Prava corrigere, et recta corroborare, et sancta sublimare

Correcting the false, strengthening the true and elevating the sacred

And do you also know what the world is to me?

Shall I show it to you in my mirror?

This world: a monster of strength, without beginning, without end.

A firm, iron size of strength, which does not become bigger, not smaller, which does not consume itself, but only transforms.

As a whole unchangeably large, a household without expenditures and losses, but likewise without increase, without incomes.

Enclosed by nothing as by its limit.

Nothing blurred. Nothing wasted, nothing infinitely extended.

But as a certain force inserted into a certain space.

And not to a space, which would be empty somewhere, but as force everywhere, as play of forces and force waves.

At the same time one and many, here accumulating and at the same time there diminishing.

A sea of storming and flooding forces in itself, eternally changing, eternally running back, with immense years of return.

With an ebb and flow of its formations, drifting out of the simplest into the most manifold.

Out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest into the most glowing, wildest, most self-contradictory.

And then again returning from the fullness to the simplicity, from the play of contradictions back to the pleasure of unison.

Still affirming itself in this sameness of its courses and years, blessing itself as that which has to come back eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no weariness, no tiredness:

This my Dionysian world of eternal-self-creation, of eternal-self-destruction, this mystery-world of double voluptuousness, this my beyond good and evil, without aim, if in the happiness of the circle does not lie an aim, without will, if a ring does not have good will to itself.

Do you want a name for this world?

A solution for all its riddles?

A light also for you, you most hidden, strongest, most fearless, most midnight?

This world is the will to power - and nothing else!

And also you yourselves are this will to power - and nothing else!

Nietzsche, From the estate of the eighties

These heroic and rapturous lines from Nietzsche's estate, which are quoted with pleasure - here edited for better readability - are, on closer inspection, not a transfiguration of the will to power.

For the will to power is there at best a good will to oneself, which knows no other goal than the circle.

People as will to power - and nothing else actually exist in abundance.

You should recognize them and, tired of them, make them harmless.

We do not want the eternal circulus vitiosus of murder, manslaughter and mutual extinction in ever better filmed wars.

The will to power only leads the world deeper and deeper into the underworld in a downward spiral.

Perhaps the world has been the will to power - and nothing else until now.

High time for a correction:

We want to be more than a will to power that leads us like dancing bears on the ring in the nose willy-nilly in the circle of the fatalistic eternal return of the same.

Rather the will to knowledge - and nothing else suggests itself:

A real will to a long adventurous journey among companions with the goal of the self-knowledge of life.