322 Epilogue
American pragmatism, "life" is a matter of common sense. Nietzsche,
however, was an extremist—particularly as a philosopher of life—and
he detested Anglo-Saxon banality as much as the Darwinist dogma of
"adaptation" and "selection" in the evolution of life. For him, those
concepts were projections of a utilitarian morality, which holds that
adaptation is rewarded even in nature. Nietzsche considered "nature"
the playful Heraclitean wodd child. Nature builds up forms and then
breaks them down, in an ongoing process of creation in which a pow-
erful vitality triumphs over adaptation. Survival is not in itself a triumph.
Life becomes triumphant when a state of abundance has been achieved,
when life is squandered and lived to the fullest Those who knew how to
enjoy life interpreted Nietzsche's philosophy as a philosophy of magna-
nimity and extravagance. His philosophy of a "will to power" was ini-
tially taken to be an aesthetic rather than a political vision. His famous
statement in Zarathustra concerning the power of creativity was widely
quoted: "no one knows yet what is good and evil unless it is the one who
creates!—He, however, is the one who creates man's goal and gives the
earth its meaning and future. He is the one responsible for something's
being good or evil" (4,246f.; ZThird Part, "On Old and New Tablets"
§ 2). Creativity, not imitation, is the goal. Morality has to follow the cre-
ative impulse.
Nietzsche held that if art and reality did not mesh, so much the worse
for reality. He gave readers an incentive to unlock their own creative
potential by descending into the unconscious. Freud acknowledged that
Nietzsche had ably paved the way for him. In his On the History of the
Psycho-Analytic Movement, Freud wrote of having denied himself "the very
great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche" in order not to be
hampered "in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis
by any sort of anticipatory ideas [There are] many instances in which
laborious psycho-analytic investigation can merely confirm the truths
which the philosopher recognized by intuition" (Freud 15-16). Because
pyschoanalysis aspired to establish itself as a scholarly discipline and
even take its place among the natural sciences, its practitioners attempted