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Will to power

The will to power (German: der Wille zur Macht) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. However, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's work, leaving its interpretation open to debate.[1] Usage of the term by Nietzsche can be summarized as self-determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto one's self or one's surroundings, and coincides heavily with egoism.[2]

Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology. This can be contrasted to the other Viennese schools of psychotherapy: Sigmund Freud's pleasure principle (will to pleasure) and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (will to meaning). Each of these schools advocates and teaches a very different essential driving force in human beings.

Kraft vs. Macht edit

Some of the misconceptions of the will to power, including Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, arise from overlooking Nietzsche's distinction between Kraft ("force" or "strength") and Macht ("power" or "might").[3] Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything possessing it, while Macht is, within Nietzsche's philosophy, closely tied to sublimation and "self-overcoming", the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes.

Early influences edit

Nietzsche's early thinking was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he first discovered in 1865. Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis on will and in particular has a concept of the "will to live". Writing a generation before Nietzsche, he explained that the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results in a desire in all living creatures to avoid death and to procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality – more fundamental even than being.

Another important influence was Roger Joseph Boscovich, whom Nietzsche discovered and learned about through his reading, in 1866, of Friedrich Albert Lange's 1865 Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism). As early as 1872, Nietzsche went on to study Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophia Naturalis for himself.[4] Nietzsche makes his only reference in his published works to Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil, where he declares war on "soul-atomism".[5] Boscovich had rejected the idea of "materialistic atomism", which Nietzsche calls "one of the best refuted theories there is".[6] The idea of centers of force would become central to Nietzsche's later theories of "will to power".

Appearance of the concept in Nietzsche's work edit

As the 1880s began, Nietzsche began to speak of the "Desire for Power" (Machtgelüst); this appeared in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) and Daybreak (1881). Machtgelüst, in these works, is the pleasure of the feeling of power and the hunger to overpower.

Wilhelm Roux published his The Struggle of Parts in the Organism (Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus) in 1881, and Nietzsche first read it that year.[7] The book was a response to Darwinian theory, proposing an alternative mode of evolution. Roux was a disciple of and influenced by Ernst Haeckel,[8] who believed the struggle to survive occurred at the cellular level. The various cells and tissues struggle for finite resources, so that only the strongest survive. Through this mechanism, the body grows stronger and better adapted. Rejecting natural selection, Roux's model assumed a neo-Lamarckian or pangenetic model of inheritance.

Nietzsche began to expand on the concept of Machtgelüst in The Gay Science (1882), where in a section titled "On the doctrine of the feeling of power",[9] he connects the desire for cruelty with the pleasure in the feeling of power. Elsewhere in The Gay Science he notes that it is only "in intellectual beings that pleasure, displeasure, and will are to be found",[10] excluding the vast majority of organisms from the desire for power.

Léon Dumont (1837–77), whose 1875 book Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité, le plaisir et la peine Nietzsche read in 1883,[11] seems to have exerted some influence on this concept. Dumont believed that pleasure is related to increases in force.[12] In The Wanderer and Daybreak, Nietzsche had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty are pleasurable because of exercise of power. But Dumont provided a physiological basis for Nietzsche's speculation. Dumont's theory also would have seemed to confirm Nietzsche's claim that pleasure and pain are reserved for intellectual beings, since, according to Dumont, pain and pleasure require a coming to consciousness and not just a sensing.

In 1883 Nietzsche coined the phrase Wille zur Macht in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The concept, at this point, was no longer limited to only those intellectual beings that can actually experience the feeling of power; it now applied to all life. The phrase Wille zur Macht first appears in part 1, "1001 Goals" (1883), then in part 2, in two sections, "Self-Overcoming" and "Redemption" (later in 1883). "Self-Overcoming" describes it in most detail, saying it is an "unexhausted procreative will of life". There is will to power where there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power. This suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive.

Schopenhauer's will to live (Wille zum Leben) thus became a subsidiary to the will to power, which is the stronger will. Nietzsche thinks his notion of the will to power is far more useful than Schopenhauer's will to live for explaining various events, especially human behavior—for example, Nietzsche uses the will to power to explain both ascetic life-denying impulses and strong life-affirming impulses as well as both master and slave morality. He also finds the will to power to offer much richer explanations than utilitarianism's notion that all people really want to be happy, or the Platonist notion that people want to be unified with the Good.[citation needed]

Nietzsche read William Rolph’s Biologische Probleme around mid-1884, and it clearly interested him,[13] for his copy is heavily annotated.[14] He made many notes concerning Rolph. Rolph was another evolutionary anti-Darwinist like Roux, who wished to argue for evolution by a different mechanism than natural selection. Rolph argued that all life seeks primarily to expand itself. Organisms fulfill this need through assimilation, trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of themselves, for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment. Life forms are naturally insatiable in this way.

