28. Will to Power - Nietzsche’s theory of everything and what it means for you. Season finale, Part 3

Welcome to the third and final part of the Will to Joy Season Finale. 

This episode is going to be the most momentous. We wrestle with will to power as it relates to you and to your life. You'll be faced with the most consequential question—that of the value of your own existence.

We track Nietzsche’s break from Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the shift from “will to life” to “will to power,” and the emergence of Dionysus as the figure who dissolves all boundaries: between desire and fulfilment, self and world, necessity and freedom. This isn’t Greek mythology; it’s the psychological architecture of your instincts, your ambitions, and the drives you pretend not to have.

Along the way, we daly with determinism, deflate guilt and regret, and contend with Nietzsche’s most severe test. Your answer shapes the person you are right now and will become—not through choice, but through necessity.

This episode explores the exquisite tension between total acceptance of reality and the irrepressible urge to strive, to overcome, to expand, to change the world. It shows how these opposites form a single dynamic—the Dionysian duality at the heart of life itself.

If you engage wholeheartedly, you’ll come away with a new way of seeing your suffering, your desires, your past, and your future. The depths of Nietzschean thought we'll explore are not just philosophy; they offer an initiation. 

Some lessons, properly learned, cannot be unlearned. 

Some truths can be integrated only by those strong enough to bear them.

In the end, joy is the only goal that justifies itself.

Music: Kate Bush, Nocturn

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Transcript

Quote: “At bottom, it is only the moral god that has been overcome. Does it make sense to conceive a god “beyond good and evil”? Would a pantheism in this sense be possible? Can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and then affirm the process in spite of this?— This would be the case if something were attained at every moment within this process—and always the same.” WP.55

Intro:

Welcome to the third and final part of the Will to Joy season finale, and I think this episode is going to be the most momentous. Today’s episode isn’t a lecture, it’s a showdown. It’s about WTP as it relates to you and to your life. It’s about the most consequential question anyone can face—that of the value of existence itself. 

In what follows, you’ll see how all regret, guilt and shame can and should be banished. How comforting lies—lies everyone believes—are traps. How many of your purported moral failings, your desires, ambitions, your secret envies, are in fact the signal of WTP, an expression of the most fundamental reality within which we are all entangled. You’ll see how the god Dionysus represents a re-enchantment of the world, a sacralisation of the entire universe, and a consecration of your deepest and most life-affirming instincts.

Ultimately, by the end of this episode, you will discover a profound truth about yourself, one that could alter the trajectory of your life forever: whether you can say yes.

Welcome to the third and final part of the Will to Joy season finale, and I think this episode is going to be the most momentous. But before we start, I want to provide a summary of the will to power dynamic as I’ve unfolded it. And in particular I want to clarify a particular term as I’ve been using it thus far: forms. When I say forms compete for existence, remember that by forms I mean ‘patterns of organisation.’ Don’t confuse these with, say, Plato’s forms. Our forms are real, tangible, unlike Plato’s. So let me substitute the word “patterns” instead, which are the entities that really compete for existence—patterns are types.

So, it isn’t the individual rock that “strives” or “competes” in any meaningful sense. Rather, it’s rock as a stable material pattern that has persisted because it fits the physical environment. Its structure survives pressures that would destroy less stable arrangements of matter. In that sense, the pattern “rock” endures because it is the kind of organisation that resists dissolution under the conditions of this planet. And though a tree expresses behaviours that aim at survival and reproduction, it is the survival and reproduction of its replicating pattern of genes towards which it has been directed by evolution. And you consciously strive to survive and flourish, but this is driven by your evolved physiological directedness towards behaviour that promotes the survival and reproduction of your replicating pattern of genes.

So it’s the replicable patterns that lie at the bottom of this struggle. The struggles of species and individual organisms are expressions of this implicit dynamic breaking the surface. 

So with that, to recap:  

Human desire for power is simply the conscious, motivated experience of a species whose physio-psychology has evolved in alignment with the universal logic governing all existence. 

Long before life appeared, the first patterns of organisation condensed out of the flux: molecular arrangements of various kinds. These molecules agglomerated into larger patterns—stars, planets, rock formations, atmospheres. There was no purpose in this. Patterns endured only because they did not readily dissolve under the influence of “local conditions,” meaning the surrounding totality of other patterns. This was the evolution of the stable: a primitive form of selection in which what remains is simply what can remain.

Over billions of years, these molecular patterns churned until chance variation produced a novel molecule capable of replicating itself—probably by attracting atoms into its selfsame pattern. The inherent tendency towards variation meant replicators produced imperfect copies of themselves—sometimes differing in ways significant enough to affect survival chances. Selection favoured those variations that were better suited to endure and replicate; less fit patterns were outcompeted and perished. Fit patterns proliferated but were displaced again and again by even fitter patterns generated through further variation.

Crucially, the most successful patterns were not only those that persisted themselves but those that tended to produce even fitter copies. This created a recursive, self-reinforcing ratchet: selection selecting for patterns that accelerate selection.

Over billions of years this process of runaway fitness enhancement produced complex biological structures—the first forms of life: species of self-replicating organisms whose physiology embodied active strategies for securing the endurance and expansion of their genetic patterns: hunting, feeding, exploring, mating, competing, and dominating—in a word, instinct.

As such lifeforms became more complex through the process of evolution, variations that equipped species with environmental sensitivity, awareness, and sophisticated responsiveness were selected because they increased chances of gene survival and reproduction. This burgeoning sentience culminated in humans as acute, conscious self-awareness.

What humans experience psychologically as insecurity, restless ambition, curiosity, learning, social connection, love, sexual desire, status-anxiety, greed, rivalry, aggression, the craving for esteem, excellence, greater control, and the compulsion to overcome is simply the conscious manifestation of an evolved physiological directedness.

