Nietzsche

by Roy Jackson

• An objective explanation for everything: Nietzsche wants to give us a metaphysical picture of the world – a ‘theory of everything’ that explains the world of experience but that is, nonetheless, ‘beyond’ the physical (hence ‘metaphysical’)

  • A subjective interpretation: this is not asserting that there is a world ‘out there’ beyond the physical, but is simply explaining the will to power as subjective.

  Both these interpretations will be considered, as well as a possible third interpretation, but first it will help to speculate on why there exist such diverse understandings and how much importance should be attributed to this doctrine.

  The enigma of the will to power

  ‘What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome…’

  The Anti-Christ, 2

  The will to power is certainly one of the most famous contributions that Nietzsche made to philosophy, yet it is also a concept subject to a variety of differing interpretations by scholars. As said already, Nietzsche, for his part, is not always helpful in his own articulation of the will to power either, which inevitably opens him up to speculation and disagreement among his readers. Much writing on the will to power, especially early scholarship, places this concept at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as the underlying concept for all of his philosophical views on such things as morality, art and nature. More recent scholarship, however, has raised questions about whether Nietzsche really gives us a strong doctrine of the will to power at all.

  Has the importance of the will to power for Nietzsche’s philosophy been overplayed? It is certainly curious that Nietzsche seemed to drop any reference to the will to power in his last major work, Ecce Homo. This omission is significant because in this work Nietzsche reflects upon his ideas in all his previous works. To make no mention of the will to power at all certainly suggests that he no longer considered it important. In addition, in 1886 Nietzsche wrote a series of new prefaces to The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, Dawn and The Gay Science in which he reflected upon his major philosophical themes, yet the will to power was again not mentioned.

  Spotlight

  The ‘Dig deeper’ section at the end of this chapter cites the work on Nietzsche by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It is an interesting read but should be treated with caution, for Heidegger saw the will to power as Nietzsche’s real philosophy and his unpublished works as truly reflecting what Nietzsche meant, rather than what he chose to publish. In fact, Heidegger stated that the Superman is embodied in the Nazi SS tank commander!

  However, although he may have decided against developing the will to power as a doctrine in his published works, this is not to say that the doctrine had ceased to preoccupy him – quite the opposite, in fact. The reason Nietzsche wrote new prefaces for many of his earlier books was because he was in the process of changing publishers after learning that his old publisher had two-thirds of his books stuffed in a warehouse with little attempt to push sales. After writing books for 15 years, it would have been a huge disappointment to Nietzsche to discover that his publisher had made little effort to sell his books. By launching with a new publisher, Nietzsche hoped for a fresh beginning, and so he wrote a series of new prefaces. He also decided to start a new work with the title The Will to Power: Attempt at a New Interpretation of Everything That Happens. The title alone is quite revealing and does suggest that Nietzsche believed in at least the possibility of the will to power as an important contribution to his philosophical enterprise. This project became almost an obsession (and certainly a therapeutic aid against depression) for Nietzsche and, for that reason, if for no other, it should not be surprising that his sister and Peter Gast should collect his notes together into a work with the title The Will to Power.

  Nietzsche’s project was intended to be a major four-volume work with a coherent structure, unlike his previous collections of aphorisms and short essays. In the autumn of 1888 he completed what he meant to be the first volume, The Anti-Christ, but it ended up being the whole work itself. Nietzsche had previously given up on the title The Will to Power anyway, and was leaning towards ‘Revaluation of All Values’, which, in retrospect, seems more fitting to his lifelong enterprise. He wrote, ‘My revaluation of all values, which has The Anti-Christ as its main title, is finished.’

  It is perhaps going too far to say that Nietzsche placed no importance on the will to power. The terms ‘will to power’ and ‘power’ are used explicitly throughout many of his works, as well as implicitly. The fact that Nietzsche was so preoccupied with it through much of his sane life also suggests that it has some value, even if he saw it more as a tentative experiment than a fully worked-out doctrine.

  ‘And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces […] do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!’

  The Will to Power, 1067

  ‘Assuming, finally, that we could explain our entire instinctual life as the development and differentiation of one basic form of the will (namely the will to power, as my tenet would have it); assuming that one could derive all organic functions from this will to power and also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and alimentation (it is all one problem), then we would have won the right to designate all effective energy unequivocally as: the will to power. The world as it is seen from the inside, the world defined and described by its “intelligible character” – would be simply “will to power” and that alone.’

  Beyond Good and Evil, 36

  The objective interpretation

  The traditional view looks to the will to power as an explanation for all of life’s manifestations. It is a neutral ‘force’ governing the world that is akin to Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will, considered in Chapter 2. The best way to understand this view of the will to power is to look at the quote above from the collected notes The Will to Power.

