Beyond Good and Evil, section 19

"Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the world...Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word - and it is precisely in this one word that the popular prejudice lurks, which has defeated the always inadequate caution of philosophers. So let us for once be more cautious, let us be "unphilosophical": let us say that in all willing there is, first, a plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the state "away from which," the sensation of the state "towards which," the sensations of this "from" and "towards" themselves, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting into motion "arms and legs," begins its action by force of habit as soon as we "will" anything.

Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, secondly, should thinking also: in every act o the will there is a ruling thought - let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the "willing," as if any will would them remain over!

Third, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an affect, and specifically the affect of the command. That which is termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must obey" - this consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally so the straining of the attention, the straight look that fixes itself exclusively on one aim, the unconditional evaluation that "this and nothing else is necessary now," the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered - and whatever else belongs to the position of the commander. A man who wills commands something within himself that renders obedience, or that he believes renders obedience."

to be continued...

Beyond Good and Evil - Preface

"But the fight against Plato or...the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millenia...has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals.

"...we good Europeans* and free, very free spirits - we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and - who knows? - the goal -"

*Nietzsche's coinage, intiially introduced by him in Human, All-Too-Human (1878), section 475 (Portable Nietzsche, pp. 61-63).

[From Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufmann, pp. 193-194]