Life is essentially will to power

So far, this is perhaps the most important paragraph. It is a protest against reading a moral order of things in life. “Life is something essentially immoral!” Nietzsche tells us in the introduction to the “Birth of Tragedy”. Even to call life “activity,” or to define it further as “the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations,” as Spencer has it, Nietzsche characterises as a “democratic idiosyncracy.” He says to define it in this way, “is to mistake the true nature and function of life, which is Will to Power.... Life is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation and at least, putting it mildest, exploitation.” Adaptation is merely a secondary activity, a mere re-activity (see Note on Chapter LVII.).