HENRY McDONALD
400
Nietzsche usually used the term, 'Will to Power," to connote
the tendency of life forms to struggle with and dominate other
life forms. But he didn't conceive of such domination in
Darwinian terms. On the contrary, the genesis of the term is as–
sociated with Nietzsche's realization that life was
not
a struggle for
survival. Accordingly, those who exemplify the Will to Power
most fully are-as tender Nietzscheans rightly point out-the
artist, philosopher, and saint.
Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power cannot be under–
stood apart from his distinction between two different types of
morality. The first type he regarded as a straightforward, healthy
expression of the Will to Power, associating it with aristocratic,
ruling classes and creative thinkers and artists; it was an "active,"
"master" morality, a "creator" morality, a morality founded on
the affirmation of "good" and the positing of "bad" as that which
differs from the good. What is "bad," in this perspective, is de–
pendent on what is "good," which can in turn be defined as an
action or deed expressing the Will to Power. The second type of
morality, sometimes referred to as "slave morality," Nietzsche
regarded as a twisted, "resentful" expression of the Will to Power,
associating it with metaphysical, especially Christian dualism
and all protest movements, democratic, socialistic, or fascistic.
This morality of
ressentiment
was a morality founded on negation,
on the positing of "evil" and the construction of "good" as the op–
posite of evil. In such a perspective, the act of rejection, the posit–
ing of evil, comes first. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, many re–
active moralities of
ressentiment
have historically labelled "evil"
what active, master moralities posited as "good." Here we see the
origin of Nietzsche's invocation that we affirm "evil"; he means
the evil which modern, reactive morality has associated with
both the sensuous sphere of nature and the cultural realm of his–
tory.
Judged from the standpoint of Nietzsche's later work, the
Schopenhauerian analysis of
The Birth of Tragedy
is strongly in–
fected with elements of a "reactive" morality. The notion that
there is a metaphysical (Dionysian) sphere lying behind the
phenomenal (Apollonian) world of appearance is indicative of a
morality that has fashioned its concept of good out of what is "not
evil"; its concept of truth out of what is "not false"; and its concept
of beauty out of what is "not merely sensuous." Only through
