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The Will to Power is a great book. Although it is philosophy; the book isn't written with the consideration of logic. He spares no race, religion of creed, and I felt myself arguing against him as I read. At the same time, he embraces them; offering counterpoints and several different viewpoints. In the end it gave me a new perspective of the era. It's worth a read.

The age of consumerism must surely rank as the epoch of supreme servitude!

Kristen wrote:... Although it is philosophy; the book isn't written with the consideration of logic.

That depends on your definition of logic. I'm certain that for Nietzsche himself, his arguments where entirely logical. It's certainly a matter of perspective.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbs said, "For such is the nature of men that how so ever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance."

Nietsche isn't really useful or enlightening nowadays except as part of an historical survey of philosophy. He was most relevantly made obsolete by Freude and Freude's treatises on ego.

...And now Freude is more or less well out-of-date also.

Nietsche was working before modern psychology, before the discoveries of modern genetics and just immediately after Darwin, before the full impact of Darwinism took hold. So he didn't have the full benefit of those sciences. He seems to describe the will to power as some fundamental essence of Life. Wrong. It's just evolution. What works best survives to reproduce. The structure of the brain is what is passed along.

Probably the science of human power relationships will continue to be probed as the human brain slowly gives up its secrets. People will probably learn that the social part of their brains are 1.26% genetically different in than those in a pack of wolves. After all, like wolves, we're mammals - even the Pope, that annoyingly ever-present uber-mensche and alpha.

Most accounts of Nietsche describe him him as an isolated, disheveled nut scribbling away in the attic. Poor thing.

I'm a great fan of Spinoza whom Nietzche surely had read. Spinoza is a monist - we are all modes in one substance, i.e. Deus siva Natura.

But the individual modes - e.g. a man - has "conatus". All individual modes have a "conatus". An ant has a very ant like conatus. A rock a very rock like conatus.

But conatus - or drive - can be describe in Nietachean terms as a will to power.

Makes sense to me.

"Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087rt4z

There are no facts, only interpretations

I believe he said that not long before he was committed to the Basel mental asylum.

One wonders what the gap is between brilliance and sheer lunacy.

Likewise Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist, all his seminal works were produced in the last couple of years before he was carted off to die in an asylum from syphilitic necrosis. He only had sex twice in his life, the first time as a young man broke his heart & permanently tainted his view of women. The second, decades later was a syphilitic prostitute- where he caught the disease which took first his Christian faith (previously a fervent & prolific writer in the Calvinist line), eventually taking his sanity & his life. As interesting as Nietzsche is, his conection & influence on his niece, Eva Braun- Hitler's de-facto wife, in turn her influence on Hitler & on history- makes him undoubtedly one of the most influential writers of all time.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a great mind, undoubtly.