The too-human gods attacked by Xenophanes were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one god, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variously estimited number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form the so-called Hermetica. In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, because the subject and predicate negate each other. Possibly so, but the formula of the Hermetic books almost entitles us to envisage that sphere. In the thirteenth century the image it reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the Speculum Triplex encyclopedia. In the sixteenth century the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them.
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The first person perspective is concave.
The third person perspective is convex.
The second person perspective is not so easy to characterize.
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Suppose nothing else were “given” as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives — for thinking is merely an interrelation {Verhalten} of these drives to each other –: is it not permitted to perform an experiment and to ask the question whether this “given” would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or “material”) world? I do not mean as a deception, as “appearance,” a “representation” (in the Berkeleian or Schopenhauerian sense), but as holding the same rank of reality that our affect has — as a more primitive form of the world of affects in which everything still lies contained in a powerful unity before it undergoes ramifications and developments in the organic process (and, as is only fair, pampered and weakened, too –), as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions, along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, metabolism, are still synthetically linked with one another — as a pre-form of life. In the end, not only is it permitted to perform this experiment: the conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (– to the point of nonsense, if I may say so): that is a moral of method which one may not shirk today — it follows “from its definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do — and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself –, then we must perform the experiment of positing the causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. “Will,” of course, can have an effect only upon “will” — and not upon “matter” (not upon “nerves” for example — ): in short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will has an effect upon will wherever “effects” are recognized — and whether all mechanical occurrences are, insofar as a force is active in them, will force {Willenskraft}, effects of will. — Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will — namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it — ; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment — it is one problem — then one would have gained the right to designate all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world viewed from inside, the world defined and described by its “intelligible character” — it would be simply “will to power” and nothing else. —