with obedience." What Nietzsche calls Züchtung (training, discipline) he ranks high for this reason: it increases strength—untrained men being weak, wasteful, inconstant.[1] He even sees the higher meaning of asceticism from this point of view, however hostile he is to it in other ways.[2] Why did a mediæval baron on occasion bow before a saint—not merely one of the Franciscan type, but the sterner sort as well, above all one of the sterner sort? Because, Nietzsche answers, however strong his own will to power, he recognized in the saint a kindred will to power, though taking a different turn.[3] The baron conquered others, the saint conquered himself, laid a strong hand on the natural impulses welling up in him—and the baron might well ask from his own experience, which was the greater victory and showed the greater power? Nietzsche says that the feeling of power has hitherto reached its highest point in continent priests and hermits (for example, among the Brahmans).[4] Further, it is possible not only to control "natural impulses"; we can triumph over suffering and pain. Nietzsche uses the word "tyrannize" on one occasion. A measure of the power of the will is how much opposition, pain, torture it can bear and turn to account.[5] It is one of the characteristic marks of the most spiritual, i.e., strongest, men, the great individuals on whom Nietzsche sets his heart, that they practise hardness against themselves: "it is their pleasure to subdue themselves, asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct with them."[6]
Indeed, virtue in general finds its definition with Nietzsche in terms of strength—and after all this is only returning to ancient usage. Virtue for him is literally virtus, ἀρετή, Italian Renaissance virtù, i.e., strong excellence of some sort, manly
- ↑ Will to Power, § 398. Yet John Dewey speaks of Nietzsche as "a rebel against any philosophy of regimentation and subordination" (Atlantic Monthly, February, 1916, p. 254).
- ↑ He devotes one of the Essays of Genealogy of Morals to the question, "What do Ascetic Ideals signify?"
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 51.
- ↑ Werke, XI, 253, § 229 (he remarks here that the reabsorption of the semen into the blood makes the strongest nourishment, and stimulates to an extraordinary degree the impulse for mastery, as also the craving for something contradictory and opposed on which the impulse may expend itself).
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 113; Will to Power, § 382.
- ↑ The Antichristian, § 57.
