Opening of the Way

so page 60ff Lachman writes:

Power is perhaps the greatest intoxicant because it is linked to the feeling of life itself.  Nietzsche knew this, and it helped him to outgrow Schopenhauer's pessimism.  "What is goo?" he asks in The Antichrist.

All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

What is bad? -- All that proceeds from weakness.

What is happiness? -- The feeling that power increases -- that a resistance is overcome.

Nietzsche's rhetoric is powerful itself and is too often quoted out of context to support attitudes and beliefs he did not share; that is an occupational hazard of a good writer.  Nietzsche is not advocationg power over others, as he is often said to be, but power over oneself.  Life Nietzsche tells us, is that "which must overcome itself again and again."  His Ubermensch -- usually mistranslated as "superman" -- is not a demigod or a member of a master race lording it over the rest of us, but someone who has "overcome" himself, an "overman."  When Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra addresses the people in the market place and says that "as long as I can conceive of something better than myself I cannot be unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it."  The greatest sense of power comes from overcoming one's own weaknesses and strengths, from growing beyond oneself.  This is what creative evolution is about.

(Creative Evolution is the title of a work by Henri Bergson.  Lachman has to know this. )

But Nietzsche the psychologist knows that often this will to power finds other more immediately stimulating channels and that it is all to easy to develop the habit of following those rather than developing the more legitimate means of heightening our sense of power, that is of growth.  Indeed, one sign of self-mastery is that one outgrows the temptation to get a quick, cheap thrill at the expense of one's development.
.
.

As Colin Wilson discovered, one of the avenues for this is sex.