "ego" "matter" are the metaphysics of the people, by which they seek to transcend the shifting realm of change, alone directly known to us; they want something permanent and this is the way they get it: but the entities are fictitious, imaginary.
Hence, in general, the world we commonly picture is a false one, not real: we fancy that it exists quite independently of us, that we simply find it—and we are mistaken. We may correct our images in this way and that, may make one interpretation of the world succeed another, but we do not get beyond images and interpretations: the original data in the case are a meager quantity, and even they are not reality itself (in the independent sense), but the way or ways in which reality affects us.
II
Second, we make the world real, i.e., hold it so, do so the better to live, and none the less delude ourselves. The underlying thought is that life, uncertain and changing as it is, needs something on which to stay itself; with this it walks more securely, has greater confidence. We assume that what we need exists, and, by a subtle process of self-deception, transfer some of our experiences into an objective and supposably unchanging world. As Nietzsche puts it, we project our conditions of ​maintenance, and turn them into predicates of existence. We convert trees and stones and stars into independent realities and feel thereby at ease and secure. And when science comes with its analysis and makes us aware that these sensible objects cannot exist just as they appear, the same feeling and craving leads us to form (or to acquiesce in the effort of science to form) the idea of elementary kinds of matter, molecules, atoms, or what not, that do not have these palpable subjective references. Indeed, practical need plays no small part in determining our beliefs in general. For example, experience gives us a whole host of particulars—how shall we get on with them? If everything is particular, and nothing like another, how can we know what to expect and how to act? Accordingly we classify the particulars or try to, make groups of them, so far as they have points of resemblance, say, this is the same as that—and reason and act accordingly. But there is no real identity in the world, and a purely theoretic instinct never would have come on such a notion: our ordinary reasoning and logic are but a rough rule of thumb. So practical need, rather than theoretical interest, determines the common ideas of causality, substance, subject, ego, being as opposed to becoming, also the ordinary articles of religious faith and conceptions like desert and guilt—they are useful to man and society, therefore we hold them valid and true. Christianity, Nietzsche observes, is necessary to most in old Europe now, and a religious doctrine may be refuted a thousand times, but if necessary, man will still hold to it. So valuations of things are necessary to life, and under the workings of similar impulses and by a similar self-deception we put good and bad into things, making them intrinsic there, though as matter of fact all values are of our positing and represent simply conditions of our self-preservation.
In other words, a large range of belief and even of so-called "knowledge" has nothing to do with truth and never came from the search for it. Nietzsche remarks that those who urge ​strictly scientific methods of thinking have the whole pathos of mankind against them. And so far does he go in sympathy with "mankind" that he is ready to say that if a choice has to be made between truth and the requirements of life, the requirements of life should come first. Why may not illusions be allowed to stand, he virtually asks,—on what ground do we say that truth has the greater right to be? He is the first thinker, to my knowledge, to turn truth itself into a problem. He criticises truth for truth's sake as much as art for art's sake or the good for the good's sake, saying that those who, instead of valuing these things from the standpoint of life, make them supreme over life, are only logical as they postulate another world than this one, since here truth, science at any cost, may be inconsistent with life and an absolute will to truth may be a hidden will to death. Knowledge (in the strict sense) may actually not be desirable for most, the world as we picture and conceive it under the stress of life's needs may be better than the world as it really is—our ignorance, even a will to ignorance, may be expedient for us.
