Thursday, June 6, 2013

Bestowing and Will to Empower

In 'Of the Bestowing Virtue', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche asserts that the "highest virtue is a bestowing virtue."  Now, 'bestow' is closer to 'enhance' than it is to 'compel'.  Thus, the underlying process in this explicitly paradigmatic case is more appropriately 'Will to Empower' than 'Will to Power'.  Furthermore, since the bestow-receive relation does not easily reduce to a command-obey one, the latter inadequately interprets the structure of the fundamental Power-relation of Nature, despite Nietzsche's formulations to the contrary, e. g. in 'Of Self-Overcoming', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and #19 of Beyond Good and Evil.  That shortcoming suggests that his more militaristic imagery does not necessarily do justice to the concepts that he uses it to represent.

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