Hegel and Nietzsche
My favorite Nietzsche quote has always been “Only excess of strength is proof of strength.” I believe it’s from The Will to Power (a book-length collection of his unpublished notes).
The best way to think about Nietzsche is that he was exploring the ideas of Kant and Hegel from the perspective of a human person.
I think this quote—“Only excess of strength is proof of strength” is a good example of this. One of Hegel’s most well-known quotes is “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” This means that philosophy only reaches an understanding of a way of life or of history as that time passes away. Knowledge is always too late.
I think the Nietzsche quote is an implementation of this idea, but on an existential, human level. “Only excess of strength is proof of strength”—You can only give evidence of your strength or power or worth really, once it crosses over into too much, and once something is too much, it can no longer really be understood or useful. But it only becomes proof once it passes over into this zone of excess.
So strength or power, just like knowledge, only has meaning or coherence in the world once the conditions for it are no longer there. You will have strength only when it can’t really be used, you will have wisdom and knowledge only after it’s relevant.