OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
witnessed the completion of Western metaphysics in Nietzsche, the lucid self-certainty of subjectity has proved to be the justification by the will to power in accordance with the justice that prevails in the being of beings.
Nietzsche, in an early and more widely known piece (the second untimely observation, "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life"), already replaced the objectivity of historical knowledge with "justice" (section 6). But otherwise he was silent on the topic. Not until the decisive years 1884-85, when the "will to power" stood before his thoughtful eye as the fundamental trait of beings, did he write down two thoughts about "justice," without publishing them.
The first note (1884) is entitled "The Ways of Freedom." It runs: "Justice as the manner of thinking which builds, eliminates, annihilates out of value-estimation; the highest representative of life itself" (Werke, vol. XIII, "Nachgelassene Werke," § 98).
The second note (1885) states: "Justice, as the function of a power that sees far and wide, that sees past the narrow perspectives of good and evil, therefore has a wider horizon of interest: the intention to preserve something that is more than this or that person" (Werke, vol. XIII, "Nachgelassene Werke," § 158).
A meticulous explication of these thoughts would exceed the bounds of the reflection attempted here. Here let it suffice to point to the essential area where justice, as thought by Nietzsche, belongs. To prepare to understand the justice that Nietzsche has in mind, we must exclude all the ideas about justice that come from Christian, humanist, Enlightenment, bourgeois, and socialist morality. For Nietzsche does not at all understand morality as something determined in the first place within the ethical and juridical realms. Rather, he thinks morality on the basis of the being of beings in their entirety, i.e., on the basis of the will to power. What is just [das Gerechte] is in accordance with what is right [dem Rechten]. However, what is right is determined on the basis of that which is in being as a being. That is why Nietzsche says (Werke, vol. XIII, "Nachgelassene Werke," § 462, from 1883): "Right = the will to make a momentary power relation obtain eternally. To be satisfied with that power relation is the pre-condition. Everything venerable is called in to let what is right appear to be eternal."
Parallel to this is a note from the following year: "The problem of justice. The first and most powerful thing is precisely the will and strength to overpower. The ruler establishes "justice" only afterward, which means, he measures things in accordance with his own measure. If he is very powerful, he can go very far in recognizing and letting alone the individual who is
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