C. The Will to PowerThe “last man” signifies the suppression of our most fundamental instinct, the will to power, and the triumph of subhuman mediocrity. We cannot deny this instinct’s existence or force without denying life itself: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is Will to Power.” More elaborately in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche insists,
‘Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange, weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation; but why should one forever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each others as equal – it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavor to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy – not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives and because life is precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter; people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which ‘the exploiting character’ is to be absent: --that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life. – Granting that as a theory this is a novelty – as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!” (Beyond Good and Evil, 259)
He attacks all philosophical or religious positions that advocate suppression of the drive for power. This drive for power can exhibit itself I many different ways – in war and government, of course, but also in preaching from a pulpit, in writing prose or poetry (As does Nietzsche), in achieving self-control, in punishing children who defy parental desires, in taking risks, or in educating oneself. He does not use the will to power as the ground and limit of a universal moral code.
