The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IVNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Nihilism (Philosophy); Power (Philosophy); Values
Ugliness signifies _the decadence of a type_: contradiction and
faulty co-ordination among the inmost desires--this means a decline
in the _organising_ power, or, psychologically speaking, in the will.
The condition of pleasure which is called intoxication is really
an exalted feeling of power. ... Sensations of space and time are
altered; inordinate distances are traversed by the eye, and only then
become visible; the extension of the vision over greater masses and
expanses; the refinement of the organ which apprehends the smallest
and most elusive things; divination, the power of understanding at the
slightest hint, at the smallest suggestion; intelligent sensitiveness;
_strength_ as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as agility and
love of movement, as dance, as levity and quick time; strength as the
love of proving strength, as bravado, adventurousness, fearlessness,
indifference in regard to life and death.... All these elated moments
of life stimulate each other; the world of images and of imagination
of the one suffices as a suggestion for the other: in this way states
finally merge into each other, which might do better to keep apart,
_e.g._ the feeling of religious intoxication and sexual irritability
(two very profound feelings, always wonderfully co-ordinated. What is
it that pleases almost all pious women, old or young? Answer: a saint
with beautiful legs, still young, still innocent). Cruelty in tragedy
and pity (likewise normally correlated). Spring-time, dancing, music,
--all these things are but the display of one sex before the other,--as
also that "infinite yearning of the heart" peculiar to Faust.
Artists when they are worth anything at all are men of strong
propensities (even physically), with surplus energy, powerful animals,
sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a man like
Raphael is unthinkable.... To produce music is also in a sense to
produce children; chastity is merely the economy of the artist, and
in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with sexual
potency.... Artists should not see things as they are; they should
see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of
youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be
peculiar to their lives.
801.
The states in which we transfigure things and make them fuller, and
rhapsodise about them, until they reflect our own fulness and love
of life back upon us: sexuality, intoxication, post-prandial states,
spring, triumph over our enemies, scorn, bravado, cruelty, the ecstasy
of religious feeling. But three elements above all are active:
_sexuality, intoxication, cruelty_; all these belong to the oldest
_festal joys_ of mankind, they also preponderate in budding artists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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