Am I
understood
?
Nietzsche - v15 - Will to Power - b
Wherever a culture points to anything as evil, it
betrays its fear and therefore weakness,
Thesis : everything good is the evil of yore
which has been rendered serviceable. Standard:
the more terrible and the greater the passions may
be which an age, a people, and an individual are at
liberty to possess, because they are able to use
them as a means, the higher is their culture: the
more mediocre, weak, submissive, and cowardly a
man. may be, the more things he will regard as evil:
according to him the kingdom of evil is the largest
The lowest man will see the kingdom of evil (i. e.
that which is forbidden him and which is hostile
to him) everywhere.
1026.
It is not a fact that "happiness follows virtue"
but it is the mighty man who first declares his
happy state to be virtue.
Evil actions belong to the mighty and the
virtuous: bad and base actions belong to the
subjected.
The mightiest man, the creator, would have to
be the most evil, inasmuch as he makes his ideal
prevail over all men in opposition to their ideals,
and remoulds them according to his own image.
## p. 405 (#435) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
405
Evil, in this respect, means hard, painful, en-
forced.
Such men as Napoleon must always return and
always settle our belief in the self-glory of the in-
dividual afresh: he himself, however, was corrupted
by the means he had to stoop to, and had lost
noblesse of character. If he had had to prevail
among another kind of men, he could have availed
himself of other means; and thus it would not
seem necessary that a Cæsar must become bad.
1027
Man is a combination of the beast and the super-
beast; higher man a combination of the monster
and the superman:* these opposites belong to
each other. With every degree of a man's growth
towards greatness and loftiness, he also grows down-
wards into the depths and into the terrible: we
should not desire the one without the other ;-or,
better still: the more fundamentally we desire the
one, the more completely we shall achieve the
other.
1028.
Terribleness belongs to greatness: let us not
deceive ourselves.
1029.
I have taught the knowledge of such terrible
things, that all “Epicurean contentment” is im-
* The play on the German words: “Unthier” and
“ Uberthier, ** « Unmensch” and “ Übermensch," is unfortu-
nately not translatable. —TR.
## p. 406 (#436) ############################################
406
THE WILL TO POWER.
possible concerning them. Dionysian pleasure is
the only adequate kind here: I was the first to dis-
cover the tragic. Thanks to their superficiality in
ethics, the Greeks misunderstood it. Resignation
is not the lesson of tragedy, but only the mis-
understanding of it! The yearning for nonentity
is the denial of tragic wisdom, its opposite!
1030.
A rich and powerful soul not only gets over
painful and even terrible losses, deprivations, rob-
beries, and insults: it actually leaves such dark
infernos in possession of still greater plenitude and
power; and, what is most important of all, in pos-
session of an increased blissfulness in love. I
believe that he who has divined something of the
most fundamental conditions of love, will under-
stand Dante for having written over the door of
his Inferno: “I also am the creation of eternal
love. "
IO31.
To have travelled over the whole circumference
of the modern soul, and to have sat in all its corners
-my ambition, my torment, and my happiness.
Veritably to have overcome pessimism, and, as
the result thereof, to have acquired the eyes of a
Goethe-full of love and goodwill.
2
1032.
The first question is by no means whether we
are satisfied with ourselves : but whether we are
## p. 407 (#437) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
407
satisfied with anything at all. Granting that we
should say yea to any single moment, we have then
affirmed not only ourselves, but the whole of ex-
istence. For nothing stands by itself, either in us
or in other things: and if our soul has vibrated and
rung with happiness, like a chord, once only and
only once, then all eternity was necessary in order
to bring about that one event,
and all eternity, in
this single moment of our affirmation, was called
good, was saved, justified, and blessed.
1033.
-
The passions which say yea. —Pride, happiness,
health, the love of the sexes, hostility and war,
reverence, beautiful attitudes, manners, strong will,
the discipline of lofty spirituality, the will to power,
and gratitude to the Earth and to Life: all that
is rich, that would fain bestow, and that refreshes,
gilds, immortalises, and deifies Life -- the whole
power of the virtues that glorify—all declaring
things good, saying yea, and doing yea.
1034.