Nietzsche's next published work was Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where the influence of Rolph seems apparent. Nietzsche writes,

Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.[15]

Beyond Good and Evil has the most references to "will to power" in his published works, appearing in 11 aphorisms.[16] The influence of Rolph and its connection to "will to power" also continues in book 5 of Gay Science (1887) where Nietzsche describes "will to power" as the instinct for "expansion of power" fundamental to all life.[17]

Carl Nägeli's 1884 book Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre, which Nietzsche acquired around 1886 and subsequently read closely,[18] also had considerable influence on his theory of will to power. Nietzsche wrote a letter to Franz Overbeck about it, noting that it has "been sheepishly put aside by Darwinists".[19] Nägeli believed in a "perfection principle", which led to greater complexity. He called the seat of heritability the idioplasma, and argued, with a military metaphor, that a more complex, complicatedly ordered idioplasma would usually defeat a simpler rival.[20] In other words, he is also arguing for internal evolution, similar to Roux, except emphasizing complexity as the main factor instead of strength.

Thus, Dumont's pleasure in the expansion of power, Roux's internal struggle, Nägeli's drive towards complexity, and Rolph's principle of insatiability and assimilation are fused together into the biological side of Nietzsche's theory of will to power, which is developed in a number of places in his published writings.[21] Having derived the "will to power" from three anti-Darwin evolutionists, as well as Dumont, it seems appropriate that he should use his "will to power" as an anti-Darwinian explanation of evolution. He expresses a number of times[22] the idea that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, behind the desire to expand one's power – the "will to power".

Nonetheless, in his notebooks he continues to expand the theory of the will to power.[23] Influenced by his earlier readings of Boscovich, he began to develop a physics of the will to power. The idea of matter as centers of force is translated into matter as centers of will to power. Nietzsche wanted to slough off the theory of matter, which he viewed as a relic of the metaphysics of substance.[24]

These ideas of an all-inclusive physics or metaphysics built upon the will to power do not appear to arise anywhere in his published works or in any of the final books published posthumously, except in the above-mentioned aphorism from Beyond Good & Evil, where he references Boscovich (section 12). It does recur in his notebooks, but not all scholars treat these ideas as part of his thought.[25]

Will to power and eternal recurrence edit

Throughout the 1880s, in his notebooks, Nietzsche developed a theory of the "eternal recurrence of the same" and much speculation on the physical possibility of this idea and the mechanics of its actualization occur in his later notebooks. Here, the will to power as a potential physics is integrated with the postulated eternal recurrence. Taken literally as a theory for how things are, Nietzsche appears to imagine a physical universe of perpetual struggle and force that repeatedly completes its cycle and returns to the beginning.[26]

Some scholars believe that Nietzsche used the concept of eternal recurrence metaphorically. But others, such as Paul Loeb, have argued that "Nietzsche did indeed believe in the truth of cosmological eternal recurrence."[27] By either interpretation the acceptance of eternal recurrence raises the question of whether it could justify a trans-valuation of one's life, and be a necessary precursor to the overman in his/her perfect acceptance of all that is, for the love of life itself and amor fati.[citation needed]

Interpretations edit

In contemporary Nietzschean scholarship, some interpreters[who?] have emphasized the will to power as a psychological principle because Nietzsche applies it most frequently to human behavior. However, in Nietzsche's unpublished notes (later published by his sister as "The Will to Power"), Nietzsche sometimes seemed to view the will to power as a more (metaphysical) general force underlying all reality, not just human behavior—thus making it more directly analogous to Schopenhauer's will to live. For example, Nietzsche claims the "world is the will to power—and nothing besides!".[28] Nevertheless, in relation to the entire body of Nietzsche's published works, many scholars[who?] have insisted that Nietzsche's principle of the will to power is less metaphysical and more pragmatic than Schopenhauer's will to live: while Schopenhauer thought the will to live was what was most real in the universe, Nietzsche can be understood as claiming only that the will to power is a particularly useful principle for his purposes.

Some interpreters also upheld a biological interpretation of the Wille zur Macht, making it equivalent with some kind of social Darwinism. For example, the concept was appropriated by some Nazis such as Alfred Bäumler, who may have drawn influence from it or used it to justify their expansive quest for power.

This reading was criticized by Martin Heidegger in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche—suggesting that raw physical or political power was not what Nietzsche had in mind. This is reflected in the following passage from Nietzsche's notebooks:

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.) The powerful natures dominate, it is a necessity, they need not lift one finger. Even if, during their lifetime, they bury themselves in a garden house![29]

Opposed to a biological and voluntary conception of the Wille zur Macht, Heidegger also argued that the will to power must be considered in relation to the Übermensch and the thought of eternal recurrence—although this reading itself has been criticized by Mazzino Montinari as a "macroscopic Nietzsche".[30] Gilles Deleuze also emphasized the connection between the will to power and eternal return. Both Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze were careful to point out that the primary nature of will to power is unconscious. This means that the drive to power is always already at work unconsciously, perpetually advancing the will of the one over the other. This thus creates the state of things in the observable or conscious world still operating through the same tension. Derrida is careful not to confine the will to power to human behavior, the mind, metaphysics, nor physical reality individually. It is the underlying life principle inaugurating all aspects of life and behavior, a self-preserving force. A sense of entropy and the eternal return, which are related, is always indissociable from the will to power. The eternal return of all memory initiated by the will to power is an entropic force again inherent to all life.

