I think it’s probably best to note where this thread is coming from. I first heard of it before it was started, when Fixed Cross told me in a private email that MechanicalMonster and he had noticed some good posts of mine–by which I think he meant (some of) my posts in James S. Saint’s “Value Ontology Benefits” thread up to and including this one:
Fixed Cross then went on to tell me that MechanicalMonster had–supposedly (partially) as a result of those posts–proposed “to cultivate a rigorous Nietzsche/VO thread” with the three of us. This, then, is that thread. I have some ideas for it, but I think it would be best if MM and FC, as I will henceforth call you in this thread, would specify which posts, or which passages, you found especially worthy of notice, and why. We could then take it from there.
I also think FC should be more than a debate-leader. First off, I’m not sure it should necessarily be a debate, and secondly, I think MM and I should both try to make ourselves understood to FC where we can’t seem to make ourselves understood to each other. FC can then try to make his understanding, in turn, understood to the other. In other words, there’s a weaker link between MM and me than between either of us and FC, so we should use that indirect connection to complement the direct one.
At this point, my heart is not really in it. The “remarkable” posts in James’s thread occurred naturally in the discussion that started with my first post, which was specially about political philosophy. At the moment I’m really interested in the notion of “Nietzschean superhumanism versus transhumanism”.
[size=95]“Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then the successes of your enemies are also your successes.” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, Of War and Warriors.)[/size]
For what it’s worth, here’s what I had before I changed my mind and wrote what I wrote.
::
In James’s thread, I quoted part of the following passage (which I myself wrote):
[size=95]Nietzsche does of course not says “Being is willing to power”, but “life is will to power” or “Living is will to power” (Leben ist Wille zur Macht). However, he also says we have no other concept of Being than as Living. And a will is a Willing. Thus: Being is Willing to power. But the notion of selfhood or Being is lacking in “Willing to power”. It seems that only a self or a being could will. The specific notion of selfhood or Being as power is lacking, and therefore Heidegger said the doctrine of the will to power only answered the guiding question of metaphysics–the question what beings are–, and not its grounding question–the question what Being is. Value Metaphysics (as I call it) makes this step, by not speaking of Willing power but of Willing selfhood–Willing Being. And yes, that is a self-reference, a circularity.[/size]
It is not my aim to delimit the will to power in the sense of saying “there is more”; rather, it is to expand it, by saying “it is more”. The “power” in “will to power” means much more than the narrow sense in which people usually understand it. It becomes too broad, however,–too general, too abstract–until we specify the meaning of “power”. We expand the will to power, then, precisely by delimiting it.
To expand on the notion of Being as power, it may be helpful if I quote at length from Laurence Cooper’s Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. There, the Nietzschean counterpart to Platonic eros is understandably the will to power; Platonic eros, however, is understood as follows:
[size=95]“[I]f philosophy isn’t erotic in any ordinary sense, it is nevertheless erotic in the truest sense. For it understands that what we most deeply want, or what would most deeply satisfy us, is not immortality but experience of the eternal and infinite. That is eros’ true aim, which means that what is normally called eros is a defective version of the desire for the good based on a misapprehension of what would really satisfy us. Ordinary eros, in fact, is based on two delusions: first, that immortality–earthly immortality–is possible, whether through children, fame, or lasting works; second, that, if attained, it would bring comprehensive satisfaction.” (Cooper, op.cit., page 95.)[/size]
Now the second part of Cooper’s book is dedicated to eros in Rousseau, and the first section of that part (chapter 5 of the book) is titled “Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and ‘The Desire to Extend Our Being’”. In it, Cooper writes:
[size=95]“The good, as the desirable, is fulfilling either of our deepest desire (Plato) or our highest desire (Kant, and also Plato). What, then, are our deepest and our highest desires?
Rousseau has an answer worth considering. […] Rousseau holds that there is one good, arising from one desire, that outranks all others and indeed comprehends them, in the sense that these other goods are good only to the extent that they participate in or contribute to the primary good. In this, Rousseau’s good is comparable to Plato’s good. Yet Rousseau’s good is not, in its content, presented as synonymous with Plato’s, and Rousseau does not endorse or otherwise indicate that he subscribes to the Platonic conception of eros. The kinship between his thought and Plato’s appears to be formal or structural more than substantive. Rather than suggest that there is some particular condition or state of being or content of consciousness that constitutes the good for human beings, he holds that the good exists in maximized existence, that is, felt existence, or, as he calls it, the sentiment of our being, a good whose rather formal and abstract name points to the fact that it can be gained through a number of means. Rather than suggest that we all long for or are drawn to transcendence of our finitude and mortality (which would seem to be the core meaning of eros), he seems to hold that our desire for the good, that is, our desire to exist, a desire whose name is self-love, is more a push than a pull and an intrinsically directionless, nonteleological push at that. Self-love is inherently expansive: it seeks to extend one’s very being or self–though not, apparently, to any particular end.” (Cooper, op.cit., pp. 136-37.)[/size]
To say that life (or that being as life) has no end or goal/aspiration other than itself or than “expansion” would be a simplification and distortion, for the structure of what we call living or consciousness is rooted far beyond itself in greater and wider circles-- expansion is a sign of basically concentric and hierarchical finitizations of which “beings” are partialities. But we were talking about Being.
