What I gather from nietzche’s will is it originates from schopenhauer’s will, which is prelude to his birth of tragedy. It is not an intent. There are more interpretations, but most describe will as a force, a yea saying, besides the overcoming. The force of the will to power is not an intent or an intention in the existential meaning of the word, which is more purposeful, as in an intention toward an object. Does the myriad interpretations of Nietzche’s will irreducible to a single definition of it?
Rather that that is the only way we can understand it. Thus he writes:
[size=95]“Willing: A pressing feeling, very agreeable! It is the accompaniment of every effusion of force.” (Source: Nietzsche, Nachlass Autumn 1883; my translation.)[/size]
When he says things like, “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”, what he means is that this world, including we ourselves, are nothing besides the effusion of force. However, as he says elsewhere,
[size=95]“The victorious concept ‘force’, by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power’, i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc. Physicists cannot eradicate ‘action at a distance’ from their principles; nor can they eradicate a repellent force (or an attracting one). There is nothing for it: one is obliged to understand all motion, all ‘appearances’, all ‘laws’, only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end. In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source.” (Source: Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 619 whole; Kaufmann translation, with my amendment.)[/size]
Inasmuch as “inner world” is another way of saying “soul”, Nietzsche was a panpsychic, yes. We do not know the effusion of force, which is “physical”, from the inside; we only know its accompaniment (Begleiterscheinung), which is “psychical” or “mental”.
Nietzsche’s “will” differs from Schopenhauer’s in the following manner:
[size=95]“There is no such thing as ‘willing’, but only a willing something: one must not remove the aim from the total condition—as epistemologists do. ‘Willing’ as they understand it is as little a reality as ‘thinking’: it is a pure fiction.” (ibid., section 668.)
“Is ‘will to power’ a kind of ‘will’ or identical with the concept ‘will’? […] Is it that ‘will’ of which Schopenhauer said it was the ‘in-itself of things’?
My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all, that instead of grasping the idea of the development of one definite will into many forms, one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its ‘whither?’—this is in the highest degree the case with Schopenhauer: what he calls ‘will’ is a mere empty word.” (ibid., section 692.)[/size]
So instead of saying “every will is a will to X, and every such X is a form of power; therefore every will is a form of the will to power”, one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its “to X”.
I don’t think that’s a necessary interpretation; certainly not of Schopenhauer’s Will - which can be seen as more basic than mental/physical, as that which the gives rise to the mental. It’s a development of Kant’s thing-in-itself, as I understand it - prior to and outside our mental worlds, but whose effects we apprehend.
So the Will to Power is like the will of man.
A will without a mind is nigh impossible to comprehend.
The will of man is a will to power, so the will to power where it occurs in non-human nature is like the will of man, yes.
Nietzsche reduces the mind to will alone:
[size=95]“[T]hinking is merely an interrelation of [our] drives to each other[.]” (Source: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 36; The Nietzsche Channel translation.)[/size]
This is starting to make some sense. So the will of man is one manifestation of this will to power.
Thank you, Sau, for your corrections. I learned German when I was 5 and spoke it almost exclusively for 4-5 years. I call it “baby German” as I learned most of it from children’s songs and conversations. Technically, I’m often incorrect, but my point was that understanding Nietzsche and his ‘will-to-’ is extremely difficult because of the complexity of the language and its nuances, and because he seems to use the noun ‘will’ in different ways. Even when I read N as poetry, he’s difficult to interpret.
So, a Will to Power can mean a striving for ‘the ideal’, perfection, a ‘better than now’ that goes beyond German philosophical and Christian idealism. I don’t know enough about German philosophical idealism, really, but I get the impression, from what I’ve read, that N. feels it was as stultifying and restrictive as Christianity–that humanity has the ability to advance beyond those restrictions. Yet doesn’t that imply the N. was also an idealist?
If panpsychism states that mind–“psyche”–infuses everything, both animate and inanimate, is the universe working toward some sort of ‘better that now’ rather than simply maintaining stasis? Or is the universe evolving in a way we can only understand as advancing toward an unknown goal of some sort? We understand evolution as ultimate advancement that may include periodic regression. The goal of evolution is unknown.
Does the universe have ‘will,’ or do we endow it with will in our attempts to understand it?
I take Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” as something more fundamental than a mental force, like the most basic reflexive drive of all life. To me, this is a pretty definitive passage about will to power:
Will to Power is not a mental force, as in requisitive of consciousness or “mind,” it has expressly to do with the very essence of life. It wasn’t thought by Nietzsche to be a fact about the universe or nature in general, but a fact about life. I don’t think Nietzsche was panpsychic; nothing I’ve read from BoT, TGS, BGE, GoM, or ToTI has given me any reason to think he might be.