  This passage has its attractions in its picture of the world as a ‘monster of energy’ and seems to point to a belief on Nietzsche’s part in some underlying principle, a ‘theory of everything’. To support this interpretation, some scholars would cite the importance of the Presocratics for Nietzsche who, on the whole, were distinguished by the belief that there is an underlying principle that governs the universe, an arche (first principle) that is the origin of and responsible for all things. For example, the Greek philosopher Thales (c.625–545 BCE) presented a form of material monism: that the universe consists ultimately of only one substance. What makes Thales stand out here was his pronouncement that there are fundamental features of the universe that are not immediately accessible to the senses or to ‘common sense’. It makes us think that the world is not as it at first seems: there are inner workings to be uncovered. Thales was not so concerned with the Homeric gods at play, but adopted a materialist view that all things were made of material substance and that it is possible to uncover patterns and laws for this material stuff. Thales, in his case, concluded that the seeming multiplicity of the universe can be reduced to the fundamental substance of water – which, of course, is wrong, but at least he began the philosop
hical enterprise of seeking an underlying explanation for all things.

  Case study: Thales

  In looking at the history of philosophy in the Western world, Thales is a good starting point. He was a ‘Presocratic’, which simply means ‘one who comes before Socrates’ (although, in fact, a number of the ‘Presocratics’ were contemporary with Socrates). The Presocratics are important in understanding what philosophy is all about and how it can be distinguished from other disciplines. It is also important to understand that Plato did not emerge from a cultural vacuum; the kind of philosophical questions he was asking (What is knowledge? What is the best life? What is right and wrong?) were the same questions that philosophers before him were engaged with.

  Thales was born in the town of Miletus on the Anatolian coast, just south of the island of Samos – the first ‘Greek’ philosopher was actually from what is now Turkey. However, during the time of Thales, Miletus was a Greek (or, rather, Hellenic) city-state, a modern city that was wealthy and, due to its involvement in commerce with other nations, aware of differing beliefs. Certainly, the fact that the city’s wealth and cosmopolitan nature allowed some people at least to engage in such leisurely activities as thinking and to have access to knowledge of other ideas goes some way in explaining why philosophy began when and where it did. But, also, in many respects the Presocratics were quite ‘modern’ in that their philosophical investigations were very ‘scientific’. The need for trade and commerce was a motivating force in trying to understand nature, astronomy and the art of navigation, and there is a story that Thales was so preoccupied with looking up at the stars that he once fell into a pothole as a result.

  Thales’ conclusion that the world consists of water is wrong, of course, but the important point here is that he does get us to question whether the world is really as it seems: that there are fundamental features of the universe that are not immediately accessible to the senses or to ‘common sense’. Where the Greek myth-makers such as Homer and Hesiod looked for explanations with the gods, Thales looked for more natural explanations.

  Is this, then, what Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power is? Is it the view that the underlying principles of the universe are a multiplicity of drives seeking power over one another? This may be one possible understanding, to be explored further in this chapter, but we need to be aware that things are not that simple. Taken at face value, the much-quoted passage above certainly seems to assert that the will to power is an all-encompassing phenomenon – the very essence of life itself: ‘This world is the will to power – and nothing besides!’ But we need to be very careful of our sources when reading Nietzsche. The above quote from section 1067 of The Will to Power is from a work that has been much discredited, as it is really a compilation of Nietzsche’s notes edited by his sister who had her own political and ideological agenda. In fact, Nietzsche himself had discarded the passage in 1887, and so he would not have endorsed its publication, thus giving it a printed status it does not deserve.

  We must look to works that Nietzsche wished to be published to see whether a ‘theory of everything’ thesis can be supported. Interestingly, Nietzsche, throughout the whole of his works, presents only one argument (if ‘argument’ is the right word here) for the will to power. This is contained in Section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil, which is the second quote in the section above.

  Does this really differ that much from the quote from The Will to Power? In very subtle ways it does, but the subtlety – in Nietzsche’s case – is always important. Nietzsche was a trained philologist, remember, and he chose his words carefully. If you read The Will to Power passage again, you will note how assertive it is, how certain; but these were notes not intended to be published. When it actually comes to writing something for intended publication, Nietzsche is more circumspect in his choice of words, more cautious. For example, he starts off with the word ‘Assuming’ and then uses words such as ‘if’ followed by ‘then’. The important point that Nietzsche is trying to get across is that we should not remain silent or be sceptical on such topics, but that we should realize that when we attempt to contemplate metaphysical ‘truths’ we are confronted with the problem of how to actually understand ‘truth’. This is the type of puzzle, conundrum or riddle that Nietzsche is very fond of.

