There is no such substratum: there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.
The fictitious world of subject, substance, “reason,” etc., is
needed-: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. “Truth” is the will to be master over the
multiplicity of sensations:-to classify phenomena into definite
categories. In this we start from a belief in the “in-itself” of things (we take phenomena as real).
Continual transition forbids us to speak of “individuals,” etc;
the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would know nothing
of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we
see what is at “rest” beside what is in motioll. The same applies
to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of
“empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception
of space. The principle of identity has behind it the
“apparent fact” of things that are the same. A world in a state
of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or
“known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing”
intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated
out of mere appearances but become firm to the extent that this
kind of appearance has preserved life-only to this extent is there
anything like “knowledge”; i.e., a measuring of earlier and later
errors by one another.
Becoming as invention, willing, self-denial, overcoming of oneself: no
subject but an action, a positing, creative, no “causes and effects.”
The truth is that every man himself is a piece of fate; when he thinks he is stirring against fate in the way described, fate is being realized here, too; the struggle is imaginary, but so is resignation to fate — all these imaginary ideas are included in fate… In you the whole future of the human world is predetermined.
To attain a height and bird’s eye view, so one grasps how
everything actually happens as it ought to happen; how every
kind of “imperfection” and the suffering to which it gives rise
are part of the highest desirability..
“Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation.
The “subject” is not something given, it is something added
and invented and projected behind what there is.- Finally, is it
necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even
this is invention, hypothesis.
We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins,
at which we can see no further, e.g., the word “I,” the word “do,”
the word “suffer”:-these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge,
but not “truths.”
Everywhere language sees a doer and a doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the “ego”, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of “being” follows, and is derivative of, the concept of “ego.” In the beginning there is that great calamity of error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity . Today we know that it is only a word.
The “inner world” is full of phantoms … : the will is one of
them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not
explain anything either — it merely accompanies events;
it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error.
Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness some –
thing alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up
the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. …
What follows from this? There are no mental [geistigen]
causes at all.
Men were thought of as ‘free’ so that they could become guilty; consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness.
In this state, your own fullness leads you to enrich everything: whatever you see, whatever you will, you see as swollen, packed, vigorous, overloaded with strength. In this state you transform things until they are mirrors of your own power—until they reflect your perfection. This necessity to transform things into perfection is—art. Even everything that you are not turns into self-enjoyment; in art, human beings enjoy themselves as perfection.
Parmenides said, “one cannot think of what is not”,–we are at the other extreme, and say “what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.”
But, after all, why must we proclaim so loudly and with such
intensity what we are, what we want, and what we do not want? Let us look at this more calmly and wisely; from a higher and more distant point of view. Let us proclaim it, as if among
ourselves, in so low a tone that all the world fails to hear it and
us! Above all, however, let us say it slowly….
There are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads: here, too, “beings” are only introduced by us. . . “Forms of domination”; the sphere of that which is dominated continually growing or periodically increasing and decreasing according to the favorability or unfavorability of circumstances. . . “Value” is essentially the standpoint for the increase or decrease of these dominating centers (“multiplicities” in any case; but “units” are nowhere present in the nature of becoming)—a quantum of power, a becoming, in so far as none of it has the character of “being.”
Two successive states, the one “cause,” the other “effect”: this is false… It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the measure of power of each of them. The second condition is something fundamentally different from the first (not its effect): the essential thing is that the factions in struggle emerge with different quanta of power.
Is “will to power” a kind of “will” or identical with the concept “will”? Is it the same thing as desiring? or commanding? Is it that “will” of which Schopenhauer said it was the “in itself of things”? My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all . . . one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its “whither?”
If we eliminate these additions, no things remain over but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their “effect” upon the same.
In our science, where the concept of cause and effect is reduced to the relationship of equivalence, with the object of proving that the same quantum of force is present on both sides, the driving force is lacking: we observe only results, and we consider them equivalent in content and force.
The victorious concept of “force,” by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power.”
There is no will: there are only treaty drafts of will that are constantly increasing or losing their power.
Through thought the ego is posited; but hitherto one believed
as ordinary people do, that in “I think” there was something of
immediate certainty, and that this “I” was the given cause of
thought, from which by analogy we understood all other causal
relationships; However habitual and indispensable this fiction may
have become by now-that in itself proves nothing against its
imaginary origin: a belief can be a condition of life and nonetheless
be false.
One would have to know what being is, in order to decide
whether this or that is real (e.g., “the facts of consciousness”); in
the same way, what certainty is, what knowledge is, and the Iike.-
But since we do not know this, a critique of the faculty of knowledge
is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself when
it can use only itself for the critique? It cannot even define itself!”
The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary;
perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects,
whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought
and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of “cells”
in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals,
used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command?
My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity.
Pain intellectual and dependent upon the judgment “harmful”:
projected. The effect always “unconscious”: the inferred and imagined
cause is projected, follows in time.
Pleasure is a kind of pain. The only force that exists is of the same kind as that of the will: a commanding of other subjects, which thereupon change.
The continual transitoriness and fleetingness of the subject.
“Mortal soul.” Number as perspective form.
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
The whole surface
of consciousness -consciousness is a surface – has to be kept free from all of
the great imperatives. Be careful even of great words, great attitudes. They
pose the threat that instinct will ‘understand itself’ too early. – – In the
mean time, the organizing, governing ‘idea’ keeps growing deep inside, –
it starts commanding, it slowly leads back from out of the side roads
and wrong turns, it gets the individual qualities and virtues ready, since
at some point these will prove indispensable as means to the whole, –
one by one, it develops all the servile faculties before giving any clue
as to the domineering task, the ‘goal’, the ‘purpose’, the ‘meaning’.
I walk amongst men as the fragments of the future: that future which I contemplate.
And it is all my poetisation and aspiration to compose and collect into unity what is fragment and riddle and fearful chance. And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, and riddle-reader, and redeemer of chance!
To redeem what is past, and to transform every “It was” into “Thus would I have it!”- that only do I call redemption!
mark forshee 