This can only be defended if one limits oneself exclusively to his published writings, and interprets BGE § 36 as a mere thought experiment.
Please respond to my post as it’s something I’ve been struggling to understand for some time, now. I’ve asked you this before, sau, and, while your replies (when you reply) have always tried to explain, you haven’t yet done so–for me. Thank you.
Sauwelios,
I’m looking at the Kaufmann translation of that BGE passage (§ 36). It’s definitely a lot more obscure than the straightforward one that I posted. I think N. is taking the reader on a little ride in this passage.
[size=85]the so-called mechanistic world […] as a more primitive form of the world of affects […] --as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions are still synthetically intertwined along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, and metabolism–as a pre-form of life.[/size]
So I guess he’s wondering whether the universe isn’t also a “reality of drives” and all its occurrences “effects of will”. You’re right, the question is how literal is Nietzsche’s aim with this comparison between our “world of desires and passions” and the “mechanistic world”.
[size=85]In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so) […][/size]
He kind of approaches causality in the opposite way a material determinist would. He takes the experience and phenomenon of will in life and asks whether it is will that really underlies everything in the universe, whereas a determinist takes the physical laws honed from scientific observation of the the world and asks whether it is these same physical laws which really underlie all the activity of life, including intelligent, conscious life. It’s really not clear, though, what is intended by this experiment. For instance, why does he suggest that this experiment leads to nonsense?
[size=85]In short, one has to risk the hypothesis […] whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will.[/size]
What is the relationship between will in general and will to power? Or are they the same thing (could “will to power” be substituted for every mention of “will”)?
Was Nietzsche a panpsychic?
Dah no.
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Someone brought up BGE 36. That’s a good place to start. Schopenhauer identified Being with willing. Nietzsche proposes that the only given reality is our desires and passions- our drives- whose relation to each other is what we call “thinking”. This is enough to understand the material world. Where Kant had closed us within “categories” that frame and determined the real, Nietzsche uses these drives. However these drives are a given, material. And they form the necessary ingredients of “willing”. They form (our drives) a pre-form of our mental life.
Positing the willing as a phenomenon of the material world (drives) solves for Nietzsche the problem of the causality of the will. The will is in essense material, form by drives and passion, and has an effect, likewise, on the world which is posited as will, below the material composition. Will to power is not so much Being, as Schopenhauer would have it, but more like a “force” as used in physics. WTP describes the nature of such force. It is not a repeller, attraent or some more traditional form of force because he is stepping away from the mechanistic view of the universe and attempting the hypothesis that the character of the universe is more organic, regardless of being available to mechanistic interpretation. As such will affects will and it is an effect of will, or in other words, the universe is unbridled effervescence, a force of existence which is the cause of everything, as if a will, but more out of excess, including our drives, which again mirror their origin because they can be expressed as a will but which are more of an excess, a constant pressure against the limits set by other forms of will, expressed sometimes psychically and other times materially but which nonetheless are accounted by one originating force, Will to Power.
I hate to add that his concept of WTP is more like Luther’s idea of God’s Grace as he used it in his book about the “Bondage of the Will”.
If an avalanche knocks down a whole bunch of trees, is this an example of the Will to Power? At least, what Nietzsche would be contemplating when questioning how far the Will to Power can be extended? If this is the case, would the 2nd law of thermodynamics be the physicists term for the Will to Power?
Yet, oddly enough, if this is how the Will to Power manifests in mechanistic systems, it would seem the opposite principle is at work in biology. If the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a principle by which more complex systems degenerate into simpler ones, life is typically the exception to the rule, with simpler forms evolving into much more complex ones.
I think things can be clarified by Nietzhe’s own definition of his will to power.
No things remain to all other dynamic quanta, their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta in their "effect" upon the same power is not a becoming, but a pathos.- the most elemental fact for which a becoming and effecting first emerge.
From “will to power”. I think this may be interpreted both toward a literal mechanical view, or a desriptive one. I hope this helps.
Gib: I picked this up from will to power because you referred to Kant via Schopenhauer, and I think even as late as in Nietzche, You can find this, what he calls pathos, in re. This kind of makes me see his rereference to will, as wanting to make this distiction, but he glosses over it as if by implication.
First of all, I guess it is better to declare that I only rarely disagree with Sauwelios when he speaks about Nietzsche, on the contrary, I humbly acknowledge his command of the subject (thou I personally do not get as far as the Qabalah, but that’s another story). So my comments here are intended just as a supplement to his view and not as objections.
