Assuming that our world of desires and passions
is the only thing “given”
as real,

that we cannot get down or up
to any “reality” except
the reality of our drives
(since thinking is only a relation between these drives)

– aren’t we allowed to make the attempt
and pose the question
as to whether something like this “given”
isn’t enough

to render the so-called… material world
comprehensible as well?

…I mean it might allow us
to understand the mechanistic world
as belonging to the same plane of reality
as our affects themselves –,
as a primitive form of the world of affect,
where everything
is contained in a powerful unity
before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process.

We would be able to understand the mechanistic world
as a kind of life of the drives,
where all the organic functions
(self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism)
are still synthetically bound together
– as a pre-form of life?

…Enough: we must venture the hypothesis
that everywhere “effects” are recognized,
will is effecting will
– and that every mechanistic event
in which a force is active
is really a force and effect of the will.

– Assuming, finally,
That we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives
as the organization and outgrowth
of one basic form of will
(namely, of the will to power,
which is my claim);

assuming we could trace
all organic functions back to this will to power
and find that it even solved
the problem of procreation and nutrition
(which is a single problem);
then we will have earned the right
to clearly designate
all efficacious force as:
will to power.

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 36

Just yesterday I wrote about a view of the future which a friend offered on the basis of his “feeling”. I and everyone else often speaks of what we believe to be the case due to what we have felt or are feeling. Perhaps this is a Freudian slip revealing that we’ve thought very little or perhaps not at all about what we have to say.  Well, we do seem to get through much of our lives without a great deal of thought!

Today once again I read another section drawing attention to the always changing bodily state of inclinations, drives, urges, some rising to consciousness, most below the surface of awareness. This waxing, waning, competing, felt states we call our “feelings.” The ones we know most intimately: the desire for nourishment (hunger); to extend ourselves beyond the finality of our one life, to procreate (sex). In this descriptive thought experiment Nietzsche is insightful to say that the desire for nutrition and sex amount to the same thing, to extend one’s life.

The what-if conjecture is this: consider the possibility that the tides of emotion, the changing bodily states, that sleep does not pacify, might be the common condition of all things…

This possibility seems so radical that it is hard to imagine inanimate stuff, say a single atom of oxygen, or a molecule of water (two hydrogen and one oxygen) are as dynamic for their own level, as am I, seated with fingers on a keyboard, staring at the glowing white screen, as words “appear.” The idea proposed is all things have a life, so to speak, or in Nietzsche’s words,- synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life.

Assuming the likelihood of his hypothesis, what difference would this make in my attitude toward the inanimate world or the external world that heretofore I had assumed to be nothing more than mechanical relationships. As an example outside of our backdoor, powder coated aluminum deck railing, is attached to the Trex deck boards with steel screws, etc., etc.. Materials are mechanically in relationship, full stop. Nothing more need be taken into account.

Nietzsche suggests that another possibility could be more fundamental. Every element strives to accomplish a full expression of it’s nature, a thrust toward every other existing element within it’s space and time in order to express/impress it’s nature. The term which Nietzsche coined: will-to-power.

If I adopted this assumption upon examining the world, what might I discover?

How different, albeit slowly, would things seem?