I’ve been reading Nietzsche and being the somewhat vague aphorism-user that he is, I haven’t gotten any clear and precise premises for the Will to Power concept. Than again, I’ve only read BG&E and TSZ; I know, I know, I need to read The Will to Power.
But in the mean time, can you explain why he thought the Will was after Power and what evidence he had to support it?
I’m sure some of the more die-hard Nietzscheans here will give you a better answer, but it is important that it not be thought of as “will to power” but rather as “will-to-power”. Basically it is a refutation of Schopenhauer’s will-to-life where the only purpose of an organism is to live. Nietzsche proposed an alternative which was basically an existentialist cry that there has to be something more to life than simply living. Which, I would agree, there is. One needn’t just live, one needs to thrive in order for life to be meaningful and the process of attaining that thriving is the will-to-power.
Will to power can be thought of as will to overcome. Thriving is an example of overcoming one’s environment. But one can think in terms of overcoming oneself, also.
as long as you remember nietzsche didn’t write will to power…
his sister did, posthumously
-Imp
It is my understanding that she pretty much edited everything he did to some degree.
Don’t bother: it will only confuse the issue. He never wrote a book on the concept, having changed directions well before his collapse. The book of that title was cobbled together from leftover scraps: some he rejected, some he re-wrote and used elsewhere, some that were only thought-experiments, and some that were actually quotes from books he was reading! The structure given to those scraps was based on someone else’s (inaccurate) understanding of what he meant.
Not at all; most of his work was published long before she took change of his literary estate. There were a few pieces cut from Ecce Homo’s early printings, and one of them is absent from the Kaufmann translation because it had not yet been recovered, but it has since been restored to the original German. She also oversaw publication of Antichrist, but I can’t recall anything being excised from it; if so, it has long since been restored to his draft version.
I wish I had more time to write this morning, as this is something I’ve spent a long time on. But I’ll try to answer as quickly as I can, and at least give you a few bits to think about.
I think it is wrong to approach will to power as a metaphysic (like Heidegger) and it is dead wrong to think of it as a telos, but I think he did mean it in a very real, literal sense. Nietzsche had studied a lot of contemporary natural sciences, from the physics of Boscovich and Mach to the Naturphilosophie of Goethe and Schelling to the biology of Roux and Nägeli. He was particularly taken with biology, and engages in his writings with a version of Darwinism (drawn second-hand from Rée, Lange, Nägeli, Rolph, Roux, Strauss, and others), with the teleological development of Kant and his followers, and the theorists of a vital force (Bildungstrieb or Lebenskraft) like Blumenbach et al.
From this extensive engagement, in publications, notebooks, and annotations in the books he owned, one can draw certain conclusions about how we saw will to power active in the world. For him it was a replacement for theories of Bildungstrieb, but (ostensibly) free of the taint of telos and metaphysics of such others. It was not so much a vital force as a simple description of what life is: dynamism and change. As Nietzsche observed, the tiniest forms of life (microbes, etc.) do not consider their options: they do not think about ‘preserving’ themselves in a ‘struggle for existence’, or consider their hunger for sustenance–they simply act, overpowering what they can to feed and reproduce. What is it that drives them forward? More broadly, what is it at root that drives all lifeforms forward: to act, change, be? Nietzsche’s answer is will to power.
It is important to distinguish this from willing as such, and from Schopenhauer’s will to life. Nietzsche actually came to the opinion that there was no such thing as the will (just as he argued that there was no such thing as the ego, or the individual). Willing was not a conscious activity for him, and will to power is not something that you have or use. It really is a description of natural processes, and outside dealings with fundamental properties of life itself, it is not much use as an explanatory tool for philosophy. It is also part of a lengthy engagement with–and utter rejection of–Schopenhauer’s will to life, which was at times folded back into his misreading of Darwin’s theory as a reactionary will to life. Such a will would impute conscious motive and purpose to life, and both of these were anathema to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer saw in all lifeforms a clear end-directedness related to the preservation of life; for Nietzsche this is a clear error, since it implies forethought, and his suggested replacement as a fundamental motive is the desire to change, overpower, overcome, consume, dominate–i.e., will to power.
This is quite impossible to summarize quickly, but if the topic is interesting I can pull quotes and pieces in and we can talk about details of how he saw will to power functioning, and about what he hoped it would accomplish for philosophy, and even from the sources he drew upon to defend the idea. My dissertation is on Nietzsche’s relation to science, so I’ve tonnes of material floating ‘round the house. I do hope this was a good start, tho’, and that it was in some way helpful.
Everything that lives is constantly on the will to power or survival.
There is no escaping it as the only exit is death.
Thanks a lot, morthaur. I think I should have been more specific in my query, the others assumed that I was asking what the will to power was/is. I was instead asking why the will to power was/is; that is it’s origins and how Nietzsche concluded its validity. Thanks for giving an expository on his reasonings.
I find it very interesting in that, when I was barely scratching the Nietzsche-surface, so to speak, I too made the assumption that he was talking about free will, will-power, and the will in general. It was soon afterwards that I released that he in fact disdained hopeful idealism such as will and ego. It goes to show that simply reading a summary of his ideas and concepts in no way justify their innate complexities. Such misconceptions can, at least partly, be blamed on his aphoristic prose. He truly accomplished his intentions of not systematizing even his own philosophy by using somewhat vague writing compositions. It definitely left everything to interpretation.
As for will to power, I can’t help but feel as though, because of his usage of the whole eternal recurrence thing, that it’s not just another valid argument with unsound premises; that it wasn’t just made for the sake of making an elaborate point, like eternal recurrence. Nietzschean metaphysics and, effectively, his entire philosophy is so hard to trust, considering his quip-filled, almost tongue-in-cheek, tone and prose.
What are your thoughts?
I’m not sure I get what you’re after here. Are you wondering if there is a deeper significance to his formulation? Something more elaborate than the rationale for recurrence? That’s what it sounds like, and if so I’m not sure how much I can add for you…
I think that the arguments hold together pretty well, even in the light of modern science, and that the best objections to it usually have more to do with a creeping suspicion that it is a metaphysics, or a feeling that it’s just silly, or that it’s a distasteful approach, etc. The important thing for Nietzsche was the negative aspect: will to power argues against what he saw as the pernicious lies of contemporaries like Spencer. If the fundamental drive was to overcome and dominate, there isn’t much room for the optimistic view of human potential, i.e., that we will someday get over our predilections for violence and deceit, etc. Nietzsche wants to show that, not only will we not outgrow the wicked sides of our nature, but we really ought not to think of them as wicked in the first place.
On the ‘validity’ front, the same thing holds for eternal recurrence. On the one hand, he spent a lot of time on his own trying to get it to square with the physics of his day, and even made notes that put him well ahead of the curve in his view of the universe, but ultimately he published none of it because it wasn’t important. Recurrence is, by definition, untestable, and whilst he wanted to be sure it wasn’t invalid on the evidence, he wasn’t interested in trying to prove it to anyone. That fact by itself is significant for his method, and reinforces his own distrust of the wild claims of metaphysics: if there’s no evidence for it, why bother? 
Either way, the point was to create a life-affirming approach to life, and I think he did all right on that score.