ON SELF-OVERCOMING
ON SELF-OVERCOMING
YOU CALL IT “WILL to truth,” you wisest men, that which impels you and fills you with lust?
A will to the thinkability of all being: thus I call your will!
You would make all being thinkable: for you doubt with a healthy mistrust whether it is already thinkable.
But it shall yield and bend to you! So wills your will. It shall become smooth and serve the spirit as its mirror and reflection.
That is your entire will, you wisest men, as a Will to Power;9 and that is even when you speak of good and evil and of valuations.
You want to create a world before which you can kneel: such is your ultimate hope and drunkenness.
The ignorant, to be sure, the people-they are like a river on which a boat floats along: and in the boat sit the valuations, solemn and disguised.
You put your will and your valuations on the river of becoming; what the people believe to be good and evil betrays to me an old will to power.
It was you, you wisest men, who put such guests in this boat, and gave them grandeur and proud names—you and your ruling will!
The river now carries your boat onward: it must carry it. Small matter if the rough wave foams and angrily resists its keel!
It is not the river that is your danger and the end of your good and evil, you wisest men, but that will itself, the will to power—the unexhausted procreating will of life.
But that you may understand my teaching on good and evil, I shall relate to you my teaching on life and the nature of all the living.
I have followed the living, I walked in the broadest and narrowest paths to learn its nature.
With a hundred-faced mirror I caught its glance when its mouth was shut, so that its eye might speak to me. And its eye spoke to me.
But wherever I found the living, there too I heard the language of obedience. All that lives, obeys.
And this is the second point: he who cannot obey himself is commanded. Such is the nature of the living.
But this is the third thing I heard: that commanding is more difficult than obeying. And not only because the commander bears the burden of all who obey, and because this burden may easily crush him:—
All commanding seemed to me to be an experiment and a risk: and whenever it commands, the living risks itself.
Yes, even when it commands itself, it must still pay for its commanding. It must become the judge and avenger and victim of its own law.
How does this happen! so I asked myself. What persuades the living thing to obey and to command and even to be obedient in commanding?
Listen now to my word, you wisest men! Test in all seriousness whether I have crept into the heart of life itself and into the very roots of its heart!
Wherever I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.
That the weaker shall serve the stronger, to that it is persuaded by its own will, which would be master over what is weaker still: that pleasure alone it is unwilling to forego.
And as the lesser surrenders to the greater that he may have delight and power over the least of all, so even the greatest surrenders himself, and for the sake of power stakes-life.
That is the surrender of the greatest—that they face risk and danger and roll dice for death.
And where there is sacrifice and service and loving glances, there is also the will to be master. By secret paths the weaker slinks into the castle and even into the heart of the more powerful-and there steals power.
And life itself spoke this secret to me. “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must ever overcome itself.
“To be sure, you call it a will to procreate or a drive toward a goal, towards the higher, remoter, more manifold: but all that is one and the same secret.
“I would rather perish than renounce this one thing; and truly, where there is perishing and the falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself-for power!
“That I must be struggle and becoming and goal and conflict of goals: ah, he who divines my will surely divines on what crooked paths it must tread!
“Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I have to oppose it and my love: so my will wills it.
“And even you, knowing one, are only a path and footstep of my will: truly, my will to power even steps on the feet of your will to truth!
“He certainly did not hit the truth who shot at it the doctrine, ‘will to existence’: this will-does not exist!
“For what is not cannot will; but that which is in existence—how could it still strive for existence!
“Only where there is life is there also will: but not will to life, rather—so I teach you—will to power!
“Much is valued more highly than life itself by the living; but out of the valuing itself speaks-the will to power!”—
Thus life taught me once: and thereby, you wisest men, I solve the riddle of your hearts.
Truly, I say to you: unchanging good and evil-do not exist! From out of themselves they must overcome themselves again and again.
With your values and doctrines of good and evil, you exercise power, you valuers: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls.
But a stronger power grows out of your values, and a new overcoming: egg and eggshell break against them.
And he who must be a creator of good and evil: truly, he must first be a destroyer and break values.
Thus the greatest evil belongs with the greatest good: that, however, is the creative good.—
Let us speak of this, you wisest men, even if it be bad. To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.
And let everything break that is able to be broken by our truths! Many a house is still to be built!—
Thus spoke Zarathustra.