Opposed to this interpretation, the "will to power" can be understood (or misunderstood) to mean a struggle against one's surroundings that culminates in personal growth, self-overcoming, and self-perfection, and assert that the power held over others as a result of this is coincidental. Thus Nietzsche wrote:

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.[31]

It would be possible to claim that rather than an attempt to 'dominate over others', the "will to power" is better understood as the tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces' relations to each other. While a rock, for instance, does not have a conscious (or unconscious) "will", it nevertheless acts as a site of resistance within the "will to power" dynamic. Moreover, rather than 'dominating over others', "will to power" is more accurately positioned in relation to the subject (a mere synecdoche, both fictitious and necessary, for there is "no doer behind the deed," (see On the Genealogy of Morals) and is an idea behind the statement that words are "seductions" within the process of self-mastery and self-overcoming. The "will to power" is thus a "cosmic" inner force acting in and through both animate and inanimate objects. Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. This includes both such apparently[need quotation to verify] harmful acts as physical violence, lying, and domination, on one hand, and such apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love, and praise on the other—though its manifestations can be altered significantly, such as through art and aesthetic experience. In Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective, absolute truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their will to power; this will can be life-affirming or a manifestation of nihilism, but it is the will to power all the same.

Other Nietzschean interpreters[who?][32] dispute the suggestion that Nietzsche's concept of the will to power is merely and only a matter of narrow, harmless, humanistic self-perfection. They suggest that, for Nietzsche, power means self-perfection as well as outward, political, elitist, aristocratic domination. Nietzsche, in fact, explicitly and specifically defined the egalitarian state-idea as the embodiment of the will to power in decline:

To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be 'unjust,' since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character. One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable: that, from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general perhaps after the communistic cliché of Dühring, that every will must consider every other will its equal—would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.[33]

Nietzsche thought that the drive is to manifest power rather than self-preservation. He thought it was most of the time incorrect that organisms live to prolong their life-time or extend the life of their species. Resistances are not painful annoyances but necessary for growth to occur. Suffering annoyances and being thwarted in ones attempt to accomplish a goal are necessary pre-conditions for our power. In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' Nietzsche said "And life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself." Nietzsche thought it necessary to have the power to discharge ones strength and thus fulfil one's purpose in the manifestation of will to power.

"Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power- self preservation is only one of the indirect and most infrequent consequences of this."[34]

"Human beings do not seek pleasure and avoid displeasure. What human beings want, whatever the smallest organism wants, is an increase of power; driven by that will they seek resistance, they need something that opposes it - displeasure, as an obstacle to their will to power, is therefore a normal fact; human beings do not avoid it, they are rather in continual need of it".[35]

Individual psychology edit

Alfred Adler borrowed heavily from Nietzsche's work to develop his second Viennese school of psychotherapy called individual psychology. Adler (1912) wrote in his important book Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Constitution):

Nietzsche's "Will to power" and "Will to seem" embrace many of our views, which again resemble in some respects the views of Féré and the older writers, according to whom the sensation of pleasure originates in a feeling of power, that of pain in a feeling of feebleness (Ohnmacht).[36]

Adler's adaptation of the will to power was and still is in contrast to Sigmund Freud's pleasure principle or the "will to pleasure", and to Viktor Frankl's logotherapy or the "will to meaning".[37] Adler's intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. His interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power was concerned with the individual patient's overcoming of the superiority-inferiority dynamic.[38]

In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl compared his third Viennese school of psychotherapy with Adler's psychoanalytic interpretation of the will to power:

... the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power stressed by Adlerian psychology.[39]

In fiction and popular culture edit

The 1999 4x strategy game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri refers to the will to power by naming one of its available technologies by that name. A quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra is given when the technology is discovered by the player.

The character of "The Jackal" in the 2008 Ubisoft game Far Cry 2 quotes from Beyond Good and Evil and the Will to Power.

The 2016 4x strategy game Stellaris also includes a technology with this name.

Bob Rosenberg, founder of freestyle music group Will to Power chose the name for the group as an homage to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of an individual's fundamental "will to power".[40]

The first title in the Xenosaga trilogy is Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht.

On September 8, 2017, melodic death metal band Arch Enemy released an album entitled Will to Power.[41]

The book makes an appearance in the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck movie Baby Face.

In Smallville (Season 1, Episode 17), the Lex Luthor character reveals that his father gave him a copy of the book for his tenth birthday.

