The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
704.
How is it that the fundamental article of faith in all psychologies is a piece of most outrageous contortion and fabrication? "Man strives after happiness," for instance--how much of this is true? In order to understand what life is, and what kind of striving and tenseness life contains, the formula should hold good not only of trees and plants, but of animals also. "What does the plant strive after?"--But here we have already invented a false entity which does not exist,--concealing and denying the fact of an infinitely variegated growth, with individual and semi-individual starting-points, if we give it the clumsy title "plant" as if it were a unit. It is very obvious that the ultimate and smallest "individuals" cannot be understood in the sense of metaphysical individuals or atoms; their sphere of power is continually shifting its ground: but with all these changes, can it be said that any of them strives after happiness?--All this expanding, this incorporation and growth, is a search for resistance; movement is essentially related to states of pain: the driving power here must represent some other desire if it leads to such continual willing and seeking of pain.--To what end do the trees of a virgin forest contend with each other? "For happiness"?--For power! ... Man is now master of the forces of nature, and master too of his own wild and unbridled feelings (the passions have followed suit, and have learned to become useful)--in comparison with primeval man, the man of to-day represents an enormous quantum of power, but not an increase in happiness! How can one maintain, then, that he has striven after happiness?..
But while I say this I see above me, and below the stars, the glittering rat's-tail of errors which hitherto has represented the greatest inspiration of man: "All happiness is the result of virtue all virtue is the result of free will"! Let us transvalue the values: all capacity is the outcome of a happy organisation, all freedom is the outcome of capacity (freedom understood here as facility in self-direction. Every artist will understand me). "The value of life."--Every life stands by itself; all existence must be justified, and not only life,--the justifying principle must be one through which life itself speaks. Life is only a means to something: it is the expression of the forms of growth in power.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.