Notes on Nietzsche

The 'Will to Power' must be understood both as a term and as it is applied: as a term in means some sort of positive mental energy, and passion for life, in its application Nietzsche distinguishes between uncontrolled Will to Power, as in barbarians and animals (would anthropologists agree with that ?) and sublimated Will to Power. Nietzsche's ideas on sublimated passions are related to Freud's sublimated sexual energy: it is an energy whose cause is not its object. Nietzsche saw in the Greek games a type of warfare, and speculated that this is where the inspiration and motivation for paricipating in the games comes from, further observations convinced him that the sublimation of the warring instinct produced the noble and sublime Greek culture, thus Nietzsche's great insight was not that naked force is all powerful, but sublimated will to power drives noble and sublime instincts.

Morality has two sources, according to Nietzsche. There is the slave morality and the master morality, and the important thing to remember is that Nietzsche doesn't actually wholeheartedly support the master morality, rather he explains how it came to be, however he certainly prefers it to the slave morality. Both moralities come from the experience of those who believe in those moralities: the master morality distinguishes between good and bad, that which is good is that which serves the ruling class (the 'masters') and that which is bad is that which seeks to weaken or overthrow the ruling class; the slave morality distinguishes between good and evil, it begins not with what is good (like the master morality) but out of ressentment, out of what it doesn't like, its initial instinct is for pulling down, not building up, and the good becomes the opposite of this 'evil'. As in most of Nietsches's explanations the emphasis is on the USE to which beliefs are put rather than the objective truth or falsity of those beliefs.