Part 2 — The Free Spirit

Part 2 opens with a warning against philosophical martyrdom. "Beware of suffering for the truth's sake," Nietzsche says — it spoils the neutrality that honest inquiry requires. The free spirit does not want a halo; he wants to see clearly, which is a different and lonelier ambition. Section 26 describes the solitude the free spirit requires: every select man strives instinctively for a citadel, a privacy where he is free from the crowd and the many. This is not misanthropy; it is the condition of independent thought.

Section 36 is the argumentative center of Part 2 and one of the most concentrated passages in the book. Starting from the reality of the will — "it is given in evidence" — Nietzsche attempts to extend it: suppose all organic functions are reducible to will to power? Suppose what we call "force" in physics is nothing but the world of the will seen from outside? "The world viewed from the inside, defined and determined according to its intelligible character — would be will to power and nothing besides." The argument is compressed and contestable. Nietzsche acknowledges it. But the hypothesis organizes everything that follows.

The part closes with a meditation on masks. Every profound nature builds a mask involuntarily: its genuine qualities are misread by shallower observers, who attribute to it the motives they would have themselves. A man of genuine hardness is assumed to be cruel; a man of genuine reserve is assumed to be cold; a man of genuine piety is assumed to be calculating. Nietzsche's advice to the free spirit is to neither correct nor protest these misreadings. Let the mask stand. "What is 'genuine' about them appears perhaps in only the masks they wear, in the faces they do not show." The concept will recur throughout the book.