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
On the same principle, seeing that all our philosophies and moralities
have hitherto been directed at a mass and at a mob, we find that their
elevation must of necessity be decided by the lowest of mankind. Thus
all passions are banned, because base men do not know how to enlist
them in their service. Men who are masters of themselves and of others,
men who understand the management and privilege of passion, become the
most despised of creatures in such systems of thought, because they are
confounded with the vicious and licentious; and the speed of mankind's
elevation thus gets to be determined by humanity's slowest vessels.
Aphorisms 881, 882, 886 fully elucidate the above considerations, while
in 912, 916, 943, and 951 we have plans of a constructive teaching
which the remainder of Part I. elaborates.
And now, following Nietzsche carefully through Part II. (Dionysus),
what is the inevitable conclusion of all we have read? This analysis
of the world's collective values and their ascription to a certain
"will to power" may now seem to many but an exhaustive attempt at a new
system of nomenclature, and little else. As a matter or fact it is very
much more than this. By mean? of it Nietzsche wishes to show mankind
how much has lain, and how much still lies, in man's power By laying
his finger on everything and declaring to man that it was human will
that created it. Nietzsche wished to give man the courage of this will,
and a clean conscience in exercising it. For it was precisely this very
will to power which had been most hated and most maligned by everybody
up to Nietzsche's time.
Long enough, prompted by the fear of attributing any one of his
happiest thoughts to this hated fundamental will, had man ascribed
all his valuations and all his most sublime inspirations to something
outside himself,--whether this something were a God, a principle, or
the concept Truth. But Nietzsche's desire was to show man how human,
all too human, have been the values that have appeared heretofore;
he wished to prove, that to the rare sculptors of values, the world,
despite its past, is still an open field of yielding clay, and in
pointing to what the will to power has done until now, Nietzsche
suggests to these coming sculptors what might still be done, provided
they fear nothing, and have that innocence and that profound faith in
the fundamental will which others hitherto have had in God, Natural
Laws, Truth, and other euphemistic fictions.