On Self-Overcoming

“Will to truth” you call it, you wisest ones, what drives you and makes you ardent?

Will to the thinkability of all that is: that is what I call your will!

All that is you want first to make thinkable: for you doubt, with well-founded mistrust, whether it is already thinkable.

But it shall yield and bend to you! So your will wills it. Smooth it shall become, and subject to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection.

That is your whole will, you wisest ones, as a will to power; and even when you speak of good and evil and of valuations. You still want to create the world before which you can kneel: such is your last hope and intoxication.

The unwise, of course, the people—they are like the river on which a boat floats onward: and in the boat sit the valuations, solemn and masked.

Your will and your values you set upon the river of becoming; what the people believe to be good and evil betrays to me an old will to power.

It was you, you wisest ones, who set such guests in this boat and gave them pomp and proud names—you and your ruling will!

Onward the river now carries your boat: it must carry it. It matters little whether the broken wave foams and angrily contradicts the keel!

It is not the river that is your danger and the end of your good and evil, you wisest ones: but that will itself, the will to power—the unexhausted, begetting will of life.

But so that you may understand my word about good and evil: for that I will tell you yet my word about life and about the nature of all that lives.

I followed what lives, I walked the greatest and the smallest paths, so that I might know its nature.

With a hundredfold mirror I caught its glance even when its mouth was closed: so that its eye might speak to me. And its eye spoke to me.

But wherever I found what lives, there I also heard the speech of obedience. All that lives is something that obeys.

And this is the second thing: he who cannot obey himself is commanded. Such is the nature of what lives.

But this is the third thing I heard: that commanding is harder than obeying. And not only that the one who commands bears the burden of all who obey, and that this burden easily crushes him:—

An experiment and a risk appeared to me in all commanding; and always, when it commands, what lives risks itself in doing so.

Yes, even when it commands itself: even then it must pay for its commanding. It must become judge and avenger and victim of its own law.

How does this happen! so I asked myself. What persuades what lives to obey and command, and in commanding still to practice obedience?

Hear my word now, you wisest ones! Test it seriously, whether I have crept into the heart of life itself, and to the very roots of its heart!

Wherever I found what lives, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the one who serves I found the will to be master.

That the weaker shall serve the stronger, to this it is persuaded by its will, which wants to be master over what is weaker still: this joy alone it does not like to do without.

And as the smaller gives itself up to the greater, so that it may have joy and power over the smallest: so even the greatest gives itself up, and for the sake of power stakes—life.

This is the self-surrender of the greatest: that it is risk and danger and a casting of dice for death.

And where there are sacrifice and services and loving glances: there too is will to be master. On secret paths the weaker steals into the castle, and into the very heart of the more powerful—and steals power there.

And this secret life itself spoke to me. Behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself.

“To be sure, you call it will to begetting or drive to a goal, to the higher, the further, the more manifold: but all this is one, and one secret.

“I would rather go under than renounce this one thing; and truly, where there is going under and the falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for power!

“That I must be struggle and becoming and goal and the contradiction of goals: ah, whoever guesses my will surely guesses too on what crooked paths it must go!

“Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I must be its adversary, and my love’s: so my will wills it.

“And you too, knower, are only a path and footprint of my will: truly, my will to power walks on the feet of your will to truth as well!

“He certainly did not hit the truth who shot at it with the phrase about the ‘will to existence’: this will—does not exist!

“For: what is not cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still will to come into existence!

“Only where there is life is there also will: but not will to life, but—so I teach you—will to power!

“Much is esteemed more highly by the living than life itself; yet out of the esteeming itself speaks—the will to power!”—

Thus life once taught me: and from this, you wisest ones, I solve for you the riddle of your heart as well.

Truly, I tell you: good and evil that would be imperishable—there is no such thing! Out of itself it must overcome itself again and again.

With your values and words of good and evil you exercise power, you valuers: and this is your hidden love and the gleaming, trembling, and overflowing of your soul.

But a stronger power grows out of your values, and a new overcoming: on it egg and eggshell break.

And whoever must be a creator in good and evil: truly, he must first be an annihilator and break values.

Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is the creative goodness.—

Let us speak of this, you wisest ones, even though it is bad. Silence is worse; all truths kept silent become poisonous.

And let everything break that against our truths
can—break! There are many houses still to build!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.