Chapter 5 5. Drunkenness and the Will to Power

In the early days, Nietzsche used Schopenhauer's concept of "will to life" to refer to the noumenal world in his mind-the eternal process of generation and change, but compared with Schopenhauer's understanding, there are positive and negative differences.Later, in order to draw a line with Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, it was renamed "will to power". The "will to power" is actually the "will to life" transformed with the spirit of Dionysus, emphasizing the abundance and excess of life in nature. The world is not a negative process in which all things seek to survive, but a positive process in which all things seek to expand their vitality. After the theory of "will to power" was put forward, Nietzsche increasingly linked various aesthetic phenomena with the intensity of vitality in aesthetics, and emphasized the intensity of life even more when advocating an aesthetic attitude towards life.

In Nietzsche's later aesthetics, "drunkness" is a key concept.Previously, drunkenness was just another name for the Dionysian state.Now, Nietzsche clearly attributes both the Apollonian state and the Dionysian state to drunkenness, and regards drunkenness as different categories, affirming that drunkenness is the psychological premise of all aesthetic behaviors and the most basic aesthetic emotion.The essence of intoxication is "the excess of power", "the sense of heightened and overflowing power", and "a high sense of power".Various aesthetic states are produced by the drunkenness overflowing with vitality.Apollonian beauty is the result of projecting the fullness of life force onto things.The joy of Dionysus' tragedy is a sense of victory in which the powerful vitality dares to contend with pain and disaster.Art is the impulse to change things, to make things reflect the fullness of their own vitality.Artists are people with extremely vigorous vitality, who are forced by inner abundance and have to give.On the contrary, people with exhausted vitality have absolutely no sense of beauty and have no connection with art.Nietzsche concluded: "Whether and why the judgment of 'beauty' is valid is a question of (a person's or a nation's) power." Life, in the final analysis, depends on the strength and weakness of the inner vitality.