So keenly does Nietzsche feel all this, that for a moment he is willing to revise his idea of truth. Wishing to keep the word in its customary honorific sense, he says, let us agree to designate as truth what furthers life and elevates the type of man. As he once puts it paradoxically (mingling the two meanings of truth in the same sentence), truth is the kind of error without which a definite type of human being could not live. He tries valiantly to keep to this new definition. And yet the settled uses of languages prove too much for him and we find ​him continually relapsing into the ordinary methods of speech. He says time and again that the necessities of life prove nothing as to truth. Schematizing for purposes of practical control he still specifically distinguishes from knowing. Is it really knowing a thing, he asks, to class it with something else with which one is already familiar and so find it less strange?—this when both alike may be unknown, the things we are most familiar with being sometimes the least known, inasmuch as they excite no curiosity and we fancy we know them already. Comprehending, explaining, understanding—that alone fills out Nietzsche's idea of knowing; and classifying, not to say mathematizing, only touches the borders of the subject. That a belief is convenient, practical, even necessary, proves nothing as to its standing in foro scientiæ. The law of causality, for example, may, like other so-called a priori truths, be so much a part of us that unbelief in it would cause our undoing—is it therefore true? As if truth were proved by our remaining alive! The idea of an "ego" may be indispensable, and for all that be a fiction. The ideas of a given type of being simply prove what is necessary for it, and the ideas may vary as the types vary. The Euclidean space may, like our kind of reason, be simply an idiosyncrasy of certain kinds of animals—other kinds might find necessary a space of four dimensions and have a different type of logic from the human. So with valuations. The valuations of one species, being from the standpoint of its particular interests, may differ from those of another species, the interests of which are different; or, if the ruling impulses vary, differing estimations of ends and means, different interpretations of historical events, different world-perspectives generally may result. It is naïve to take man as the measure of things, either theoretically or practically. We do not know ​but that some beings might experience time backwards, or forwards and backwards alternately, whence would result other directions of life and other conceptions of cause and effect than those with which we are familiar. It is a hopeless curiosity, indeed, to wish to see round our corner, but Nietzsche thinks or hopes that at least we are modest enough not to claim that our perspective is the only one. He even says that by reflections such as these the world becomes infinite to him again, i.e., capable of an infinite variety of interpretations,—though he has no notion of worshiping the new infinity, since it may include undivine interpretations as well as the other kind. All the interpretations may be justified relatively to those who make them, and none have strictly objective warrant. But then the question arises (and this is the third point):—
III
Are there any objective things, is there any reality (in the independent sense) at all? Nietzsche may have wavered here at times—in any case his language is not always consistent. Still two things stand out with tolerable distinctness. One is, that his very language about falsehood, error, illusion, indicate that in the background of his mind lurks the idea of something or other, the knowledge of which would be truth. Indeed he explicitly says as much—as, for example, in speaking of the possibility that the "real make-up" (wahre Beschaffenheit) of things may be so harmful to life, so opposed to its presuppositions, that illusion is needed to make life possible. He even uses Kantian and Schopenhauerian language at times, speaking of the "intelligible character" of the world, i.e., the world "seen from within." Zarathustra is described as willing to see "the ground of all things" and the ultimate ground. The other thing is the practically constant recognition of an original mass or chaos of sensations. They are indeed our creation, but ​in response to stimuli—and the stimuli Nietzsche distinctly does not contemplate as self-generated. They do not come from the outer word as we picture it, for this is an after-product of the sensations themselves; all the same we "receive" them, and Nietzsche is inevitably driven to ask, whence?
The idea of reality outside us is thus inexpugnable to him. What it is, what its constitution, is another matter. It is not this familiar world of common sense; it is not the world of atoms and denatured "forces" of popular science; nor is it the world of purely quantitative and mathematical relations of refined science. Still more, it is not a world of "things-in-themselves," as this phrase is often bandied about by philosophical writers who think to refute Kant by showing that the idea of things out of any kind of relation is absurd; neither Kant nor any other realist worth mentioning has ever meant by independent reality that. Things are always in relation—and when conceived of (if they can be conceived of) as isolated, they are a pure invention of the mind, an illusion. Most emphatically it is not a world of pure and changeless being such as Schopenhauer dreamed of. That being changes is our ground-certainty about it. Schopenhauer's other world is the product of a mind ill at ease in the order of change and suffering we know and conjuring up another order for its relief, i.e., it is the offspring of subjective need, and Nietzsche distrusts (at least for his own account) constructions that come from any other need or impulse than the theoretic or knowing one itself. Even moral needs are no safe basis for construction, not to speak of the needs of happiness, comfort, or inspiration.
