Saturday, May 4, 2013

Dionysian, Will to Power, Empowerment

In #211 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche proposes that "genuine philosophers" are "commanders and legislators", who "create values", via the exercise of the Will to Power.  In contrast, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he cites "gift-giving", or "bestowing", depending on the translation, in the chapter titled after it, as the "highest virtue", thereby suggesting the image of a philosopher as a source of Empowerment, and not merely as an exerciser of Power.  If he falls short of that vision in BGE, it is perhaps because there he abstracts Will to Power from the Dionysian context, in which the empowerment of any creator, e. g. the ecstatic state described in Birth of Tragedy, immediately and irresistibly prompts its communication to others.

No comments:

Post a Comment