“WILL to Truth”
you call it, you learned ones,
which compels you to become so focused?

~*~
Will for the thinkableness of all being:
thus would I characterize your will!

All being you want to make thinkable:
because you secretly doubt with good reason
whether being is already thinkable…
But it shall accommodate and bend itself to you!
So wills your will.

Being shall become “smoothed”
and subject to the (your) spirit,
as its mirror and reflection.
That is your entire agenda,
you most clever ones,
as a Will to Power;
so it is when you speak of good and evil,
and of estimates of value.

You want to create a world before
which you can bow the knee:
such is your ultimate hope and ecstasy.

~*~
The ignorant, to be sure,
the people
— they are like a river
on which a boat floats along:
and in the boat sit
the (your) estimates of value,
solemn and disguised.

Your will and your valuations
you have put on the river of becoming;
it looks to me like
that old Will to Power,
that is believed by the people
as good and evil.

It was you, you wonks,
who put such guests in this boat,
you assigned them distinguished, respectable names
— you and your ruling Will!

Onward the river
now carries your boat: it must carry it.
A small matter if the rough wave foams
and angrily resists its keel!

~*~
Do not fear the river as a danger
and the end of your good and evil,
you shrewdest ones:
but that Will itself,
the Will to Power
— the everlasting, procreating life-will.

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Part II Self-surpassing, page 111

This passage is midway the story of Zarathustra, a literary device useful to Nietzsche. Zarathustra, a hermit philosopher leaves behind his solitude, walks into the village and engages the townspeople. Zarathustra reminds me of Socrates the stone-mason turned philosopher who strolled about the Athenian public market space. Socrates posed questions which were taboo, questions about values and authority. Socrates was accused of impiety which was equivalent being labeled anti-patriotic. Socrates was given a choice between exile or death.

This passage impresses me as the lynch-pin of what Nietzsche has to say. While reading and contemplating these prophetic lines written in 1885, I reflected upon Trumpism, the metamorphosis of the Republican Party into a nascent pro-Nationalist movement. I thought about the theoreticians, individuals as well as the uber-rich funded think-tanks that laid the ground work for the bulldozing of democracy, razing of the Constitution. Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, etc., etc., came to mind.

Nietzsche-Zarathustra indicates that the real issue is not truth. It’s not even power, that seductive addiction of every political party since the beginning of recorded history.

The entire magillah, or to use another idiom, the “whole enchilada” amounts to Will itself, the absolute proclivity of life, that life always surpasses itself.

And “this too shall pass.” The point somehow is not comforting.

More tomorrow!

*I have exercised a writer’s freedom to substitute contemporary terms for some of the obsolete language in the translation.

Hey wait! There’s always enough time for a tune! This one is an anthem of resistance. Livin’ On A Prayer by Bon Jovi.