Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Power, Possession, and the Distance That Charms

Optional full-text route · Station 4 of 35

Read: Book I, §§13–20, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §13 and stop before §21.
Allow: About 50–70 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The eight sections total about 2,100 words in the free edition; §§13–14 make up more than half of it.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §13 · §14 · §18.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here.

Before you read

Station 3 asked who needs unconditional duties. These eight sections turn the same suspicion on kindness, pity, and love. §13 explains doing good and doing harm alike by a “sense of power.” §14 explains love as a striving for possession. Then the book changes register: a mountain seen from a distance, a friendship lost over a small plank, a gardener’s fountain-nymph, the Greek who hardly saw his slaves, and a future in which folly could become noble.

The main question: If kindness and love can be explained as power and possession, is anything left over—and who is doing the explaining?

Keep the marks from station 2 ready. §§13–14 are mostly P: psychological claims about motive. Ask what would test each one.

What to notice

1. “That is all we care for!” §13 begins with a sweeping claim about motive. Does the rest of the section keep it that sweeping?
2. The exception at the end of §14. After reducing love to possession, the section names something else. What, and how rare?
3. Distance. §15 and §18 both turn on seeing from far away. Compare what each distance makes possible.

Close reading

The sense of power

§13 opens: “We exercise our power over others by doing them good or by doing them ill—that is all we care for!” Harm is the sharper instrument, because “pain always asks concerning the cause.” Kindness works on those already dependent on us: we increase their power to increase our own, or show them the advantage of being in our power. Even martyrdom “for the sake of our church” is a sacrifice to “our longing for power.” §13, good and ill as power

The section then becomes a study of taste. It is “a matter of taste” whether someone prefers slow or sudden, safe or dangerous, increases of power. “An easy booty is something contemptible to proud natures.” They are hard toward sufferers, courteous toward equals; Nietzsche traces the “exquisite courtesy” of “the knightly caste” to this. §13, proud natures and easy booty

Then pity: “Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride.” The sufferer is an easy booty. The section ends with a sneer: “Pity is said to be the virtue of the gay lady.” Common’s “gay lady” is period English for a woman of loose reputation; check how your edition renders it. The line insults pity by attaching it to a disparaged kind of woman. State that plainly; it is a jibe, not an argument. §13, pity

Mark the whole section P and V, and ask what would test it. The opening says power is “all we care for.” The rest describes varied tastes and cases, which is a weaker and more testable claim. This is an early psychology of power from 1882. Do not read it as the later, broader doctrine of “will to power”; see the theme page on will to power for how the idea develops.

Love as possession

§14 asks whether “the lust of property and love” might be “the same impulse twice named”: disparaged by those who already possess, glorified by those who still want. Love of neighbour, love of knowledge, love of novelty: each may be “a striving after new property.” Even our pleasure in ourselves maintains itself by “transforming something new into ourselves.” The benevolent person who sees someone suffering takes the chance to “take possession of him.” §14, the same impulse twice named

Sexual love, Nietzsche says, shows the striving most plainly. The lover wants “unconditioned, sole possession,” power over the beloved’s soul as well as her body, and would like to become “the dragon of his golden hoard.” It is surprising that this should have been called the opposite of egoism, “when it is perhaps precisely the most unqualified expression of egoism.” Note the “perhaps,” and note the pronouns: the lover is “he,” the beloved “her.” §14, the most unqualified egoism

The section does not end there. “There is, of course, here and there” a sequel to love in which two people’s longing for each other gives way to “a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them.” Then: “but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.” §14, friendship

This ending changes the section’s claim. The reduction of love to possession is not total: there is a kind of love directed with another person toward something above both. Nietzsche calls it rare, and doubts that anyone knows it. Book IV returns to friendship through shared joy (§338, station 24, and Reading 6).

