ABSTRACT
If Nietzsche is concerned to establish that the world and life in this world (our own existence included) are not to be conceived in any of the ways considered in the previous chapter, he is no less intent upon arriving at a more adequate conception of them; and while he has relatively little to say about them in the works he published, his notes amply indicate both his confidence that his efforts along these lines were on the right track, and at least the outlines of their results. ‘The victorious concept “force,” ‘he writes, ‘by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power” ’ (WP 619). Availing himself of the former notion, he argues that if it is modified along the latter lines, the result is an interpretation of life and the world which fares much better under critical scrutiny than do those he attacks. Thus he advances the hypothesis that ‘the world defined and determined according to its “intelligible character,” ’ and all ‘life’ along with it, is ‘the “will to power” and nothing else’ (BGE 36). Characterizing ‘this world’ as ‘a monster of energy’ which ‘does not expend itself but only transforms itself and so is ‘eternally self-creating’ and ‘eternally self-destroying,’ his proffered ‘solution for all its riddles’ is that ‘this world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!’ (WP 1067).
