"To will" is not "to desire," to strive, to aspire to; it distinguishes itself from that through the passion of commanding.
There is no such thing as "willing," but only the willing of something: the aim must not be severed from the state—as the epistemologists sever it. "Willing," as they understand it, is no more possible than "thinking": it is a pure invention.
It is essential to willing that something should be commanded (but that does not mean that the will is carried into effect).
The general state of tension, by virtue of which a force seeks to discharge itself, is not "willing."
669.
"Pain" and "pleasure" are the most absurd means of expressing judgments, which of course does not mean that the judgments which are enunciated in this way must necessarily be absurd. The elimination of all substantiation and logic, a yes or no in the reduction to a passionate desire to have or to reject, an imperative abbreviation, the utility of which is irrefutable: that is pain and pleasure. Its origin is in the central sphere of the intellect; its prerequisite is an infinitely accelerated process of perceiving, ordering, co-ordinating, calculating, concluding: pleasure and pain are always final phenomena, they are never causes.
As to deciding what provokes pain and pleasure, that is a question which depends upon the degree of power: the same thing, when confronted with a small quantity of power, may seem a danger and may suggest the need of speedy defence, and when confronted with the consciousness of greater power, may be a voluptuous stimulus and may be followed by a feeling of pleasure.
All feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose a measuring of collective utility and collective harmfulness: consequently a sphere where there is the willing of an object (of a condition) and the selection of the means thereto. Pleasure and pain are never "original facts."
The feelings of pleasure and pain are reactions of the will (emotions) in which the intellectual centre fixes the value of certain supervening changes as a collective value, and also as an introduction of contrary actions.
670.