Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 281from the tomb of his life. "Something invaluable, unburiable is in me,
something to explode rocks, namely my will " (4,145; Ζ Second Part,
'Tomb Song").
The path from the power of life leads through the dance of life and
the obstacles posed by knowledge, past injury and fatal lethargy to the
philosophy of the will to power, which is finally thematized in the pres-
entation "On Self-Transcendence," the section immediately following
"The Tomb Song." In this section, Zarathustra declares: 'Wherever I
found living beings, I found will to power" (4,147; Ζ Second Part, "On
Self-Transcendence"). The tone changes here. Lyricisms of the night,
dancing, and tomb songs are replaced by harsh strokes of fate. These are
fragments of a philosophical doctrine that had been suggested in earlier
writings, in which Nietzsche had probed the driving forces of life and
knowledge, but he did not begin to regard them as a task for systematic
elaboration until he wrote Zarathustra.
The doctrine of the "will to power," as delineated in Zarathustra, con-
sists of the following principles. Its crux is the principle of self-tran-
scendence. The will to power is first and foremost the will to power over
oneself. As the progression from night song to dancing song to tomb
song demonstrates, there is a rebirth from the grave of suffocating
depression, induced by the memory of a creative power that is inherent
in us but manages to slip away and must therefore be seized deliberately
and boldly. There is obviously no endeavor that could or should be acti-
vated without the "will to.. ." Even creativity requires the will to cre-
ativity. If there is such a thing as a Münchhausen effect, this is it: a life
that wills itself can yank itself out of its muck and mire. Zarathustra asks
what the will to power is, and supplies this answer: "You still want to cre-
ate the world before which you can kneel: this is your final hope and
intoxication" (4,146; Ζ Second Part, "On Self-Transcendence").
Self-transcendence as the creation of an entire imaginary world of
ideas, images, and scenes, which is what we fipd in the Zarathustra proj-
ect, goes beyond self-preservation and becomes self-enhancement, the
second aspect of the will to power. We underestimate life if we take note