Consciously, it feels like you strive for yourself; but your striving is driven by a motivational architecture shaped to promote the survival and proliferation of your inherited genetic pattern. All motivation is rooted in a blind universal will to become and keep becoming. Everything it reaches for is an expression of power—its conservation, accumulation, and discharge.

Schopenhauer

You may be aware that the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, was the young Nietzsche’s early inspiration. Schopenhauer began as a devotee of that other notable German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and he accepted Kant’s idea that the world we experience is phenomenal—it is filtered and interpreted by our human consciousness, structured by the mind’s categories of space, time, and causality. So the world we experience is a representation, not the thing-in-itself; it’s a projection filtered through our cognitive apparatus. 

Schopenhauer wasn’t content with Kant’s claim that we can never know the thing-in-itself behind appearances. He wanted to know what reality is in itself. He thought that while we know the outer world only as representation, we also have immediate, inner access to one phenomenon—ourselves. And this means there’s one case where we have immediate, non-representational knowledge: our own willing. In willing, I don’t represent my volition—I am it. This for Schopenhauer was the thing in itself in its essential character: will. So for him the world was will and representation, and this is the title of his magnum opus: the world as will and representation.

Schopenhauer was the first to posit a universal will then, and so it is from him that Nietzsche inherited this idea. Indeed you can see the basis for Nietzsche’s division of the world into the Dionysian and the Apollonian here too—but with an artistic-aesthetic gloss rather than the cognitive-rational one of Kant and Schopenhauer: the Dionysian will is the creative impulse, and the Apollonian representation is our creative act. For Nietzsche this is artistic-aesthetic because it’s more than sense making—its meaning making. He writes, “To stamp Becoming with the character of Being—this is the highest Will to Power.” WP.617—this is, of course, exactly what Apollonian consciousness does. It thereby misrepresents the world in its act of representation—but in a way that is useful for life.

Schopenhauer’s will wasn’t the will to power, but the will to life, and in its blind strivings he saw only meaningless struggle, inevitable suffering, and anguish. No final happiness was possible. The conclusions he arrived at were nihilistic and pessimistic—life was an error, it was to be denied. The world was inherently evil. 

Nietzsche soon rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view. He writes in WP.1005: “I grasped that my instinct went into the oppo­site direction from Schopenhauer’s: toward a justification of life, even at its most terrible, ambiguous, and mendacious; for this I had the formula "Dionysian.”

Nietzsche thought that there was something deeply pathological in the fact that a creature born into the world—born of the world—could denigrate it, and even decry its own existence. As if a leaf could hate the tree of which it is a part. This self-mortifying tendency can even be seen, personally, in microcosm: the human seems to be the only organism that frequently hates its own body—that hates itself!

Nietzsche came to see Schopenhauer’s will to life as a misunderstanding—life and its drive to survive is only a side effect, a consequence of the activity of a more fundamental drive: the will to power. He goes on: “Schopenhauer’s interpre­tation of the “in-itself” as will was an essential step; but he did not understand how to deify this will: he remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal. Schopenhauer was still so much subject to the dominion of Christian values that, as soon as the thing-in-itself was no longer “God” for him, he had to see it as bad, stupid, and absolutely reprehensible. He failed to grasp that there can be an infinite variety of ways of being different, even of being god.”

Nietzsche inherits Schopenhauer’s insight that beneath appearances lies a primal will, but he reverses its valuation. Where Schopenhauer saw only futile striving and suffering, Nietzsche sees creation, differentiation, limitless power, and joy in the very act of struggle. Nietzsche deifies the will, this will which is necessarily directed towards power, and that deified entity is Dionysus.

Will to Power’s Eidolon: Dionysus
Dionysus is no benign father god; he is not a just ruler and judge. He does not govern the world from above; he is the world-process itself—the will to power made flesh, the flux incarnate. Will to power, that universal will willing its own willing, is felt in sentient creatures like us as desire. 

As the personification of will to power, Dionysus is desiring desiring desiring. He is desire and all that he desires is himself. 

Now, because Dionysus desires only himself, he is always getting what he desires; but because he is desire, what he gets is desire itself. He is eternally getting what he wants, and wanting what he gets, and what he gets is more and more wanting. In this way, both desire and the satiation of desire amplify each other exponentially, so Dionysus becomes ever increasing desire and ever increasing satiation all at the same—a self-reinforcing, constantly accelerating feedback loop of desire and satiation amplifying to infinity; indeed, desire and satiation collapsing into each other, such that desire is satiation, and satiation is desire—Dionysus is joy in apotheosis, revelling in itself alone—after all, there is nothing else. Remember Dionysus dissolves all boundaries, all distinctions. He is a singularity where the distinction between desire and satiation completely breaks down; likewise between cause and effect, means and ends, past and future, commanding and obeying, master and slave, in him, even will and power are indistinguishable, becoming a strange unity—the only unity. Here, we are reminded of that ancient and venerable symbol of Ouroboros: the Snake swallowing its own tail? Or perhaps, more provocatively, the beautiful young god fellating himself in a recursive, autoerotic, orgasmic circuit. 

You may have intimations of the eternal recurrence in all this; an intrinsic circularity undergirding reality. Dionysus is the erotic, cosmic Narcissus, who is both the lover and the beloved all at the same time.

Premoral

The figure of Dionysus represents our physio-psychological directness towards power—our WTP—and this directedness manifests in every living organism as its natural impulses—its instincts. 

