Why Love is about POWER | Nietzsche

Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos: ▶   / weltgeistyt   Mentioned in the video: ▶ Genealogy of Morals:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: The Genealogy of Mora...   OUR ANALYSES: ▶ Beyond Good and Evil:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: Beyond Good and Evil ...   ▶ The Antichrist:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: The Antichrist (Full ...   ▶ Genealogy of Morals:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: The Genealogy of Mora...   ▶ Twilight of the Idols:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: Twilight of the Idols...   ▶ The Will to Power:    • NIETZSCHE: Will to Power Explained (all pa...   ▶ Daybreak:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: DAYBREAK - Thoughts o...   ▶ The Joyful Science:    • NIETZSCHE Explained: The Joyful Science | ...   In the Joyful Science, Nietzsche notes his surprise in how our culture came to regard love as a sweet, romantic, selfless, self-sacrificial thing. For Nietzsche, true love is actually the opposite of these things: it's about desire, about wanting something for yourself, about not being willing to share, about willing to compete with rivals and to wish for them nothing, and for yourself, everything. He even goes so far as to say that love and greed might be the same psychological impulse, just under a different name. But then how did love come to be associated with selflessness? The answer is to be found in the slave revolt in morals: the powerless, deprived as they were of the pleasures of love, invented an imaginary victory over the powerful: they transvaluated the value of love, redefined it to mean general love of mankind (agape in the Ancient Greek sense) so that now anyone could enjoy the pleasures of love, not just the happy few. Through a long march through our culture (Nietzsche always maintained the slave revolt in morals was a resounding success) the slaves succeeded in taking love, originally conceived as Eros, a violent, lust-filled affair with a tinge of violence in it (just think of jealousy as one of the strongest human emotions) and turned it into Agape, a kind of neutered, general, abstract "love of mankind." The Western, Romantic conception of love is the history for a forgetting of the original meaning of love, and the heart of darkness within it, the human, all-too-human base impulses that rule our existence: the desire for power, domination, competition.