We, many or few, who once more dare to live in
a world purged of morality, we pagans in faith,—we
are probably also the first who understand what a
pagan faith is : to be obliged to imagine higher
creatures than man, but to imagine them beyond
good and evil; to be compelled to value all higher
existence as immoral existence. We believe in
Olympus, and not in the “man on the cross. ”
## p. 408 (#438) ############################################
1
THE WILL TO POWER.
408
1035
The more modern man has exercised his ideal-
ising power in regard to a God mostly by moralis-
ing the latter ever more and more—what does that
mean ? —nothing good, a diminution in man's
strength.
As a matter of fact, the reverse would be possible:
and indications of this are not wanting. God im-
agined as emancipation from morality, comprising
the whole of the abundant assembly of Life's con-
trasts, and saving and justifying them in a divine
agony.
God as the beyond, the superior elevation,
to the wretched cul-de-sac morality of " Good and
Evil. ”
« He can-
1036.
A humanitarian God cannot be demonstrated
from the world that is known to us: so much are
ye driven and forced to conclude to-day.
But
what conclusion do ye draw from this ?
not be demonstrated to us”: the scepticism of
knowledge. You all fear the conclusion: “From
the world that is known to us quite a different
God would be demonstrable, such a one as would
certainly not be humanitarian ”—and, in a word,
you cling fast to your God, and invent a world for
Him which is unknown to us.
1037.
Let us banish the highest good from our con-
cept of God: it is unworthy of a God. Let us
## p. 409 (#439) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
409
likewise banish the highest wisdom: it is the
vanity of philosophers who have perpetrated the
absurdity of a God who is a monster of wisdom:
the idea was to make Him as like them as possible.
No! God as the highest power that is sufficient!
Everything follows from that, even — "the
world"!
1038
And how many new Gods are not still pos-
sible! I, myself, in whom the religious--that is
to say, the god-creating instinct occasionally be-
comes active at the most inappropriate moments :
how very differently the divine has revealed itself
every time to me! . . . So many strange things
have passed before me in those timeless moments,
which fall into a man's life as if they came from
the moon, and in which he absolutely no longer
knows how old he is or how young he still may
be! . . . I would not doubt that there are several
kinds of gods. . . . Some are not wanting which
one could not possibly imagine without a certain
halcyonic calm and levity. . . Light feet perhaps
belong to the concept “God. ” Is it necessary to
explain that a God knows how to hold Himself
preferably outside all Philistine and rationalist
circles ? also (between ourselves) beyond good and
evil ?
His outlook is a free one
as Goethe
would say. —And to invoke the authority of Zara-
thustra, which cannot be too highly appreciated in
this regard : Zarathustra goes as far as to confess,
“I would only believe in a God who knew how to
dance. .
21
## p. 410 (#440) ############################################
410
THE WILL TO POWER.
Again I say: how many new Gods are not still
possible! Certainly Zarathustra himself is merelyan
old atheist: he believes neither in old nor in new gods.
Zarathustra says, “he would”—but Zarathustra
will not. . . . Take care to understand him well.
The type God conceived according to the type
of creative spirits, of “great men. "
1039.
And how many new ideals are not, at bottom,
still possible? Here is a little ideal that I seize
upon every five weeks, while upon a wild and lonely
walk, in the azure moment of a blasphemous joy.
To spend one's life amid delicate and absurd things;
a stranger to reality; half-artist, half-bird, half-
metaphysician; without a yea or a nay for reality,
save that from time to time one acknowledges it,
after the manner of a good dancer, with the tips of
one's toes; always tickled by some happy ray of
sunlight; relieved and encouraged even by, sorrow
--for sorrow preserves the happy man; fixing a
little tail of jokes even to the most holy thing:
this, as is clear, is the ideal of a heavy spirit, a ton
in weight--of the spirit of gravity.
1040.
From the military-school of the soul. (Dedicated
to the brave, the good-humoured, and the abstinent. )
I should not like to undervalue the amiable vir-
tues; but greatness of soul is not compatible with
## p. 411 (#441) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
411
them. Even in the arts, grand style excludes all
merely pleasing qualities.
In times of painful tension and vulnerability,
choose war. War hardens and develops muscle.
Those who have been deeply wounded have the
Olympian laughter; a man only has what he needs.