Being can most accurately and completely be described as truth, which is to say if we want to speak of life and the “living as being” (manifest being-ness, will to power) as depth. What is depth? Depth is connection and openness, unconscious or pre-conscious receding linkages through material and immaterial substances; depth is a reality as well as a sign of the underlying mechanics of method, here we have a unity of episteme and ousia.
Consciousness expresses a formal system of moving into relation to larger realities and logics, what we call expansion is grounded in one aspect or pole of this structure just as the other pole is rooted in coherence and recoherence, in resisting the expansive, dissociating impulse. Meaning circles back upon itself in consciousness and becomes the actual contents and “subjectivity” of a given consciousness, as “living as being”, which is to say that formal structure alone cannot reveal anything about the “nature of life” or of existence except to define some outer parameters beyond which our momentary reason cannot yet travel. Therefore it is a huge mistake to rest in these categories of rational (de)limitation in terms of that which to and for consciousness is pronounced as most real, substantive, meaningful, true.
Every shade of philosophy or ethics reflects one such place of temporary rest, where some such categorical configuration and series of psychologically-procured drives have been reified beyond their proper scope, thus once an intimation of this appears irresistably to us we also gain a subtler idea of a more essential “expansivity” as if growth, will, creation, were somehow the secret truth all along, when in reality our constitution and psychological makeup has not even yet prepared us, let alone in our highest ideas, for receiving any such “secret truths”. This is of course where Nietzsche and cynical scientific modernity fall victim to the same trap, a trap that so-called postmodernity struggles to break free of. We should read the often absurd “at all costs” associated with that struggle of the postmodern spirit as a sign of the danger and seriousness of the trap itself.
Then we are also speaking of Being itself which might be at this point most adequately described as this very pre-figuring schematism itself (and consequently beginning to be encapsulated by a Peircean approach to logic and the “metalogical”), the ebb and flow of tides which momentarily coordinated configurations speak convincingly of will, freedom, strength or even beauty, good and right. Expansion defeats itself in a sufficiently greater purview in which such expansion might actually be comprehended and given a true context-- in that largeness once finally invoked expansion loses its momentum and its majesty, becoming just one more abstracted dynamism that, once we really see it clearly, plays a largely derivative role in the grand succession of things, in the more eternal bend and ideality. Life cannot comprehend itself without undoing that comprehension, hence the vast diversity of conscious forms and moments, and too this vagarity and profusion cannot be comprehended its own structure and ‘essence’ without likewise un-making those very coordinations and organizations that we call life, consciousness, or truth. Being aims to draw itself as a veil around its contents, around an interiority; philosophy cannot root itself either in the structure of that being’s drawing-itself-around nor in some kind of abstraction and generalization from beings to Being along similar routes… philosophy must instead go bravely into the center, into the depths and darkness, into the contents themselves and bring with it as tools all former powers of abstraction, formalism, categorical will, phenomenal passion, ethical freedom, etc. But philosophy isn’t ready for that yet, not nearly there yet. So we can basically work to bring about such possibilities and transformations in the philosophical spirit, if we really want to contribute something. Or we can be human and coordinate human substances among the living and non-living, freedom and slavery as ultimate bounds for our valuation. In the absence of being required to sit oneself in the hell of philosophy, the next best thing is to seat oneself firmly in our humanity, to be human.
That is a mistranslation. The zu means ‘for’, not ‘to’, and Wille is not always merely ‘will’, as you can see if you consult a good German-English dictionary. Thus, Leben ist Wille zur Macht = ‘Life is the desire for power’.
The English “will” can also be synonymous with “desire”, so you don’t really have a point there.
Moreover, you’re also wrong there, as the Wille in Wille zur Macht does expressly not mean “will” in the sense of “desire”.
As for zu, that means as literally “to” as Wille obviously literally (etymologically) means “will”.
The only reason to translate it as “for” is if the context demands it, for instance because there is as little such a thing as a “desire to” as a “will for” something.
But, to be sure, there is an even more literal possible translation than mine above: “Living is will to might”.—
No. ‘Will to’ in English is followed only by a verb (will to win, will to fight, will to live, etc.). The ‘to’ is thus not a preposition but part of the infinitive. The translation ‘will to power’ is not only incorrect, it is impossible.
