Index
Third Book. the Principles of a New Valuation.
I. The Will to Power in Science—
(a) The Method of Investigation 3
(b) The Starting-Point of Epistemology 5
(c) The Belief in the "Ego." Subject 12
(d) Biology of the Instinct of Knowledge. Perspectivity 20
(e) The Origin of Reason and Logic 26
(f) Consciousness 38
(g) Judgment. True—False 43
(h) Against Causality 53
(i) The Thing-in-Itself and Appearance 62
(k) The Metaphysical Need 74
(l) The Biological Value of Knowledge 96
(m) Science 99
II. The Will to Power in Nature—
1. The Mechanical Interpretation of the World 109
2. The Will to Power as Life—
(a) The Organic Process 123
(b) Man 132
3. Theory of the Will to Power and of Valuations 161
III. The Will to Power As Exemplified in Society and
in the Individual
1. Society and the State 183
2. The Individual 214
IV. The Will to Power in Art 239
Fourth Book. Discipline and Breeding.
I. The Order of Rank—
1. The Doctrine of the Order of Rank 295
2. The Strong and the Weak 298
3. The Noble Man 350
4. The Lords of the Earth 360
5. The Great Man 366
6. The Highest Man as Lawgiver of the Future 373
II. Dionysus 388
III. Eternal Recurrence 422
For the history of the text constituting this volume I would refer readers to my preface to The Will to Power, Books I, and II., where they will also find a brief explanation of the actual title of the complete work.
In the two books before us Nietzsche boldly carries his principle still further into the various departments of human life, and does not shrink from showing its application even to science, to art, and to metaphysics.
Throughout Part I. of the Third Book we find him going to great pains to impress the fact upon us that science is as arbitrary as art in its mode of procedure, and that the knowledge of the scientist is but the outcome of his inexorable will to power interpreting facts in the terms of the self-preservative conditions of the particular order of human beings to which he belongs. In Aphorisms 515 and 516, which are typical of almost all the thought expressed in Part I., Nietzsche says distinctly: "The object is not 'to know,' but to schematise,—to impose as much regularity and form upon chaos as our practical needs require."
Unfamiliarity, constant change, and the inability to reckon with possibilities, are sources of great[Pg viii] danger: hence, everything must be explained, assimilated, and rendered capable of calculation, if Nature is to be mastered and controlled.
Schemes for interpreting earthly phenomena must be devised which, though they do not require to be absolute or irrefutable, must yet favour the maintenance of the kind of men that devises them. Interpretation thus becomes all important, and facts sink down to the rank of raw material which must first be given some shape (some sense—always anthropocentric) before they can become serviceable.
Even the development of reason and logic Nietzsche consistently shows to be but a spiritual development of the physiological function of digestion which compels an organism to make things "like" (to "assimilate") before it can absorb them (Aph. 510). And seeing that he denies that hunger can be a first motive (Aphs. 651-656), and proceeds to show that it is the amba's will to power which makes it extend its pseudopodia in search of what it can appropriate, and that, once the appropriated matter is enveloped, it is a process of making similar which constitutes the process of absorption, reason itself is by inference acknowledged to be merely a form of the same fundamental will.
An interesting and certainly inevitable outcome of Nietzsche's argument appears in Aph. 516, where he declares that even our inability to deny and affirm one and the same thing is not in the least necessary, but only a sign of inability.
The whole argument of Part I. tends to draw[Pg ix] science ever nearer and nearer to art (except, of course, in those cases in which science happens to consist merely of an ascertainment of facts), and to prove that the one like the other is no more than a means of gaining some foothold upon the slippery soil of a world that is for ever in flux.
In the rush and pell-mell of Becoming, some milestones must be fixed for the purposes of human orientation. In the torrent of evolutionary changes pillars must be made to stand, to which man can for a space hold tight and collect his senses. Science, like art, accomplishes this for us, and it is our will to power which "creates the impression of Being out of Becoming" (Aph. 517).
According to this standpoint, then, consciousness is also but a weapon in the service of the will to power, and it extends or contracts according to our needs (Aph. 524). It might disappear altogether (Aph. 523), or, on the other hand, it might increase and make our life more complicated than it already is. But we should guard against making it the Absolute behind Becoming, simply because it happens to be the highest and most recent evolutionary form (Aph. 709). If we had done this with each newly acquired characteristic, sight itself, which is a relatively recent development, would also have required to have been deified.
