Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 16:43:03 -0700 From: "George L. Sherwood" <search-research-AT-worldnet.att.net> Subject: Re: Does lifting weights to increase muscle power increases Nietzsche's Nietzsche's *Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks* recently crystallized his meaning for me of the Will to Power. The Will to Power is the free spirit who has come to know how the love of his amor fati is the law he must obey, and it is his alone. ("We understand fate as the principle that guides us in our unconscious activity" HKA 68.) Our "stillest hour" is when we know without words, know through instinct, as an animal does. ("He is *unable* to do anything other than translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance: this art of transfiguration *is* precisely philosophy" JS O3.) This is how we are animal. Intuition rules and carries us to ever newer heights away from words and reason, into the Dionysion. Morality is a set of words used to define in Apollonian terms what life should be, but simply because it uses words it cannot know, because by relying on words it has already lost its Will to Power. Exercise and nutrition are important lest we fall the way of the artist: "The ceaseless desire to create and looking to the outside on the part of the artist prevents him from becoming more beautiful and better as a person, from creating *himself*--unless his ambition is great enough to compel him to show himself as equal to the growing beauty and greatness of his works in his life with other people as well. In any case he has only a certain amount of energy: whatever he uses to work on *himself*, how could this be used for his *work*?-- and vice versa" (AOM 102). So it would depend on what one's art is. But if we need more and more stimulation it is because we avoid our "stillest hour" and our Will to Power, we have not yet the courage to face our subconscious and all it may spit out of the sea. btw, I intentionally neglected to quote from *Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks* only because I wonder first if anyone else has read it yet. Hope so. George --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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