In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim the dragon Paarthurnax tells the player character that the dragons were made to dominate: "The will to power is in our blood." Only through meditation has he been able to overcome his dominating compulsion.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2021.
  2. ^ Leiter, Brian (2021), "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2022-03-26
  3. ^ Golomb, Jacob (2002). Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy.
  4. ^ Whitlock, Greg (1996). "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche: The Untold Story". Nietzsche Studien. 25 (1): 200–220. doi:10.1515/9783110244441.200. S2CID 171148597.
  5. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1886; New York: Vintage Books, 1966), §12.
  6. ^ Anderson, R. Lanier (1994). "Nietzsche's Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 25 (5): 738. Bibcode:1994SHPSA..25..729A. doi:10.1016/0039-3681(94)90037-X"Boscovich's theory of centers of force was prominent in Germany at the time. Boscovich’s theory 'is echoed in Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, which reduces matter to force altogether. Kant’s view, in turn, became very influential in German physics through the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers. By the time Nietzsche wrote, treating matter in terms of fields of force was the dominant understanding of the fundamental notions of physics.'"{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  7. ^ Moore, Gregory (2002). Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521812305.
  8. ^ Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, "The Organism as Inner Struggle: Wilhelm Roux’s Influence on Nietzsche", in Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 161–82.
  9. ^ Section 13
  10. ^ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (1887; New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §127.
  11. ^ Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 166.
  12. ^ Small, Nietzsche in Context, 167.
  13. ^ Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 47.
  14. ^ Thomas H. Brobjer, "Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library, 1885–1889", Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (Oct 1997): 663–93.
  15. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §259.
  16. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 22, 23 36, 44 ("Macht-Willen," translated "power-will"), 51, 186, 198, 211, 227, 257 ("Willenskräfte und Macht-Begierden", translated "strength of will and lust for power"), 259.
  17. ^ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §349.
  18. ^ Brobjer says it is the most heavily annotated book of his 1886 reading, "Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library", 679.
  19. ^ Quoted in Horn, Anette (2005). "Nietzsche's interpretation of his sources on Darwinism: Idioplasma, Micells and military troops". South African Journal of Philosophy. 24 (4): 260–272. doi:10.4314/sajpem.v24i4.31426. S2CID 144841378.
  20. ^ Horn, "Nietzsche's Interpretation of his Sources", 265–66.
  21. ^ Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 55.
  22. ^ Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, §13; Gay Science, §349; Genealogy of Morals, II:12.
  23. ^ The phrase will to power appears in "147 entries of the Colli and Montinari edition of the Nachlass. ... one-fifth of the occurrences of Wille zur Macht have to do with outlines of various lengths of the projected but ultimately abandoned book". Linda L. Williams, "Will to Power in Nietzsche's Published Works and the Nachlass", Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 3 (1996): 447–63, 450.
  24. ^ Whitlock, "Boscovich, Spinoza and Nietzsche", 207.
  25. ^ cf. Williams, "Will to Power in Nietzsche's Published Works and the Nachlass".
  26. ^ For discussion, see Whitlock, "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche"; Moles, "Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology"; Christa Davis Acampora, "Between Mechanism and Teleology: Will to Power and Nietzsche’s Gay 'Science'", in Nietzsche & Science, 171–188 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich’s Natural Philosophy"; and Small "The Physics of Eternal Recurrence", in Nietzsche in Context, 135–152.
  27. ^ Loeb, Paul, The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 11.
  28. ^ Nietzsche, The Will To Power, §1067
  29. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche. Nachlass, Fall 1880 6 [206]
  30. ^ Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche (1974), 121.
  31. ^ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §636 = Digitale kritische Gesamtausgabe, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1888, 14[186].
  32. ^ Burnham, Douglas (2006). Reading Nietzsche: An Analysis of "Beyond Good and Evil". Routledge.
  33. ^ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II:11
  34. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
  35. ^ Nietzsche, The Will to Power
  36. ^ Adler, Alfred (1912–1917). "The Neurotic Constitution". New York: Moffat, Yard and Company: ix. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  37. ^ Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute
  38. ^ Ansbacher, Heinz; Ansbacher, Rowena R. (1956). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. Harper Perennial (1964). pp. 132–133. ISBN 0-06-131154-5.
  39. ^ Frankl, Viktor (1959). Man's Search for Meaning. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. p. 154. ISBN 0-671-02337-3.
  40. ^ Bronson, Fred (2003). The Billboard Book of No. 1 Hits, 5th Edition (Billboard Publications), page 715.
  41. ^ Arch Enemy: Discography

External links edit

  • Der "Wille zur Macht" – kein Buch von Friedrich Nietzsche, a selection of texts from Nietzsche's estate related to his philosophical concept and book projects "Wille zur Macht" ("Will to Power"), edited by Bernd Jung based on the Digital Critical Edition of Nietzsche’s Works, 2012/13
  • "Nietzsche – Will to Power", a video explication of the will to power concept.