It has now already lasted ten years: no sound
any longer reaches me-a land without rain. A
man must have a vast amount of humanity at his
disposal in order not to pine away in such drought. *
1041.
My new road to an affirmative attitude. -Philo-
sophy, as I have understood it and lived it up to the
present, is the voluntary quest of the repulsive and
atrocious aspects of existence. From the long ex-
perience derived from such wandering over ice and
desert, I learnt to regard quite differently everything
that had been philosophised hitherto: the con-
cealed history of philosophy, the psychology of its
great names came into the light for me.
much truth can a spirit endure; for how much truth
is it daring enough ? ”--this for me was the real
“ How
*
For the benefit of those readers who are not acquainted
with the circumstances of Nietzsche's life, it would be as well
to point out that this is a purely personal plaint, comprehen-
sible enough in the mouth of one who, like Nietzsche, was
for years a lonely anchorite. —TR.
## p. 412 (#442) ############################################
412
THE WILL TO POWER.
measure of value. Error is a piece of cowardice
. . . every victory on the part of knowledge, is the re-
sultof courage,of hardness towards one's self, of clean-
liness towards one's self. . . . The kind of experimental
philosophy which I am living, even anticipates the
possibility of the most fundamental Nihilism, on
principle: but by this I do not mean that it re-
mains standing at a negation, at a no, or at a will
to negation. It would rather attain to the
very
reverse—to a Dionysian affirmation of the world, as
it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice —
it would have eternal circular motion : the same
things, the same reasoning, and the same illogical
concatenation. The highest state to which a philo-
sopher can attain: to maintain a Dionysian attitude
to Life—my formula for this is amor fati.
To this end we must not only consider those
aspects of life which have been denied hitherto, as
necessary, but as desirable, and not only desirable
to those aspects which have been affirmed hitherto
(as complements or first prerequisites, so to speak),
but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more
terrible, and more veritable aspects of life, in which
the latter's will expresses itself most clearly.
To this end, we must also value that aspect of
existence which alone has been affirmed until now;
we must understand whence this valuation arises,
and to how slight an extent it has to do with a
Dionysian valuation of Life: I selected and under-
stood that which in this respect says "yea” (on the
one hand, the instinct of the sufferer; on the other,
the gregarious instinct; and thirdly, the instinct of
the greater number against the exceptions).
## p. 413 (#443) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
413
Thus I divined to what extent a stronger kind
of man must necessarily imagine
the elevation and
enhancement of man in another direction: higher
creatures, beyond good and evil, beyond those values
which bear the stamp of their origin in the sphere
of suffering, of the herd, and of the greater number
-I searched for the data of this topsy-turvy forma-
tion of ideals in history (the concepts “pagan,"
“classical," " noble," have been discovered afresh
and brought forward).
1042.
We should demonstrate to what extent the
religion of the Greeks was higher than Judæo-
Christianity. The latter triumphed because the
Greek religion was degenerate (and decadent).
1043
It is not surprising that a couple of centuries
have been necessary in order to link up again-a
couple of centuries are very little indeed.
1044.
There must be some people who sanctify func-
tions, not only eating and drinking: and not only
in memory of them, or in harmony with them; but
this world must be for ever glorified anew, and in
a novel fashion.
1
1045
The most intellectual men feel the ecstasy and
charm of sensual things in a way which other men
## p. 414 (#444) ############################################
414
THE WILL TO POWER.
—those with “fleshy hearts"-cannot possibly
imagine, and ought not to be able to imagine:
they are sensualists with the best possible faith,
because they grant the senses a more fundamental
value than that fine sieve, that thinning and mincing
machine, or whatever it is called, which in the
language of the people is termed "spirit. ” The
strength and power of the senses—this is the most
essential thing in a sound man who is one of
Nature's lucky strokes: the splendid beast must
first be there otherwise what is the value of all
"humanisation"?
1046.
(1) We want to hold fast to our senses, and to
the belief in them-and accept their logical con-
clusions ! The hostility to the senses in the philo-
sophy that has been written up to the present, has
been man's greatest feat of nonsense.
(2) The world now extant, on which all earthly
and living things have so built themselves, that it
now appears as it does (enduring and proceeding
slowly), we would fain continue building — not
criticise it away as false !
