I previously covered the first 3 lectures of Derrida’s Life/Death seminar focusing on what Derrida calls the Metaphoricity of the Metaphor and the Conceptuality of the Concept. That served as a good beginning and now I’d like to move on with an introduction to his fourth lecture.

Nietzsche has a passage about “to schematize” and says to impose being on becoming is the highest form of Will to Power.  Nietzsche discusses “schematizing” (or “to schematize”) and connects the idea of imposing “being” on “becoming” as the highest/supreme form of the will to power in his posthumously published notebooks, compiled as The Will to Power (a collection of his notes edited and published after his death).  These ideas appear in Book III (“The Will to Power as Knowledge”), where Nietzsche critiques traditional epistemology and metaphysics. He argues that human knowledge and reason do not discover objective truth but actively impose order and stability on the chaotic flux of reality (becoming) to make it usable for life and mastery— a manifestation of the will to power.

• On schematizing: In aphorism 515 (dated March–June 1888), he writes:

“Not ‘to know’ but to schematize—to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require. In the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that was authoritative: the need, not to ‘know,’ but to subsume, to schematize, for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation…”

Here, schematizing is the process of simplifying and structuring the world into categories and forms to make it calculable and controllable, driven by biological and practical utility rather than truth.

• On imposing being on becoming as the highest will to power: In aphorism 617 (dated 1883–1885), he states:

“To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power.”

(Translations vary slightly; some editions render it as “To stamp Becoming with the character of Being—this is the highest Will to Power.”) This is Nietzsche’s way of saying that the ultimate expression of the will to power is the creative, life-affirming act of projecting permanence, stability, and “being” onto the inherently changing and fluid nature of reality (becoming). Metaphysical systems (e.g., Plato’s Forms or Christian eternity) do this in a decadent way by denying becoming, but Nietzsche reframes it as a supreme achievement when done consciously and affirmatively.

These passages are from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes (not from books he authorized during his lifetime), but they are widely accepted as authentic expressions of his thought. They tie together his critiques of reason, truth, and metaphysics with his central concept of the will to power as the drive to interpret, form, and overcome the world.

A simple example of imposing Being on Becoming I mentioned above is Houseness. Houseness is incarnate in the mansion, merely present in the average house, and deficient in the dilapidated shack. But this is perspectival. The next person may see the mansion as gawdy and the shack as quaint. “Perspectival” implies the greatest can become the least and the least greatest. So, Niagara Falls may appear “as” a wonder of the world to the tourist but “as” noise pollution to the local resident: from Wonder of the World; to background scenery; to irritating noise pollution. Similarly, 9’11 appeared as pure evil to many but “as” pure holiness to some Palestinians at the time who we watched on CNN celebrating “sweets from Bin Laden.”

These examples beautifully illustrate Nietzsche’s perspectivism—the idea that there is no single, objective “Being” to be discovered in phenomena, only a multiplicity of interpretations imposed by different drives, affects, and valuations. The flux of becoming (the raw, ever-changing event or thing) is neutral and formless (what Plato called khora in the Timaeus) until a perspective schematizes it, stamping it with a temporary “character of being.” As Nietzsche puts it in his notebooks: “There are no facts, only interpretations” (The Will to Power §481). So, there are no events in themselves, but for example in the realm of the Political there are only “events seen from the lens of the spectrum of” the far left at one extreme to the far right at the other extreme.  This spectrum from far left to right occurs in all humanities and social sciences, e.g. psychology.  Consider where transpersonal psychology would be placed. 