In what way are the instincts WTP then? Well, consider what our instincts have been shaped for through the process of evolution by natural selection: the preservation, continuity, and enhancement of our genes. Not with intention, of course—there’s no purpose in evolution—it’s merely that genes that grant their carriers an advantage in the battle for survival and reproduction tend to stick around and get passed on to the next generation. What we call “adaptions” in species are, in fact, residua—leftovers; they are what’s left over when natural selection winnows out everything else that is not sufficiently constituted to carry on existing—in other words, fit enough to meet the demands of the environment—the environment, which is, incidentally, just the totality of all existing forms. 

As we’ve discussed, power is to be a form—a pattern of organisation—that prevails in the struggle for existence, that resists dissolution or being absorbed by other forms; that grows, adapts, outcompetes other forms, that overcomes and incorporates the weaker, and that overcomes itself though constant development into forms that are ever better at all these things. Genetic forms are an exemplary manifestation of this WTP structural dynamic, and the instinctive behaviours of every species are determined by the genes it carries. Instincts are the genetically-encoded behaviours that have accumulated in a species because they have supported the continuity of that form-type—that species. In other words, forms that are good at getting themselves copied, are likely to endure.

Remember, these instincts are non-purposive—they don’t have goals—they simply demand to be expressed. In its natural environment, every animal’s instincts are a perfectly evolved suite of behaviours that work seamlessly with the stimuli in its environment to maximise its chances of survival for reproduction—little, or usually, no thinking is required. Nietzsche makes no bones: “Genius resides in instinct; goodness likewise. One acts perfectly when one acts instinctively" WP.440

In beings like us, however, beings with acute consciousness, thinking is our special power, and thinking presupposes goals—if we are to reason, to solve problems, we need to be able to envision and aim at goals in the future that represent solutions to those problems. So our blind instincts towards WTP are expressed in conscious, purposive proxy goals that satisfy the urge—at least to some degree and at least for a time. 

Further, because instincts are goalless but we receive a pleasurable reinforcing reward from our brains when we express them, we also possess the psychological urge to overcome resistances just for the pleasurable feeling of overcoming itself—of feeling our own power. Successfully tackling challenges is gratifying even if they don’t explicitly improve the chances of our genes’ proliferation. This second order “meta drive” is a plastic capability—a tool—that can be of use in a whole range of life situations—it has been naturally selected because it increases the chances of gene proliferation. It’s a predisposition for enjoying competence, strength, and efficacy, and an incentive that encourages us to strive for ever greater competence, strength, and efficacy. Instinct is will to power in all organic life. The taste for challenge itself is a further, refined manifestation of WTP in humans.

So you see, we are all directed towards the survival and reproduction of our genes, even though this is not a conscious goal, and even though we can make choices that are, in fact, absolutely contrary to this end. Every instinct demands expression, not a practical concrete result. But more often than not, throughout the past, instinctive activity led to the right results for our genes. That explains our instinctive behaviours’ existence.

What does this have to do with Dionysus? 

He is the divine beast of the preconscious instincts which express WTP. We experience our instincts as our urges, appetites, tastes, preferences, and peccadilloes: our yearning for the things we regard as the highest desiderata—not necessarily consciously—but viscerally—in the body. These things are our motivators, they stimulate envy and rivalry, they get the heart racing, the pupils dilating, the blood coursing though our veins. They constitute real, primal, and pre-moral goodness in its highest form. This is the highest good prior to our moral and cultural epoch, the good that our bodies evolved over countless generations to recognise, crave and to strive for. It is the promise of a kind of transcendent joy—a this-world transcendence— by which I mean the survival, proliferation, and continual enhancement of your genetic lineage in perpetuity. This is the “function” (scare quotes around function) for which evolution has blindly shaped us.

It’s our inborn orientation toward what Nietzsche calls “ascending life”. We experience it in our attraction to, and desire for beauty, health, strength, vitality, creativity, abundance, splendour, triumph, self-affirmation, excellence and power in all its forms. These constitute The Good in a time before the notion of “good” was coopted as a moral standard, valorising altruism, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Each of us has a quantum of desirable traits: beauty, vitality and so forth, and I call these power-traits because they strongly influence the chances of our genetic lineage’s survival and proliferation—for that matter, they strongly determine our own life chances and quality of life. We have evolved to recognise and respond to these signs of reproductive fitness, access to resources, and social success and to crave both their enhancement in ourselves and their presence in our potential reproductive partners, whose genes we might be merging with our own. 

This is the aesthetic basis of sexual attraction, and For Nietzsche, aesthetic judgements of others are inevitable—“A species simply cannot do anything except say yes to itself alone like this”⁠1 as he writes in TI. The feeling of attraction, felt as rausch (German for intoxication) is a Geiger counter guiding us, not to a fixed destination but in a definite direction: towards the biological transcendence of ascending life.⁠2

To quote from my essay, an economy of bodies:

“For Nietzsche, this is what beauty presages, and what the feeling of Rausch announces: the promise of genetic immortality in forms that will incarnate ever greater reproductive fitness.⁠3 All the power-traits, but especially beauty—the oldest aesthetic sensibility—are the most potent promise of health, strength, pride, fecundity, joy, and immortality: of goodness itself. Indeed, all these good things converge on the ultimate pre-moral good: ascending life. Beauty is the biological blessing which, if bestowed upon your descendants, grants them the best possible prospects for flourishing—for happiness.⁠4” [unquote]

The aesthetic pull of these attractors—these power traits—is inescapable because our orientation to them is built-into our bodies—more, it is our bodies. Instinct isn’t something bodies have, it’s what they are: instinct incarnate. In our social existence, shaped by the demands of the herd-entities we belong to, these appetites are inhibited, concealed, perverted, pathologised, or allowed expression only in forms society deems decent—safe, non-threatening to the herd entity’s cohesion—yet their power over us couldn’t be more obvious, wherever one looks.

