The Will to Power: an Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book Iii and Iv

Part 1

THE

WILL TO POWER

AN ATTEMPTED

TRANSVALUATION OF ALL VALUES

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED BY

ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI

VOL. II

BOOKS III AND IV

T.N. FOULIS

13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET

EDINBURGH: AND LONDON

1913

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

THIRD BOOK. THE PRINCIPLES OF A NEW VALUATION.

I. THE WILL TO POWER IN SCIENCE--

(a) The Method of Investigation (b) The Starting-Point of Epistemology (c) The Belief in the "Ego." Subject (d) Biology of the Instinct of Knowledge. Perspectivity (e) The Origin of Reason and Logic (f) Consciousness (g) Judgment. True--False (h) Against Causality (i) The Thing-in-Itself and Appearance (k) The Metaphysical Need (l) The Biological Value of Knowledge (m) Science

II. THE WILL TO POWER IN NATURE--

1. The Mechanical Interpretation of the World 2. The Will to Power as Life-- (a) The Organic Process (b) Man 3. Theory of the Will to Power and of Valuations

III. THE WILL TO POWER AS EXEMPLIFIED IN

SOCIETY AND IN THE INDIVIDUAL

1. Society and the State 2. The Individual

IV. THE WILL TO POWER IN ART

FOURTH BOOK. DISCIPLINE AND BREEDING.

I. THE ORDER OF RANK--

1. The Doctrine of the Order of Rank 2. The Strong and the Weak 3. The Noble Man 4. The Lords of the Earth 5. The Great Man 6. The Highest Man as Lawgiver of the Future

II. DIONYSUS

Part 2

III. ETERNAL RECURRENCE

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

For the history of the text constituting this volume I would refer readers to my preface to The Will to Power, Books I, and II., where they will also find a brief explanation of the actual title of the complete work.

In the two books before us Nietzsche boldly carries his principle still further into the various departments of human life, and does not shrink from showing its application even to science, to art, and to metaphysics.

Throughout Part I. of the Third Book we find him going to great pains to impress the fact upon us that science is as arbitrary as art in its mode of procedure, and that the knowledge of the scientist is but the outcome of his inexorable will to power interpreting facts in the terms of the self-preservative conditions of the particular order of human beings to which he belongs. In Aphorisms 515 and 516, which are typical of almost all the thought expressed in Part I., Nietzsche says distinctly: "The object is not 'to know,' but to schematise,--to impose as much regularity and form upon chaos as our practical needs require."

Unfamiliarity, constant change, and the inability to reckon with possibilities, are sources of great danger: hence, everything must be explained, assimilated, and rendered capable of calculation, if Nature is to be mastered and controlled.

Schemes for interpreting earthly phenomena must be devised which, though they do not require to be absolute or irrefutable, must yet favour the maintenance of the kind of men that devises them. Interpretation thus becomes all important, and facts sink down to the rank of raw material which must first be given some shape (some sense--always anthropocentric) before they can become serviceable.

Even the development of reason and logic Nietzsche consistently shows to be but a spiritual development of the physiological function of digestion which compels an organism to make things "like" (to "assimilate") before it can absorb them (Aph. 510). And seeing that he denies that hunger can be a first motive (Aphs. 651-656), and proceeds to show that it is the amœba's will to power which makes it extend its pseudopodia in search of what it can appropriate, and that, once the appropriated matter is enveloped, it is a process of making similar which constitutes the process of absorption, reason itself is by inference acknowledged to be merely a form of the same fundamental will.

An interesting and certainly inevitable outcome of Nietzsche's argument appears in Aph. 516, where he declares that even our inability to deny and affirm one and the same thing is not in the least necessary, but only a sign of inability.

The whole argument of Part I. tends to draw science ever nearer and nearer to art (except, of course, in those cases in which science happens to consist merely of an ascertainment of facts), and to prove that the one like the other is no more than a means of gaining some foothold upon the slippery soil of a world that is for ever in flux.

