For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
At #283 we find an extremely important statement of Nietzsche's ethical project, and this continues through #290. This project will carry us from the few noble souls of his own age to an age of "preparatory humans" who will themselves be replaced by a race of such beings. He even emphatically uses the word 'overcome' in this context. What is it in each of us, indeed in all things, that needs to be overcome?
Nietzsche continually uses rhetorical language aimed at heroism, waging war, living dangerously, etc. But it is extremely important to recognize that these are wars of the mind. It is hard to see through the cultural crust that clothes us in habit; therefore, we need to go to ourselves ready for warfare and ready to take the risks of original thought and skepticism. As the theme continues in #285,
Nietzsche stresses the constancy of energy necessary in the kind of existence that he is proposing and suggests that, "you will the eternal recurrence of war and peace." And finally, "perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god." Note at #292 his hostility toward morality as such. Nietzsche's project is an ethical system to be taken up by brave and adventurous individuals, not a formula to be laid down over individuals to stifle their own activity.
At #301, again, he makes the crucial point that, while we always think ourselves to be "observers" of life, I suppose that "life happens to us," we are really the poets who keep creating life. This is especially true of values. Natural things have no intrinsic value, for Nietzsche, for we are the ones who bestow value. "Only we have created the world that concerns man!"
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