The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV
Nietzsche · en
_(d)_ If we abandon the ideas "subject" and "object"; then we must also
abandon the idea _"substance"_--and therefore its various modifications
too; for instance: "matter," "spirit," and other hypothetical things,
"eternity and the immutability of matter," etc. We are then rid of
_materiality._
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From a moral standpoint _the world is false._ But inasmuch as morality
itself is a part of this world, morality also is false. The will
to truth is a process of _establishing things_, it is a process of
_making_ things true and lasting, a total elimination of that _false_
character, a transvaluation of it into _being._ Thus, "truth" is not
something which is present and which has to be found and discovered; it
is something _which has to be created_ and which _gives_ its name _to a
process,_ or, better still, to the Will to overpower, which in itself
has no purpose: to introduce truth is a _processus in infinitum,_ an
_active determining_--it is not a process of becoming conscious of
something, which in itself is fixed and determined. It is merely a word
for "The Will to Power."
Life is based on the hypothesis of a belief in stable and regularly
recurring things, the mightier it is, the more vast must be the world
of knowledge and the world called being. Logicising, rationalising, and
systematising are of assistance as means of existence.
Man projects his instinct of truth, his "aim," to a certain extent
beyond himself, in the form of a metaphysical world of Being, a
"thing-in-itself," a world already to hand. His requirements as a
creator make him _invent_ the world in which he works in advance; he
anticipates it: this anticipation (this faith in truth) is his mainstay.
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All phenomena, movement, Becoming, regarded as the establishment of
relations of degree and of force, as a contest....
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As soon as we _fancy_ that some one is responsible for the fact that
we are thus and thus, etc. (God, Nature), and that we ascribe our
existence, our happiness, our misery, our _destiny,_ to that some one,
we corrupt the _innocence of Becoming_ for ourselves. We then have some
one who wishes to attain to something by means of us and with us.
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The "welfare of the individual" is just as fanciful as the "welfare
of the species": the first is _not_ sacrificed to the last; seen
from afar, the species is just as fluid as the individual. "The
_preservation_ of the species" is only a result of the _growth_ of the
species--that is to say, _of the overcoming of the species_ on the road
to a stronger kind.
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