## Metadata - Author: [[Steven Gambardella]] - Full Title: Nietzsche’s Cure for Negativity - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[stoicism]] [[philosophy]] - Summary: How to Harness the “Will to Power” - URL: https://medium.com/@stevengambardella/nietzsches-cure-for-negativity-6dbf546c323a ## Full Document #### How to Harness the “Will to Power” To achieve exuberance Nietzsche believed that we need to understand that the Will to Power is the underlying force behind everything we are and do. Painting: Archers by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1935–37 (detail. source: Wikimedia) The nineteenth century was a watershed for western civilisation. It was, for Nietzsche, the beginning of a great crisis for mankind. Secularism spread rapidly across Europe but there was nothing to fill the void that religion had left. The sciences, that had been so preoccupied with physics and cosmology in the centuries before, had suddenly begun to systematise life itself. Halfway through the century, evolutionists broke the news that human beings were likely the descendants of apes. It is against this backdrop that Nietzsche proclaimed: “God is Dead. We have killed Him.” The upshot of this, according to Nietzsche, was nihilism: a spiritual sickness in which we have become bereft of purpose and meaning. But Nietzsche is *the* great psychologist-philosopher, a man who had a profound understanding of what it was to be human. He believed he had the antidote for our psychological ills, both as individuals and as a civilisation. When Nietzsche set about curing our ills he asked the most fundamental question: **What is driving us?** Firstly, to be driven is to change. Nietzsche believed that the idea of “becoming” should take precedence over the idea of “being”. In ancient Greece, two schools of thought emerged regarding the nature of the universe. While Parmenides believed change to be an illusion, Heraclitus of Ephesus reasoned that the only constant thing in the world *is* change. > “All entities move and nothing remain still […] You cannot step in the same river twice.” > > To Heraclitus, the world is an “eternal fire”: > “ This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always was and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.” > > We only have fragments of Heraclitus’s wisdom saved for posterity in the writings of later philosophers like Plato. What little there is of Heraclitus’ words impressed themselves immensely on Nietzsche. The philosopher agreed with Heraclitus that the world is constantly changing and that fact is all that we…