Will to power and civilizing childhood
14
Oct
A well-known concept of Nietzsche is the will to power, as a “natural”
driving force of man, we have already developed that the natural is different from the cultural, this being one of the infernal dichotomies as Latour said, the other is objectivity x subjectivity coming from rationalism/idealism of modernity.
In fact, this led people to expand from the primitive world, I would say in the infant civilizing age, the wars and empires of Alexander the Great, of which Aristotle was tutor, and later the Roman Empire, and the empires of modernity: the Portuguese, the French, Russian and American and the two world wars are in fact the great crisis of modernity, we were not able to overcome the civilizing childhood.
There were other great empires little mentioned in history: the great Manchu Qing dynasty of northern China invaded and defeated the Ming dynasty, it was a minority ethnicity but it dominated all of China and even had a brief restoration in 1917 and the great Mongol Empire was one of the largest in terms of area, reaching Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.
One can think of potency as a form of growth to overcome both individual and civilizing childishness, so there is an act and potency, theorized Thomas Aquinas, but Nietzsche himself warns of this other sense: “the will to power is not even a being , not a becoming, it is a pathos”, so let us analyze the triad of classical antiquity: ethos, pathos and logos.
Pathos is in modern rationalism that also used by Descartes, in a different sense from Nietzsche from which the idea of pathology comes, which moves in imperfection, using Nietzsche’s own idea is not ontological, it denies being because it does not even ethos and nor the classic triad logos.
In Aristotelian rhetoric, ethos is one of the modes of persuasion or components of an argument, and this one gives meaning to being, being the link with the Logos that gives meaning to Being, giving credibility and establishing a truth that is not reality, because that is where the Logos draws the consistency of Being to oppose the Pathos-logical.
The Pathos lives in pure emotion, in irrationality, in deceitful imagination, he is responsible for the disorders of the Being, being in a way its denial.
The Pathology of two world wars has shown that humanity has not left its civilizing infancy, it is still a victim of itself incapable of conceiving Being as Ethos.