What is left, then? one may ask. There is evidence that Nietzsche was for a time in sore perplexity. The very extreme of skepticism and uncertainty as to both metaphysics and morals is pictured in "The Shadow" in Thus spake Zarathustra— ​Nietzsche had been that shadow and had said to himself in bitter irony: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted. There is nothing in things that we have not put into them, science, too, being this sort of child's play. We can conceive only a world That we ourselves have made—if it appears logical, it is because we have logicized it. There are no facts, only interpretations; we cannot fix any fact in itself—perhaps it is absurd to wish to. We have no organ for knowing [in the strict theoretic sense, erkennen], we know ["wissen," oder glauben oder bilden uns ein] only what is useful for our human herd or species—and even as to this utility we only have a belief, cherish an imagination, and perhaps a stupid one with which we shall sometime perish. Such are some of the extreme expressions of his despairing mood. And it must be admitted that along the ordinary lines of objective search and analysis Nietzsche finds no way of meeting the skepticism. Though he has the general idea of objective reality, he cannot give any content to it. Though he recognizes certain primitive data of sensation (or rather of stimulation), these are so primitive, so far away from anything like our actual world in which data and interpretation are inextricably combined, that they might almost as properly be designated by an x or an interrogation mark as the original realities themselves. What Nietzsche really now does is to view the whole problem from a new angle. And here I pass to the fourth point:—
IV
Reality as power and will to power. Some of the steps by which he reached this conception seem to be these: (1) It came over him at times that his fellow-men were different from things in general. Thoroughgoing idealism is necessarily solipsistic. If we—each of us—think that nothing exists outside our sensations and thoughts, then our fellow-beings exist only in our sensations and thoughts, i.e., have no independent being of their own; and though this might not matter greatly, ​so far as each other's bodies are concerned, every one would probably feel that to make his thinking or feeling dependent upon the thinking and feeling of another was absurd—indeed, no clear-headed person will assert that he feels another's feeling or can, or that another can feel his (we can only reconstruct one another's feelings and feel them in imagination, and the same is true of thoughts). Opposed as Nietzsche was in a general way to the idea of "another world," a "transcendent world," he came to see that, strictly speaking, other souls were themselves another world, a transcendent world, and he makes Zarathustra say so. Once he formally argues the matter: "For a single man the [independent] reality of the would be without probability, but for two it becomes probable. That is, the other man is an imagination of ours, entirely our 'will,' our 'idea': and we are again the same in him. But because we know that he deceives himself about us [in thinking that we are simply his imagination] and that we are in reality despite the phantom-picture of us which he carries in his head, we conclude that he too is a reality despite our imagination of him: in short, that realities outside us exist." (2) Another line of reflection came to him: Although distinguishing absolutely between "true" and "false" in the world at large is a difficult and perhaps impossible thing, setting up an end ourselves and trying to make thinks go that way is another matter—and it is what every strong man does to a greater or lesser extent, indeed, what practically every one tries to do. The very arranging, classifying, interpreting, valuing of the world and of things in it, about the objective validity of which Nietzsche is in doubt, is an incident to this end. The most wonderful of all things is not the world in its mystery, or the truths of values about which we dispute, but what is immediate and best proved, our own willing, valuing, creative selves. The extraordinary turn is accordingly made that the factor the action of which breeds skepticism as to our possession of objective truth, viz., our will to power and exercise of it, is that about which skepticism is impossible; the very changing of ​things which it works, a change so complete that we hardly know whether any of the original lineaments of things are left, is a proof of its reality.
