Nietzsche vs Plato

This “will to power”, he argues is everywhere. “Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power, and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master….And where there is sacrifice and service and loving glances, there also is the will to be master.” (Thus Spake. XXXIV, Self Surpassing.)

He toyed with the idea that Napoleon, particularly in his reforms and his code of laws might be a superior man with a sublimated “will to power” but was not convinced. He also seems to have thought that Julius Caesar might have sublimated his towering ego and ruthless energy. Almost in despair he cannot find the Overman who has sublimated his will to power and says. “I have as yet seen no great man. That which is great, the acutest eye is a present insensible to it. It is the kingdom of the mob. Many a one have I found who stretched and inflated himself, and the people cried: “Behold a freat man!” But what good do allbellows do! The wind cometh out at last.”

In the end, on the verge of madness, writing just a few weeks before his final break down, in Ecce Homo, he seems to suggest that only he himself is the overman who will one day be recognized to the genius he is.