292 Nietzscheaccept and even embrace the notion of an existence entirely determined
by the laws of nature without breaking down, and when the senseless-
ness of absolute determinism no longer shocks us and we succeed in
recognizing determinism without needing to turn fatalistic Nietzsche
had to wage batde against his own theories and his passion for free play.
He was captivated by the very idea he had mocked in the past, namely
the quest to elucidate the world from one specific point. In Beyond Good
and Evil, a book written in the winter of 1885—86 and containing mate-
rial planned for inclusion in his Will to Power, Nietzsche wrote:
"Assuming, finally, that we were able to explain the whole of our instinc-
tual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the
will—namely the will to power, as is my proposition—assuming that all
organic functions could be traced back to this will to power... we would
have earned the right to designate all effective force unequivocally as: will
to power. The wodd viewed from within ... would simply be the 'will to
power' and that alone" (5,55; BGE § 36).
Nietzsche had assailed monocausal concepts according to which a
given χ is actually a y and "nothing else." This view was widely held in
the sciences of his day. Explanations of this sort struck him as bad
mythology. However, when Nietzsche synthesized several axioms taken
from biological Darwinism and the physics of his era into a key that
would explain the world as a whole and contrive a metaphysical philoso-
phy of the "will to power," he was indulging in some mythologizing of
his own. Luckily, he did not elaborate this mythology beyond a handful
of axioms, notably that individual life is force and energy. Life as a whole
is a force field in which the quantities of energy are unevenly appor-
tioned. Of primary importance is the proposition of the conservation of
energy. There are no "empty" gaps. Wherever one thing advances, some-
thing else recedes. An increase in force in one place means a decrease in
another. One force overpowers the other, absorbs it, disintegrates, is
swallowed up by yet another force, and so forth. It is a meaningless, but
dynamic, play of growth, enhancement, overpowering, and struggle.
So far he was being consistent. Still, we have come to expect "consis-