Will To Power - Wikipedia

Will to power - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
22/07/2016 00:23
Will to power
For other uses, see Will to Power (disambiguation).
The will to power (German: der Wille zur Macht) is a prominent concept in the
philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have
believed to be the main driving force in humans achievement, ambition, and the
striving to reach the highest possible position in life. These are all manifestations of the
will to power; however, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's
work, leaving its interpretation open to debate.
Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology. This can be
contrasted to the other Viennese schools of psychotherapy: Sigmund Freud's pleasure
principle (will to pleasure) and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (will to meaning). Each of
these schools advocates and teaches a very dierent essential driving force in human
beings.
Kraft vs. macht

Some of the misconceptions of the will to power, including Nazi appropriation of
Nietzsche's philosophy, arise from overlooking Nietzsche's distinction between kraft
(force) and macht (power). Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything
possessing it, while Macht is, within Nietzsche's philosophy, closely tied to sublimation
and "self-overcoming", the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes.
Early influences
Nietzsche's early thinking was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he first
discovered in 1865. Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis on will and in particular has
a concept of the "will to live". Writing a generation before Nietzsche, he explained that
the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results in a
desire in all living creatures to avoid death and to procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will
is the most fundamental aspect of reality more fundamental even than being.
Another important influence was Roger Joseph Boscovich, whom Nietzsche discovered
and learned about through his reading, in 1866, of Friedrich Albert Lange's 1865
Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism). As early as 1872, Nietzsche went
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_power
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on to study Boscovichs book Theoria Philosophia Naturalis for himself. Nietzsche makes
his only reference in his published works to Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil, where
he declares war on "soul-atomism". Boscovich had rejected the idea of "materialistic
atomism", which Nietzsche calls "one of the best refuted theories there is". The idea of
centers of force would become central to Nietzsche's later theories of "will to power".
Appearance of the concept in Nietzsche's work

As the 1880s began, Nietzsche began to speak of the "Desire for Power" (Machtgelst);
this appeared in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) and Daybreak (1881).
Machtgelst, in these works, is the pleasure of the feeling of power and the hunger to
overpower.
Wilhelm Roux published his The Struggle of Parts in the Organism (Der Kampf der Teile
im Organismus) in 1881, and Nietzsche first read it that year. The book was a response
to Darwinian theory, proposing an alternative mode of evolution. Roux was a disciple of
and influenced by Ernst Haeckel who believed the struggle for existence occurred at the
cellular level. The various cells and tissue struggle for finite resources, so that only the
strongest survive. Through this mechanism, the body grows stronger and better
adapted. Some believe[citation needed] the theory lacks modern genetic theory and
assumes a lamarckian or pangenetic model of inheritance, thus making the theory
plausible at the time.[citation needed]
Nietzsche began to expand on the concept of Machtgelst in The Gay Science (1882),
where in a section titled "On the doctrine of the feeling of power", he connects the
desire for cruelty with the pleasure in the feeling of power. Elsewhere in The Gay Science
he notes that it is only "in intellectual beings that pleasure, displeasure, and will are to
be found", excluding the vast majority of organisms from the desire for power.
Lon Dumont (183777), whose 1875 book Thorie Scientifique de La Sensibilit, le
Plaisir et la Peine Nietzsche read in 1883, seems to have exerted some influence on this
concept. Dumont believed that pleasure is related to increases in force. In The Wanderer
and Daybreak, Nietzsche had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty are pleasurable
because of exercise of power. But Dumont provided a physiological basis for
Nietzsches speculation. Dumonts theory also would have seemed to confirm
Nietzsches claim that pleasure and pain are reserved for intellectual beings, since,
according to Dumont, pain and pleasure require a coming to consciousness and not just
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a sensing.
In 1883 Nietzsche coined the phrase "Wille zur Macht" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The
concept, at this point, was no longer limited to only those intellectual beings that can
actually experience the feeling of power; it now applied to all life. The phrase Wille zur
Macht first appears in part 1, "1001 Goals" (1883), then in part 2, in two sections, "SelfOvercoming" and "Redemption" (later in 1883). "Self-Overcoming" describes it in most
detail, saying it is an "unexhausted procreative will of life". There is will to power where
there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power. This
suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive.
Schopenhauer's "Will to life" thus became a subsidiary to the will to power, which is the
stronger will. Nietzsche thinks his notion of the will to power is far more useful than
Schopenhauer's will to live for explaining various events, especially human behavior
for example, Nietzsche uses the will to power to explain both ascetic, life-denying
impulses and strong, life-arming impulses in the European tradition,[clarification needed]
as well as both master and slave morality. He also finds the will to power to oer much
richer explanations than utilitarianism's notion that all people really want to be happy, or
the Platonist's notion that people want to be unified with the Good.[citation needed]
Nietzsche read William Rolphs Biologische Probleme around mid-1884, and it clearly
interested him, for his copy is heavily annotated. He made many notes concerning
Rolph. Rolph was another evolutionary anti-Darwinist like Roux, who wished to argue
for evolution by a dierent mechanism than the struggle for existence. Rolph argued
that all life seeks primarily to expand itself. Organisms fulfill this need through
assimilation, trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of
themselves, for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment. Life forms are
naturally insatiable in this way.
Nietzsche's next published work was Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where the influence
of Rolph seems apparent. Nietzsche writes, "Even the body within which individuals
treat each other as equals ... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to
grow, spread, seize, become predominant not from any morality or immorality but
because it is living and because life simply is will to power." Beyond Good and Evil has
the most references to "will to power" in his published works, appearing in 11
aphorisms; The influence of Rolph and its connection to "will to power", also continues
in book 5 of Gay Science (1887) where Nietzsche describes "will to power" as the
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instinct for "expansion of power", fundamental to all life.