Distance, and a plank

§15 describes a mountain that makes a whole district charming. We become grateful to it, climb it, and are disenchanted: “many a greatness, like many a goodness, wants only to be seen at a certain distance.” Some people can bear themselves only from a distance; “they are to be dissuaded from self-knowledge.” Set that last clause beside §2’s demand for intellectual conscience. It is a limit on self-examination, offered with a straight face. §15, distance

§16, “Across the Plank,” gives a moral and then, unusually, a story. The moral: with people ashamed of their feelings, kindness may mean making them laugh or saying something coolly playful. The story is told in the first and second person. Two people were so close that only a small plank lay between them. “Do you want to come across the plank to me?” The other did not come. Now mountains and torrents lie between them. The section does not identify either person, and neither should a reader. §16, the plank

Poverty, necessity, and bad weather

§17 says we cannot make a poor virtue rich, but we can “reinterpret its poverty into necessity,” as a gardener sets a thin stream in a fountain-nymph’s arms. Keep this image. Book IV will ask to see necessity as beautiful (§276) and to give style to a character, partly by reinterpretation (§290). Here the move is modest and a little comic. §17, a fountain-nymph

§19, titled “Evil,” asks whether a tree meant to grow high can do without storms. It lists hatred, jealousy, distrust, greed, and violence among “the favouring circumstances” of great growth. “The poison by which the weaker nature is destroyed is strengthening to the strong individual.” This extends §4 from the species to the individual. Mark it V. The rhetorical questions present adversity as a condition of growth; they are not hedges. It divides people into weaker and strong by the outcome. §19, storms

The ancient slave

§18, “Ancient Pride,” makes a historical and a valuative claim in one sentence: “The ancient savour of nobility is lacking in us, because the ancient slave is lacking in our sentiment.” A Greek of noble descent saw such distance between himself and the slave that he “could hardly even see the slave plainly.” We, by contrast, are “accustomed as we are to the doctrine of the equality of men, although not to the equality itself.” The Greek philosopher, Nietzsche adds, felt that everyone who was not a philosopher was a slave. For us “the word ‘slave’ has not its full force … even in simile.” §18, ancient pride

Read it carefully, because it makes two different claims about modern people. First, the ancient slave is absent from our sentiment: we lack the ancient pride because we no longer feel the vast distance that slavery made visible. Second, a being without “the free disposal of himself” and without leisure is “not regarded by us as anything contemptible,” and “there is perhaps too much of this kind of slavishness in each of us,” given our social order. That second claim is not that slavishness has vanished, but that it may be everywhere and unseen. Mark it ? as well as V: Nietzsche hedges it with “perhaps.” The section is also partly criticism of modern hypocrisy: we hold a doctrine of equality without the equality. The tone is not neutral, and the section does not condemn the ancient arrangement it describes. Do not decide from §18 alone whether Nietzsche regrets the loss. Keep it in view for Book V, where §377 speaks of “a new slavery” (station 33).

§20, “Dignity of Folly,” imagines a future in which prudence is universal and therefore vulgar. Just as “a tyranny of truth and science” could raise the value of falsehood, a tyranny of prudence could make a new nobility: “To be noble—that might then mean, perhaps, to be capable of follies.” §20, the dignity of folly

A difficulty

Does explaining a motive explain it away?

§§13–14 explain kindness, pity, martyrdom, and love by power and possession. If the explanations are right, have they shown that kindness and love are nothing but power and possession? The text itself resists that conclusion in two places. §13 turns into a range of tastes rather than one motive. §14 ends with friendship, a love directed toward an ideal above both friends.

Two questions follow. First, what evidence would show that a given act of kindness was an exercise of power? Nietzsche offers observation and analogy, not cases. Second, whose standpoint is this? §13 praises the “proud natures” who find easy booty contemptible and sneers at pity. The explanation is not offered from nowhere: it comes with a preference for one type of person. Separate the psychological claim from the ranking before judging either.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

What does the ending of §14 do to the argument that love is possession?

• State §14’s main claim in one sentence and mark its type.
• Explain what “friendship” adds, and why Nietzsche asks who has experienced it.
• Connect your answer to one other section in this station: §13, §15, or §18.

A successful response distinguishes explaining a motive from judging its value, notices the “perhaps” in §14, and states the section’s gendered picture of sexual love accurately.

Continue

Continue to station 5: Praised Virtues, a Morning Dream, and the Harvest of Corruption →

Read next: Book I, §§21–23. Its question: what does virtue cost when it becomes a public judgment?

Previous station: station 3, §§4–12. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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