Theory of chance.

The soul,
a selective and self-nourishing entity,
extremely shrewd and perpetually creative
(this creative force is usually overlooked!)
is conceived only as passive.

To recognize the active force, the creative force
among the contingencies:
chance itself is only the clash
of creative impulses.

–excerpt The Will To Power, II, bk. 4, §518 By Friedrich Nietzsche

For the well educated, who is not tempted to dismiss the possibility of “a soul?”  There is no evidence of anything that endures of the personality after the cease of brain activity.  Of course one is free, to entertain unjustified belief in a force field that leaves the body at the time of death, as the ancients believed.  The death scene of Socrates in the Phaedo is a description of the commonly held belief. A few minutes before dying Socrates is asked by a close friend, “How shall we bury you?”  The wry answer, “Anyway that you please.”  What is to be done with his body is unimportant to dying Socrates.  His soul, his essence will have departed his corpse.

Nietzsche suggests that we may think of soul as the life-force within each of us that plays with chance, that experiments with the possibilities that circumstance presents…  Each of us has infinite potential to create a world, or better said, to meaningfully change the world which we inherited by virtue of being born.

What is chance?  Chance is like a big box of crayola crayons.  What color will I choose next?  It is a matter of judgment is it not, that is, some calculation and a great deal of raw instinct, to step-over-the-edge to pick the bight yellow one…  Choosing is resolving the clash of possibilities.

Let us continue coloring, you and I!

Do you work with broken crayons?

Maybe you are unhappy with the form or the colors of what you have just done?

Well, go ahead and start again.  No effort (lesson) is wasted.

We fail often, only to begin again.