CHAPTER XXV
MORAL CONSTRUCTION (Cont.). THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER
I
"Will to power" is primarily with Nietzsche an analysis of reality—as we have seen in Chapter XV, he finds an impulse of this description at the base of man's being, and then proceeds to construe life and the world at large in terms of it. It is fundamentally a psychological and cosmological, not ethical doctrine. So and so man and the world are made, here lies the bottom spring (or springs)—such is the meaning of it.[1]
As matter of fact, Nietzsche was not laudatory of power in his early days a nor was he unqualifiedly so in his second period, and some kinds of power did not have his admiration even in the last period.
Indeed, power in and of itself was never a standard to Nietzsche—and since there is so much misconception on this point, it may be well to bring out the fact clearly at the outset, and then later indicate the connection between power, or will to it, and the general ethical aim which he proposes, as stated in the last chapter.[2]
II
Use is made by some[3] of an incident in Nietzsche's early life, when he was caught out in a thunderstorm and felt, as he said, an incomparable elevation in witnessing the lightning, the tempest, the hail—free, non-ethical forces, pure will untroubled by the intellect.[4] b It was an experience such as any
- ↑ Richter remarks tahet larger interpretation comes in Nietzsche's closing period, the doctrine having ben primarily psychological (op. cit., p. 271).
- ↑ N. Awxentieff in his interesting study, Kultur-ethisches Ideal Nietzsches, expounds first the doctrine of will to power, and then the theory of "natural" morality (see particularly pp.117-38).
- ↑ E.g. by A. S. Pringle-Pattison (op. cit., pp.261-2).
- ↑ Letter to von Gersdorff, April 7, 1866 (Briefe, I, 25-6).
354
