I called attention, in discussing Kant, to how tightly his solution to the problem of the causality or reason adhered to an Aristotelian model (# 24). Nietzsche, too, is more Aristotelian than he is often thought to be. I said (#8) that for Aristotle, form exercised a threefold domination over matter: it drew boundaries which separated one thing from others; disposed (ordered) whatever was within those boundaries; and took the initiative with regard to managing interactions with the outside world. Initiative and boundary are thus at odds for Aristotle, because once a boundary is in place, acting on the world outside transgresses it (see my Metaphysics and Oppression).
The heart of this problem is that boundary and disposition have priority over initiative: a thing without boundaries which separate it from other things does not exist at all, and a boundary within which no single component disposes the rest has—for the metaphysical tradition, anyway—no unity. Thus, for that tradition, something has to be fully existent, i.e. its form has to be in relatively full control of its matter, before it can cause changes in other things. Only an adult (male) can beget; only someone who has fully mastered a skill can teach it.
In Nietzsche’s inversion of metaphysics, initiative is basic: what is ontologically fundamental is not things but forces, which act on the world without themselves being rooted in a bounded subject or substratum. As Nietzsche puts it, “”there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—the doing is everything (Genealogy of Morality I.13). Nietzsche’s overall name for the totality of such forces is, famously, “will to power.”
When one force achieves dominance of another force (or forces), we get what I have called the “slamover.” This, I have suggested (#31), is Nietzsche’s appropriation of pre-Aristotelian (and indeed pre-Platonic) physics to furnish the stylistic form of his sentences and aphorisms. For much of their content, however, Nietzsche goes even farther back—to Homer. To understand Nietzsche even partially, then, we must understand a bit about the Homeric worldview.
There is such a thing, at least in the Iliad (for complexities in the Odyssey see its treatment in Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment). The social world of the Iliad is a simple place, centered on a series of hand-to-hand combats. In the Trojan War, groups of men never move together. Rather, each hero on the Plain of Troy selects an opponent from the other army and tries to kill him. If he fails, he dies. If he succeeds, he selects another opponent, ideally one slightly stronger then the first, and repeats his efforts. The whole Trojan War thus has the structure of a video game, in which each vanquished opponent only gives rise to a more formidable foe.
But this is no game. With one exception, every Achaean knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually face Hector, the Trojan champion; and Hector will kill him. Every Trojan, without exception, knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually have to face Achilles (if he returns to the battle); and Achilles will kill him. (Achilles himself, the exception, does not die in hand-to-hand combat, but from a poisoned arrow shot by Paris). Death, the ultimate slam-over, waits at the end of the hero’s path, and it is awful indeed: whether you have been good or bad, when you die you lose most of your life-force and spend eternity shrieking in Hades.
Most of the soldiers in this war do not want to play this game; they want to live and go home. Instead of fighting, they merely stand around and watch the heroes fight. Homer calls them ὄι κακοί, the ordinary ones; in classical Greek, as Nietzsche points out (Genealogy of Morals I.5) κακός will mean “bad.” But what about the heroes? What motivates them?
The utterly slim chance of salvaging something posthumous: the chance that your valor in battle will inspire a bard to sing about you, so that you gain ὃ κλἐος ἀθανατὀς, immortal fame. While you scream in Hades, your valor survives in the memories of your fellows.
The Greek hero, confronting his death with only his valor, quickness and strength, is a clear prototype of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. And Nietzsche describes the Achaean hero’s moment of glory, his ἀριστεῖα —the moment that shows him at his best, just after he has killed the last man he will kill, for—as he must suspect—his next opponent will kill him:
One experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things…
Gen. Mor. I.12
After a victory, as one receives the plaudits of ὄι κακοί, our hero does not know if he is experiencing his ἀριστεῖα or not, for the future is radically uncertain, and the final slam-over awaits.
The Greek hero thus exhibits a metaphysical transgression. What makes his life worthwhile is not to be found in him, but in his effects on others—on those who will sing of him, and those who will hear the songs. The good life is not for Nietzsche a matter of the right organization of the soul, as both Plato and Aristotle thought, and certainly not one of following divine commandments, but of moving outward beyond one’s self to affect the world—one of the many meanings of Nietzsche’s famous concept of “self-overcoming.” Under the rubric of will to power, initiative, the last and most problematic of the tree axes of ousiodic domination, is posited as ontologically most basic.