will, power, nietzsche, posthumous, manuscript, same, name, will, power, manuscript, other, uses, disambiguation, this, article, needs, additional, citations, verification, please, help, improve, this, article, adding, citations, reliable, sources, unsourced, . For Nietzsche s posthumous manuscript of the same name see The Will to Power manuscript For other uses see Will to power disambiguation This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Will to power news newspapers books scholar JSTOR July 2021 Learn how and when to remove this template message The will to power German der Wille zur Macht is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans However the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche s work leaving its interpretation open to debate 1 Usage of the term by Nietzsche can be summarized as self determination the concept of actualizing one s will onto one s self or one s surroundings and coincides heavily with egoism 2 Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology This can be contrasted to the other Viennese schools of psychotherapy Sigmund Freud s pleasure principle will to pleasure and Viktor Frankl s logotherapy will to meaning Each of these schools advocates and teaches a very different essential driving force in human beings Contents 1 Kraft vs Macht 2 Early influences 3 Appearance of the concept in Nietzsche s work 4 Will to power and eternal recurrence 5 Interpretations 5 1 Individual psychology 6 In fiction and popular culture 7 See also 8 References 9 External linksKraft vs Macht editSome of the misconceptions of the will to power including Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche s philosophy arise from overlooking Nietzsche s distinction between Kraft force or strength and Macht power or might 3 Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything possessing it while Macht is within Nietzsche s philosophy closely tied to sublimation and self overcoming the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes Early influences editNietzsche s early thinking was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer whom he first discovered in 1865 Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis on will and in particular has a concept of the will to live Writing a generation before Nietzsche he explained that the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live which results in a desire in all living creatures to avoid death and to procreate For Schopenhauer this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality more fundamental even than being Another important influence was Roger Joseph Boscovich whom Nietzsche discovered and learned about through his reading in 1866 of Friedrich Albert Lange s 1865 Geschichte des Materialismus History of Materialism As early as 1872 Nietzsche went on to study Boscovich s book Theoria Philosophia Naturalis for himself 4 Nietzsche makes his only reference in his published works to Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil where he declares war on soul atomism 5 Boscovich had rejected the idea of materialistic atomism which Nietzsche calls one of the best refuted theories there is 6 The idea of centers of force would become central to Nietzsche s later theories of will to power Appearance of the concept in Nietzsche s work editAs the 1880s began Nietzsche began to speak of the Desire for Power Machtgelust this appeared in The Wanderer and his Shadow 1880 and Daybreak 1881 Machtgelust in these works is the pleasure of the feeling of power and the hunger to overpower Wilhelm Roux published his The Struggle of Parts in the Organism Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus in 1881 and Nietzsche first read it that year 7 The book was a response to Darwinian theory proposing an alternative mode of evolution Roux was a disciple of and influenced by Ernst Haeckel 8 who believed the struggle to survive occurred at the cellular level The various cells and tissues struggle for finite resources so that only the strongest survive Through this mechanism the body grows stronger and better adapted Rejecting natural selection Roux s model assumed a neo Lamarckian or pangenetic model of inheritance Nietzsche began to expand on the concept of Machtgelust in The Gay Science 1882 where in a section titled On the doctrine of the feeling of power 9 he connects the desire for cruelty with the pleasure in the feeling of power Elsewhere in The Gay Science he notes that it is only in intellectual beings that pleasure displeasure and will are to be found 10 excluding the vast majority of organisms from the desire for power Leon Dumont 1837 77 whose 1875 book Theorie scientifique de la sensibilite le plaisir et la peine Nietzsche read in 1883 11 seems to have exerted some influence on this concept Dumont believed that pleasure is related to increases in force 12 In The Wanderer and Daybreak Nietzsche had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty are pleasurable because of exercise of power But Dumont provided a physiological basis for Nietzsche s speculation Dumont s theory also would have seemed to confirm Nietzsche s claim that pleasure and pain are reserved for intellectual beings since according to Dumont pain and pleasure require a coming to consciousness and not just a sensing In 1883 Nietzsche coined the phrase Wille zur Macht in Thus Spoke Zarathustra The concept at this point was no longer limited to only those intellectual beings that can actually experience the feeling of power it now applied to all life The phrase Wille zur Macht first appears in part 1 1001 Goals 1883 then in part 2 in two sections Self Overcoming and Redemption later in 1883 Self Overcoming describes it in most detail saying it is an unexhausted procreative will of life There is will to power where there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power This suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive Schopenhauer s will to live Wille zum Leben thus became a subsidiary to the will to power which is the stronger will Nietzsche thinks his notion of the will to power is far more useful than Schopenhauer s will to live for explaining various events especially human behavior for example Nietzsche uses the will to power to explain both ascetic life denying impulses and strong life affirming impulses as well as both master and slave morality He also finds the will to power to offer much richer explanations than utilitarianism s notion that all people really want to be happy or the Platonist notion that people want to be unified with the Good citation needed Nietzsche read William Rolph s Biologische Probleme around mid 1884 and it clearly interested him 13 for his copy is heavily annotated 14 He made many notes concerning Rolph Rolph was another evolutionary anti Darwinist like Roux who wished to argue for evolution by a different mechanism than natural selection Rolph argued that all life seeks primarily to expand itself Organisms fulfill this need through assimilation trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of themselves for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment Life forms are naturally insatiable in this way Nietzsche s next published work was Beyond Good and Evil 1886 where the influence of Rolph seems apparent Nietzsche writes Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals will have to be an incarnate will to power it will strive to grow spread seize become predominant not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power 15 Beyond Good and Evil has the most references to will to power in his published works appearing in 11 aphorisms 16 The influence of Rolph and its connection to will to power also continues in book 5 of Gay Science 1887 where Nietzsche describes will to power as the instinct for expansion of power fundamental to all life 17 Carl Nageli s 1884 book Mechanisch physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre which Nietzsche acquired around 1886 and subsequently read closely 18 also had considerable influence on his theory of will to power Nietzsche wrote a letter to Franz Overbeck about it noting that it has been sheepishly put aside by Darwinists 19 Nageli believed in a perfection principle which led to greater complexity He called the seat of heritability the idioplasma and argued with a military metaphor that a more complex complicatedly ordered idioplasma would usually defeat a simpler rival 20 In other words he is also arguing for internal evolution similar to Roux except emphasizing complexity as the main factor instead of strength Thus Dumont s pleasure in the expansion of power Roux s internal struggle Nageli s drive towards complexity and Rolph s principle of insatiability and assimilation are fused together into the biological side of Nietzsche s theory of will to power which is developed in a number of places in his published writings 21 Having derived the will to power from three anti Darwin evolutionists as well as Dumont it seems appropriate that he should use his will to power as an anti Darwinian explanation of evolution He expresses a number of times 22 the idea that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals behind the desire to expand one s power the will to power Nonetheless in his notebooks he continues to expand the theory of the will to power 23 Influenced by his earlier readings of Boscovich he began to develop a physics of the will to power The idea of matter as centers of force is translated into matter as centers of will to power Nietzsche wanted to slough off the theory of matter which he viewed as a relic of the metaphysics of substance 24 These ideas of an all inclusive physics or metaphysics built upon the will to power do not appear to arise anywhere in his published works or in any of the final books published posthumously except in the above mentioned aphorism from Beyond Good amp Evil where he references Boscovich section 12 It does recur in his notebooks but not all scholars treat these ideas as part of his thought 25 Will to power and eternal recurrence editThroughout the 1880s in his notebooks Nietzsche developed a theory of the eternal recurrence of the same and much speculation on the physical possibility of this idea and the mechanics of its actualization occur in his later notebooks Here the will to power as a potential physics is integrated with the postulated eternal recurrence Taken literally as a theory for how things are Nietzsche appears to imagine a physical universe of perpetual struggle and force that repeatedly completes its cycle and returns to the beginning 26 Some scholars believe that Nietzsche used the concept of eternal recurrence metaphorically But others such as Paul Loeb have argued that Nietzsche did indeed believe in the truth of cosmological eternal recurrence 27 By either interpretation the acceptance of eternal recurrence raises the question of whether it could justify a trans valuation of one s life and be a necessary precursor to the overman in his her perfect acceptance of all that is for the love of life itself and amor fati citation needed Interpretations editIn contemporary Nietzschean scholarship some interpreters who have emphasized the will to power as a psychological principle because Nietzsche applies it most frequently to human behavior However in Nietzsche s unpublished notes later published by his sister as The Will to Power Nietzsche sometimes seemed to view the will to power as a more metaphysical general force underlying all reality not just human behavior thus making it more directly analogous to Schopenhauer s will to live For example Nietzsche claims the world is the will to power and nothing besides 28 Nevertheless in relation to the entire body of Nietzsche s published works many scholars who have insisted that Nietzsche s principle of the will to power is less metaphysical and more pragmatic than Schopenhauer s will to live while Schopenhauer thought the will to live was what was most real in the universe Nietzsche can be understood as claiming only that the will to power is a particularly useful principle for his purposes Some interpreters also upheld a biological interpretation of the Wille zur Macht making it equivalent with some kind of social Darwinism For example the concept was appropriated by some Nazis such as Alfred Baumler who may have drawn influence from it or used it to justify their expansive quest for power This reading was criticized by Martin Heidegger in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche suggesting that raw physical or political power was not what Nietzsche had in mind This is reflected in the following passage from Nietzsche s notebooks I have found strength where one does not look for it in simple mild and pleasant people without the least desire to rule and conversely the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak in the end they still become the slaves of their followers their fame etc The powerful natures dominate it is a necessity they need not lift one finger Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house 29 Opposed to a biological and voluntary conception of the Wille zur Macht Heidegger also argued that the will to power must be considered in relation to the Ubermensch and the thought of eternal recurrence although this reading itself has been criticized by Mazzino Montinari as a macroscopic Nietzsche 30 Gilles Deleuze also emphasized the connection between the will to power and eternal return Both Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze were careful to point out that the primary nature of will to power is unconscious This means that the drive to power is always already at work unconsciously perpetually advancing the will of the one over the other This thus creates the state of things in the observable or conscious world still operating through the same tension Derrida is careful not to confine the will to power to human behavior the mind metaphysics nor physical reality individually It is the underlying life principle