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- This article focuses on the philosophical concept and manuscript associated with Friedrich Nietzsche. For other uses, see Will to Power.
The Will to Power (German: "Der Wille zur Macht") is a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the phrase was also used as the title of a posthumously published book, compiled from Nietzsche's notes by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
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The concept
The concept of the "will to power" appears in many of Nietzsche's works, and, although it has generated a range of interpretations, most scholars agree that it plays a role of at least some importance in Nietzsche's thought, as a principle that Nietzsche found very useful for explaining events in the universe--particularly human behavior. The concept is often understood as a response to Schopenhauer's notion of the "will to live." Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer deeply impressed Nietzsche with his proposal that the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results in all living creatures' desire to avoid death and procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality--more fundamental even than being. Nietzsche, however, argues that the will to live is actually subsidiary to the will to power: people and animals only want to go on living as a necessary condition for asserting their power on the world. In Nietzsche's own words, "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results" [1]. Here, Nietzsche thinks he is supported by the many instances in which people and animals are willing to risk their lives in order to promote their power (for example, ancient Greek heroes or "masters" often died young in battle, but achieved great power in the process). More generally, 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 in the European tradition, 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's notion that people want to be unified with the Good.
Ontological vs Pragmatic Interpretations
In contemporary Nietzsche scholarship, some interpreters have emphasized the will to power as a psychological principle, because Nietzsche applies it most frequently to human behavior. However, Nietzsche sometimes seems to view the will to power as a more 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!"[2]. Nevertheless, in relation to the entire body of Nietzsche's works, many scholars 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.
Relation to Nazism
Historically, the concept was also appropriated by some Nazis, who may have drawn influence from it or used it to justify their expansive quest for power and world domination. Some Nazis (Alfred Bäumler, etc.) also upheld a biological interpretation of the Wille zur Macht, making it equivalent with some kind of social Darwinism. This reading was criticized by Martin Heidegger in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche--suggesting that Nietzsche did not have raw physical or political power in mind, as seems to be reflected in the following passage:
- 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! [3]
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" [4] Deleuze also emphasized the connection between the will to power and eternal return. Apparently resisting the Nazi's reading, some interpreters have understood (or misunderstood) Nietzsche's will to power to culminate in personal growth, self-overcoming, and self-perfection--while downplaying power of the sort one person or group might have over other people. For example, in response to a quote like the following
- 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. [5]
some interpreters might 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' (a misinterpretation by Deleuze et al.), "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 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. In fact, Nietzsche considered consciousness itself to be a form of instinct. This includes both such apparently 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 (such as, e.g. Abir Taha) 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 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" ([1]).
The Will to Power manuscript
The Will to Power is also the title of a work that Nietzsche planned to write, as well as the title given to a book of selections from his notebooks (or Nachlass). The first rendition of this collection was released with other unpublished writings in 1901, edited by Heinrich Köselitz, Ernst Horneffer, and August Horneffer, but under the pressure and influence of Nietzsche's anti-Semitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. This version has been judged more than dubious[6], and later editions are considered more subtle in their presentation of Nietzsche's intent. Walter Kaufmann's English edition is divided into four major parts: "European Nihilism", "Critique of the Highest Values Hitherto", "Principles of a New Evaluation", and "Discipline and Breeding". Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli, who edited the complete edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments from the manuscripts themselves, have called The Will to Power a "historic forgery" artificially assembled by Nietzsche's sister and Peter Gast. Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of Beyond Good and Evil) a new work with the title, The Will to Power: Essay of a Transvaluation of all Values, this project was finally abandoned and its draft materials used to compose The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888).