Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 287is the "sense" of all of this fuss about power? Nietzsche ranked the
question of sense with notorious attempts to "humanize" nature, and
he rejected it, but not for long, because he needed to apply his theory of
the will to power to these projections of meaning for the sake of con-
sistency. Questions of meaning and projections of meaning are ulti-
mately also forms of expressing the will to power. Under the rubric of
"sense," a transformation of an otherwise senseless reality takes place
in the human sphere. "You want to make all being thinkable. ... It
should yield and bend for you!" (4,146; ZSecond Part, "On Self-
Transcendence"). By imparting sense to the course of life, man over-
powers it and brings it into a form that accords with himself. The wodd
becomes a "reflection" to the spirit Man recognizes himself in it, but
also recognizes the Other confronting him. Cognition is a power play of
creative forces, a process that culminates in successful, powerful, and
vital forms and ideas. Whatever holds its own in this way is called truth.
Truth is a power that renders itself true by prevailing. This truth applies
not only to knowledge in the narrower, more scholarly sense but to the
creation of entire mental constructs that are held to be valid.
The attention of the young Nietzsche had already begun to focus on
the power plays that establish their validity. The construct that prevailed
in agonistic intellectual contests proved its metde not only in victory but
by justifying life as a whole as the culmination of human capability. This
was Nietzsche's eady idea that life is justified by means of the birth of a
genius. He illustrated this idea by citing the examples of Sophocles,
Wagner, and Schopenhauer. These intellectual heroes vindicate the life
of an entire culture. Their works create a magic circle within which
human potential is realized and transformed. The "peak of rapture" is
the point of culture, and it is the challenge of life forces that conveys
man to this peak. "Mankind," Nietzsche wrote in a draft to a preface for
The Birth of Tragedy, does not exist for its own sake, "but rather the goal
lies in its peaks, in the great 'individuals,' the saints and the artists"
(7,354). The young Nietzsche's assertion in this eady text that "there is
no higher cultural proclivity than the preparation and production of