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It’s that time of the year again. Merry Christmas to Everyone!
I’m sure you’re wondering where I’ve been for the past few weeks. Well, to be perfectly honest, I’ve been a bit listless. The frenzy of personal issues and mind-disorienting difficulties, on top of the never-shortening daily agenda, momentarily drained my bandwidth. But I’m fine now, and I wanted to get these last decorations up, and then I have a few more to do at the house. I do have a few things left to buy, though. Here is the last of the year, and I haven’t even gone on a proper spending spree. Hah!
I hope you all enjoy this little blog. I think it’s pretty funny. I’ll try to remember to put a new one up each day.
Time for some philosophical meandering, as the exposition underneath illustrates:
As a Nietzschean, I have always understood that there is no inherent value to be found in this world. That the value is placed externally, by the human will, when human wills are aligned. That morality is a human-constructed system that maintains the status quo and accords human beings pre-eminence.
However, this does not mean that there are no ‘higher values’ to be pursued. On the contrary, I think we should all strive to live our lives in a manner that accords greatness. To do otherwise is to deny the reality of our times and to cower in the face of uncertainty and fear. In this pursuit, I believe it is important to understand the history of the human condition, the reality that we are all prisoners of our own time and place, and the value of transcendent ideals. In this pursuit, I believe it is important to understand the history of the human condition, the reality that we are all prisoners of our own time and place, and the value of transcendent ideals.
With that in mind, I propose that we can use Nietzsche’s writings to enrich our understanding of what it means to be human in a meaningful, transcendent and long-lasting manner. I have therefore undertaken a study of Nietzsche’s work and I would like to present some of the most salient features of it to you, with the hopes that you will come to understand the man, the times and the philosophy he espoused.
We shall begin, however, with a quick look into the concept of the Will to Power.
❘༻The Will To Power༺❘
Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power, as he used it in the development of his philosophy, is an intricate concept, but one that can be distilled to its very essence, as it were.
The Will to Power is an expression of a conscious, individual will, a willful desire for a certain state of being. It is an ontological, rather than an ethical concept. The ethical concern of the Will to Power would be with what one is willing to sacrifice to achieve the Will to Power. A more precise definition is difficult to provide, due to the fact that this is an unstable concept in the first place, and one which veers away from universal applicability. This is not to say, however, that the concept has to be vague and indeterminate.
The Will to Power is a human will, and therefore a specific human will. The concept cannot be divorced from the specific human wills that are used as a substrate to create it, nor can it be divorced from the biological body in which such a will is realized. The Will to Power is not some external force field, but rather a human-specific mode of energy.
The Will to Power is not the same thing as the will. The will is the mechanism through which a human being directs his or her energy toward a particular end. The Will to Power, on the other hand, is an energy itself, a particular manifestation of a human’s will. The Will to Power is always a power-law, always has a magnitude, and therefore cannot be willed into non-existence by a human being.
This is why the Will to Power is eternal in the sense that it cannot be destroyed. It is always present to some degree in all things that live. This is also why the Will to Power is so difficult to define, and so difficult to pin down.
As Nietzsche noted, the Will to Power is an elusive and somewhat paradoxical concept. The Will to Power can be understood only in relation to its manifestations.
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12/25/2021
11:32 AM
