In light of these critiques, it is not surprising that some readers see Nietzsche as a nihilist who either rejects the very possibility of justifying ethical claims or endorses some form of brute voluntarism, according to which we commit ourselves—without justification—to some set of values. And indeed, this latter view is suggested by The Gay Science, which endorses a tempering of the valuation of truth by the artistic drives (Preface, 4).39 There, Nietzsche writes, “as an aesthetic phenomenon life is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon” (GS, 107; cf. GS, 290, 299). We should follow the ancient Greeks, who “were superficial—out of profundity!” (GS, Preface: 4). For there is really just “one thing that is needful,” Nietzsche tells us: “that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself” (GS, 290). The ultimate test of this, Nietzsche suggests, would be the ability to look with delight upon the prospect of eternally reliving one’s life, with nothing changed or altered (GS, 341). At the risk of oversimplifying a notoriously complex text, GS seems to advocate a form of subjective voluntarism: whether a value or way of life is justified for an individual will depend merely upon whether it enables her to affirm her existence.
However, this subjectivist view is complicated in Nietzsche’s later works. In the works after GS, Nietzsche explicitly presents flourishing, health, or power as the standards in light of which values should be assessed, and he conducts prolonged, incisive investigations of the ways in which contemporary values conflict with these demands.40 To see what Nietzsche has in mind here, it helps to start with an idea that I think we can see emerging, in somewhat inarticulate ways, in Marx, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann: that normativity is grounded in a form of inescapability. The idea goes something like this: justified normative demands are the ones that inescapably motivate us, or that would do so once we cleared away all misunderstandings and grasped the true nature of the world and motivation. So, according to Schopenhauer, if we see into the true nature of things—if we peer through the “veil of Maya”—the will to live dissipates. Schopenhauer takes this as the ideal, so we can see that his normative ideals are those goals that we would inevitably seek once we see clearly into the nature of things. There is a trace of this in Marx as well: he denies that communism is an “ideal” to which we must aspire, arguing instead that it is an inevitable result of world history (2000, 162); his point seems to be that its normativity is vouchsafed by its inevitability.
Nietzsche’s theory takes a different form: we are inescapably motivated by something that Nietzsche calls “will to power”; and this aim of power generates normative results. Thus, Nietzsche argues that the “principle of revaluation” or the “standard by which the value of moral evaluation is to be determined” is “will to power” (KSA, 12.2[131]).41 Or, as he elsewhere puts it: “What is good? Everything that heightens in human beings the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself” (A 2).42 In other words, values are justified in terms of their connection to power.
Nietzsche frequently appeals to another evaluative standard: life. To give just a few examples, he writes, “every individual may be scrutinized to see whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life” (TI, IX: 33).43 Ascending or flourishing life is healthy; degenerating life is unhealthy (GM, P: 6, EH, IV: 8). He tells us that modern morality is “hostile to life” (GM, III:11); it “negates life” (CW, Preface).44 But what is life? Nietzsche argues that “the essence of life” is simply “its will to power” (GM, II:12). He tells us that “life itself” is a striving for “power” (A 6), and asserts that “the will to power” is “the will of life” (BGE, 259); “life simply is will to power” (BGE, 259).
So Nietzsche’s basic evaluative notion, in terms of which life, health, and flourishing are defined, is will to power. But what is power? According to an increasingly influential interpretation, willing power is the activity of perpetually seeking and overcoming resistance to one’s ends. As Bernard Reginster argues, “will to power, in the last analysis, is a will to the very activity of overcoming resistance.”45 It is important to notice that power is not a first-order end; rather, an agent wills power in the course of pursuing some other, more determinate end, such as completing a race or finishing a game. We might express this point by saying that will to power is a higher-order aim. In order to will power, one must aim at a determinate first-order goal, such as running or painting. Will to power does not compete with these determinate goals; rather, it modifies the way in which these goals are pursued.
Nietzsche claims that every action manifests will to power.46 Elsewhere, I have argued that the basis for this claim lies in Nietzsche’s drive psychology. Put briefly, the will to power thesis is a description of the form that all drive-motivated actions take. For Nietzsche argues that any action that is motivated by a drive (Trieb) will have a higher-order aim of encountering and overcoming resistance: the drive motivates us to engage in characteristic patterns of activity, and manifesting these patterns of activity involves continual overcoming of the resistances to that activity. In Nietzsche’s terminology, this is equivalent to the claim that all drive-motivated actions manifest will to power. If Nietzsche can show that all human activities are drive-motivated (obviously, no small claim), then it follows that all human actions manifest will to power.47
Given its ubiquity, Nietzsche concludes that power has a privileged normative status—not in the sense that it is objectively valuable, but in the sense that it is an ineluctable, inescapable feature of agency. For any particular aim other than power, we can ask why we should pursue it. If I have an aim of being compassionate, or promoting egalitarianism, or achieving artistic greatness, I can ask for reasons for pursuing it. When I ask what my reasons are for pursuing these aims, I presuppose that I have the option of not pursuing the aim: I could do something else. However, with will to power, this kind of questioning is moot. If someone asked, “why should I will power?,” Nietzsche would not answer by trying to show that power is valuable, or that power serves some further goal; power is not a means to anything beyond itself. Rather, Nietzsche would respond by showing that we cannot do anything but will power. Power’s privileged status isn’t grounded in any facts about objective values; it is simply the one aim that we cannot let go.