  When scholars interpret Nietzsche they sometimes forget the importance he places on the use of language, as well as his own playfulness with words and his expertise in the ancient Greek tradition of irony. By using such terms as ‘intelligible character’ – put into inverted commas by Nietzsche – he is making a reference to Kant and his belief in the world ‘in itself’, but Nietzsche himself does not assert that there is a world ‘in itself’, a noumenal world separate from the world of appearance. Rather, supposing it would be possible for there to be a world ‘in itself’, it would actually be no different from the world of appearance.

  Whereas Nietzsche’s earlier writings may suggest a view of the will to power as akin to Schopenhauer’s will to life, as an explanation for all phenomena, the essence to life itself, by the time of his more mature work – and in particular in his ‘trilogy’ of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche had seemingly rejected this view. Consider this passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

  ‘He who shot the doctrine of “will to existence” at truth certainly did not hit the truth: this will – does not exist! Only where life is, there is also will: not will to life, but – so I teach you – will to power! The living creature values many things higher than life itself; yet out of this evaluation itself speaks – the will to power! Thus life once taught me: and with this teaching do I solve the riddle of your hearts, you wisest men.’

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II. 12

  Here, Nietzsche is rejecting Schopenhauer’s metaphysical doctrine of the Will, and so it would be surprising if the replacement of this with the will to power is also meant to be metaphysical, in which case how would it differ at all from Schopenhauer? Also, in his mature work, Nietzsche is explicit – as much as he ever is explicit – in his rejection of metaphysical speculation. For example, in his preface to Beyond Good and Evil he considers such ‘philosophical dogmatism’ to be ‘some folk superstition from time immemorial… some play on words perhaps, some seductive aspect of grammar, or a daring generalization from very limited, very personal, very human, all-too-human facts’, and then, in Section 1, he considers a belief in metaphysical truths as the ‘prejudice’ of philosophers. Or consider the title of one section of The Twilight of the Idols: ‘How the Real World Finally Became a Fable’. With such explicit attacks on metaphysics, it is certainly difficult to sustain a view that Nietzsche’s will to power is metaphysical in character.

  Those scholars who have attempted to argue that Nietzsche’s will to power is a reference to the underlying ‘substance’ of the world, to the world as a ‘monster of energy, without beginning, without end’ (WP, 1067) have had to rely mostly upon the discredited work The Will to Power as their source. Attractive though this concept of the will to power may be, it does not stand up to scrutiny when seen in the light of works that Nietzsche intended to have published. In fact, to suggest that Nietzsche wanted to put forward a ‘theory of everything’ may well go against what he stood for. For example, when we read what Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil:

  ‘… what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image.’

  Beyond Good and Evil, 9

  This passage can be read in a number of ways: on the one hand, he is accusing the Stoics of imposing a particular view upon nature; on the other, Nietzsche seems to be suggesting this is something that philosophy inevitably does. While he may be criticizing the Stoics for ‘creating the world in its own image’, he seems to be admitting that this is unavoidable. Is Nietzsche acknowledging that his speculations on the will to power are an assertion of some underl
ying fact about nature while also being aware that any assertions, any statements of ‘facts’, are ultimately the philosopher’s own prejudices? Such ambiguities are typical of Nietzsche and there is certainly a tension between Nietzsche speaking of nature in terms of universal, natural laws, and his constant warning against engaging in such metaphysical speculation.

  The subjective interpretation

  ‘… somebody with an opposite intention and mode of interpretation could come along and be able to read from nature, and with reference to the same set of appearances, a tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims. This sort of interpreter would show the unequivocal and unconditional nature of all “will to power” so vividly and graphically that almost every word, and even the word “tyranny”, would ultimately seem useless […] Granted, this is only an interpretation too – and you will be eager enough to make this objection? – well then, so much the better.’

  Beyond Good and Evil, 22

  The final sentence of the quote above is particularly instructive as it appears to be an admission that his talk of the will to power is his own interpretation and is therefore no ‘truer’ than that put forward by any other philosopher. But if it is indeed the case that the will to power is no more true than any other view of the world, and if Nietzsche knows he is putting forward his own subjective view, then why give it any credence?

  To answer this, it is important to remember how much value needs to be placed on Nietzsche’s style: on his use of metaphor, ambiguity, riddles, humour and irony. Nietzsche knows he is seeing the world from his own perspective, for how can he – or anybody else for that matter – do otherwise? Nonetheless, the knowledge that one cannot demonstrate objective truths, that one cannot step outside one’s own perspective, is not a reason to remain silent or to adopt a nihilistic stance towards our values. Nietzsche, remember, is very positive; he does not bury his head in despair and existential nausea (although he has his moments), but rejoices in the realization that we cannot know what is true. Nietzsche, however, does not stop using words such as ‘truth’ and ‘soul’, but these words for Nietzsche mean something different. He writes about the will to power because he values it, not because it necessarily exists ‘out there’.