NIETZSCHE'S WORD: "GOD IS DEAD"

becomes the subjectity of self-consciousness,³ which now brings its essence to light as the will to will. As the will to power, will is the command to more-power. In order for will, in the overpowering of itself, to be able to overcome the level it has reached at a given time, this level must already have been attained, set."Ul"cd, and retained. To secure a given level of power is the condition necessary for intensifying power. However, this necessary condition is not sufficient to ensure that the will is able to will itself, i.e., that a will to be stronger is, that an increase of power is. Will must look into the field of sight, must first open this field, in order that the possibilities from there (possibilities that indicate the way for an increase in power) show themselves in the first place. Will must set such a condition of willing-above-and-beyond-itself. Above all, the will to power must set: conditions for the preservation and increase of power. Part of willing is the setting of these conditions which belong together intrinsically.

Will, in general, amounts to the will to become stronger, the will to grow — and also to will "the means to that end" (The Will to Power, no. 675, from 1887/88).

The essential means are the conditions of the will to power itself that are posited by the will to power itself. Nietzsche calls these conditions "values." He writes (Werke, vol. XIII, "Nachgelassene Werke," § 395, from 1885): "In all will is an esteeming estimation." To esteem means: to constitute and ascertain value. The will to power esteems in that it constitutes the condition of increase and fixes the condition of preservation. In accordance with its essence, the will to power is the will that posits values. Values are the conditions of preservation-increase within the being of beings. The will to power, as soon as it comes to light specifically in its pure essence, is itself the ground and realm for the dispensation of value. The will to power has its ground not in a feeling of lack; rather, it is itself the ground of the most abundant [überreichsten] life. Life means here the will to will. "'Living': that already means 'to esteem'" (loc. cit.).

Since will is the overpowering of itself, no richness [Reichtum] of life will satisfy it. It has its power in overreaching [im Überreichen] — namely, in reaching over its own will. Thus it, as the same, is constantly coming back unto itself as the Same. The mode in which beings (whose essentia is the will to power) in their entirety exist, their existentia, is the "eternal return of the same." The two fundamental terms of Nietzsche's metaphysics, "will to power" and "eternal return of the same," determine beings in their being in accordance with the perspectives which have guided metaphysics since antiquity, the ens quo ens in the sense of essentia and existentia.

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