[7] The Will to Power, which Elisabeth Förster called Nietzsche's unedited magnum opus, was in fact abandoned as a book by Nietzsche himself. Nevertheless, the concept remains, and has, since the reading of Karl Löwith, been identified as a key component of Nietzsche's philosophy. So The Will to Power was not written by Nietzsche. But the concept of "will to power" is certainly in itself a major motif of Nietzsche's philosophy, so much so that Heidegger, under Löwith's influence, considered it to form, with the thought of the eternal recurrence, the basis of his thought. After returning from Paraguay, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche founded the Nietzsche-Archiv in Naumburg in 1894 (after Nietzsche's mental breakdown), which she would later transfer to Weimar. The culmination of this organization was the publishing, in Leipzig between 1894 and 1926, of the Großoktavausgabe edition. It was first edited by C. G. Naumann, then by Kröner. In these 20 volumes, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche included part of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which she gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. With Peter Gast, she claimed that Nietzsche had died before completing his magnum opus, which he allegedly wanted to name "The Will to Power, in Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". This compilation of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, selected and ordered under his sister's authority, led to the book commonly known as The Will to Power. Until Colli & Montinari's edition, this would form the basis for all successive editions, including the 1922 Musarion edition, often commonly used even today. While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari decided to go to the Archives in Leipzig to work with the original documents. From their work emerged the first complete and chronological edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which Förster-Nietzsche had cut up, mixed and pasted together, according to her own antisemitic views (which were a bone of contention between her and Nietzsche himself). The complete works comprise 5,000 pages, compared to the 3,500 pages of the Großoktavausgabe. In 1964, during the International Colloquium on Nietzsche in Paris, Colli and Montinari met Karl Löwith, who would put them in contact with Heinz Wenzel, editor for Walter de Gruyter's publishing house. Heinz Wenzel would buy the rights of the complete works of Colli and Montinari (33 volumes in German) after the French Gallimard edition and the Italian Adelphi editions. Before Colli and Montinari's philological work, the previous editions led readers to believe that Nietzsche had organized all his work toward a final structured opus called The Will to Power. In fact, if Nietzsche did consider producing such a book, he had abandoned such plans before his collapse. The title of The Will to Power, which appears for the first time at the end of the summer of 1885, was replaced by another plan at the end of August 1888. This new plan was titled "Project for a reversion of all values", and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. In fact, according to Montinari, the earlier editions, which all depended on the Großoktavausgabe, are technically nonsense, as Nietzsche's fragments were cut up in various places and ordered according to his sister's will; and are a case of revisionism, as it was left to his sister to artificially combine Nietzsche's fragments into a unified opus magnum (which very concept is alien to Nietzsche's philosophy and style of writing), whose meaning was distorted according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's anti-semitic and Germanist biases. Gilles Deleuze himself saluted Montinari's work declaring:
- "As long as it was not possible for the most serious researcher to accede to the whole of Nietzsche's manuscripts, we knew only in a loose way that the Will to Power did not exist as such (...) We wish only now that the new dawn brought on by this previously unpublished work will be the sign of a return to Nietzsche" [8]
Not only did this critical philological work, a milestone in Nietzsche studies, prove case-by-case the distortions accomplished by Nietzsche's sister on his posthumous fragments, it also called into question the very conception of a Nietzschean magnum opus, given his style of writing and thinking. [9]
References
- ^ Walter Kaufmann, Beyond Good and Evil
- ^ The Will To Power, Kaufmann-Hollingdale trans., 1067
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche. Nachlass, Fall 1880 6[206]
- ^ Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche (1974; transl. in German in 1991, Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Einführung., Berlin-New York, De Gruyter; and in French, Friedrich Nietzsche, PUF, 2001, p.121 chapter "Nietzsche and the consequences"
- ^ trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Will to Power, §636'
- ^ Martin Heidegger already criticized this unauthorized publishing in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche (see, for ex., beginning of Nietzsche II) (parts of which have been published under the name Nietzsche I (1936-1939), ed. B. Schillbach, 1996, XIV, 596p. and Nietzsche II (1939-1946), ed. B. Schillbach, 1997, VIII, 454p. — note that these publications are not the exact transcription of the 1930s courses, but were done post-war)
- ^ See Mazzino Montinari, 1974.
- ^ Deleuze: "Tant qu'il ne fut pas possible aux chercheurs les plus sérieux d'accéder à l'ensemble des manuscrits de Nietzsche, on savait seulement de façon vague que La Volonté de puissance n'existait pas comme telle (...) Nous souhaitons que le jour nouveau, apporté par les inédits, soit celui du retour à Nietzsche in Mazzino Montinari and Paolo d'Iorio, "'The Will to Power' does not exist" Centro Montinari (Italian)
- ^ Mazzino Montinari and Paolo d'Iorio, "'The Will to Power' does not exist" Centro Montinari (Italian)