inaugurating all aspects of life and behavior a self preserving force A sense of entropy and the eternal return which are related is always indissociable from the will to power The eternal return of all memory initiated by the will to power is an entropic force again inherent to all life Opposed to this interpretation the will to power can be understood or misunderstood to mean a struggle against one s surroundings that culminates in personal growth self overcoming and self perfection and assert that the power held over others as a result of this is coincidental Thus Nietzsche wrote My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force its will to power and to thrust back all that resists its extension But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement union with those of them that are sufficiently related to it thus they then conspire together for power And the process goes on 31 It would be possible to claim that rather than an attempt to dominate over others the will to power is better understood as the tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces relations to each other While a rock for instance does not have a conscious or unconscious will it nevertheless acts as a site of resistance within the will to power dynamic Moreover rather than dominating over others will to power is more accurately positioned in relation to the subject a mere synecdoche both fictitious and necessary for there is no doer behind the deed see On the Genealogy of Morals and is an idea behind the statement that words are seductions within the process of self mastery and self overcoming The will to power is thus a cosmic inner force acting in and through both animate and inanimate objects Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors even in humans were to be reduced to the will to power This includes both such apparently need quotation to verify harmful acts as physical violence lying and domination on one hand and such apparently non harmful acts as gift giving love and praise on the other though its manifestations can be altered significantly such as through art and aesthetic experience In Beyond Good and Evil he claims that philosophers will to truth i e their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective absolute truth is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their will to power this will can be life affirming or a manifestation of nihilism but it is the will to power all the same Other Nietzschean interpreters who 32 dispute the suggestion that Nietzsche s concept of the will to power is merely and only a matter of narrow harmless humanistic self perfection They suggest that for Nietzsche power means self perfection as well as outward political elitist aristocratic domination Nietzsche in fact explicitly and specifically defined the egalitarian state idea as the embodiment of the will to power in decline To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless in itself of course no injury assault exploitation destruction can be unjust since life operates essentially that is in its basic functions through injury assault exploitation destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable that from the highest biological standpoint legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life which is bent upon power and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means namely as a means of creating greater units of power A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general perhaps after the communistic cliche of Duhring that every will must consider every other will its equal would be a principle hostile to life an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man an attempt to assassinate the future of man a sign of weariness a secret path to nothingness 33 Nietzsche thought that the drive is to manifest power rather than self preservation He thought it was most of the time incorrect that organisms live to prolong their life time or extend the life of their species Resistances are not painful annoyances but necessary for growth to occur Suffering annoyances and being thwarted in ones attempt to accomplish a goal are necessary pre conditions for our power In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche said And life confided the secret to me behold it said I am that which must always overcome itself Nietzsche thought it necessary to have the power to discharge ones strength and thus fulfil one s purpose in the manifestation of will to power Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being Above all a living thing wants to discharge its strength life itself is will to power self preservation is only one of the indirect and most infrequent consequences of this 34 Human beings do not seek pleasure and avoid displeasure What human beings want whatever the smallest organism wants is an increase of power driven by that will they seek resistance they need something that opposes it displeasure as an obstacle to their will to power is therefore a normal fact human beings do not avoid it they are rather in continual need of it 35 Individual psychology edit Main article Individual psychology Alfred Adler borrowed heavily from Nietzsche s work to develop his second Viennese school of psychotherapy called individual psychology Adler 1912 wrote in his important book Uber den nervosen Charakter The Neurotic Constitution Nietzsche s Will to power and Will to seem embrace many of our views which again resemble in some respects the views of Fere and the older writers according to whom the sensation of pleasure originates in a feeling of power that of pain in a feeling of feebleness Ohnmacht 36 Adler s adaptation of the will to power was and still is in contrast to Sigmund Freud s pleasure principle or the will to pleasure and to Viktor Frankl s logotherapy or the will to meaning 37 Adler s intent was to build a movement that would rival even supplant others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well being with that of social equality His interpretation of Nietzsche s will to power was concerned with the individual patient s overcoming of the superiority inferiority dynamic 38 In Man s Search for Meaning Frankl compared his third Viennese school of psychotherapy with Adler s psychoanalytic interpretation of the will to power the striving to find a meaning in one s life is the primary motivational force in man That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle or as we could also term it the will to pleasure on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered as well as in contrast to the will to power stressed by Adlerian psychology 39 In fiction and popular culture editThe 1999 4x strategy game Sid Meier s Alpha Centauri refers to the will to power by naming one of its available technologies by that name A quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra is given when the technology is discovered by the player The character of The Jackal in the 2008 Ubisoft game Far Cry 2 quotes from Beyond Good