Conflict, Will, Power

Abstract

‘The total character of the world … is in all eternity chaos’, Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science [(109) p. 168]. In A Vision Yeats complains of Shelley that he ‘lacked the Vision of Evil, could not conceive of the world as a continual conflict, so, though great poet he certainly was, he was not of the greatest kind’ [V, p. 144]. And in one of the last letters to come from his pen he tells Ethel Mannin, ‘To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other’s life, live each other’s death’ [20 Oct 1938, L, p. 918].

All events, all motion, all becoming… a determination of degrees and relations of force… a struggle…

— Nietzsche, The Will to Power (522) p. 299.

I saw the world as a conflict....

— Yeats, A Vision p. 72.