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"Pleasure"...
Is a feeling of power (presupposing the existence of pain).
658.
(1) The organic functions shown to be but forms of the fundamental will, the will to power,—and buds thereof.
(2) The will to power specialises itself as will to nutrition, to property, to tools, to servants (obedience), and to rulers: the body as an example.—The stronger will directs the weaker. There is no other form of causality than that of will to will. It is not to be explained mechanically.
(3) Thinking, feeling, willing, in all living organisms. What is a desire if it be not: a provocation of the feeling of power by an obstacle (or, better still, by rhythmical obstacles and resisting forces)—so that it surges through it? Thus in all pleasure pain is understood.—If the pleasure is to be very great, the pains preceding it must have been very long, and the whole bow of life must have been strained to the utmost.
(4) Intellectual functions. The will to shaping, forming, and making like, etc.
(b) Man.
659.
With the body as clue.—Granting that the "soul" was only an attractive and mysterious thought,[Pg 133] from which philosophers rightly, but reluctantly, separated themselves—that which they have since learnt to put in its place is perhaps even more attractive and even more mysterious. The human body, in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through, this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent; the body is a more wonderful thought than the old "soul." In all ages the body, as our actual property, as our most certain being, in short, as our ego, has been more earnestly believed in than the spirit (or the "soul," or the subject, as the school jargon now calls it). It has never occurred to any one to regard his stomach as a strange or a divine stomach; but that there is a tendency and a predilection in man to regard all his thoughts as "inspired," all his values as "imparted to him by a God," all his instincts as dawning activities—this is proved by the evidence of every age in man's history. Even now, especially among artists, there may very often be noticed a sort of wonder, and a deferential hesitation to decide, when the question occurs to them, by what means they achieved their happiest work, and from which world the creative thought came down to them: when they question in this way, they are possessed by a feeling of guilelessness and childish shyness. They dare not say: "That came from me; it was my hand which threw that die." Conversely, even those philosophers and theologians, who in their logic and piety found the most imperative reasons for regarding their body as a[Pg 134] deception (and even as a deception overcome and disposed of), could not help recognising the foolish fact that the body still remained: and the most unexpected proofs of this are to be found partly in Pauline and partly in Vedantic philosophy. But what does strength of faith ultimately mean? Nothing!—A strong faith might also be a foolish faith!—There is food for reflection.
And supposing the faith in the body were ultimately but the result of a conclusion; supposing it were a false conclusion, as idealists declare it is, would it not then involve some doubt concerning the trustworthiness of the spirit itself which thus causes us to draw wrong conclusions?
Supposing the plurality of things, and space, and time, and motion (and whatever the other first principles of a belief in the body may be) were errors—what suspicions would not then be roused against the spirit which led us to form such first principles? Let it suffice that the belief in the body is, at any rate for the present, a much stronger belief than the belief in the spirit, and he who would fain undermine it assails the authority of the spirit most thoroughly in so doing!
660.
The Body as an Empire.
The aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (the fight between the cells and the tissues).
Slavery and the division of labour: the higher type alone possible through the subjection of the lower to a function.
Pleasure and pain, not contraries. The feeling of power.
"Nutrition" only a result of the insatiable lust of appropriation in the Will to Power.
"Procreation": this is the decay which supervenes when the ruling cells are too weak to organise appropriated material.
It is the moulding force which will have a continual supply of new material (more "force"). The masterly construction of an organism out of an egg.
"The mechanical interpretation": recognises only quantities: but the real energy is in the quality. Mechanics can therefore only describe processes; it cannot explain them.
"Purpose." We should start out from the "sagacity" of plants.
The concept of "meliorism": not only greater complexity, but greater power (it need not be only greater masses).
Conclusion concerning the evolution of man: the road to perfection lies in the bringing forth of the most powerful individuals, for whose use the great masses would be converted into mere tools (that is to say, into the most intelligent and flexible tools possible).
661.
Why is all activity, even that of a sense, associated with pleasure? Because, before the activity was possible, an obstacle or a burden was done away with. Or, rather, because all action is a process of overcoming, of becoming master of, and of increasing the feeling of power? The pleasure[Pg 136] of thought. Ultimately it is not only the feeling of power, but also the pleasure of creating and of contemplating the creation: for all activity enters our consciousness in the form of "works."
662.
Creating is an act of selecting and of finishing the thing selected. (In every act of the will, this is the essential element.)
663.
All phenomena which are the result of intentions may be reduced to the intention of increasing power.
664.
When we do anything, we are conscious of a feeling of strength; we often have this sensation before the act—that is to say, while imagining the thing to do (as, for instance, at the sight of an enemy, of an obstacle, which we feel equal to): it is always an accompanying sensation. Instinctively we think that this feeling of strength is the cause of the action, that it is the "motive force." Our belief in causation is the belief in force and its effect; it is a transcript of our experience: in which we identify force and the feeling of force.—Force, however, never moves things; the strength which is conscious "does not set the muscles moving." "Of such a process we have no experience, no idea." "We experience as little concerning[Pg 137] force as a motive power, as concerning the necessity of a movement." Force is said to be the constraining element! "All we know is that one thing follows another;—we know nothing of either compulsion or arbitrariness in regard to the one following the other. Causality is first invented by thinking compulsion into the sequence of processes. A certain "understanding" of the thing is the result—that is to say, we humanise the process a little, we make it more "familiar"; the familiar is the known habitual fact of human compulsion associated with the feeling of force.