(3) Our valuations help in the process of build-
ing; they emphasise and accentuate. What does
it mean when whole religions say: “Everything is
bad and false and evil”? This condemnation of
the whole process can only be the judgment of the
failures !
(4) True, the failures might be the greatest
sufferers and therefore the most subtle! The con-
tented might be worth little !
## p. 415 (#445) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
415
(5) We must understand the fundamental artistic
phenomenon which is called “Life,"—the formative
spirit, which constructs under the most unfavourable
circumstances : and in the slowest manner pos-
sible - The proof of all its combinations must
first be given afresh: it maintains itself.
1047
Sexuality, lust of dominion, the pleasure derived
from appearance and deception, great and joyful
gratitude to Life and its typical conditions—these
things are essential to all paganism, and it has a
good conscience on its side. That which is hostile
to Nature (already in Greek antiquity) combats
paganism in the form of morality and dialectics.
1048.
An anti-metaphysical view of the world—yes,
but an artistic one.
1049.
Apollo's misapprehension : the eternity of beauti-
ful forms, the aristocratic prescription, “ Thus shall
it ever be !
Dionysus : Sensuality and cruelty. The perish-
able nature of existence might be interpreted as
the joy of procreative and destructive force, as un-
remitting creation.
1050.
The word “Dionysian" expresses : a constraint
to unity, a soaring above personality, the common.
## p. 416 (#446) ############################################
416
THE WILL TO POWER.
place, society, reality, and above the abyss of the
ephemeral; the passionately painful sensation of
superabundance, in darker, fuller, and more fluctu-
ating conditions; an ecstatic saying of yea to the
collective character of existence, as that which
remains the same, and equally mighty and blissful
throughout all change; the great pantheistic
sympathy with pleasure and pain, which declares
even the most terribleand most questionable qualities
of existence good, and sanctifies them; the eternal
will to procreation, to fruitfulness, and to recurrence;
the feeling of unity in regard to the necessity of
creating and annihilating.
The word “ Apollonian” expresses: the con-
straint to be absolutely isolated, to the typical “in-
dividual,” to everything that simplifies, distinguishes,
and makes strong, salient, definite, and typical: to
freedom within the law.
The further development of art is just as neces-
sarily bound up with the antagonism of these two
natural art-forces, as the further development of
mankind is bound up with the antagonism of the
sexes. The plenitude of power and restraint, the
highest form of self-affirmation in a cool, noble, and
reserved kind of beauty: the Apollonianism of the
Hellenic will.
This antagonism of the Dionysian and of the
Apollonian in the Greek soul, is one of the great
riddles which made me feel drawn to the essence
of Hellenism. At bottom, I troubled about nothing
save the solution of the question, why precisely
Greek Apollonianism should have been forced to
grow out of a Dionysian soil: the Dionysian Greek
## p. 417 (#447) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
417
had need of being Apollonian; that is to say,in
order to break his will to the titanic, to the com-
plex, to the uncertain, to the horrible by a will
to measure, to simplicity, and to submission to
rule and concept. Extravagance, wildness, and
Asiatic tendencies lie at the root of the Greeks.
Their courage consists in their struggle with their
Asiatic nature: they were not given beauty, any
more than they were given Logic and moral
naturalness: in them these things are victories,
they are willed and fought for—they constitute
the triumph of the Greeks.
1051.
It is clear that only the rarest and most lucky
cases of humanity can attain to the highest and
most sublime human joys in which Life celebrates
its own glorification, and this only happens when
these rare creatures themselves and their forbears
have lived a long preparatory life leading to this
goal, without, however, having done so consciously.
It is then that án overflowing wealth of multi-
farious forces and the most agile power of “free
will ” and lordly command exist together in per-
fect concord in one man; then the intellect is just
as much at ease, or at home, in the senses as the
senses are at ease or at home in it; and everything
that takes place in the latter must give rise to ex-
traordinarily subtle joys in the former. And vice
verså: just think of this vice verså for a moment
in a man like Hafiz; even Goethe, though to a
lesser degree, gives some idea of this process.
It
2 D
VOL. II.