Here then is something to start with. Nietzsche feels this power in himself and thinks that it is really the bottom thing in him; and as he is not solipsist, he thinks that there are similar centers of power in other men. And turning his thought to the world at large, the question arises, may not animals and plants and even insensate things be centers of power in varying measures and ways? May not the world in its real being be made up, not of "things," substances, subjects, egos, atoms, causes and effects, spatial quantities and movements, but of these centers of power more of less conflicting and struggling with one another? Each being a will to power seeks to prevail, and is only prevented by others which want to do the same; each estimates all that is outside from its own standpoint, and to the extent it is conscious, builds up a world accordingly—images, concepts, categories, and all; each is real and its created world is real (at least, till another center of power puts an end to one or the other or both), and this is what and all that reality means. The question as to the truth of the estimates or images or concepts, save as it is a question of what each can make good or can successfully act by, is irrelevant and without meaning, since estimations, images, concepts only exist in relation to the power which creates them and seeks to effectuate itself by their aid. Sensations, or rather the stimuli to which we react with sensations, become then construable, as a part of the effect which some outside center of power makes upon us—it is a kind of signal that another power is there. By the sensations, the memories we keep of them, and the ordered picture of the world we draw up, we know a little better how to act in relation to these unseen friends or foes. It is, however, only in the initial semi-physical contact that we are in direct, first-hand relation to them, and our sensations themselves need not have the slightest resemblance to the original realities.
V
Such is the construction which Nietzsche offers in its most general terms. It is an hypothesis purely—he so speaks of it. To take it as a dogma is to misconceive it and miss its value (whatever value it has). It is something to mull over—and then to accept or no according as it seems to cover the ground and meet theoretic requirements. (Other requirements have to be left out of account by one who takes up the problem in Nietzsche's spirit.) I shall be content in what follows if I can make the hypothesis reasonably clear.
In the first place, "will to power" is a theoretic proposition. By many it is taken as an ethical standard (and rather a brutal one); but primarily it is with Nietzsche an analysis or interpretation of reality—a view as to its last elements. Secondly, it is manifest that it is not merely power on a physical level that is in his mind; indeed, it may be questioned whether the discovery that instincts of power lie behind a large range of mental operations and also play an important part in the varying moralities of men, did not contribute as much as anything else to the formation of the view. Further, the view is relatively new in his intellectual history. It is, in a sense, metaphysical and stands in contrast with the purely critical and positivistic attitude of his middle period. Then he had spoken of the idea that will is the essence of things as "primitive mythology"; now he is ready to argue from analogy, and frankly takes man as his starting-point. One might almost call it a return to the metaphysics of his first period, except that now he is less assured of the subjectivity of space and time (time at least he asserts to be objective), and the will is many, not one—the Primal Will (Urwille), that eases itself of its pain by looking at itself objectively and so creating the world, being left our of account. The view might be described as Pluralistic Voluntarism. The question of the origin of the many wills is ​not even raised—so that, if Schopenhauer's system is metaphysics in the second or highest degree, Nietzsche's is so only in the first; still it is metaphysics so far as this means a transcending of experience and the phenomenal realm in general. Certain positivist writers regard Nietzsche as going backward—reversing in his procedure Comte's law of the three stages.
The starting-point is, as I have said, man. The bottom thing in him is his impulsive, willing nature. Each impulse, indeed, would rule if it could—the human problem being to establish an order of rank or precedence between them. Mind itself is of a commanding nature—wants to rule. Philosophy, which seeks to arrange, grasp, comprehend the world and establish values in it, is the most sublimated form of the will to power. One who thinks that philosophy has nothing to do with power should grapple with a philosophical problem, or with Nietzsche himself—and see whether power is needed. Nietzsche regards the scientific specialist as a tool—a precious one, one of the most precious that exists—but a tool in the hands of one more powerful than he, the philosopher. The philosopher is the Cæsarian trainer and strong man of culture. The saint is interpreted in similar terms. He is commonly thought to turn his back on power, but he is a supreme type of power, and of the will to it, according to Nietzsche. He is revered by the mightiest—why? Because, Nietzsche answers, they feel in presence of one of their own kind—whose power, however, turns inward rather than outward. Even love is an exercise of power—it gives the highest feeling of power; and Jesus, in telling his disciples to call no one master, really recommended a very proud life under the form of a poor and serving one. Nietzsche thinks that the sense of power is what in varying form we all crave, that the love of power is a central, universal instinct: he defines psychology as a doctrine of the development ​of the will to power and of the forms it takes. Such is his analysis of human nature.
