Abstract

In virtue of what do things have an identity? This question still lands us in great difficulties and confusion. Against the traditional Aristotelian view of reality, which clings to firmness and stability in the world, Nietzsche postulates his conception of reality as becoming. Nietzsche's alternative conception of the world is characterized as an organized strife of wills to power. The continuous change that we experience on the one hand, and the durability that we seem to perceive in the world on the other hand, are not explained as two different and opposed aspects of reality; nor are the change and richness that we experience in the world reduced to a fixed, universal principle. Rather, the notion of being is taken up in the notion of becoming: becoming is understood as the continuous fixation of reality in processes of mastery, and as a dynamic that serves life in its unceasing striving to overcome itself