narrower relations and were born of numberless errors.[1] Moreover, it is an aim for the totality of humanity that is wanted; it is humanity as a whole that needs to be organized. What is the ideal that may make an aim, a goal, and a principle of organization?[2]
Before giving Nietzsche's actual answer to this question, a word may perhaps properly be said as to the general logic of his procedure. In the first place, he remembers that it is an interregnum in which we live—hence we cannot be dogmatic, can only propose: "we are experiments, we wish to be."[3] He is simply convinced in general that the future (future possibilities) must regulate our valuations—that we cannot seek the laws of our actions behind us.[4] Secondly, the end or goal is not given to us. There is no absolute command, saying "so and so thou must choose," there is none from metaphysics and there is none from science: science indicates the flow of things, but not the goal.[5] Once with an ideal, science may tell us how to reach it; science also gives us presuppositions (the general nature of existence) with which an ideal must correspond—but it does not fix the ideal itself.[6] Herbert Spencer's picture of the future, for instance, is not a scientific necessity, it simply indicates a wish born of present ideals.[7] Indeed, thirdly, this realm of ends is a field where the ordinary categories of true and false do not apply. In the final analysis, an end or goal or ideal is not a reality, an object to which thought must conform, but a something projected by the mind and set (made objective) by the will. We make ends, goals, ideals, they are a proof of our creative power. When we have set them, there are real conditions of attaining them, and these we do not make; we have to discover them, here we are bound, and science
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 335, § 178.
- ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 880 (a substitute for morality through will to our end, and hence to the necessary means).
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 453; cf. § 164. Nietzsche regards past moralities as really built on hypothesis more or less; but as man's mind was too weak and unsure of itself to take an hypothesis as such and at the same time make it regulative, faith (Glaube) was necessary (Werke, XIII, 139, § 321).
- ↑ Will to Power, § 1000; cf. Werke, XIII, 342, § 984.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 320, § 155; cf. Will to Power, § 583; Werke, XII, 357, § 672.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 453; Werke, XII, 357, § 672.
- ↑ Werke, XIII, 80, § 155.