But the driving force which he finds in us, he thinks he sees traces of, though in simpler form, in the lower ranges of life. Indeed in ourselves it is something more elemental than conscious choice or than consciousness itself. It becomes conscious on occasion, but itself lies deeper, and in a more of less unconscious form Nietzsche imagines that it exists in animals and plants, and indeed wherever there is activity. He does not attempt to demonstrate this inference—he attempts no demonstration even of the primacy of will in man, he has not unsaid his old criticism of Schopenhauer to the effect that we have no real first-hand knowledge of will: it is all, whether as regards man or as regards lower beings, hypothesis, a view without pretense to certainty, speculation, as perhaps any kind of metaphysics must be.
VI
Let me give the interpretation in still further detail—beginning with the lowest forms of existence. Physical motion, for example, is a subjective phenomenon—an alteration in our sensations: the reality in the case is a change in the relations of two or more centers of power—a change that is symbolically revealed to us, being translated into the sign-language of eye and touch. The world of mechanics in general is sign-language [unmeaning and unexistent apart from us or beings like us] for will-quanta struggling with one another, some perhaps temporarily overcoming [which are real, quite independent of us]. The unintelligible "forces," "attractions," and "repulsions" which physicists speak of get concreteness and meaning, construed as kindred to impulses in ourselves; they reach out to control or they repel foreign control much as we do. The same ​may be said of chemical action and reaction, which are always of a specific character—the elements of preference or choice [according to the nature of the elements in question] cannot be left out of account in explaining them. "Qualities" are the expression [sensations in us] of definite kinds of action and reaction, and Nietzsche suggests that quantity may be the outcome of quality [of the objective counterpart of quality]—the center of power wishing to become more, to grow, to attain greater size. Causality appears in a new light. How, we ask, can two contrasted things, such as mind or will in us and an object outside us, affect one another? Nietzsche's view makes them fundamentally alike—will acts on will everywhere, not on something foreign to it. Moreover, causality is not so much a relation of succession, as a working in an upon one another of two powers or wills, with its natural and inevitable result, either of a compromise, or of conquest on one side and subjection on the other. There is no cause and effect in the sense of an antecedent and consequent, nor is there a transference of energy from one thing to another, but rather a measuring up of forces against one another and a result—and this is why cause and effect, as ordinarily conceived, are rated a fiction, equally with "substance," "atom," and the rest. Further, the ordinary idea of causality is of an unending process of change, an effect once reached becoming the cause of another effect and so on. But why, Nietzsche asks, need this be so, why might not a state once reached continue indefinitely, why would not the impulse of self-preservation itself tend that way—why, unless aside from self-preservation there is an instinct in every living thing to be more and greater, to expand and enlarge itself, in short an instinct for power and domination?
