4.6.2—
Becoming and the Contest of Interpretations

Let us pursue this further. To account for the ubiquity and perpetuity of change in the world, both Heraclitus and Nietzsche call upon the metaphor of war and struggle: "war is the father of all" (fr. 53),^[84] says the former; "[t]he world [ . . . ] is 'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36), declares the latter, explaining that:

every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the parts of other bodies and ends by coming into an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they conspire together for power . And the process goes on. (WP 636)

"[T]he process goes on" because these unions are unstable, each part bent on power; and so "the contest endures in all eternity" (PTA 5, P. 55). This contest could not have had a simple beginning, because it requires at least two contestants and the difference and tension between them. And the projection of an end to this struggle Nietzsche views as merely the dream of those for whom this world of becoming ought to be other than it is (see WP 708).

[83] Cf. GS 54, 335; WP 556ff.; and WP 625 ("there is no 'essence-in-itself,' it is only relations that constitute an essence").

[84] Nietzsche quotes this fragment in GS 92 and celebrates war and warriors throughout his writing: see, e.g., HC ; GS 283, 285, 377; Z: 1 "On Reading and Writing," Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; BGE 76; GM I: 5, I: 7, II: 9, II: 24, III: epigram, III: 10, III: 25; TI "Morality" 3, "Skirmishes" 24; EH "Wise" 7; and WP 1040.

Moreover, for Nietzsche and Heraclitus, there is no place outside this struggle:

While Heraclitus' imagination saw this restless motion of the universe, this "reality," with the eyes of a blissful spectator who is watching innumerable pairs of contestants wrestling in joyous combat and refereed by stern judges, he was overcome by an even greater idea: he could no longer see the contesting pairs and their referees as separate; the judges themselves seemed to be striving in the contest and the contestants seemed to be judging them. (PTA 6, P. 57)

That is, we who witness this becoming are ourselves a part of it; our interpretations are contestants in the game or agon . Rejecting the notion that the world simply reveals itself as it is, Nietzsche and Heraclitus maintain that the world always appears under the aegis of one or another interpretation. Yet, lacking both a fixed essence and a detached judge who could determine it, no one of these interpretations can ever be granted ultimate priority. While surely there are "momentary ascendanc[ies]" during which particular interpretations dominate, the contest continues without end. "A thing would be defined," Nietzsche writes, "once all creatures had asked 'what is that?' and had answered their question. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things were missing, then the thing would not yet be 'defined'" (WP 556). Thus is any final characterization of a "thing"—and, indeed, of the world as a whole—forever contested and, hence, deferred.