Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism
But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in
individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity.
Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself
as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the
creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again,
Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding,
not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first
imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path
was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.”
He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to
power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a
superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this
particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type
shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to
the slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with
Seannchan, the poet:
“The stars had come so near me that I caught
Their singing. It was praise of that great race
That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,
With a high head, and open hand, and how,
Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series
of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their
result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to
speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series
of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the
other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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