Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 291colors have been extracted from base and even despised substances?"
(2,24; HHI § 1).
This oudook propelled depreciation of life to its limit Whatever the
effects of a belief in historical laws, hypostatization of metaphysical
essences, and a religious oudook on life and the morality it spawned—
all of that is probably harmless compared with naturalistic disenchant-
ment of living things, which get lost in the shuffle of chemical,
instinctual, and physical processes. After all, Nietzsche did not call any
of his Untimely Meditations "On the Benefits and Drawbacks of Natural
Science for Life." The critic of the metaphysical "wodd behind" was
being seduced by scientific wodds behind. He dabbled in perspectives
that objectify human beings, using the phrase "man is nothing but "
Man was now considered a locus of mental and physiological processes,
erotic tensions, and chemical activities. This is where "thinking from
without" (Foucault) triumphs—an outside view of the human condition
that accepts inner self-awareness as nothing more than an epiphenome-
non. Of course, Nietzsche did not abandon inner awareness, but he suc-
cumbed to outside pressures and sometimes identified with his
adversaries. He went over, tentatively and playfully, to the other side and
sang the praises of physics in a tortured and provocative manner: "We
must become the best learners and discoverers of everything in the
wodd that is lawful and essential. We must be physicists to be able to be
creators in that sense, although in the past all valuations and ideals were
based on ignorance of physics or dissension from it Therefore: Long live
physics! And even longer live that which compels us to seek out physics—
our honesty" (3,563f.; GS% 335).
On the one hand, Nietzsche subsumed mankind into nature com-
pletely, naturalized and depersonalized human beings, and treated man
as "one thing among others." On the other, he claimed that we could be
"creators" who would enact the laws over which we would have no con-
trol. But what might this creative aspect consist in if we are determined
by the laws of nature? Nietzsche's response is astonishing and, quite
apart from its pathos, fairly inadequate. We are creative when we can