## p. 418 (#448) ############################################
418
THE WILL TO POWER.
is probable that, in such perfect and well-constituted
men, the most sensual functions are finally trans-
figured by a symbolic elatedness of the highest
intellectuality; in themselves they feel a kind of
deification of the body and are most remote from the
ascetic philosophy of the principle "God is a Spirit":
from this principle it is clear that the ascetic is the
“ botched man” who declares only that to be good
and “God” which is absolute, and which judges and
condemns.
From that height of joy in which man feels him-
self completely and utterly a deified form and self-
justification of nature, down to the joy of healthy
peasants and healthy semi-human beasts, the whole
of this long and enormous gradation of the light
and colour of happiness was called by the Greek-
not without that grateful quivering of one who is
initiated into secret, not without much caution and
pious silence-by the godlike name: Dionysus.
What then do all modern men-the children of a
crumbling, multifarious, sick and strange age-
know of the compass of Greek happiness, how could
they know anything about it! Whence would the
slaves of "modern ideas” derive their right to
Dionysian feasts!
When the Greek body and soul were in full
"bloom," and not, as it were, in states of morbid
exaltation and madness, there arose the secret
symbol of the loftiest affirmation and transfigura-
tion of life and the world that has ever existed.
There we have a standard beside which everything
that has grown since must seem too short, too
poor, too narrow: if we but pronounce the word
-
## p. 419 (#449) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
419
" Dionysus" in the presence of the best of more
recent names and things, in the presence of Goethe,
for instance, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or
Raphael, in a trice we realise that our best things
and moments are condemned. Dionysus is a judge !
Am I understood ? There can be no doubt that
the Greeks sought to interpret, by means of their
Dionysian experiences, the final mysteries of the
“ destiny of the soul" and everything they knew
concerning the education and the purification of
man, and above all concerning the absolute hier-
archy and inequality of value between man and man.
There is the deepest experience of all Greeks, which
they conceal beneath great silence, we do not
know the Greeks so long as this hidden and sub-
terranean access to them remains obstructed. The
indiscreet eyes of scholars will never perceive any-
thing in these things, however much learned energy
may still have to be expended in the service of this
excavation-; even the noble zeal of such friends
of antiquity as Goethe and Winckelmann, seems to
savour somewhat of bad form and of arrogance,
precisely in this respect. To wait and to prepare
oneself; to await the appearance of new sources of
knowledge; to prepare oneself in solitude for the
sight of new faces and the sound of new voices; to
cleanse one's soul ever more and more of the dust
and noise, as of a country fair, which is peculiar to
this age; to overcome everything Christian by some-
thing super-Christian, and not only to rid oneself
of it,- for the Christian doctrine is the counter-
doctrine to the Dionysian; to rediscover the South
in oneself, and to stretch a clear, glittering, and
i
## p. 420 (#450) ############################################
420
THE WILL TO POWER.
more
more
mysterious southern sky above one; to reconquer
the southern healthiness and concealed power of the
soul, once more for oneself; to increase the com-
pass of one's soul step by step, and to become more
supernational,
European,
super-
European, more Oriental, and finally more Hellenic
-for Hellenism was, as a matter of fact, the first
great union and synthesis of everything Oriental,
and precisely on that account, the beginning of the
European soul, the discovery of our “ new world":
”
—he who lives under such imperatives, who knows
what he may not encounter some day? Possibly
a new dawn!
1052.
The two types : Dionysus and Christ on the Cross.
We should ascertain whether the typically religious
man is a decadent phenomenon (the great inno-
vators are one and all morbid and epileptic); but
do not let us forget to include that type of the
religious man who is pagan. Is the pagan cult
not a form of gratitude for, and affirmation of, Life?
Ought not its most representative type to be an
apology and deification of Life ? The type of a
well-constituted and ecstatically overflowing spirit !
The type of a spirit which absorbs the contradic-
tions and problems of existence, and which solves
them!
At this point I set up the Dionysus of the Greeks:
the religious affirmation of Life, of the whole of
Life, not of denied and partial Life (it is typical
that in this cult the sexual act awakens ideas of
depth, mystery, and reverence).
## p. 421 (#451) ############################################
DIONYSUS.