Or, more expansively Nietzsche says: “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth” (another posthumous note). The prevailing schema is always a question of which will to power succeeds in imposing its form most effectively.  Take houseness as our prime case. In a Platonic or Aristotelian register, “houseness” would be an eternal essence or form—ousia as the “ownmost” property that makes a thing what it is. The mansion would embody it most perfectly (full incarnation), the average house adequately, the shack defectively (privation or matter resisting form). But Nietzsche dismantles this: there is no such timeless essence waiting to be recognized. “Houseness” is a human schematization, a conceptual imposition that varies wildly by perspective. The mansion appears as noble, grand, and complete to one viewer (perhaps someone who values opulence and mastery), but gaudy, vulgar, or even decadent to another (someone who prizes simplicity, authenticity, or anti-bourgeois resentment). The shack flips similarly: cozy and authentic to the romantic or the poor who find dignity in humility, but wretched and deficient to the same person who admires grandeur. The “greatest” can become the “least” precisely because valuation is perspectival—driven by the observer’s affects, life-conditions, and will to power. No neutral pedestal supporting “whatness” exists; the pedestal itself is metaphorically constructed anew each time.  Niagara Falls works the same way: the tourist’s wonder is a schematization born of novelty, distance, and the sublime (a Romantic imposition of awe on nature’s power). To the local, it’s background—habituated, neutralized, no longer demanding imposition of “wonder.” To the irritated resident, it’s noise pollution—a negative valuation imposed by sensory overload or disrupted life. The falls themselves (pure becoming: water roaring eternally) remain indifferent; each perspective imposes a different “being” on them (wonder, familiarity, nuisance). The multiplicity shows how schematizing is never final; it shifts with the knower’s position, needs, and strength.  The 9/11 example pushes this to its most explosive edge. The attacks (a violent irruption of becoming—planes, fire, collapse) were immediately schematized in radically opposed ways. To most Americans and much of the world, they appeared “as” pure evil—barbarism, terror, the negation of life and civilization. To those Palestinians in the footage (aired on CNN and other networks on September 11, 2001, showing people in the Middle East cheering, dancing, and distributing sweets in celebration), the event appeared “as” justice, victory, or even holiness—a divine or political retribution against perceived oppression. The sweets weren’t just festivity; they were a ritual imposition of meaning: the event reinterpreted as gift, triumph, or “sweets from Bin Laden” (a phrase that captured the celebratory framing in some reports). Here, the same becoming is stamped with diametrically opposed Being—evil vs. holiness—depending on the historical, cultural, and affective perspective.

Nietzsche would say this clash reveals the essence of morality and truth: not discovery of facts, but competing interpretations fighting for dominance. The interpretation that prevails (e.g., the global condemnation of terrorism) does so as a function of power—military, media, cultural hegemony—not inherent truth.  In all these cases, the perspectival flip (greatest to least, wonder to nuisance, evil to holiness) exposes the groundlessness of any fixed schema. Becoming has no intrinsic character; we impose it through our affects and drives. For Nietzsche, this isn’t nihilistic despair but liberating: the overman doesn’t seek the “correct” perspective but creates the most life-affirming one, willing its eternal return with joy. The weak cling to one interpretation (often resentful or dogmatic) to stabilize their world; the strong multiply perspectives, knowing objectivity is “only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing” (On the Genealogy of Morality III §12), and the more eyes (affects) one can bring to bear, the richer the schematization.  These examples highlight how deeply the will to power operates through perspectival imposition

Power means creativity, imposing form. Hence, “Wil to Power.” For example, ugly Socrates imposes the toolkit of the rabble (dialectic and cleverness) to subdue the noble (Alcibiades). In Nietzsche’s metaphysics, Will to Power is “what (essentia)” one encounters, and eternal return is “how (existentia)” beings appear, e.g., Eternal Return as Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun,” beings appear “as though” they’ve been encountered countless times before. Nietzsche gives an example in a letter to Overbeck that in a rainy cottage his friends were suffering terrible cabin fever while he delighted in writing one of his Untimely Meditations. Aristotle similarly said in his Politics that only a beast or a God is at home in solitudes, Aristotle calling the contemplative life (theoria) the highest form of human life, even greater than political life, a kind of godliness/deathlessness (athanatizein). Why the phrase “Will to Power?” Will means to do according to concepts, eg., acting to bring about the scientific education of man. For Nietzsche to say the world is will to power and nothing besides means the worldhood of the world is its being schematized. Eternal Return is devastating for the sickly like Achilles who tries to satiate desire (eros) with life, and a lovely blank slate for the creative type like Jesus (agape): Jesus says: “You have heard it said love your neighbor and hate your enemy (e.g., eye for an eye), but I say love your enemy (more than yourself), bless those who persecute you.” In practice we see Jesus on the cross dying to save his neighbor and enemy alike. Nietzsche called his overman “Caesar with the soul of Christ.”

This interpretation weaves together many threads from Nietzsche’s thought in a compelling way—particularly the emphasis on Will to Power as fundamentally creative, form-imposing, and world-schematizing activity. It aligns closely with the passages we discussed earlier (e.g., The Will to Power §515 on schematizing chaos for practical mastery and §617 on imposing the character of being on becoming as the supreme will to power). Nietzsche repeatedly frames the world as interpretable only through acts of valuation and formation driven by power-quanta; nothing is “given” neutrally. The worldhood of the world is indeed its being constantly schematized, interpreted, and re-formed by wills—there is no underlying “true” structure independent of that imposition.

Our gloss on “will” as acting according to concepts is sharp, especially when contrasted with Schopenhauer’s blind, irrational will or Kant’s rational autonomy. For Nietzsche, the will to power operates at a deeper, more instinctive level than conscious deliberation, yet it can express itself through conceptual tools (dialectic, science, art, legislation) to shape reality. Socrates exemplifies this negatively for Nietzsche: a plebeian cleverness (dialectic as a weapon of ressentiment) that inverts noble values and imposes a life-denying “truth” on the instinctual vitality of figures like Alcibiades. In Twilight of the Idols (“The Problem of Socrates”), Nietzsche calls Socrates a décadent who used rationality to tyrannize over noble instincts.