In the rush and pell-mell of Becoming, some milestones must be fixed for the purposes of human orientation. In the torrent of evolutionary changes pillars must be made to stand, to which man can for a space hold tight and collect his senses. Science, like art, accomplishes this for us, and it is our will to power which "creates the impression of Being out of Becoming" (Aph. 517).

According to this standpoint, then, consciousness is also but a weapon in the service of the will to power, and it extends or contracts according to our needs (Aph. 524). It might disappear altogether (Aph. 523), or, on the other hand, it might increase and make our life more complicated than it already is. But we should guard against making it the Absolute behind Becoming, simply because it happens to be the highest and most recent evolutionary form (Aph. 709). If we had done this with each newly acquired characteristic, sight itself, which is a relatively recent development, would also have required to have been deified.

Pantheism, Theism, Unitarianism--in fact all religions in which a conscious god is worshipped, are thus aptly classed by Nietzsche as the result of man's desire to elevate that which is but a new and wonderful instrument of his will to power, to the chief place in the imaginary world beyond (eternal soul), and to make it even the deity itself (God Omniscient).

With the question of Truth we find Nietzsche quite as ready to uphold his thesis as with all other questions. He frankly declares that "the criterion of truth lies in the enhancement of the feeling of power" (Aph. 534), and thus stands in diametrical opposition to Spencer, who makes constraint or inability the criterion of truth. (See Principles of Psychology, new edition, chapter ix.... "the unconceivableness of its negation is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition.")

However paradoxical Nietzsche's view may seem, we shall find that it is actually substantiated by experience; for the activity of our senses certainly convinces us more or less according to the degree to which it is provoked. Thus, if we walked for long round a completely dark room, and everything yielded, however slightly, to our touch, we should remain quite unconvinced that we were in a room at all, more particularly if--to suppose a still more impossible case--the floor yielded too. What provokes great activity in the bulbs of our fingers, then, likewise generates the sensation of truth.

From this Nietzsche proceeds to argue that what provokes the strongest sentiments in ourselves is also true to us, and, from the standpoint of thought, "that which gives thought the greatest sensation of strength" (Aph. 533).

The provocation of intense emotion, and therefore the provocation of that state in which the body is above the normal in power, thus becomes the index to truth; and it is a very remarkable thing that two prominent English thinkers should, at the very end of their careers, have practically admitted this, despite the fact that all their philosophical productions had been based upon a completely different belief. I refer, of course, to Spencer and Buckle, who both upheld the view that in a system of thought the emotional factor is of the highest importance.

It follows from all this, that lies and false doctrines may quite conceivably prove to be even more preservative to species than truth itself, and although this is a view we have already encountered in the opening aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil, in Aph, 538 this volume we find it further elucidated by Nietzsche's useful demonstration of the fact that "the easier way of thinking always triumphs over the more difficult way"; and that logic, inasmuch as it facilitated classification and orderly thought, ultimately "got to act like truths."

Before leaving Part I., with which it would be impossible to deal in full, a word or two ought to be said in regard to Nietzsche's views concerning the belief in "cause and effect." In the Genealogy of Morals (1st Essay, Aph. 13), we have already read a forecast of our author's more elaborate opinions on this question, and the aphorism in question might be read with advantage in conjunction with the discussion on the subject found in this book (Aphs. 545-555).

The whole of Nietzsche's criticism, however, resolves itself into this, that the doctrine of causality begins with an unnecessary duplication of all that happens. Language, and its origin among a people uneducated in thoughts and concepts, is at the root of this scientific superstition, and Nietzsche traces its evolution from the primeval and savage desire always to find a "doer" behind every deed: to find some one who is responsible and who, being known, thus modifies the unfamiliarity of the deed which requires explaining. "The so-called instinct of causality [of which Kant speaks with so much assurance] is nothing more than the fear of the unfamiliar."

Continue reading The Will to Power: an Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book Iii and Iv free in the Wunder reader →