Dionysus, as desire exponentialised, represents the apotheosis of ascending life and because his only criterion of evaluation is aesthetic, he is absolutely amoral. For him the sacred and the holy have nothing to do with morality, as they do in our communal herd culture—no, no, no—sacredness and holiness are found in sublime beauty; in aesthetic perfection. The Dionysian question is not: is this fair? Is this decent? is this compassionate? Does this reduce the quantity in suffering in the world? Instead, it is: is this beautiful? Does this excite me? Does this taste good? Does it feel good? Do I like it? Will I say yes to this? Do I want more and more and more of it?

And so this is a dangerous god for sure. For Dionysus is the abnegation of all pretence of morality and selflessness. In this god, we revert back to the primordial imperative: the only law of which is ‘I want.’ And the only justice of which is ‘I get.’ 

Obviously, this will sound appalling to most of us, yet let me put it to you that we all follow this imperative all the time anyway—we only ever do what we want, and we want it because in some way in preserves, protects, increases, or expresses our own power. Can you really make a choice that doesn’t benefit you? Is that even possible? Sure, you pretend to; we are all forced to pretend to. And you can fool even yourself. And you can make mistakes, we all do, but in the intention, in the will, we always seek our own power advantage. You work hard?—money in the bank and just think of what this will do for your reputation. You do favours for neighbours?—now they owe you; that’s reciprocal favours you can draw on in the future. You obey the laws of the land? Yes, because society will take away everything you have if you don’t. You give to to charity? How noble, you must feel so self-satisfied. Or it is that you’ve been socialised to feel pity and guilt in the face of others’ suffering and a donation is the only way you can assuage your own discomfort? 

Whether it’s your own vanity in deigning to be magnanimous, or your social climbing, or your rational material self-interest, or your fear of social reprisals, or just your need to ameliorate your own niggling conscience, you always have skin in the purportedly moral game. 

True selflessness is a much a metaphysical fiction and a myth as free will—another on of society’s “noble lies.”

Nietzsche thinks some of us are capable of being more honest—more moral—about morality. Ironic then, on this view, that our popular morality requires us all to lie constantly, or at least fool ourselves, about our secret selfishness. In his notes from 1880-81, he writes, “In itself, it is not at all shameful, but natural and fair, that a desire be satisfied immediately.”

This is not so much an imprecation to selfishness as a plea for cutting the bullshit. 

But to return to Dionysus: he is these natural and healthy self-serving instincts divinised. All our needs, urges, desires—our innate values—converge on the attractor of ascending life, which is the will to power dynamic as instantiated in our genes. We always obey our instinct’s commands—often by crooked paths, often employing subterfuge, sublimation, and rationalisation, sometimes getting lost or becoming fixated on mirages—but they direct us nonetheless. We experience the influence of Dionysus in the preconscious feelings that draw us to certain activities, things, experiences, people. Those feelings, as they become more and more intense, converge ever more closely on the theoretical culmination of ascending life at its vanishing point. That infinity-point of perfection is the sacred grove where Dionysus cavorts with his satyrs and maenads. 

The dual perspective:

We’ve seen Dionysus in two aspects thus far. Firstly, as he who dissolves all boundaries, all intellectual differentiation, all separateness, including that between the individual and the great roiling flux of becoming. This flux, the primal will to power, is inherently dynamic and heterogenous but unintelligible and incomprehensible to reason. This is why to experience it is madness—it cannot be rationally conceptualised, it cannot be perceived objectively from a subjective standpoint—indeed it collapses the distinction between subject and object—it can only be experienced. This experience is exhilarating and terrifying, because the initiate must freely give up their sanity, their agency, their sense of self and all illusion of control, and choose to leave solid ground of certainty behind, as if casting themselves into a bottomless abyss from whence they do not know if they will return. 

And yet the flux is a realm that can be navigated without the “sanity” of Apollonian rational consciousness, without ego—we are all at home there—because every living thing’s instincts are perfectly interwoven with the fabric of the flux, of which they, like everything, are part. This is a return to animal consciousness—pre-rational, pre-moral, preconscious—pre-human.

It’s is the realisation of oneness, connectedness, and an all-encompassing unity that is inexhaustible and eternal. In this state of consciousness, our paltry everyday cares are seen as utterly insignificant—well, they would be if we could remember them. But there is no past or future in this state—only the eternal now. In Dionysian de-individuated experience, all things are interwoven, necessary—free will is an absurdity, everything is bound together and determined by everything else. In A14, Nietzsche writes, “Formerly man was given a ‘free will’ as his dowry from a higher order: today we have taken his will away altogether.” There is no personal will, free or otherwise, only the primal will expressing itself through you.

So that’s Dionysian de-individuated consciousness.

In the second aspect of Dionysus, the individuated, we have seen that he represents all force in action—the will to power itself as instinctive desire, struggle, conflict of interests, creation and destruction, the impulse to overcome and dominate. In D.262, Nietzsche talks of the demon of power. This is the human craving for continuous growth and improvement. “You may give men everything possible —health, food, shelter, enjoyment—but they are and remain unhappy and capricious, for the demon waits and waits; and must be satisfied. Let everything else be taken away from men, and let this demon be satisfied, and then they will nearly be happy—.” 

Dionysus is the irresistible aesthetic pull we feel towards ascending life—towards an event horizon of divine joy. We feel him in that familiar hedonic cycle of wanting, getting, then new wanting. To have in mind goals for the future and plans for realising them instead of just following your instincts is Apollonian, but these intentional goals are proxies—all desire that drives us towards those goals is Dionysian. Dionysus is the will to power as desire desiring its own desire. 