421
>
Dionysus versus "Christ"; here you have the
contrast. It is not a difference in regard to the
martyrdom, --but the latter has a different mean-
ing. Life itself-Life's eternal fruitfulness and re-
currence caused anguish, destruction, and the will
to annihilation. In the other case, the suffering of
the “ Christ as the Innocent One" stands as an ob-
jection against Life, it is the formula of Life's
condemnation. -Readers will guess that the prob-
lem concerns the meaning of suffering; whether
a Christian or a tragic meaning be given to it. In
the first case it is the road to a holy mode of
existence; in the second case existence itself
is regarded as sufficiently holy to justiſy an
enormous amount of suffering. The tragic man
says yea even to the most excruciating suffering:
he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deify-
ing, to be able to do this; the Christian denies
even the happy lots on earth: he is weak, poor,
and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any
form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a
signpost directing people to deliver themselves from
it;-Dionysus cut into pieces is a promise of Life:
it will be for ever born anew, and rise afresh from
destruction
## p. 422 (#452) ############################################
III.
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
105 3.
My philosophy reveals the triumphant thought
through which all other systems of thought must
ultimately perish. It is the great disciplinary
thought: those races that cannot bear it are
doomed; those which regard it as the greatest
blessing are destined to rule.
1054.
The greatest of all fights: for this purpose a
new weapon is required.
A hammer: a terrible alternative must be
created. Europe must be brought face to face
with the logic of facts, and confronted with the
question whether its will for ruin is really earnest.
General levelling down to mediocrity must be
avoided. Rather than this it would be preferable
to perish.
1055.
A pessimistic attitude of mind and a pessi-
mistic doctrine and ecstatic Nihilism, may in
## p. 423 (#453) ############################################
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
423
certain circumstances even prove indispensable to
the philosopher—that is to say, as a mighty
form of pressure, or hammer, with which he can
smash up degenerate, perishing races and put
them out of existence; with which he can beat a
track to a new order of life, or instil a longing for
nonentity in those who are degenerate and who
desire to perish.
1056.
I wish to teach the thought which gives unto
many the right to cancel their existences—the
great disciplinary thought.
1057.
*Eternal Recurrence. A prophecy.
1. The exposition of the doctrine and its theo-
retical first principles and results.
2. The proof of the doctrine.
3. Probable results which will follow from its
being believed. (It makes everything break open. )
(a) The means of enduring it.
(6) The means of ignoring it.
4. Its place in history is a means.
The period of greatest danger.
The foundation of an oligarchy above peoples
and their interests: education directed at
establishing a political policy for humanity
in general.
A counterpart of Jesuitism.
€
## p. 424 (#454) ############################################
424
THE WILL TO POWER.
1058.
The two greatest philosophical points of view
(both discovered by Germans).
(a) That of becoming and that of evolution.
(6) That based upon the values of existence
(but the wretched form of German
pessimism must first be overcome ! )-
Both points of view reconciled by me in a
decisive manner.
Everything becomes and returns for ever,
-escape is impossible!
Granted that we could appraise the value of
existence, what would be the result of it? The
thought of recurrence is a principle of selection in
the service of power (and barbarity ! ).
The ripeness of man for this thought.
1059.
1. The thought of eternal recurrence: its first
principles, which must necessarily be true if it were
true. What its result is.
2. It is the most oppressive thought: its prob-
able results, provided it be not prevented, that is
to say, provided all values be not transvalued.
3. The means of enduring it: the transvalua-
tion of all values. Pleasure no longer to be found
in certainty, but in uncertainty; no longer “cause
and effect," but continual creativeness; no longer
, "
the will to self-preservation, but to power; no
longer the modest expression “it is all only sub-
jective,” but “it is all our work! let us be
proud of it. ”
>
## p. 425 (#455) ############################################
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
425
1060.
In order to endure the thought of recurrence,
freedom from morality is necessary; new means
against the fact pain (pain regarded as the instru-
ment, as the father of pleasure; there is no accre-
tive consciousness of pain); pleasure derived from
all kinds of uncertainty and tentativeness, as a
counterpoise to extreme fatalism; suppression of
the concept“necessity"; suppression of the “ will”;
suppression of “absolute knowledge. "
Greatest elevation of man's consciousness of
strength, as that which creates superman.
1061.
The two extremes of thought—the materialistic
and the platonic-are reconciled in eternal recur-
rence : both are regarded as ideals.