Zu in German does not mean only ‘to’. For example, zum Beispiel means ‘for example’. Ich bin zu Berlin means ‘I am in Berlin’. Er is nicht zu Hause means ‘he is not at home (or in)’. To say I am going home, you say nach Hause, not zu Hause.
No, Ornello merely broke ILN 1 (I Love Nietzsche) and ILSC (I Love Social Criticism).
tab ILF (“I Love Fun”),
(2) ILG (“I Love Gossip”),
(3) ILL (“I Love Lies”),
(4) ILN 1 (“I love Nietzsche”),
(5) ILN 2 (“I love Nonsense”),
(6) ILN 3 (“I Love Nothing”),
(7) ILP (“I Love Philsophy”) (that means: averagely merely 12.5% (1/8) are really interested in philosophy),
(8) ILSC (I Love Social Criticism).[/tab]
The Nietzschean(ist)s do not know what Nietzsche meant - as usual.
But perhaps the German philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche did also not know what he meant.
“Ich bin in Berlin” <=> “I am in Berlin”.
Instead of “Er ist nicht zu Hause (zuhause)” you can also say “Er ist nicht daheim” <=> “He is not at home”.
Instead of “Ich gehe nach Hause” you can also say “Ich gehe heim” <=> “I am going home” or “I go home”.
The English (and b.t.w.: also the Low German) preposition “to” is the right translated form of the High German preposition “zu” in the term “will to power” or “will to might” <=> “Wille zur Macht”. But it is also true that the English (and b.t.w.: also the Low German) preposition “to” requires a following verb, if the foregoing word is a noun, and this is mostly also required by the High German preposition “zu”.
Are you shocked now?
So again: perhaps the German philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche did also not know what he meant.
The German preposition “zu” does not always but mostly also require a following verb, if the foregoing word is a noun. “Wille zur Macht” or “Liebe zum Detail” are examples of the absolutely accepted exceptions of a rule. So the preposition “zu” in the term “Wille zur Macht” is the right preposition, and therefore the term “Wille zur Macht” is correctly translated by “will to power (might)”.
No, it is not. ‘Will to’ can never be followed by a noun in English. It’s impossible. The ‘to’ is not a preposition here, but part of the infinitive (‘to live’, ‘to fight’). There is no such thing as ‘will to (noun)’. But in German, Wille zu is followed by a noun, sometimes a nominalized verb (Wille zum Leben). Thus, Wille zur Macht is perfectly normal. The zur means ‘for’, just as it does in zum Beispiel. Thus, since ‘for’ is the correct translation of zur (and ‘to’ is incorrect), a noun such as ‘desire’ or ‘wish’ is called for.
Had you lived before roughly the turn of the twentieth century, you may have had a point. Living languages like English are not fixed, however. So, like it or not, there has been a tradition of the phrase “will to” followed by a noun in English for well over a century now.
Yes, it means different things in different contexts, as I already pointed out. The language into which one translates it may require different words in different contexts. This does not change the fact that the German literally says “to example” (more literally “to the byplay”), “I am to Berlin”, “he is not to house”, etc.
Yes, literally “after house”. Compare the fact that one may also say “desire after” instead of “desire for”. This may serve as a hint as to the difference between “will to power” and “desire for power”: the will to power reaches all the way to power, it touches power–it is not removed from power. Thus Nietzsche writes:
[size=95]“‘Willing’ is not ‘desiring,’ striving, demanding [‘begehren’, streben, verlangen]: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 668, Kaufmann translation.)[/size]
Whoever wills is thereby already a commander–one in power.
[quote=“Sauwelios”]
Nonsense. ‘Will to (noun)’ is not a proper construction in English. There may be some influence from the mistranslation that we are discussing.
By the way, Kaufmann’s translations are full of egregious errors.
Während auf palästinensischer Seite heute der Wille zu verzeichnen ist, zu fordern, daß die Europäische Union in den Friedensprozeß […]
While the Palestinian side is currently demonstrating a desire to seek European intervention in the peace process, there are […]
Dieser gemeinsame Wille zu Veränderung hat in der Wirkung dazu geführt, dass der Anteil unrentabler Geschäfte bei LANXESS […]
The effect of this common commitment to change has been to greatly reduce the share of unprofitable businesses within LANXESS as measured by EBITDA margin.
Zu diesen zählen beispielsweise das Vermeiden von Leid, der Wille zu leben, die Freiheit und die Verwirklichung von Interessen an sich. tierrechte-muelheim.de
These interests are for example the avoidance of pain, the will to live, to live in freedom and the realization of interests itself.
[…] den EU-Außenbeziehungen strukturell angelegtes und daher wiederkehrendes Problem: die Frage nach der Gewichtung der Wertedimension im Verhältnis zu Staaten, die gravierende Defizite bei der Achtung der Menschenrechte und der Herrschaft des Rechts aufweisen und in denen der politische Wille zu substantiellen Reformen fehlt.
