The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Life, which is our best known form of being, is altogether "will to the accumulation of strength"—all the processes of life hinge on this: everything aims, not at preservation, but at accretion and accumulation. Life as an individual case (a hypothesis which may be applied to existence in general) strives after the maximum feeling of power; life is essentially a striving after more power; striving itself is only a straining after more power; the most fundamental and innermost thing of all is this will. (Mechanism is merely the semeiotics of the results.)

690.

The thing which is the cause of the existence of development cannot in the course of investigation be found above development; it should neither be regarded as "evolving" nor as evolved ... the "will to power" cannot have been evolved.

691.

What is the relation of the whole of the organic process towards the rest of nature?—Here the fundamental will reveals itself.

692.

Is the "will to power" a kind of will, or is it identical with the concept will? Is it equivalent to desiring or commanding; is it the will which Schopenhauer says is the essence of things?

My proposition is that the will of psychologists hitherto has been an unjustifiable generalisation, and that there is no such thing as this sort of will, that instead of the development of one will into several forms being taken as a fact, the character of will has been cancelled owing to the fact that its content, its "whither," was subtracted from it: in Schopenhauer this is so in the highest degree; what he calls "will" is merely an empty word. There is even less plausibility in the will to live: for life is simply one of the manifestations of the will to power; it is quite arbitrary and ridiculous to suggest that everything is striving to enter into this particular form of the will to power.

693.

If the innermost essence of existence is the will to power; if happiness is every increase of power, and unhappiness the feeling of not being able to resist, of not being able to become master: may we not then postulate happiness and pain as cardinal facts? Is will possible without these two oscillations of yea and nay? But who feels happiness? ... Who will have power? ... Nonsensical question! If the essence of all things is itself will to power, and consequently the ability to feel pleasure and pain! Albeit: contrasts and obstacles are necessary, therefore also, relatively, units which trespass on one another.