1062,
If the universe had a goal, that goal would
have been reached by now. If any sort of un-
foreseen final state existed, that state also would
have been reached. If it were capable of any
halting or stability of any "being," it would only
have possessed this capability of becoming stable
for one instant in its development; and again
becoming would have been at an end for ages,
and with it all thinking and all "spirit. ” The
fact of “intellects" being in a state of development
proves that the universe can have no goal, no
")
## p. 426 (#456) ############################################
426
THE WILL TO POWER.
final state, and is incapable of being. But the old
habit of thinking of some purpose in regard to all
phenomena, and of thinking of a directing and
creating deity in regard to the universe, is so
powerful, that the thinker has to go to great pains
in order to avoid thinking of the very aimlessness
of the world as intended. The idea that the
universe intentionally evades a goal, and even
knows artificial means wherewith it prevents itself
from falling into a circular movement, must occur
to all those who would fain attribute to the uni-
verse the capacity of eternally regenerating itself
—that is to say, they would fain impose upon a
finite, definite force which is invariable in quantity,
like the universe, the miraculous gift of renewing
its forms and its conditions for all eternity.
Although the universe is no longer a God, it must
still be capable of the divine power of creating
and transforming; it must forbid itself to
relapse into any one of its previous forms; it
must not only have the intention, but also the
means, of avoiding any sort of repetition; every
second of its existence, even, it must control every
single one of its movements, with the view of
avoiding goals, final states, and repetitions—and
all the other results of such an unpardonable and
insane method of thought and desire. All this is
nothing more than the old religious mode of
thought and desire, which, in spite of all, longs to
believe that in some way or other the universe
resembles the old, beloved, infinite, and infinitely-
creative God that in some way or other "the
old God still lives "—that longing of Spinoza's.
## p. 427 (#457) ############################################
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
427
which is expressed in the words " deus sive natura"
(what he really felt was natura sive deus ").
Which, then, is the proposition and belief in which
the decisive change, the present preponderance of
the scientific spirit over the religious and god-
fancying spirit, is best formulated ? Ought it not
to be: the universe, as force, must not be thought
of as unlimited, because it cannot be thought of
in this way, we forbid ourselves the concept in-
finite force, because it is incompatible with the idea
of force ? Whence it follows that the universe
lacks the power of eternal renewal.
1063.
The principle of the conservation of energy
inevitably involves eternal recurrence.
1064.
That a state of equilibrium has never been
reached, proves that it is impossible. But in
infinite space it must have been reached. Like-
wise in spherical space. The form of space must
be the cause of the eternal movement, and ulti-
mately of all “imperfection. "
That “energy” and “stability” and “immut-
ability” are contradictory. The measure of energy
(dimensionally) is fixed, though it is essentially fluid.
“ That which is timeless " must be refuted. At
any given moment of energy, the absolute condi-
tions for a new distribution of all forces are present;
it cannot remain stationary. Change is part of
## p. 428 (#458) ############################################
428
THE WILL TO POWER.
its essence, therefore time is as well: by this
means, however, the necessity of change has only
been established once more in theory.
.
1065.
A certain emperor always bore the fleeting
nature of all things in his mind, in order not to
value them too seriously, and to be able to live
quietly in their midst. Conversely, everything
seems to me much too important for it to be so
fleeting; I seek an eternity for everything: ought
one to pour the most precious salves and wines
into the sea ? My consolation is that everything
that has been is eternal : the sea will wash it up
again.
1066.
The new concept of the universe. The universe
exists; it is nothing that grows into existence and
that passes out of existence. Or, better still, it
develops, it passes away, but it never began to
develop, and has never ceased from passing away;
it maintains itself in both states.
It lives on
itself, its excrements are its nourishment.
We need not concern ourselves for one instant
with the hypothesis of a created world. The con-
cept "create" is to-day utterly indefinable and
unrealisable; it is but a word which hails from
superstitious ages; nothing can be explained with
a word.
The last attempt that was made to con-
ceive of a world that began occurred quite recently,
## p. 429 (#459) ############################################
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
429
in many cases with the help of logical reasoning,
-generally, too, as you will guess, with an
ulterior theological motive.