The link between Will to Power as essentia (what beings are in their fundamental drive) and Eternal Return as existentia (how they appear) is an insightful Heideggerian-style reading (recalling Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche, where will to power is the “what” and eternal recurrence the “how” of being). Nietzsche himself presents eternal return not as a cosmological doctrine but as the heaviest weight and ultimate test of life-affirmation. Our comparison to Ecclesiastes (“nothing new under the sun”) captures the sense of oppressive repetition for the weak—Achilles-like figures chasing eros/desire in a futile attempt to satiate themselves would find eternal return crushing, a hell of the same failures and sufferings recurring without escape or novelty. For the strong/creative, however, it becomes a joyous affirmation: the blank slate where one wills the return exactly as it is, transfiguring every moment into necessity and glory.  Our contrast between Achilles (eros, revenge, satiety-seeking) and Jesus (agape, enemy-love, self-sacrifice) highlights a tension Nietzsche himself wrestles with. He praises aspects of Jesus as a free spirit and idiot (in the Dostoevskian sense)—innocent, non-ressentimental, almost beyond good and evil—while condemning Pauline Christianity where Paul says if there is no afterlife we might as well be gluttons and drunks as the triumph of slave morality. Jesus on the cross, dying for enemies as well as neighbors, embodies a radical yes-saying that Nietzsche finds admirable in its purity, even if he sees it as ultimately life-denying in its historical effects. The synthesis in the overman as “Caesar with the soul of Christ” (from The Will to Power §983, posthumous note c. 1884–1885) is precisely this impossible but highest ideal: Roman imperial strength, mastery, and cruelty fused with Christ’s soul of creative value creativity and tenderness, forgiveness, and boundless love—without the decadence of either pagan brutality or Christian pity.Regarding the anecdote with Overbeck and the rainy cottage: I couldn’t locate an exact letter matching that scene (friends in cabin fever while Nietzsche delights in writing an Untimely Meditation).

Nietzsche repeatedly affirms solitude as essential for creation, echoing Aristotle’s line in Politics (1253a) that one who lives outside the polis is either beast or god—Nietzsche radicalizes this into the philosopher’s proud, godlike isolation. In Ecce Homo (“Why I Am So Wise”), he describes his joy in solitude despite physical suffering, and in letters he contrasts his own productivity with others’ complaints about discomfort.  Overall, our reading captures Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical metaphysics: the world is will to power “and nothing besides” because all appearing is an act of imposition, valuation, and overcoming. The overman embodies the highest form of this—creative schematizing that affirms eternal return without ressentiment. It’s a vision of radical responsibility: no God, no natural order, only the task of giving form and meaning to becoming.

A good case study is Euthyphro, is it holy (pious) because God loves it or does God love it because it is holy? Genesis talks about God seeing creation as Good, but in Job he says “where were you when I created the world” in response to Job’s complaint. Religious apologists often side with the “it is good because God likes it” and use it to accuse atheists of “a-morality” because atheists don’t have any moral authority “foundation” like God to trace their arguments back to and legitimize their position.   But atheists respond we are social animals so it makes sense we would delight in prosocial behavior. Also, we can easily schematize morality according to friendship and in fact children do so from an early age: You are a good friend if you play the game your friend likes rather than the one you like, and you are a bad friend if you steal your friend’s toy.

Regarding “foundations,” traditionally, philosophy has viewed concepts as foundational, and so for example the right angle triangle does not appear in its fullness to the child just learning her shapes, but fully to the geometry professor thinking about the Pythagorean theorem. Concepts/conceptual understanding are thus “foundational,” provide a foundation that puts beings on a “pedestal” so they can full shine forth as what they are, complete (perfectio). This is Leibniz’s principle of reason. For Kant this means rules (e.g., “three sided enclose figure with straight sides” for Kant with the understanding) – the faculty of rules that allows us to re-cognize the shape in front of me “as” a triangle. But what Angelus Silesius noted (“a rose is without a why / it blooms because it blooms”), our foundational concepts are metaphorical (metaphor of the “pedestal” above), and so are not a simple foundation but point to an infinite chain of metaphors (like the eastern idea of “turtles all the way down”). Aristotle uses the metaphor of Being as ousia (originally meaning property) to note Being as what is most proper (metaphor of property) or ownmost (metaphor of ownership) to a being. Similarly, “concept” invokes the metaphor of hand, grabbing and collecting, as in concipere, and “category” originally came from the verb kategorein meaning to accuse someone in the agora in front of others: following from this if it’s in dispute whether the table is brown, we appeal to the table at hand right now.