We cannot really tell what will-to-power is (like).
This is an open problem in interpreting Nietzsche. Heidegger noted that Nietzsche never developed entirely his thought on wtp (quite correctly in my view). The quotes from the book «the Will to Power» and the Nachlass are valuable and possibly helpful. Yet their status - whether they are to be considered Nietzsche’s philosophy or something that he would have eventually rejected - is uncertain.
What Nietzsche says is that «the hypothesis must be hazarded [… that] The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its “intelligible character”–it would simply be “Will to Power,” and nothing else» (BGE, 36).
If that is true, then mind, thoughts, man, etc. do not exist per se, they exist only inasmuch they are wtp (and nothing else).
Well, eventually a man’s will has to be wtp, according to the hypothesis.
However, it seems safer to say that the will of man is wtp of a certain degree (which is probably what you meant). But here again caution is needed. Against what it is commonly presumed, Nietzsche seems to think that there’s no unique will of man, that what we generally call will is not the same phenomenon occurring in all men. We should rather consider that there are different “wills” in different men, and that they differ in quality.
Ultimately, as Sauwelios has shown, it would be misleading trying to understand wtp in terms of human will (though that can be hardly avoided) - or one need to deeply reconsider his view on what a man is, also because it is doubtful that a man’s will actually “belongs” to him (see BGE 19, 16 and 12).
So, coming to the OP, seeing Nietzsche as a panpsychic is not necessarily wrong, but it would still represent a reversal of Nietzsche’s perspective.
Well, there is idealism and idealism. Nietzsche (usually) used the word in its non-technical sense, i.e. in the sense of entry # 2. Considering what you said about “a striving for ‘the ideal’, perfection”, etc., I believe that that is indeed the sense in which you mean the word.
Well then, was Nietzsche an idealist? The doctrine of the will to power may indeed be put in terms of idealism:
[size=95]“Every drive that desires to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things: what? is the whole perhaps composed of dissatisfied parts, which all have desiderata in their heads? is the ‘course of things’ perhaps precisely this ‘away from here? away from actuality!’ eternal dissatisfaction itself? is desirability perhaps the driving force itself? is it—deus?” (Source: Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 331; Kaufmann translation.)[/size]
There is, however, a caveat here—one which may mark another important difference from Schopenhauer. For Nietzsche, willing is not the same as desiring. I quote again from section 668 of The Will to Power:
[size=95]“‘Willing’ is not ‘desiring’, striving, demanding: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding.
[…]
It is part of willing that something is commanded[.]”[/size]
If willing were simply desiring, it could not be enjoyable; desire is not a feeling of overfulness, but of lack.
No, the universe as a whole is not, because the universe as a whole consists of many “centers of force”. The Wikipedia article on panpsychism says: “Panpsychism is related to the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that possesses a mind[.]” However, even though the doctrine of the will to power may be considered a kind of panpsychism, it’s still definitely incompatible with such a “more holistic view”: Nietzsche keeps repeating that there is no overarching cosmic consciousness.
According to modern science, evolution has no goal. And I don’t see why we could only understand the cosmic process as having a goal.
The former is unknowable; the latter is certain.
I don’t think Nietzsche, in such a polished published work as BGE, was just “wondering”. I agree with Leo Strauss here, who says:
[size=95]“Aphorism 36 presents the reasoning in support of the doctrine of the will to power. Nietzsche had spoken of the will to power before [in BGE], but only in the way of bald assertion, not to say dogmatically. Now he sets forth with what is at the same time the most intransigent intellectual probity and the most bewitching playfulness his reasons, i.e. the problematic, tentative, tempting, hypothetical character of his proposition. It could seem that he does not know more of the will to power as the fundamental reality than what he says here.” (Source: Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”; emphasis mine.)[/size]
He does not say that it leads to nonsense, but only that one would have to push it to the point of nonsense before one would be permitted to assume multiple kinds of causality. Reductio ad absurdum would be the only disproof of the existence of only a single kind of causality. But in fact, Nietzsche shows here that pushing the experiment to its utmost limit does not lead to nonsense.
They are the same thing according to Nietzsche, and it might be possible to always make that substitution, yes.
Yes.
I’d rather say it would be the physicist’s term for an aspect of the will to power—as you go on to show:
Both are manifestations, as you put it, of the will to power. Sometimes a struggle of wills is decided to the outcome of disintegration of more complex systems into simpler ones, and sometimes to the outcome of integration of simpler ones into more complex ones. Some trees may withstand an avalanche and some may be knocked down by it. It all depends on the strength of the different wills—on the magnitude of the different forces.