Peculiarly interesting is the revision of biological notions that ensues. Mere self-preservations is not the life-instinct proper. The will of living creatures is a special case of will to power. It is a will, however, not only to dominate (this all ​power strives for), but to dominate by incorporating, by making the foreign substance of power an integral, though subordinate, part of itself. This is manifest in hunger and the overt acts of seizure—the living thing perhaps takes more than it can actually appropriate. Exploiting, stealing belongs thus to its nature. According life is radically misconceived when it is taken as mere adaptation to environment; "adaptation" is something secondary—is reaction, while life is action, activity itself (self-activity, one might say, though Nietzsche does not use the phrase—he does say "spontaneous" activity)—activity positive, aggressing, an "attacking, encroaching, freshly-interpreting, freshly-directing and shaping" force. To be controlled by outer conditions, or mere accommodation to them, is, for Nietzsche, a sign of decadence—he thinks that Darwin and Spencer both overvalue outer conditions in their view of life. Indeed, as he conceives the matter, life wants opposing outside forces—wants them to feel its power over them. In this way he interprets the pseudopodia of lower forms of life: the living substance is reaching out after something on which to expend its power, and appropriation is merely the consequence. And when it appropriates more than it can really control, it proceeds to divide itself—as two, it can still control. There is, however, no "altruism" in the process. As "nourishment" is something secondary, the original impulse being simply the will to close in on whatever is at hand, so self-division or propagation is equally derived—where one will does not suffice to organize what has been appropriated, another arises. Structure, organization, is another result: it is necessary to the end of disposing of what has been appropriated—its meaning is arranging, ordering, putting in place to the end of dominance and use. Incident to all life is power that commands and power that obeys—whatever does not command must ​obey, i.e., be used, become subservient. Here is the foundation for the distinction between means and end in an organism. The superior power overcomes the lesser, incorporates it, gives it its place, making it a means to its own end. Hence the definition of an organ—something that would otherwise be independent is turned into a means, an instrumentality. For example, something that happens to be more or less suitable becomes an eye for the organism, something else a foot or hand, something else still apparatus for digestion, and so on; they may not have been formed for these purposes, but the superior power turns them to account in these ways, just as one man may make others his slaves or as the state may convert this or that individual into its tool or agent. Wherever we find a thing that serves a purpose and is useful, "a will to power has made itself master of something less powerful, and of its own motion has stamped the meaning of a function upon it."
If we do not read the organic world in terms of power, i.e., of controller and controlled, of master and servant, there is little sense in speaking of organs, functions. The very "meaning" of a thing implies that a superior power has got control of it and given it a place in relation to its own ends. The meaning may have nothing to do with its origin or essence—a thing may in the course of time have various meanings, depending on the nature of the power that gets control of it. Accordingly, the "evolution" of a thing (whether an organ of a body or a custom of society) is by no means necessarily progress toward a goal prefigured in its nature, still less a logical movement along the shortest lines and accomplished with the least expenditure of force, but rather a succession of processes of subjugation which it undergoes, the changes going more or less deep and having no necessary connection with one another—to which may be added its own resistances, attempts at change of form in self-defense, and any successes ​it may win. The form changes, flows, and the "meaning," purpose, still more so. Even in an individual organism it is not otherwise: with every essential growth of the whole, the "meaning" of single parts shifts also—under given conditions, a partial perishing of some parts, a reduction in the number of others (for example, an elimination of intermediate organs) may be proof of the growing power and perfection of the whole. In other words, degeneration, losing of meaning and purpose, or death, may belong to the conditions of actual progress—something that ever appears in the form of a will and way to greater power and is accomplished at the expense of numberless lesser powers. The greatness of an advance may, indeed, be measured by the amount of what is sacrificed to it. For example, the mass of mankind sacrificed to the growth of a single, higher, stronger species of man—that would be an advance.
This relation of controller and controlled (in whatever form of organic life) involves what Nietzsche calls an order of rank (Rangordnung). It is a conception that plays a great part in his social speculations; but it originates in the general biological field. The human body itself involves an order of rank; there are higher and lower in it, ends and means—it is teleologically constituted, though the teleology comes not from God or from a vague thing called Nature, but is established by the supreme controlling force in the body itself. Nietzsche speaks of the "lower world" in the body and of "the higher functions and functionaries for ruling, anticipating, predetermining,"—for "our organism is oligarchically arranged." The mind is a part of the ruling, determining forces, and an instrument for accomplishing that on which they are bent. Every center of power in a sense measures and estimates other power outside it, but when this is done in clear consciousness, the measuring may be surer and more effective. In the development of mind and consciousness, the need of communication between those with common interests plays an important part. Mind grows in intercourse and with reference to the needs of intercourse—hence also the limitations of ​consciousness: we see the general, the communicable with greater distinctness than the altogether individual and specific (e.g., our individual acts and experiences, which may be incommunicable). But consciousness is not an end in itself, but a means to the heightening of power. Nietzsche even suggests that there may be an oligarchy in the mind itself, there being not necessarily one subject there, as we commonly think, but several, the play and struggle between them making the hidden basis of our thinking and consciousness—or, to use the physical terms, there may be an aristocracy of cells, with vassals more or less obedient.
