I had not noticed your thread yet, heavenly.
I will show you what my superior in Nietzschianiis thinks:
“Is that [the Will to Power] a delusion too?
Probably, but we have to pursue it first to find out.”
[Moody Lawless.]
Let us pursue the will to power, and treat it as a provisional hypothesis.
“One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself—behind oneself… A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength… Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them—it knows itself sovereign.—”
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 54.]
But there are two distinct kinds of skepticism: skepticism of weakness and skepticism of strength. Skepticism of weakness is;
“the incurable wretchedness of a heart which is no longer hard enough for evil or for good, of a broken will which no longer commands, can no longer command.”
[Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 209.]
Skepticism of strength is;
“the skepticism of audacious manliness, which is related most closely to genius for war and conquest and which first entered Germany in the person of the great Frederick. This skepticism despises and yet grasps to itself; it undermines and takes into possession; it does not believe but retains itself; it gives perilous liberty to the spirit but it keeps firm hold on the heart”.
[ibid.]
This last aspect is crucial:
“Bound heart, free spirit.— If one binds one’s heart firmly and imprisons it one can allow one’s spirit many liberties”.
[BGE 87.]
The weakness of the weak skeptic is a weakness of the will: and this will comes from the heart, it is a passion, it is love, eros:
“The decadence [weakness of the will] that besets late modernity […] comprises an assault on beauty itself, as potential objects of erotic attraction [like Nietzsche] are systematically debased. Indeed, if it were no longer possible to “attach one’s heart” to a great human being, in whom one sees reflected one’s own prospects for self-perfection, then one would have no means of redeeming one’s hatred of oneself. The future of humankind as a whole would no longer be warranted, and the teachings of Silenus [that the best thing would be not to exist, and the next-best thing is to die soon] would become wisdom once again.”
[Daniel Conway, Love’s labor’s lost.]
For us, we who affirm life, the worst thing would be to die soon; and the next-worst thing is to die at all. Therefore we affirm the eternal recurrence: we will forever be reborn and return again from destruction, to this identical and self-same life!
Hail Nietzsche!
