harmony, instead of a discord and contradiction, of his inner life. "Unfree will" is defined as defect in inhibitory power against stimuli;[1] with power comes free-will (in the legitimate sense of that phrase). Libertinism, laisser aller, is not power, but the antithesis of it: whether practised by an individual in relation to his impulses, or by society in relation to the mass of its members, it is symptomatic of weakness and degeneration—strength is ever in rule, in organization.[2] The decadents of our or any time find their definition (in part) as those who cannot control themselves—this is the meaning of their irritability: all predominantly irritable people belong to the descending line of life—they are impulse merely, have no surplus strength.[3] This holds of the sexual as of other instincts—one who does not have them under control is not a strong man; the artist, Nietzsche holds, is a temperate, often a chaste man, his dominating instinct making him so—one of the regular symptoms of exhausted stock is inability not to respond to the slightest sexual stimulus.[4] Once he speaks of the necessity on occasion of fighting, even knocking out of their senses, impulses, though they are not on that account to be called evil, but only to be downed, made subservient—for power over, not destruction of, the passions is the true aim.[5] The body does best itself when it is best ruled[6]—and the underlying truth is a general one; power is organized and attains its maximum of efficiency and happiness, when higher, stronger power directs it. For culture as for war we need "great leaders, and all education begins
- ↑ Will to Power, § 1020.
- ↑ Ibid., § 122. Cf. the reflection on those whose bad impulses thirst for freedom, whose wild dogs want liberty, Zarathustra, I, viii. Contrary to his usual custom, libertinism of the intellect is once spoken of without disparagement (ibid., § 120), but the thought is much the same as that underlying his use of the assassin-motto, "Nothing is true, everythingis permitted" (see supra, pp. 320, 336).
- ↑ Will to Power, § 737.
- ↑ Ibid., §§ 815, 934; cf. Werke, XIV, 273, § 58, and views of his earlier period as cited, supra, p. 125. Yet Paul Carus can say: "Nietzsche knows nothing of self-control;" he "made himself the advocate of vice and gloried in it;" among the thoughts of George Moore which he might have written is, "I boasted of dissipation" (op. cit., pp. 34, 61, 104). Even The Nation (New York, February 22, 1912) speaks of his denying the validity of any check within ourselves contrary to the primitive instincts and impulses of nature." It is the general ignorance.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 76; Will to Power, § 933.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 81, § 161.