and Evil and the Will to Power The 2016 4x strategy game Stellaris also includes a technology with this name Bob Rosenberg founder of freestyle music group Will to Power chose the name for the group as an homage to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche s theory of an individual s fundamental will to power 40 The first title in the Xenosaga trilogy is Xenosaga Episode I Der Wille zur Macht On September 8 2017 melodic death metal band Arch Enemy released an album entitled Will to Power 41 The book makes an appearance in the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck movie Baby Face In Smallville Season 1 Episode 17 the Lex Luthor character reveals that his father gave him a copy of the book for his tenth birthday In The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim the dragon Paarthurnax tells the player character that the dragons were made to dominate The will to power is in our blood Only through meditation has he been able to overcome his dominating compulsion See also edit nbsp Philosophy portal nbsp Psychology portalAggression Heinz Ansbacher Maximum power principle True Will The Will to Power manuscript References edit Nietzsche s Moral and Political Philosophy The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Metaphysics Research Lab Stanford University 2021 Leiter Brian 2021 Nietzsche s Moral and Political Philosophy in Zalta Edward N ed The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summer 2021 ed Metaphysics Research Lab Stanford University retrieved 2022 03 26 Golomb Jacob 2002 Nietzsche Godfather of Fascism On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy Whitlock Greg 1996 Roger Boscovich Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche The Untold Story Nietzsche Studien 25 1 200 220 doi 10 1515 9783110244441 200 S2CID 171148597 Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil trans Walter Kaufmann 1886 New York Vintage Books 1966 12 Anderson R Lanier 1994 Nietzsche s Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 5 738 Bibcode 1994SHPSA 25 729A doi 10 1016 0039 3681 94 90037 X Boscovich s theory of centers of force was prominent in Germany at the time Boscovich s theory is echoed in Immanuel Kant s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science which reduces matter to force altogether Kant s view in turn became very influential in German physics through the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers By the time Nietzsche wrote treating matter in terms of fields of force was the dominant understanding of the fundamental notions of physics a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a CS1 maint postscript link Moore Gregory 2002 Nietzsche Biology Metaphor New York Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521812305 Wolfgang Muller Lauter The Organism as Inner Struggle Wilhelm Roux s Influence on Nietzsche in Nietzsche His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy trans David J Parent Chicago University of Illinois Press 1999 161 82 Section 13 Nietzsche The Gay Science trans Walter Kaufman 1887 New York Vintage Books 1974 127 Robin Small Nietzsche in Context Burlington VT Ashgate 2001 166 Small Nietzsche in Context 167 Moore Nietzsche Biology Metaphor 47 Thomas H Brobjer Nietzsche s Reading and Private Library 1885 1889 Journal of the History of Ideas 58 no 4 Oct 1997 663 93 Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil 259 Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil 22 23 36 44 Macht Willen translated power will 51 186 198 211 227 257 Willenskrafte und Macht Begierden translated strength of will and lust for power 259 Nietzsche The Gay Science 349 Brobjer says it is the most heavily annotated book of his 1886 reading Nietzsche s Reading and Private Library 679 Quoted in Horn Anette 2005 Nietzsche s interpretation of his sources on Darwinism Idioplasma Micells and military troops South African Journal of Philosophy 24 4 260 272 doi 10 4314 sajpem v24i4 31426 S2CID 144841378 Horn Nietzsche s Interpretation of his Sources 265 66 Moore Nietzsche Biology Metaphor 55 Cf Nietzsche Beyond Good amp Evil 13 Gay Science 349 Genealogy of Morals II 12 The phrase will to power appears in 147 entries of the Colli and Montinari edition of the Nachlass one fifth of the occurrences of Wille zur Macht have to do with outlines of various lengths of the projected but ultimately abandoned book Linda L Williams Will to Power in Nietzsche s Published Works and the Nachlass Journal of the History of Ideas 57 no 3 1996 447 63 450 Whitlock Boscovich Spinoza and Nietzsche 207 cf Williams Will to Power in Nietzsche s Published Works and the Nachlass For discussion see Whitlock Roger Boscovich Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche Moles Nietzsche s Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology Christa Davis Acampora Between Mechanism and Teleology Will to Power and Nietzsche s Gay Science in Nietzsche amp Science 171 188 Burlington VT Ashgate 2004 Stack Nietzsche and Boscovich s Natural Philosophy and Small The Physics of Eternal Recurrence in Nietzsche in Context 135 152 Loeb Paul The Death of Nietzsche s Zarathustra Cambridge University Press 2010 p 11 Nietzsche The Will To Power 1067 Friedrich Nietzsche Nachlass Fall 1880 6 206 Mazzino Montinari Friedrich Nietzsche 1974 121 Nietzsche The Will to Power 636 Digitale kritische Gesamtausgabe Nachgelassene Fragmente 1888 14 186 Burnham Douglas 2006 Reading Nietzsche An Analysis of Beyond Good and Evil Routledge Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals II 11 Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche The Will to Power Adler Alfred 1912 1917 The Neurotic Constitution New York Moffat Yard and Company ix a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Seidner Stanley S June 10 2009 A Trojan Horse Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology Mater Dei Institute Ansbacher Heinz Ansbacher Rowena R 1956 The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler Harper Perennial 1964 pp 132 133 ISBN 0 06 131154 5 Frankl Viktor 1959 Man s Search for Meaning Boston Massachusetts Beacon Press p 154 ISBN 0 671 02337 3 Bronson Fred 2003 The Billboard Book of No 1 Hits 5th Edition Billboard Publications page 715 Arch Enemy DiscographyExternal links edit nbsp Look up will to power in Wiktionary the free dictionary nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Will to power nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Power Der Wille zur Macht keinBuch von Friedrich Nietzsche a selection of texts from Nietzsche s estate related to his philosophical concept and book projects Wille zur Macht Will to Power edited by Bernd Jung based on the Digital Critical Edition of Nietzsche s Works 2012 13 Nietzsche Will to Power a video explication of the will to power concept Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Will to power amp oldid 1180876285, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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