Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 293tent" systems to yield the very premises that have been inserted into
them, and the "systematizer" Nietzsche was no exception. Following the
materialistic spirit of his age, he discovered brutalities in nature after
positing them there.
Events in nature can be regarded not just as a murderous "struggle"
but also as a play of forces. It all depends, as we know quite well from
Nietzsche, on the evaluative perspective. No single perspective is
absolute, but it is significant that one and the same threshold at times
makes life seem like a battleground ruled by power, and at other times
like a game. It is a threshold of a comprehensive vision of life. Nietzsche
lived in the wrenching tension between two such visions—one of the
great cosmic game and the other of power as "causaprima." These two
visions differed in one important respect: the grand game encouraged
ironic self-relativizing. The will to power as a "theorem of causaprimd'
enabled Nietzsche to exact imaginary revenge for the humiliations and
insults he had suffered. He was succumbing to the phantasms of power
suggested in the chilling sentences from Ecce Homo that hail "the new
party of life, which takes charge of the greatest of all tasks, namely rais-
ing up humanity, including the relendess destruction of all that was
degenerate and parasitical" (6,313; EH"Birth of Tragedy" § 4).
Nietzsche's vision of the cosmic game set a very different tone.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast placed a wonderfid and cel-
ebrated passage that Nietzsche had written in the summer of 1885 at the
conclusion of their compilation of Nietzsche's writings (which they
published as The Will to Power). It is an attempt to capture in a few all-
encompassing sentences what could be the essence of the will to power
when seen as a great cosmic game: "And do you really know what 'the
world' is to me? Should I show it to you in my mirror? This wodd: a mon-
ster of force, with no beginning and no end, a firm, iron magnitude of
force that grows neither larger nor smaller, that does not get expended
but only transformed, as an entity invariably large, a household without
expenses or losses, but also without a growth or income, surrounded by
'nothingness' as by its borders, not something blurry, wasted, or infinitely