Nietzsche has interesting reflections on will to power as involving pleasure and pain—pleasure resting on the increase of power, pain consisting in the feeling of weakness—but I must merely refer to them.
Will to power also lies behind thought or philosophy, as already explained. It too is a kind of appropriation, mastery. Thinking is only a sublimated action of the same forces manifested in the amœba. Man seeks to turn all that is into something like himself, to make it thinkable, visible, feelable—he subjects it to categories and turns it into his own substance, as the amœba does foreign material into its own body.
There is only one higher expression of the will to power and that is in the saint (in the nobler meaning of the term), the hero-saint, who does not turn his back on the world, but impresses the image of his highest thought upon it and transforms it—who knows, thinks, only to love and in love to act, to create.
So does Nietzsche interpret the whole gamut of things in terms of power and will to it.
* ↑ The substance of this chapter appeared in Mind, October, 1915 (Vol. XXIV, N. S., No. 96).
* ↑ footnote
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 516, 545.
* ↑ Ibid., § 479.
* ↑ Ibid., § 636.
* ↑ Ibid., § 624.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XII, 33, § 63; XIV, 45, § 83; also p. 325.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 12.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 619-21, 551.
* ↑ Cf. ibid., §§ 622, 627.
* ↑ Ibid., § 552.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 629, 630; cf. Mixed Opinions etc., § 9; Werke, XII, 30, § 56.
* ↑ Cf. Joyful Science, § 373; Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, x; Will to Power, §§ 554, 618. I need scarcely add that explaining and comprehending things is not a problem that Nietzsche thinks can be put to one side; cf. the implications of Will to Power, §§ 624-8; Beyond Good and Evil, § 14; Werke, XIII, 82-4. He can only say that phenomena themselves cannot be causes (Will to Power, § 545).
* ↑ Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 16, 17, 54; Will to Power, §§ 481, 488; Werke, XI, 185, § 76.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 552; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 12.
* ↑ Cf. Zarathustra, I, iv. Nietzsche finds two elements in the notion substance," on the one hand, the idea of something permanent (see, e.g., Werke, XII, 33, § 62), on the other that of a subject (ibid., XV, 1st ed., 281) , so that if "subject" disappears as without scientific warrant, "substance" must also.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 551-2.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 12 (A), 622, 542, 602, 604, 616.
* ↑ Cf. ibid., § 552d.
* ↑ Ibid., § 507.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 423, 515, 610; Beyond Good and Evil, § 191.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 497 (as to causality); § 513 (as to substance, subject, etc.); § 354 (as to religious errors).
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 347.
* ↑ See later, p. 218.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 469.
* ↑ Genealogy of Morals, III, § 24. The very reverence for truth is partly the result of illusion, i.e., of thinking that the values which we put into existence are there independently of us.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 298.
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 344; of. Will to Power, § 608.
* ↑ Joyful Science (preface of 1886); cf. §§ 54, 299, 301, 344; Genealogy etc., III, § 24; Will to Power, §§ 583, 598 ("the truth is ugly"); Joyful Science, § 107 ("our final gratitude to art").
* ↑ Will to Power, § 609.
* ↑ Ibid., § 51; cf. Werke, XII, 209, § 442.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 493; cf. Werke (pocket ed.), VII, xviii ("knowledge is error that becomes organic and organizes").
* ↑ In accordance with it he even speaks at times of "creating" truth (cf. Will to Power, § 552).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 515; cf. Werke, XIII, 52, § 123.
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 355; cf. Will to Power, § 479.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 497.
* ↑ Cf. in general as to most indispensable judgments being at the same time false, Beyond Good and Evil, § 4 (also Werke, XIV, 16, § 24).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 515; Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, x. Nietzsche even has critical reflections on the "law of non-contradiction" (Will to Power, §§ 515-6).
