Nietzsche talked about the Will to Power. Anyone who knows a thing or two about Nietzsche knows that his concept of the will was inspired by Schopenhaurer, and anyone who knows a thing or two about Schopenhauer knows his was a response to Kant. Kant certainly philosophized a lot about the mind, and I’m not sure how the will can, or ever was, torn away from the will. The Will to Power, in other words, must be a mental force.
Add to this that the Will to Power was seen, by Nietzsche, to pervade all of nature, not just human power struggles. What does that mean? Does it mean that Nietzsche was a panpsychic?
Gibb: do you mean there was some kind of mystic or cosmic unity between the individual and the universal will? If that is what you mean, I tend to agree. That is why the individual will seems to be anathema, and the personal will one with a silent causation, the universal will. What this is, apart from merely a description of Natural trends, or the forces of Nature are probably beyond understanding, since these processes are integral parts of our consciousness. But. In his case,its very probably that he was dealing with underlying universal forces.
It seems to me that when Nietzsche talked about the Will to Power he was actually talking about humans. SHop did seem to dabble with the mystical side of things as he was very interested in Eastern Philosophies, but I do not think that so easily applies to Nietzsche.
So in the sense that panpsychism is defined as the view that think that the whole universe is imbued with mental properties I think we have to dismiss the idea.
Here’s an interesting quote from Wiki that deals with the difference between Shop and NZe.
There’s a difference between the idea that everything is literally will to power, compared to the idea that everything is a perspective willing to power, and that all we have mainly is that perspective, instead of thinking we have the literal universe.
If Nietszche was a perspectivist, the world and the mind would not be separate things. Since the mind and the perspective is based in wills, the world would be a will. If Nietszche was a literalist, the world would be a real object, and the mind would be its own, separate object, and the world would have its own nature, and the mind would have its own nature. Which of the two seems more accurate?
Earth = the physical objective thing constructed of material.
World, die Welt = is the internalised subjective understanding of lived experience of being on the earth, or being in the world.
Thus when Nietzsche talks of die welt he is not referring to the ontology of the universe, but of all of the people, societies, and institutions on the human community, as an ideal. An idealist rather than a realist one. This the will to power is not vested in the materiality of the universe , but in our perception of it.
I think this is what Dan means by perspective, above. Not the literal universe.
I don’t know enough about the nature of the world to answer that question. But what are you saying here? Are you saying that Nietzsche took the will of his own mind and projected it onto the world (because his mind is his world) and called it the Will to Power?
If you say so Hobbes; you seem to know a thing or two about Nietzsche, probably more than me, so I’ll take your word for it.
I don’t know a whole lot about Nietzshe’s philosophy as I’ve said many times. I’ve tried to read him but I give up because he seems to change the meanings of his words from page to page. German and English are very rich languages with a lot of undertones and nuances. (Handschusheheimerland Strasse, for example, means the street to the glove/mitten maker’s home, translated literally. But a lot depends on the gender of the nouns and the declension of any verbs, once the nouns are separated out of the whole. Handschuhe means shoes for the hands–I can’t remember if it’s masc. or neuter. Deutschland, Germany,–uber alles in der Welt–over (superior, greater, leading) alles (all, all countries) in der (masc) Welt–Germany is the greatest (country) in the entire world. Sounds normally patriotic, doesn’t it? Until it took on other meanings.)
All of which is to say Nietzshe’s ‘will to power’ is difficult to accurately translate–now matter how good the translator. Even if we lived in 19th century Germany it would be difficult to understand because it’s used in more than one way.
Getting back to the OP, if “will”–the concept–implies intentionality, I don’t think Nietzsche was thinking of anything without consciousness–but he might have been. I don’t see it because he so consciously denied the Christian God. (If there is consciousness in the inanimate, how did it get there?–I’m saying that, not Nietzshe.) In a world of chaos, one thing stands out–human life. Man has the “will-to-” whatever, because he’s human. A sunflower can only be a sunflower; a dog can only be a dog; a tree can only be a tree–but humanity can be much more than simple glove makers, farmers, merchants.
Forget about it–I can’t interpret Nietzshe’s thoughts. I only use what people say to spark my own thoughts. It’s a matter of mental exercise and trying to show how my mind works.