In individuated consciousness—our everyday mode of consciousness, our most familiar one—we are at our most self-conscious, egoistic, and driven by our own needs and interests. This is the realm of apparently unfettered free will and unconstrained choice. It’s experienced as the desire to exercise one’s willpower and be distinguished from the crowd, to be better than others—to be better than ourselves. To win, prevail, dominate the competition. It’s the craving for our own glory, elevation, and exaltation. 

From this individuated perspective, it is only through an unending cycle of increasing success against increasing resistance can anything like real fulfilment be found.

Paradox

And so here we see, Dionysus, this god of paradox in another one of his essential uncanny dualities. He is both de-individuation, the ecstasy of dissolution and, at the same time the perilous and intrepid adventure of individuation—these two antipodes in an exquisite tension. He is both the circle and the centre—the circumference and its point. He is the love with which everything is bound together in a self-desiring integrated whole, and he is the Bellum omnium contra omnes; the relentless war of all against all. He is war as peace and peace as war. He is both unity and multiplicity. 

Incidentally, though there isn’t space to go into it here in detail but consider also the third metamorphosis from Thus Spoke Zarathustra—that of the child: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying. Yes, for the game of creation my brothers a sacred yes-saying is required. The spirit wants its will, the one lost to the world now wins its own world. Three metamorphoses of the spirit I named for you: how the spirit became a camel, and the camel a lion, and finally the lion a child.”

This metamorphosed spirit is someone who has completely undergone a transformation; who do they sound like? Dionysus of course. He is innocence. He is forgetting, existing only in the timeless moment. He is the wheel revolving eternally. He is a first movement because does not interact with anything outside of himself—he responds only to his own nature?—To which of course, he says yes. He says yes to everything. He is everything. He plays this “game of creation” which is the only game in town? And this spirit wants his own will. 

In the coming months I will unpack and translate this into some actionable practices for De Profundis members over on Patreon towards developing this Dionysian psychology, but for now let us not digress and get lost in a side mission.

The stars are caught in our hair. The stars are on our fingers. A veil of diamond dust. Just reach up and touch it.

These are the words of the inimitable Kate Bush in the track I recommend to you in this our last show.

The track is Nocturn from the album: Ariel.

As you may well know by now, Nietzsche is the philosopher of music and of emotion. I've fallen out of the habit of recommending music in these shows because its frustrating not to be able to play any, but for this culminating show, I wanted to recommend that you give this beautiful track a listen - several listens.

It is such a wonderful song, and a special one for me and my nearest and dearest. It is so replete with gorgeous imagery: a night drive out into the countryside, away from people and the city, and a wild swim under the stars. 

So magical, evocative, and truly enchanting. If there is one song that sums up the feelings I am reaching for with my interpretation of Nietzsche's Dionysian consciousness, it is this one. Whether it will chime with you in the same way, I cannot say.

It is somehow both epic and expansive and yet intimate and confiding at the same time.

When Kate sings "we long for just that something more". And when she declares "We become panoramic," it evokes for me that pantheistic intuition so many of us experience at some point in our lives. A feeling of being one with the vastness of the universe.

Anyway, I invite you to have your own expereince. Let me know what it does for you.

What does this mean for you? Well, take a look from where you are right now in the moment. This moment is all that exists. But look back over your shoulder at your past. Didn’t everything that happened in your life have causes that brought it about? And if so, didn’t everything that happened have to happen exactly as it did? Isn’t it irrefutably obvious that everything has always been determined and must be determined by all the other conditions of the universe? 

From HH, 208, slightly abridged:

“Now if we reflect that every human action [...], in some way becomes the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is indissolubly tied up with everything that will happen, then we recognise the real immortality that exists, that of movement: anything that has ever moved is included and eternalized in the total union of all that exists, like an insect in amber.”

But to understand that there is no free will is not to fall into despair—it is to wake from a long dream of blame and regret. Everything that has ever happened to you, every mistake, loss, or triumph, every cruel word or act of love, was necessary. It could not have been otherwise. The entire chain of causes stretching back over uncountable billions of years led inevitably to this moment: you, listening now to my words, breathing, thinking about what this means for you. 

And because determinism reigns, no other you was ever possible—abandon all guilt, shame, and regret—only in a different universe could you be in any way different. The past isn’t the chaotic landscape it appears to be and to affirm its necessity is to affirm yourself.

Zarathustra talks of this: “All ‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident—until the creative will says to it, ‘But thus I willed it.’ Until the creative will says to it, ‘But thus I will it; thus shall I will it.’ (Z, 141)

Can you will the past and in doing so will yourself?

In WP.1004, Nietzsche exhorts us to “attain a height and bird’s eye view, so one grasps how everything actually happens as it ought to happen; how every kind of “imperfection” and the suffering to which it gives rise are part of the highest desirability.” 

All guilt, shame, and regret dissolves when one truly realises this. You are innocent. Everyone is. Everything is. You did not choose the parents who made you, the culture you were born into, the impulses that drive you, the thoughts and feelings that arise within you. You did not choose your strengths or your weaknesses, your hungers or your fears. You were thrown into being, sculpted by forces older and vaster than you can comprehend. You are a node of self-awareness that has briefly coalesced in the undulating unified fabric of the flux.

From HH.107. “Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence.” 

