[size=95]If Nietzsche’s solitary account of the fundamental will of life, will to power, is ever to persuade and become as pervasive as Spinoza’s once solitary account [of “the fundamental life drive” as “self-preservation”, which Nietzsche’s account is to replace], it will, presumably, likewise depend on auditors with shared experiences.
[…] This [Joyous Science 349] is the only time Nietzsche names will to power in this whole Book [Book Five] addressed to science, but it is hardly a casual occasion: will to power is the rival of the view that took over modern science and grounded modern politics.
[…]
The Joyous Science Book Five is, in its own way, a repetition of the pattern of insight and affirmation present in Nietzsche’s two previous books [TSZ and BGE]. […] This most programmatic aphorism on will to power [BGE 36] sets the direction for the investigation of the fundamental phenomenon carried out most extensively in notes which Nietzsche’s breakdown left unorganized and unpublished. But Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s elaborate vehicle for reporting this fundamental discovery and its consequences, had already set out the issue in a way Nietzsche never abandoned—a way that explains the extreme economy of all references to the will to power in the post-Zarathustra books. After the poetic portrayal of Zarathustra’s preparation for the discovery of life’s secret (“The Dancing Song,” Z 2.10), “On Self-Overcoming” (Z 2.12) extends a private and urgent invitation to “you who are wisest”: they are to undertake with him the vast new set of investigations which test the truth of what life revealed to him, that it can be fathomed as will to power.* A fundamental philosophical teaching can only take root the way Spinoza’s did (JS 349): as the insight of a solitary, it can only become persuasive if the solitary can entice those whose kinship with it impels them to confirm it or refute it through their own investigations.
[Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, pp. 334, 335, 338 and 351.][/size]
- Lampert’s footnote: “I analyzed these crucial chapters in Nietzsche’s Teaching.”
“The Dancing Song” is the 32nd chapter of TSZ’s 66 chapters (not counting Part Four, and counting “The Seven Seals” as seven chapters); “On Self-Overcoming” is the 34th. And though Lampert does not tend to put much emphasis on it, the 33rd is “The Grave-Song”, in which Zarathustra rediscovers his will. So in the 32nd, Life implies to him that she can be fathomed; in the 33rd, Zarathustra fathoms himself (discovering his will as his deepest ground); and by the 34th, he has found this ground to be the deepest ground of all life. So the ‘generalisation’ from personal truth to universal truth occurs between the 33rd and 34th chapters, i.e., exactly in the middle of the book.
[size=95]Nietzsche’s method, his way in to the fundamental problem of “the way of all beings” (Z 2.12), begins with one’s own being—as unknown but as more knowable: “Many drives struggle to predominate in me. In this I am the image of everything living and I explain this to myself.” Nietzsche explains this to others in the methodological rigor of Beyond Good and Evil §36, a lengthy Versuch [attempt, experiment, or essay] which begins with the unknown self, and by a strict “conscience of method” moves to what must be posited about oneself, about “our entire instinctual life,” and from there to what must be posited about “all organic functions,” and finally about “all efficient force univocally.”
[Lampert, ibid., pp. 350-51.][/size]