Nietzsche’s “Dionysian world”
the will to power and the eternal recurrence
[from the notebooks, 1885]
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror?
This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, iron magnitude
of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only
transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses,
but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not
something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space
as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force
throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many,
increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing
together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence,
with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most
complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent,
most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this
abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself
in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return
eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian
world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the
twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of
the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you
want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-
concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?—This world is the will to
power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing
besides! (The Will to Power §1067
One of the most sublime prose hymns of raw nature ever written proclaiming an endless affluence in its creativity, mystery, and contradictions which no god ever imagined is equal to.