But now look ahead into the future. How uncertain it is. Sure, there are regularities that seem relatively stable. The sun will likely rise tomorrow morning. Your job and your relationships may seem secure enough for the time being. But there are no real guarantees. Things can change in ways that no one can predict. And change is inevitable—all is constantly becoming. Next week you could find out you have cancer, or you could win the lottery. War could break out. You might take a fateful step that changes your life. The future is yet to unfold itself. From your perspective, it is a realm of all manner of possibilities, and what happens next depends to a great extent on you and what you choose for yourself, including how you respond to changes that occur that are outside of your control. Contingency and accident reign.

Consider, if the French Revolution had never occurred, Napoleon Bonaparte would probably have had an unremarkable career as a Calvary offer from a backwater province. If a record executive hadn’t heard the $4 record Elvis Presley recorded for his mother’s birthday, we would likely never have heard of him. Contingency and accident. Everything can turn on a sixpence. 

Opportunity may find you, may be on its way to you right now, it may already be here, staring you in the face—and you can go out hunting for opportunities too. The future is pregnant and you are its midwife. Free will may be illusory, but you get to choose anyway. Indeed, you have to choose, because not choosing is also a choice. You are an agent in the field, using your wiles, thinking on your feet, trying to guess what will happen next, trying to control what will happen next, notwithstanding the fact that this story is already scripted, and that every supposedly free choice is immediately revealed as a deterministic inevitability. 

You are the locus at which your individual destiny is gradually unveiled. In the Joyous Science, Nietzsche writes “become the one who you are”, but you are always becoming who you are. So the only real question is, who are you becoming? 

You see, the future is already written. It will be the product of all the determinants in the present, and one of those determinants, the most significant one for you personally, is you and your response to this realisation that everything has occurred exactly as it had to occur and everything that will occur will be inevitable. How you feel about it will determine who you are going to become. Your response is, of course, predetermined, but you don’t yet know what your response will be, and even this not knowing will effect your response.

Here we come face-to-face with Nietzsche’s test of Amor Fati—love of fate. In this world—the only world we ever get—where everything is necessary and nothing could be otherwise, can you love your fate and the world of which it is an ineliminable component? 

This is the ultimate existential question: can you say yes to existence exactly as it is? Or are you compelled to say: no. 

And this question couldn’t be more momentous, because your answer to this question determines your future. Your answer to this question speaks to who you are and who you will become from this point forward.

You will recognise Nietzsche existential challenge of the eternal return in this from way back in episode 2. Remember that demon that stole into your loneliest loneliness and whispered: “This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh will return to you—all in the same succession and sequence.”

Could you bear it? Could you will it?

If this thought crushed you, if it filled you with dread, then what does that say about how you have lived? It would mean that you have not yet learned to affirm life—you have not yet become strong enough to say yes to existence as it is. But if you could say to that demon, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine,” then you would have passed the ultimate test. You would have become the one who wills eternity.

The paradox

As is so often the case with Nietzsche, there’s a profound paradox here, and that’s because, in his philosophy, life is paradoxical. Realising that everything is inevitable doesn’t stand outside the chain of causation. it’s part of it. And that realisation has effects — it changes how you live, how you act, and what you become.

If you can affirm this necessity—if you can love your fate and the world in its entirety of which your fate is part—you become one way: expansive, life-affirming, creative, adventurous, willing to roll the dice and play the game.

If you can’t, you become another: contracted, resentful, reactive, fatalistic, fearful, and resigned.

Both outcomes are determined. But the difference between them is vast. And you don’t yet know which is going to happen.

Your affirmation, if you can make it, doesn’t break the chain of causality — it is an inevitable determinant enmeshed within it. But it will positively transform everything downstream, precisely because it always had to.

You see, you don’t choose to love your fate; you discover that can, you do, and you were always going to.

This is a test, and whether you pass or fail, it was always your destiny. And whether you pass or fail, it will colour your world for the rest of your life. In fact, you will continue to undergo this test in every moment of your life henceforth. 

And that’s the paradox: your response to the realisation of necessity is itself a necessity—yet through it, your future is shaped—for good or ill.

Heroic objection

But isn’t accepting everything just as it is to surrender all desire, all projects, all goals for the future? Isn’t it to become passive? Fatalistic? A bystander just watching the future unfold? Do we become like the stoic, attempting to quieten our desires, to live with resignation? Or like the buddhist mystic, on a quest for absolute freedom from all desire? What about our Dionysian will to power and its insatiable appetite for greater and greater successes? Do we relinquish this when, through Amor Fati, we accept the world as absolutely necessary just as it was, just as it is, and just as it will be?

No. Because your irrepressible will to power is a part of that necessary world too. When one accepts and affirms the world just as it is, one also accepts and affirms one’s own will to power. Even more so, because the world just is will to power; it is a constant becoming, not a static being, and, whether we like it or not, we are active participants in this becoming. 

Your desire to change the world is a part of the world that we must love just as it is. 

Do you understand?: because everything is determined by the whole, no matter what you aim for, it is always an inevitability, and so must be affirmed—including your anger, your dissatisfactions, your frustrations, your mistakes, even your moments of despair. 

For Nietzsche, even the stoic and the buddhist are proponents of the will to power—the desire to mute or extinguish desire is still the exercise of desire; of will to power. Indeed, this is a particularly formidable expression of will to power: it is will to power endeavouring to overcome itself.

So, for Nietzsche, desire and passion are not evils to be tamed and contained, though our culture treats them as such because they are inherently dangerous to the herd entity and its interests. For us, passion is will to power in one of its highest expressions. And yet our strivings all come to naught in the end. 

The human animal is unique in many respects. One of these is the tragic knowledge of its own finitude. We all know that our death is an inescapable fact of existence. We know that if we live long enough, we will grow old, get sick, become weaker and weaker, and eventually expire. This is why Schopenhauer, the Buddha, even Plato and many forms of Christianity implicitly or explicitly condemned the world for its perishability and imperfection. And sure, our own mortality is a psychological burden, but can also be a stimulus to life. 

