[25] W. P., Vol. II, pp. 28, 90, 103.
For it was then that man's strongest instinct became creative in man's highest product—the artist—and the discovery was made that the world, although "without form" and "void," as a fact, could be simplified and made calculable and full of form and attractions, as a valuation, as an interpretation, as a spiritual possession. With the world at a distance from him, unfamiliar and unhuman, man's existence was a torment. With it beneath him, inside him, bearing the impress of his spirit, and proceeding from him, he became a lord, casting care to the winds, and terror to the beasts around.
Man, the bravest animal on earth, thus conceived the only possible condition of his existence; namely, to become master of the world. And, when we think of the miracles he then began to perform, we cease from wondering why he once believed in miracles, why he thought of God as in his own image, and why he made his strongest instinct God, and thereupon made Him say: "Replenish the earth and subdue it!"
It was therefore the powerful who made the names of things into law.[26] It was their Will to Power that simplified, organized, ordered and schematized the world, and it was their will to prevail which made them proclaim their simplification, their organization, their order and scheme, as the norm, as the thing to be believed, as the world of values which must be regarded as creation itself.
These early artists conceived of no other way of subduing the earth than by converting it into concepts; and, as time soon showed that there actually was no other way, interpretation came to be regarded as the greatest task of all.[27] Naming, adjusting, classifying, qualifying, valuing, putting a meaning into things, and, above all, simplifying—all these functions acquired a sacred character, and he who performed them to the glory of his fellows became sacrosanct.
So great were the relief and solace that these functions bestowed upon mankind, and so different did ugly reality appear, once it had been interpreted by the artist mind, that creating and naming actually began to acquire much the same sense. For to put a meaning into things was clearly to create them afresh[28]—in fact, to create them literally. And so it came to pass that, in one of the oldest religions on earth, the religion of Egypt, God was imagined as a Being who created things by naming them;[29] while, in the Judaic notion of the creation of the world, which was probably derived from the Egyptians themselves, Jehovah is also said to have brought things into existence merely by pronouncing their names.[30]
The world thus became literally man's Work of Art,[31] man's Sculpture.[32] Miracle after miracle at last reduced Nature to man's chattel, and it was man's lust of mastership, his will to power, which thus became creative in his highest specimen—the artist—and which, fighting for "the higher worthiness and meaning of mankind,"[33]transfigured reality by means of human valuations, and overcame Becoming by falsifying it as Being.[34]
"We are in need of lies," says Nietzsche, "in order to rise superior to reality, to truth—that is to say, in order to live.... That lies should be necessary to life, is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence....