File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0004, message 12


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


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