However, a divergence of opinion emerged in relation to a structural and therefore recurring question within EU foreign policy: what role should values play in the EU’s relationship with states that lack the political will for substantive reforms and exhibit grave deficits in their respect of rule of law and human rights?
Ornello, you have misunderstood me. I did not say that “will to” is followed by a noun. I said it is followed by a verb. Please read my last post again.
The foregoing word of the preposition (in this cae: “to” or “zu”) is of course meant by “if the foregoing word is a noun”.
Again: [size=109]Will (noun and foregoing word of the preposition ‘to’) to (preposition) power (noun).[/size]
The English rule and the German rule are the same. The German language allowed the said exception of that rule much earlier than the English language - that is the only difference.
I’m very sorry, Ornello, but you are wrong.
Normally it is “noun + to + verb” as it is in German: “Wille + zu + Verb” but in High German “Wille zu (Nomen)” is acceptionally also possible. That is what I said.
As I said: ii is an exception of a German rule that means the same as the English rule: “Nomen (noun) + zu (to) + Verb (verb)”. So the construction “Nomen + zu + Nomen” is normal merely as an exception of that said rule.
Behind the word “zur” are two compund words: “zu” + “der”.
You’re turning matters around. Yes, “to” in phrases like “will to live” is not a preposition but a particle demanded by the infinitive (though not quite required: compare “I want to live” with “I will survive”). To have the translation of Nietzsche’s Wille depend on this, however, is folly, if not ill will. The translation of zur Macht as “for power” is not a given to which the translation of Wille has to conform. To the contrary, the terms Wille and Macht are the decisive concepts here. We seem to agree that Macht means “power” rather than the narrower “might”. Well then, depending on our translation of Wille, the translation of the word zu will be obvious. Looking at synonyms for “desire”, I find that most words do indeed require “for”–or “after”!–, but a fine example of an exception even in this direction is “delight”–whose meaning by the way perfectly fits the etymology of “will”–: it would be “delight in power”, not “delight for power”. Compare the German word Lust, “pleasure, joy, etc.”
Yes, this is governed by idiom. ‘Delight in’, ‘desire for’, can be followed by nouns or gerunds (which are similar to nominalized German verbs). But ‘will to’ can be followed only by a verb, which is why some other construction must be used so that we can keep ‘power’. "Will to power’ is simply impossible, as would be ‘will to car’ or ‘will to light bulb’. Since ‘power’ is the word that cannot really be avoided, we have to make the construction allow for its presence as a noun. ‘Will to’ thus cannot be used. Everything turns on ‘power’, not ‘will’, because ‘power’ must be used, as it is the key concept in the expression.
Consider this one, where Will zu is followed by a noun:
[…] den EU-Außenbeziehungen strukturell angelegtes und daher wiederkehrendes Problem: die Frage nach der Gewichtung der Wertedimension im Verhältnis zu Staaten, die gravierende Defizite bei der Achtung der Menschenrechte und der Herrschaft des Rechts aufweisen und in denen der politische Wille zu substantiellen Reformen fehlt.
However, a divergence of opinion emerged in relation to a structural and therefore recurring question within EU foreign policy: what role should values play in the EU’s relationship with states that lack the political will for substantive reforms and exhibit grave deficits in their respect of rule of law and human rights?
I would translate this better as ‘relationship with states that lack the political will to make substantive reforms and…’
There is some history of the usage ‘will for power’ in the 19th century unrelated to Nietzsche (so far as I know).
‘The Spirit Of Might. He was so in Christ, and, therefore, Christ is called by the same Name (Hebrew word) Mighty, in Isaiah ix. The Spirit is the Spirit of Might; because there is no Might, but by him. Not by Might, nor by Power, but by my Spirit, faith the Lord of Hosts. Zech. iv. 6. He is the Spirit of Might to the Redeemed; because Sin, in robbing them of their spiritual Life, left them without any spiritual Strength. Rom. v. 6. Throughout the Scriptures, in this respect, they are described in the Condition of a dead Carcase—without Sensation— without Capacity—without the Power even to wish or to will for Power. In their Regeneration, this Spirit exerts his Might, quickening them from the…’
‘And now, Monsieur Doltaire, do we settle with you? No, there is no one on earth who could do that. Illegitimate birth, royal and peasant blood, a life of sickening evil, brute cruelty, a relentless will for power or revenge, a love for Alixe — for Alixe! — that was so low a thing as a mere pursuit; and yet a man above petty meannesses, a man of willing charity and generous hand when his heart was touched, a voice, a manner, a pleading grace, a wit to charm in spite of all the evil of his life. Mr. Parker does not leave you to sneer at such a man’s powers of fascination. As Alixe Duvarney fought against his charm the reader has to fight.’