Several attempts have been made lately to show
that the concept that “the universe has an infinite
past” (regressus in infinitum) is contradictory:
it was even demonstrated, it is true, at the price
of confounding the head with the tail. Nothing
can prevent me from calculating backwards from
this moment of time, and of saying: "I shall
never reach the end”; just as I can calculate
without end in a forward direction, from the same
moment. It is only when I wish to commit the
error-I shall be careful to avoid it-of reconcil-
ing this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum
with the absolutely unrealisable concept of a finite
progressus up to the present; only when I con-
sider the direction (forwards or backwards) as
logically indifferent, that I take hold of the head
—this very moment-and think I hold the tail :
this pleasure I leave to you, Mr. Dühring! . .
I have come across this thought in other
thinkers before me, and every time I found that
it was determined by other ulterior motives
(chiefly theological, in favour of a creator spiritus).
If the universe were in any way able to congeal,
to dry up, to perish ; or if it were capable of
attaining to a state of equilibrium; or if it had
any kind of goal at all which a long lapse
of time, immutability, and finality reserved for it
(in short, to speak metaphysically, if becoming
could resolve itself into being or into nonentity),
this state ought already to have been reached.
## p. 430 (#460) ############################################
430
THE WILL TO POWER.
But it has not been reached: it therefore
follows. . . . This is the only certainty we can
grasp, which can serve as a corrective to a host
of cosmic hypotheses possible in themselves. If,
for instance, materialism cannot consistently escape
the conclusion of a finite state, which William
Thomson has traced out for it, then materialism
is thereby refuted.
If the universe may be conceived as a definite
quantity of energy, as a definite number of centres
of energy,—and every other concept remains
indefinite and therefore useless,—it follows there-
from that the universe must go through a calcul-
able number of combinations in the great game of
chance which constitutes its existence,
nce. In infinity,
at some moment or other, every possible combina-
tion must once have been realised; not only this,
but it must have been realised an infinite number
of times. And inasmuch as between every one
of these combinations and its next recurrence
every other possible combination would neces-
sarily have been undergone, and since every one
of these combinations would determine the whole
series in the same order, a circular movement of
absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated :
the universe is thus shown to be a circular
movement which has already repeated itself an
infinite number of times, and which plays its
game for all eternity. This conception is not
simply materialistic; for if it were this, it would
not involve an infinite recurrence of identical cases,
but a finite state. Owing to the fact that the uni.
verse has not reached this finite state, materialism
## p. 431 (#461) ############################################
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
431
shows itself to be but an imperfect and pro-
visional hypothesis.
1067
And do ye know what "the universe ". is to my
mind ? Shall I show it to you in my mirror ?
This universe is a monster of energy, without
beginning or end; a fixed and brazen quantity of
energy which grows neither bigger nor smaller,
which does not consume itself, but only alters its
face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, it is a
household without either losses or gains, but like-
wise without increase and without sources of
revenue, surrounded by nonentity as by a frontier.
It is nothing vague or wasteful, it does not stretch
into infinity; but is a definite quantum of energy
located in limited space, and not in space which
would be anywhere empty. It is rather energy
everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves,
at the same time one and many, agglomerat-
ing here and diminishing there, a sea of forces
storming and raging in itself, for ever changing,
for ever rolling back over incalculable ages to
recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms,
producing the most complicated things out of the
most simple structures; producing the most ardent,
most savage, and most contradictory things out
of the quietest, most rigid, and most frozen
material, and then returning from multifariousness
to uniformity, from the play of contradictions back
into the delight of consonance, saying yea unto
itself, even in this homogeneity of its courses and
ages; for ever blessing itself as something which
## p. 432 (#462) ############################################
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THE WILL TO POWER.
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recurs for all eternity,—a becoming which knows
not satiety, or disgust, or weariness :-this, my
Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal
self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold
voluptuousness; this, my “Beyond Good and
Evil,” without aim, unless there is an aim in the
bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must
by nature keep goodwill to itself,—would you
have a name for my world? A solution of all
your riddles?
Do ye also want a light, ye most
concealed, strongest and most undaunted men of
the blackest midnight ? ---This world is the Will to
Power—and nothing else! And even ye your-
selves are this will to power—and nothing besides !
!
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