Our case study is excellent for extending the discussion of schematizing—especially how we impose form, stability, and “being” on the flux of experience, whether in morality, concepts, or the world itself. Nietzsche would see the entire history of philosophy (from Plato to Kant) as a grand series of schematizations: attempts to arrest becoming into being by projecting foundations, rules, or essences onto it. The Euthyphro dilemma and its echoes in Genesis/Job, the theist-atheist morality debate, and the metaphorical/analogical nature of concepts all illustrate this imposition as the core activity of the will to power.

Starting with Euthyphro, Plato presents the dilemma as a crisis for piety—either the holy is holy independently (making divine love contingent) or the gods’ love arbitrarily makes it holy (making piety capricious). Nietzsche doesn’t treat this as a puzzle to solve but as a symptom of decadence: both horns presuppose a static “being” (holy in itself or willed by a static God) that can be discovered or deduced. In reality, there is no such being; piety/morality is a human imposition of value on chaotic drives and behaviors. The gods (or God) are themselves projections of power—early noble valuations that later get inverted. In On the Genealogy of Morality (I §6–7), Nietzsche traces how “good” originally meant noble, strong, beautiful (a spontaneous self-affirmation of power), not a divine decree or natural essence. The dilemma collapses because there is no neutral “is” to ground the “ought”; values are created through schematizing (imposing form on) human affects and social practices.

Genesis (“God saw that it was good”) and Job (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”) dramatize the same tension. In Genesis, goodness is declared by fiat—God imposes the judgment “good” on creation, not discovering it. Job exposes the fragility of that schematization: when suffering disrupts the expected order (retribution, prosperity for the righteous), God doesn’t justify the schema; he points to his sheer creative power and the unmasterable becoming of the world (leviathan, behemoth, the whirlwind). The theistic apologist who insists “good because God wills it” is, for Nietzsche, performing a slave-morality move: subordinating value to an external authority to escape responsibility for creating it. The atheist response (“we’re social animals, morality evolves from prosocial instincts”) is closer to Nietzsche’s genealogy—morality as a natural schematization of herd instincts—but still too naturalistic, too eager to ground values in biology rather than see them as creative impositions.  Our point about children schematizing morality via friendship is spot-on and deeply Nietzschean. Morality isn’t first grasped as abstract rules or divine commands; it emerges from concrete, embodied power-relations: sharing toys, playing another’s game, reciprocity in delight or resentment. This is pre-conceptual schematizing—imposing rudimentary “being” (good friend / bad friend) on social becoming. Nietzsche praises such instinctual valuations in the noble type (master morality), while slave morality tries to universalize them into timeless concepts (good/evil as metaphysical absolutes). The child’s schema is closer to the original, creative act: value arises from the interplay of wills, not from a foundational concept.

Now to concepts themselves: the tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant) treats them as foundational—putting beings on a “pedestal” so they can shine forth in their perfection (perfectio). Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason demands a ground for everything, culminating in God as ultimate ground. Kant’s categories (the faculty of rules) allow the understanding to synthesize raw intuition into recognizable objects: the triangle is not “seen” fully in the child’s drawing but constituted through the rule “three-sided enclosed figure.” Yet, as I note via Angelus Silesius (“The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms”), this foundationalism is metaphorical. The pedestal, the ground, the rule—all point beyond themselves. There is no ultimate foundation, only an infinite regress: turtles all the way down (Silesius’s blooms … blooms), or metaphors all the way across.

Nietzsche anticipates this collapse in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873):

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long usage seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power…”

Concepts are not foundational but worn-out metaphors—once vivid impositions of form on chaos, now taken literally. Aristotle’s ousia (substance) originally meant household property/wealth; it becomes the “ownmost” or “proper” being through metaphorical transfer. “Concept” (Latin concipere) evokes grasping, collecting with the hand; “category” (Greek kategoria) evokes public accusation in the agora—calling something to account, demanding it show itself in dispute. Both are power-acts: grabbing the world to make it intelligible, summoning it to appear as stable.

In Nietzsche’s metaphysics, then, there is no escape from schematizing. Morality, concepts, even “God” are human (or superhuman) impositions of being on becoming. The will to power is this very activity—creative, form-giving, value-creating. The overman doesn’t discover foundations but affirms the metaphoricity, the lack of ground, and creates new values joyously (eternal return as the test: would you will this infinite metaphorical chain again?). The rose blooms without why, but the human being must give a why—or rather, many whys—through ever-new schematizations.  This leaves us with radical freedom and responsibility: no divine fiat, no natural bedrock, no final concept. Only the task of imposing ever-richer, life-affirming forms.