Human life is fragile, filled with struggle, suffering, injustice, loss, and grief. That is why Nietzsche sees a test here—a test of spiritual health—if you can affirm life despite its tragic character, you validate your own existence, you prove yourself worthy of it. You demonstrate that you are one of nature’s lucky throws, perfectly oriented towards the Dionysian goodness of life ascending.

If on the other hand, you cannot affirm this questionable existence—if you are not even prepared to try—you discover yourself to be a misfire, an evolutionary mistake, you are unworthy of the world you reject, and this, for Nietzsche, is a kind of nihilism: From WP. 585: “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist" 

Now, it’s true that some people are lucky in life, and so affirmation should be relatively easy, whilst others are born into miserable lives where affirmation seems utterly out of reach. If I have happen to have perfect health, an inherited fortune, good looks, and every possible opportunity, it’s seems its easy for me to say yes to my lot. If I am born sick or disabled, impoverished, unattractive, and with little or no chance of improving my circumstances, that’s going to be much harder. 

Indeed so. And here is another part of the tragic wisdom, the universe is utterly unfair. 

Can you affirm it anyway? 

The fact is, the more suffering your life entails, the less fortunate you are, the greater your achievement is in being able to affirm it—the greater the trial, the greater the triumph, remember? And bear in mind: hedonic adaption means, even the most privileged are still susceptible to dissatisfaction and sadness. Even millionaires get depressed. 

From Z, ‘Not where you come from shall constitute your honour from now on, but instead where you are going!’, which is as much to say, it’s not where you are, its how far you’ve come.

The tragic nature of human existence is what made man such an object of fascination to the gods of Olympus, who were all immortal. This fragile, ephemeral creature with its hopes and dreams was forced to fight for the significance of its brief existence. It has to risk everything in this quest and the stakes could not be higher—whereas the gods never have to face down their own extinction. As Seneca wrote: ““God cannot kill himself; in this one respect we are superior to the gods.” 

This is why the greek gods loved their heroes; were so entranced by them. Heroism is not found in beasts or in deities—it is the exclusive preserve of man.

To live heroically is to affirm life and one’s own existence even though it is full of suffering—more: because it is so full of suffering. “He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.” As Nietzsche writes in Z. Only the one who undergoes the trials of life, defiantly refusing to be diminished by them, doggedly refusing to yield to despair, can be called a hero. 

Balancing the two

And so here we have a contradiction; perhaps a balance: there’s the undiscriminating loving acceptance of all that is, as necessary and perfect because it could not be otherwise, and that sits in a dynamic tension with the irrepressible impulse to strive, overcome, and change oneself—to change the world. There’s an absolute satiation and equanimity paired with unquenchable desire and hunger for ever more power. This is the character of Dionysus, of course, who is both desire and satiation at the same time, but one can also see shades of Eastern mysticism in this: the yin and yang of Taoism in particular, where each contrary contains the seed of its opposite.

What does this mean in practical terms?: I used to be an adventure runner and my best race performances were associated with a certain mindset. Instead of trying to run hard, I learned to just let myself run hard. Whereas I used to stress about my performance, I learned to take a mental backseat and just allow my body to perform. It knew what to do; it didn’t need my mental micromanagement. My mind could relax into the run instead of fretting, and trying to control things, which wasn’t really adding anything positive to my performance. Quite the opposite.

This strange state was paradoxical because I was trying hard by not trying hard. This mindset involves adopting an ironic distance from one’s self. Its a letting go and a holding tight all at once. It’s a letting things happen, without allowing oneself to feel too entangled in what transpires.

I adopted this mindset in some other areas of life. I distilled it in this principle: in all things, never take yourself too seriously, but always take yourself absolutely seriously, but never take yourself too seriously… ad infinitum. 

I recently heard some guy online—I don’t recall who—put it this way, which I think sums it up beautifully: ‘keep it light, keep it playful, but go for it!’

It’s the illusion of having a unified self that convinces us that we cannot hold two or more contradictory impulses at the same time. We most certainly can, and as humans, we almost always do. But that’s a topic for another day.

So, love it all, want it all, say yes to everything, but pick and choose and say yes to this and no to that at the same time. Love and accept the unlovable and the unacceptable even as you despise it, transform it, or destroy it. Love your despising, your transforming, and destroying. Even love the parts of yourself that you abhor and that you strive to eliminate: ‘He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.’ [BGE.78]. Love even your hatred. Shoot for the stars, tear it up, keep questing, live dangerously, revel in the exhilarating highs, keep soldiering on through the dismal lows, learn to honour your suffering even if you can’t welcome it—all suffering is a teacher. Stay cool, fight hard, endeavour for perfection, exalt cheerfulness, good will, and a sense of humour. Make your life a beautiful significance. 

Closing:

A quotes for you here from WP.1036-37, significantly abridged:

“A humanitarian God cannot be demonstrated from the world we know: today you can be compelled to admit this much. [...] You are all afraid of the con­clusion: “from the world we know, a very different god would be demonstrable, one who at any rate is not humanitarian”— and, in short, you hold fast to your God and devise for him a world we do not know.” 

And further on… “Let us remove supreme goodness from the concept of God: it is unworthy of a god. Let us also remove supreme wisdom: it is the vanity of philosophers that is to be blamed for this mad notion of God as a monster of wisdom: he had to be as like them as possible. No! God the supreme power—that suffices! Every­ thing follows from it, “the world” follows from it!” 

