consciousness: we see the general, the communicable with greater distinctness than the altogether individual and specific (e.g., our individual acts and experiences, which may be incommunicable).[1] But consciousness is not an end in itself, but a means to the heightening of power.[2] ee Nietzsche even suggests that there may be an oligarchy in the mind itself, there being not necessarily one subject there, as we commonly think, but several, the play and struggle between them making the hidden basis of our thinking and consciousness—or, to use the physical terms, there may be an aristocracy of cells, with vassals more or less obedient.[3]
Nietzsche has interesting reflections on will to power as involving pleasure and pain—pleasure resting on the increase of power, pain consisting in the feeling of weakness[4]—but I must merely refer to them. ff
Will to power also lies behind thought or philosophy, as already explained. It too is a kind of appropriation, mastery. Thinking is only a sublimated action of the same forces manifested in the amœba. Man seeks to turn all that is into something like himself, to make it thinkable, visible, feelable—he subjects it to categories and turns it into his own substance, as the amœba does foreign material into its own body.[5] gg
There is only one higher expression of the will to power and that is in the saint (in the nobler meaning of the term), the hero-saint, who does not turn his back on the world, but impresses the image of his highest thought upon it and transforms it—who knows, thinks, only to love and in love to act, to create. hh
So does Nietzsche interpret the whole gamut of things in terms of power and will to it. ii
