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

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Man does not seek happiness and does not avoid unhappiness. Everybody knows the famous prejudices I here contradict. Pleasure and pain are mere results, mere accompanying phenomena—that which every man, which every tiny particle of a living organism will have, is an increase of power. In striving after this, pleasure and pain are encountered; it is owing to that will that the organism seeks opposition and requires that which stands in its way.... Pain as the hindrance of its will to power is therefore a normal feature, a natural ingredient of every organic phenomenon; man does not avoid it, on the contrary, he is constantly in need of it: every triumph, every feeling of pleasure, every event presupposes an obstacle overcome.

Let us take the simplest case, that of primitive nourishment; the protoplasm extends its pseudopodia in order to seek for that which resists it,—it does not do so out of hunger, but owing to its will to power. Then it makes the attempt to overcome, to appropriate, and to incorporate that with which it comes into contact—what people call "nourishment" is merely a derivative, a utilitarian application, of the primordial will to become stronger.

Pain is so far from acting as a diminution of our feeling of power, that it actually forms in the majority of cases a spur to this feeling,—the obstacle is the stimulus of the will to power.

703.

Pain has been confounded with one of its subdivisions, which is exhaustion: the latter does indeed represent a profound reduction and lowering of the will to power, a material loss of strength—that is to say, there is (a) pain as the stimulus to an increase or power, and (b) pain following upon an expenditure of power; in the first case it is a spur, in the second it is the outcome of excessive spurring.... The inability to resist is proper to the latter form of pain: the provocation of that which resists is proper to the former.... The only happiness which is to be felt in the state of exhaustion is that of going to sleep; in the other case, happiness means triumph.... The great confusion of psychologists consisted in the fact that they did not keep these two kinds of happiness—that of falling asleep, and that of triumph—sufficiently apart. Exhausted people will have repose, slackened limbs, peace and quiet—and these things constitute the bliss of Nihilistic religions and philosophies, the wealthy in vital strength, the active, want triumph, defeated opponents, and the extension of their feeling of power over ever wider regions. Every healthy function of the organism has this need,—and the whole organism constitutes an intricate complexity of systems struggling for the increase of the feeling of power....

704.

How is it that the fundamental article of faith in all psychologies is a piece of most outrageous contortion and fabrication? "Man strives after happiness," for instance—how much of this is true? In order to understand what life is, and what kind of striving and tenseness life contains, the formula should hold good not only of trees and plants, but of animals also. "What does the plant strive after?"—But here we have already invented a false entity which does not exist,—concealing and denying the fact of an infinitely variegated growth, with individual and semi-individual starting-points, if we give it the clumsy title "plant" as if it were a unit. It is very obvious that the ultimate and smallest "individuals" cannot be understood in the sense of metaphysical individuals or atoms; their sphere of power is continually shifting its ground: but with all these changes, can it be said that any of them strives after happiness?—All this expanding, this incorporation and growth, is a search for resistance; movement is essentially related to states of pain: the driving power here must represent some other desire if it leads to such continual willing and seeking of pain.—To what end do the trees of a virgin forest contend with each other? "For happiness"?—For power! ...

Man is now master of the forces of nature, and master too of his own wild and unbridled feelings (the passions have followed suit, and have learned to become useful)—in comparison with primeval man, the man of to-day represents an enormous quantum of power, but not an increase in happiness! How can one maintain, then, that he has striven after happiness?..

705.

But while I say this I see above me, and below the stars, the glittering rat's-tail of errors which hitherto has represented the greatest inspiration of man: "All happiness is the result of virtue all virtue is the result of free will"!