Thus, Nietzsche grounds his account of normative authority in an incapacity. Nietzsche is not claiming that we should will power, or that willing power is objectively valuable, or that willing power furthers our other values or goals. Rather, he is claiming that we just do will power, and cannot cease to do so. Will to power is, as Nietzsche puts it, our “innermost essence” (KSA, 13.14[80]).
And yet our contemporary values and social institutions thwart this innermost essence. Thus, Nietzsche offers a fair summary of his project in the following passage:
Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for continuance [Dauer], for accumulation of force [Häufung von Kräften], for power; where the will to power is lacking there is decline. It is my contention that all the supreme values of mankind lack this will—that the values that are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lording it under the holiest names. (A, 6)
This is why Nietzsche presents modern morality as “the danger of dangers” (GM, Preface: 6).
How, exactly, does will to power bear on values? Nietzsche never attempts to derive values directly from the demand for power; rather, he uses will to power as a “principle of revaluation,” a criterion by means of which one can assess other values. If a value conflicts with or undermines power, it is to be rejected. The conflicts between will to power and particular values won’t always be obvious from the surface content of these values; thus, Nietzsche claims, the only real way to critique a morality is “a rigorous and courageous attempt to live in” it.48 This is part of what his famous genealogies reveal: the unnoticed effects of moral systems on their participants. Thus, to put it in the simplest possible terms, the
Genealogy shows that a system of values that initially appears power-enhancing is actually power-undermining.
This strategy interacts with another element of Nietzsche’s thought: he claims that we achieve freedom to the extent that we manifest will to power. For example, he identifies the “instinct for freedom” with the “will to power” (GM, II: 18), he claims that a free will is equivalent to a “strong” will, that is, a will that manifests will to power (BGE, 21), and, in a section entitled “my conception of freedom,” he claims that freedom is measured according to the degree of power expressed by an individual (TI, IX: 38). There are two ways to interpret this. First, Nietzsche might be offering a revisionary conception of freedom according to which freedom is analyzed as maximal will to power. Second, and more plausibly, Nietzsche might accept a conception of freedom as self-determination.49 On this view, Nietzschean freedom would be attained by acting on one’s own values; a value would count as one’s own if it were critically assessed; and, given that values are to be critically assessed in terms of power, freedom and power would be closely connected.
24.8 CONCLUSION
This chapter has attempted to provide an exceedingly brief overview of the development of ethical thought in the nineteenth century. I have highlighted several themes that occupied central roles: the Kantian aspiration to anchor morality in freedom; Schiller’s call for a unified self; Hegel’s analysis of the socially and historically situated agent; Feuerbach’s and Büchner’s turn to natural science; Marx’s materialism; Schopenhauer’s philosophical psychology; and Nietzsche’s attempt to anchor normative demands in will to power.
I close with a word on Nietzsche’s position in this dialectic. What is interesting about Nietzsche is that he tries to combine the best insights from this entire stretch of nineteenth-century ethical thought. The will to power is a standard set by life, and it is a standard because of its inevitability. It is also a demand for unity—not conceived as mere consistency between desire and reason, but conceived as a kind of harmony between drive and thought. And it is also historical: the will to power cannot be used to assess isolated moral judgments, but only whole ways of life. And it is also a demand for autonomy: becoming free is valuing in accord with power. And it is also a motive whose grip is confirmed by our best science (which is not, to be sure, the simple physiology supported by some of his contemporaries).
So in Nietzsche we have one way of reconciling all of these ideas. In tracing the path from Kant to Nietzsche, we move from a confident complacency with our current moral beliefs, to something far more skeptical, far more complex, something which employs all the help of history and science, something which aspires to unity and freedom, and leaves us only with that to which we are inescapably committed. Moral philosophy is an attempt to justify our commitments, and Nietzsche’s idea is that the uncovering of inescapable commitments is thus the deepest level to which moral philosophy can go.50
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* * *
1 Kant, Immanuel, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der
Sitten (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4: 448. Further references to this text will be abbreviated G, followed by Akademie volume and page number.
2 I have reconstructed Kant’s argument as beginning with a premise about autonomy and ending with a claim about morality; this is his strategy in the Groundwork parts II and III. Elsewhere, he pursues the opposite strategy: starting with a conception of what it is to act morally, he argues that acting morally and acting autonomously coincide. For the latter argument, see the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788), where Kant writes “the moral law, and with it practical reason, come in and forced this concept [freedom] upon us” (5: 30).
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 91