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 567, 481, 605.
* ↑ Cf. Dawn of Day, § 483; Joyful Science, § 249; Beyond Good and Evil, § 3; Will to Power, § 12 (B).
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 374.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 583 (A).
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 386. In Will to Power, § 516, the question is raised whether the axioms of logic are adequate to the real or can even give us the idea of it.
* ↑ Zarathustra, III, 1.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 569 (the ambiguity in this passage turns about the term "things," which Nietzsche, as we have seen, regards as a subjective fiction; but that we are to a certain extent passive and acted upon is implied throughout).
* ↑ Nietzsche makes a running fire on both "things in themselves" and "things," sometimes misconstruing what Kant meant by the former himself (ibid., §§ 552-9; cf. § 473; Joyful Science, § 354).
* ↑ Werke, XII, 23, § 39.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 708, 585, 576.
* ↑ Zarathustra, IV, ix; cf. Genealogy etc., III, § 24.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 606; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 21.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 495, 521.
* ↑ Ibid., § 481.
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 354.
* ↑ Zarathustra, I, iii; III, xii, § 4; xiii, § 2.
* ↑ Werke, XI, 180,' § 68.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 605.
* ↑ Zarathustra, I, iii.
* ↑ The 'falseness' in things is to be explained as result of our creative force!" (Werke, XIV, 269, § 39).
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 635 (not things, but dynamic quantities, in relations of tension to one another, their essence consisting in the relations, in the mutual interaction).
* ↑ Cf. Ibid., § 569.
* ↑ Ibid., § 869.
* ↑ Nietzsche's projected book had originally as its full title Der Wille zur Mackt, eine Auslegung alles Geschehens (Werke, pocket ed., IX, xiii.).
* ↑ See Lou Andreas-Salomé's apt remarks on this subject (op. cit., p. 139).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 619.
* ↑ This is the distinction made by Richter, op. cit., p. 283.
* ↑ Zoccoli, Lasserre, and others, as reported by Mügge, Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work (3d ed.), p. 316.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 6, 230.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 9, 211.
* ↑ Ibid., § 207.
* ↑ Cf. ibid., § 51.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 176, 169.
* ↑ "Morphologie und Entwicklungslehre des Willens zur Macht" (Beyond Good and Evil, § 23).
* ↑ He rather reasserts it (Will to Power, §§ 475-8). Richter, op. cit., p. 274, comments on the difficulty presented by these varying views.
* ↑ Cf. the language of Will to Power, § 712.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 625, 634, 689 (motion eine Bilderrede, mechanics eine blosse Semiotik).
* ↑ Ibid., § 689.
* ↑ Ibid.. § 619.
* ↑ Ibid., § 636.
* ↑ Ibid., § 564.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 36; cf. Will to Power, §§ 490, 554, 658.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 631, 338, 617.
* ↑ Ibid., § 688.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 13; Will to Power, §§ 650-1.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 681.
* ↑ Hunger to merely replace what has been lost Nietzsche puts in a secondary place (ibid., §§ 651-2, 656).
* ↑ Genealogy etc. II § 12
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 44, 49, 70, 71, 647, 681; Werke, XIV, 215, §§ 432-3.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 656, 702, 694.
* ↑ Cf. the comments on Guyau, Werke, XIII, 113.
* ↑ Ibid., § 642.
* ↑ Ibid., § 492; cf. Zarathustra, II, xii.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 552.
* ↑ I need not say that a view like this does not exclude more or less development and reshaping in detail.
* ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 12 (Nietzsche explains that this holds good of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a religious form, or an eye or a hand).
* ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 12.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 552.
* ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 1.
* ↑ On consciousness as a tool, cf. Will to Power, §§ 643-4, 646.
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 354; cf. Will to Power, §§ 569, 524.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 711.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 490, 492.
* ↑ Ibid., § 693; cf. §§ 428, 657, 670.
* ↑ Zarathustra, II, ii; cf. xii; Will to Power, §§ 501, 510-1.