Nietzsche rejects the anthropomorphic god. God did not make us in his image — we made him in ours. Dionysus has no trace of this petty humanising. For Nietzsche’s new god, the word “god” is almost too small an idea. This is a force so alien as to be inconceivable, yet so intimately familiar that we recognise it every cell of our being — because through will to power, we are made in its image, as is everything. The universe is the body of Dionysus.

And here’s the crux: once the moral God has been overcome, the question is no longer “Does God exist?” but “What could divinity possibly mean now?” What kind of god is consistent with a world of necessity — a world without moral accounting, without benevolent purpose, without a final goal?

Nietzsche’s answer: a god beyond good and evil, or no god at all.

Because once you strip morality, wisdom, and teleology from the concept of God — once you reduce it to pure, self-affirming power — an entirely new possibility opens up. Not a sky-father. Not a judge. Not a shepherd. But a sacralisation of existence itself. A divinity that doesn’t stand above the world but pulses through it. Through every force, every form, through you—through everything.

The kingdom of heaven within you — but stripped of priests, guilt, shame, and metaphysical claptrap.

The sanctifying experience of this newly deified world is the act of saying an unhesitating, unconditional, eternal yes to your life — and therefore to all existence. This is Nietzsche’s amor fati.

Think of it this way. You are determined. You have no free will. You are an inevitability. Whether you say yes or no was always fated. But when you say yes, you are saying yes not just to yourself but to the inevitability of your saying yes. You become both the affirmer and the affirmed. You are the universe saying yes to itself. And in that moment, you touch the essential nature of the Dionysian cosmos: yes to everything forever.

You affirm your own affirming. You will your own will. You complete the circle, validate the eternal recurrence, and establish the circuit of joy. You orient yourself to life ascending. You flow with the current of existence itself.

Dionysus is the North Star of life ascending to infinity, sparkling in the firmament, ultimately inaccessible, and yet it is only from this star that we take our bearings and navigate through our lives. 

Dionysus is the emblem of this dual consciousness, the cosmic and the heroic: he is the cosmic mystical oneness dwelling in joy at its own self-sufficiency, and he is the heroic adventurer, building civilisations, triumphing in battle, drinking from the skulls of his enemies, summiting the highest, ice-clad peaks. He is the joy of the universe revelling in its own goodness. An eternal universe, a closed system, without losses or gains, constantly becoming but always becoming itself, rhythmic and regular in its permutations—how can one picture the activity of such an entity? 

And you can see him now, so lithe, so ravishing—a slender, androgynous, boy, naked but for the flowers woven through his cascading curls. Drenched with golden sunlight, he is laughing and dancing wildly to the frenzied piping of an unseen flute, in a glade in the heart of a dark primordial forest that goes on and on and on and on and on and on. . . 

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Epilogue

And the snow comes at last; big flakes slowly tumbling out of the twilight skies. Night is closing in, and here and there, between the clouds, cold stars dissolve into view. Our shared fatigue is lifted a little as we scramble up a steep escarpment and catch sight of the refuge nestled among pine trees. The lodge’s windows are lit with welcoming light, smoke billows from the chimney, stacks of firewood sit under tarpaulins at its side. We smile at each other through cracked lips. The air is as thin and as sharp as a needle at this altitude and neither one of us has spoken for hours, our exertions precluding conversation. But now we laugh, our breath clouding in the icy air. We scurry to shelter. Outside are tethered a few huddled mules. This is the last and the highest refuge on this mountain and it marks the limit and the last stop of the mule train which supplies this little oasis. 

We bustle inside, into thick, close, warm air, and we are greeted by the sight of a roaring fire in the hearth. A number of hardy travellers sit at tables, drinking, eating, recovering. We drop our packs. The caretaker greets us and asks for his levy. There’s a kettle of soup over the fire that we may help ourselves to, and we are to find a space on the floor for sleeping. 

We take off our outer garments and boots and get ourselves some supper, taking places at a table near a window. Outside in the descending gloom the snowfall is intensifying, enrobing the mountainside in a pale pristine shroud. At the edge of the small clearing within which this lonely lodge squats, is the tree-line, a towering wall of ancient pines. The now impenetrable blackness beneath the crowns of these trees draws our eyes. It is as if there is someone or something staring at us from the depths of the woods; or more disconcerting still, as if the blackness itself were watching us; as if voidness itself were an alien intelligence of such uncanniness and precipitousness that one’s mind could tumble into it and keep falling without ever reaching its bottom. I wrench the ragged curtain across the window to break the vertiginous spell. For a moment, a long, long way away, at the very limit of our hearing, we discern the doleful song of wolves howling. We are grateful to be inside on such a night.

A little later, bellies full, feeling more contented, there is a matter that I need to put forward for your consideration. Assuredly, it is no trivial feat to have ascended to this point, but this is the first step of a longer journey—one that has barely even begun. And so a choice lies before you: when tomorrow comes, will you continue the climb? As hard as this first day has been, it is as nothing compared to the challenges that await you at greater altitudes. Be warned, there will be no more refuges after this one—no more hot suppers, no more flaming hearths, not even any shelter unless under watchful stars, not entirely benign, we find caves to crawl into like animals at night. At a certain point even I will have to leave you and you will find yourself more alone than you have ever been. 

And so the only question for your to consider now is . . . do you want to go on? 

But wait—do not give answer yet. Rest a while. Think about what it is you really want; what you are prepared to commit to. In the morning you will make your decision. Better to sleep on it. Yes. Now to sleep. 

1 Ibid. “Raids” §19.

2 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (“Skirmishes” §48); Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §801.

3 Cf. Miller, The Mating Mind (London: Heinemann, 2000); Buss, Evolutionary Psychology, 6th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2019).

4 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (“Expeditions” §19).