Nietzsche’s Intensity of Life and Will

by Corry Shores
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The Stoic purports to live according to nature by living indifferently. But, “living – is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living – estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?” (Beyond Good and Evil §9). Thus living is living intensely: forcing differences together to create change. No life without change.

And life does not seek primarily survival: “a living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power,” and self-preservation is merely its accidental byproduct (§13).

Willing is complicated, because when one wills oneself to do something, one commands oneself. But then one is both commander and servant, feeling at once these contrary affects (§19). But “he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase in the sensation of power which accompanies all successes” (§19).

And there is not merely one part of us that is commanded, because our bodies are populated with countless “under-wills” or “under-souls.” One prevails over the rest, and we choose to identify with that winning soul (§19).

Hence willing is intense, because a multitude of competing forces within us battle for supremacy, explicated as willed action.

Creative Analysis

by Corry Shores
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In section 5 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche speaks of philosophers’ dishonesty in believing that they arrive at their conclusions through “cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic,” when instead “at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration.’” We might consider such a hunch as the intuition used to propose and critique necessary and sufficient conditions in conceptual analysis. In other words, we may precisely determine a concept’s significance first by drawing a tentative definition out from our intuition, and further using our intuitive insights to detect the accuracy of our proposed definition and its refinements.

But this “inspiration” is more than an “intuition” for Nietzsche. It is “most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract,” something perhaps more fitting to “the mystics of every rank.” In conceptual analysis, we presume that the concept is already analytically pure, but merely implicit, needing only proper explication to bring it to light. Yet perhaps the intuition or inspiration used for this purpose is more creative and arbitrary than it appears. And if not necessarily, so should it be. For, if the task of philosophers is the creation of concepts, and not merely their exposition, then something more need be expressed than mere definitions. Perhaps a true philosophical concept is one whose significance and development is pushed-and-pulled in many individually viable – but mutually incompatible – directions at once: a confused but explicit concept, one whose implicit intensity is so great that no amount of explicit definitional extension can exhaust its possibilities for unfolding.