Don’t take anyones word for it. It’s just an opinion.
I think the main problem with this sort of question is that trying to pin a single word onto a person tend to be very reductionist. These words come attached with a range of other connotations that simply cannot apply to any one in particular and also that each person you use the word against is far more complex and hard to pin down.
Obvious when we talk about Nietzsche we are talking about an entire life’s work boiled down to one word.
In general N is far too pragmatic and not open to flights of fancy that “panpsychism” would apply. He is highly critical, atheistic and dogmatic. The reason I think what I do, is that he tends to write from a subjectivist and or idealist position to unpack the endemic assumptions about the world he sees around himself. It is from that perspective that I think Panpsychicsm is simply not applicable.
Nietzsche was definitely anti-christian but the god of panpsychism (which would translate into pantheism, something like Spinoza’s god) is not quite the same thing. An indivualized, separated, personal god as the Christian God is is what I think Nietzsche railed against mostly. A pantheistic god would have no desires, wants, intentions, plans, or cares that nature herself wouldn’t have, and this certainly touches on the kind of slave morality that the Christian God imposes on humanity which, again, is mainly what Nietzsche railed against.
I’ve been told that the best way to read Nietzsche is assume that he is attempting to wipe away all the theoretical ways of looking at the world that his intellectual culture imposes on itself. He sees this as one of the major mistakes that early modern philosophers stumble over (from Descartes to Hegel). What he attempts to do is to look at the world as how he thinks primative man might have. It wouldn’t come as a huge surprise, therefore, if this inclined him towards a sort of animism (as I believe most primative cultures do embrace animism in one form or another). It is very Dianysian, after all. Why don’t we assume there is a will in the workings of nature? That’s a corrupting influence of metaphysics–Newtonian mechanics, in this case. He recognized how radically the theoretical/metaphysical thought of his day drew us away the ordinary way of seeing the world–what with Descartes concluding that animals aren’t conscious, or Kant talking about the “Transcendental Unit of Apperception”–and that a return to some more “naturalistic” way of looking at the world would have to involve seeing the Will to Power in everything. I don’t think Nietzsche was so much against the idea of spiritual forces in nature, but that “spirituality”, or metaphysics, be seen as taking place in some other world. As I read Nietzsche, he is against other-worldliness, and he sees this as the most damaging effect of metaphysics and religion.
I tend to think N saw the will to power manifest as a psychological force, so to speak. That is to say, WTP isn’t limited to perception or psychological states, but that is how we become aware of it. I don’t think he thought of WTP as applicable to only humans either, but to all living things and their processes.
Depends what you mean by such a force. I think N would have rejected any idea that that force could act externally like a spiritual or mystical property of the universe, but an internal impetus based on personal will the thrive; the sort of self affirming tendency in all men that is crushed by the force of Christianity.
Yes, but in rejecting the orthodoxy he also rejects the supernatural thoroughly, so that while he returns to the primitive natural human, he would reject animism, spiritualism, christianity, Islam, and al the other superstitions.
He’s not rejecting religion only to re-instate and older more primitive and as superstitious one. In recovering human nature he is rejecting the trapping of culture that are created to control the human “spirit”, and by that I mean a purely internal force. “Spiritual Forces in Nature”, is the sort of mumbo-jumbo he rejects in all other religions, but not rejecting the will to prosper and succeed as an individual force.
By “force”, I mean a drive, or impetus as you called it, that relates all living things. I’m not sure what you mean by saying the “force could act externally”, but I do think N may have thought of the will in a metaphysical, Schopenhauerean sense as well. The internal impetus you describe is a mode of that will.
Der in the phrase in der Welt is not masculine, but feminine; not nominative singular masculine, but dative singular feminine, to be precise. (Handschuhe is plural, by the way; the singular, Handschuh, is masculine.)
The phrase der Wille zur Macht literally means “the will to the might”; but the second “the” should be left out, just as in die Wirklichkeit, “reality”, not “the reality”; and the German Macht is broader than the English “might”, which is why “power” is indeed the best translation in this context.
What is it exactly that “depends on the gender of the nouns and the declension of any verbs, once the nouns are separated out of the whole”?