Schopenhauer said that the fundamental desire of a man is the “will to live”; Nietzsche proclaimed that the deepest longing of man is the “will to dominate”.
Schopenhauer said half-truth and Nietzsche enunciated a total truth, although perhaps in a unilateral sense. What is certain is that no being - and man even less - is satisfied by the simple fact of living, of existing only on the horizontal level, and continuing to live on it. The more conscious of itself is a being, stronger is the desire to surpass the level where it is, pursuing another one, ascensional, to live powerfully because power is happiness, personal fulfilment, and the fullness of power is the plenitude of happiness. Ultimately, complete happiness consists fundamentally in a sense of power, which gives security and freedom, without which no true happiness is possible. Those who live powerfully are happy. Happiness is life in abundance. And this abundant life is impossible in weakness; it requires power, determination, initiative, willpower.
Between the horizontal level of simple living and the vertical level of living powerfully, numerous ascensional levels are possible, of a greater or lesser degree of distancing from the horizontal and approximation of the vertical.
A worm eating humus all its entire life must live quite satisfied because its vertical potentialities are minimal since its conscience is found in a minimum degree of autonomy. We do not know how far goes the “will to dominate” of a worm.
However, an eagle or a lion shows a remarkably superior “will to dominate” because they live more abundantly, and their degrees of happiness must be much greater than that of a worm.
It is in the intimate nature of man to live abundantly. “I came that men might have life - said Jesus - and to have it in great abundance.”
Every man has the strong desire to the plenitude of realization – even if dormant, i.e., to energize his potentialities; the desire to be explicitly what he is already implicitly, to surpass the evolutionary level in which he is today and to rise to a higher level - more sensed and intuited than intellectually proved by objective reasoning. The more conscious of himself, he becomes, the more recognizes that his existence comprises numerous evolutionary stages; that he has to undergo many metamorphoses, between birth, life, and death - just as a caterpillar, after being born from the egg, knows biologically that it must die as a caterpillar, reborn as a chrysalis, and then die as a chrysalis to reborn again as a butterfly; knows that its vital epic is a succession of lights and darkness, of expansion and contraction, of activity and passivity - towards a goal that the individual consciousness of the caterpillar ignores, but which the universal consciousness of the Cosmos has known since the beginning of this evolutionary chain.
Nonhuman beings do not live properly speaking, instead, are lived by the great cosmic consciousness of life, subordinated to the intelligence determined by this potency; they have life, but they lack experience; they have no vital autocracy, for their whole life is determined by circumstances external to them; they do not govern themselves but are governed by the impact of the great Life and Universal Intelligence of the Cosmos. And for this reason, they are not responsible for their actions either – the responsibility remains with the Cosmos itself. These beings do not know ethics, neither to the right nor to the left, nor good nor to evil, because ethics supposes autocracy, autonomy.
It is only with the advent of man that the phenomenon of ego autonomy began, and therefore, ethical consciousness, the possibility of good and evil.
An ethically conscious man knows that he is a traveller from distant regions, a pilgrim from the Infinite; he knows that even though he has distanced himself from the non-human world - and that includes minerals and vegetables as well - he is still far distant from the ultimate goal, from the full realization of all his latent potentialities. It is perhaps possible that there are human beings who find themselves on the same level of ascensional evolution; some performed 10 degrees, another 20 degrees, others maybe 50 degrees of awakening from their dormant potentialities. But it seems that to this day very rare men have attained the plenitude of their perfection, and for this reason, they are called integral men, cosmic, Christlike.
If a caterpillar could reason like a human, perhaps it would be afraid to be cloistered in the mysterious cocoon - which seems to be its coffin, yet which is at the same time the cradle of a new life as a butterfly! Fortunately, the great Cosmic Intelligence thinks for the caterpillar, and so its intelligence does not fear death, because a voice from within tells it that this today’s dusk is the prelude to tomorrow's dawn.
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