Karl Wilhelm von Ngeli's 1884 book Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der
Abstammungslehre, which Nietzsche acquired around 1886 and subsequently read
closely, also had considerable influence on his theory of will to power. Nietzsche wrote a
letter to Franz Overbeck about it, noting that it has "been sheepishly put aside by
Darwinists". Ngeli believed in a "perfection principle", which led to greater complexity.
He called the seat of heritability the idioplasma, and argued, with a military metaphor,
that a more complex, complicatedly ordered idioplasma would usually defeat a simpler
rival. In other words, he is also arguing for internal evolution, similar to Roux, except
emphasizing complexity as the main factor instead of strength.
Thus, Dumonts pleasure in the expansion of power, Rouxs internal struggle, Ngelis
drive towards complexity, and Rolphs principle of insatiability and assimilation are
fused together into the biological side of Nietzsches theory of will to power, which is
developed in a number of places in his published writings. Having derived the "will to
power" from three anti-Darwin evolutionists, as well as Dumont, it seems appropriate
that he should use his "will to power" as an anti-Darwinian explanation of evolution. He
expresses a number of times the idea that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a
secondary drive in the evolution of animals, behind the desire to expand ones power
the "will to power".
Nonetheless, in his notebooks he continues to expand the theory of the will to power.
Influenced by his earlier readings of Boscovich, he began to develop a physics of the
will to power. The idea of matter as centers of force is translated into matter as centers
of will to power. Nietzsche wanted to slough o the theory of matter, which he viewed
as a relic of the metaphysics of substance.
These ideas of an all inclusive physics or metaphysics built upon the will to power do
not appear to arise anywhere in his published works or in any of the final books
published posthumously, except in the above-mentioned aphorism from Beyond Good &
Evil, where he references Boscovich (section 12). It does recur in his notebooks, but not
all scholars treat these ideas as part of his thought.
Will to power and eternal recurrence

Throughout the 1880s, in his notebooks, Nietzsche also developed an equally elusive
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theory of the "eternal recurrence of the same" and much speculation on the physical
possibility of this idea and the mechanics of its actualization recur in his later
notebooks. Here, the will to power as a potential physics is integrated with the
postulated eternal recurrence. Taken literally as a theory for how things are, Nietzsche
appears to imagine a physical universe of perpetual struggle and force that repeatedly
completes its cycle and returns to the beginning.
However such a concept of eternal return was used metaphorically, and evidenced for
not being taken as a literal theorem of Nietzsche for how in fact things are or aren't, by
how he claimed it as a most "abysmal" of convictions amongst human values. Wherein
he posed as a question to whether the eternal recurrence could be accepted by one
that such would justify that one's life beyond their valuation (a trans-valuation) and be a
necessary thought-experiment precursor to the overman in their perfect acceptance of
all that is, for the love of life itself and amor fati.[citation needed]
Interpretations
In contemporary Nietzschean scholarship, some interpreters have emphasized the will
to power as a psychological principle because Nietzsche applies it most frequently to
human behavior. However, in Nietzsche's unpublished notes (later published by his
sister as "The Will to Power"), Nietzsche sometimes seemed to view the will to power as
a more (metaphysical) general force underlying all reality, not just human behaviorthus
making it more directly analogous to Schopenhauer's will to live. For example,
Nietzsche claims the "world is the will to powerand nothing besides!". Nevertheless, in
relation to the entire body of Nietzsche's published works, many scholars have insisted
that Nietzsche's principle of the will to power is less metaphysical and more pragmatic
than Schopenhauer's will to live: while Schopenhauer thought the will to live was what
was most real in the universe, Nietzsche can be understood as claiming only that the
will to power is a particularly useful principle for his purposes.
Some interpreters also upheld a biological interpretation of the Wille zur Macht, making
it equivalent with some kind of social Darwinism. For example, the concept was
appropriated by some Nazis such as Alfred Bumler, who may have drawn influence
from it or used it to justify their expansive quest for power.
This reading was criticized by Martin Heidegger in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche
suggesting that raw physical or political power was not what Nietzsche had in mind.
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This is reflected in the following passage from Nietzsche's notebooks:

I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant
people, without the least desire to ruleand, conversely, the desire to rule has often
appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and
shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers,
their fame, etc.) The powerful natures dominate, it is a necessity, they need not lift
one finger. Even if, during their lifetime, they bury themselves in a garden house!
Opposed to a biological and voluntary conception of the Wille zur Macht, Heidegger
also argued that the will to power must be considered in relation to the bermensch and
the thought of eternal recurrencealthough this reading itself has been criticized by
Mazzino Montinari as a "macroscopic Nietzsche". Gilles Deleuze also emphasized the
connection between the will to power and eternal return. Both Jacques Derrida and
Gilles Deleuze were careful to point out that the primary nature of will to power is
unconscious. This means that the drive to power is always already at work
unconsciously, perpetually advancing the will of the one over the other. This thus
creates the state of things in the observable or conscious world still operating through
the same tension. Derrida is careful not to confine the will to power to human behavior,
the mind, metaphysics, nor physical reality individually. It is the underlying life principle
inaugurating all aspects of life and behavior, a self-preserving force. A sense of entropy
and the eternal return, which are related, is always indissociable from the will to power.
The eternal return of all memory initiated by the will to power is an entropic force again
inherent to all life.
Opposed to this interpretation, the "will to power" can be understood (or
misunderstood) to mean a struggle against one's surroundings that culminates in
personal growth, self-overcoming, and self-perfection, and assert that the power held
over others as a result of this is coincidental. Thus Nietzsche wrote:
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to
extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But
it continually encounters similar eorts on the part of other bodies and ends by
coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are suciently related to
it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.
It would be possible to claim that rather than an attempt to 'dominate over others', the
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"will to power" is better understood as the tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces'

relations to each other. While a rock, for instance, does not have a conscious (or
unconscious) "will", it nevertheless acts as a site of resistance within the "will to power"
dynamic. Moreover, rather than 'dominating over others', "will to power" is more
accurately positioned in relation to the subject (a mere synecdoche, both fictitious and
necessary, for there is "no doer behind the deed," (see On the Genealogy of Morals)) and
is an idea behind the statement that words are "seductions" within the process of selfmastery and self-overcoming. The "will to power" is thus a "cosmic" inner force acting
in and through both animate and inanimate objects. Not just instincts but also higher
level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. This includes
both such apparently[need quotation to verify] harmful acts as physical violence, lying, and
domination, on one hand, and such apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love, and
praise on the otherthough its manifestations can be altered significantly, such as
through art and aesthetic experience. In Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that
philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective,
absolute truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their will to power; this
will can be life-arming or a manifestation of nihilism, but it is the will to power all the
same.
Other Nietzschean interpreters dispute the suggestion that Nietzsche's concept of the
will to power is merely and only a matter of narrow, harmless, humanistic selfperfection. They suggest that, for Nietzsche, power means self-perfection as well as
outward, political, elitist, aristocratic domination. Nietzsche, in fact, explicitly and
specifically defined the egalitarian state-idea as the embodiment of the will to power in
decline:
To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury,
assault, exploitation, destruction can be 'unjust,' since life operates essentially, that
is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply
cannot be thought of at all without this character. One must indeed grant something
even more unpalatable: that, from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions
can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial
restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its
total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power.
A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle
between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general
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perhaps after the communistic clich of Dhring, that every will must consider every
other will its equalwould be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution
and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of
weariness, a secret path to nothingness.
Individual psychology
Main article: Individual psychology
Alfred Adler borrowed heavily from Nietzsche's work to develop his second Viennese
school of psychotherapy called individual psychology. Adler (1912) wrote in his
important book ber den nervsen Charakter (The Neurotic Constitution):
Nietzsche's "Will to power" and "Will to seem" embrace many of our views, which
again resemble in some respects the views of Fr and the older writers, according
to whom the sensation of pleasure originates in a feeling of power, that of pain in a
feeling of feebleness (Ohnmacht).
Adler's adaptation of the will to power was and still is in contrast to Sigmund Freud's
pleasure principle or the "will to pleasure", and to Viktor Frankl's logotherapy or the "will
to meaning". Adler's intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant,
others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with
that of social equality. His interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power was concerned
with the individual patient's overcoming of the superiority-inferiority dynamic.
In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl compared his third Viennese school of
psychotherapy with Adler's psychoanalytic interpretation of the will to power:
... the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man.
That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as
we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is
centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power stressed by Adlerian psychology.
In fiction and popular culture

The 1999 4x strategy game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri refers to the will to power by
naming one of its available technologies by that name. A quote from Thus Spoke
Zarathustra is given when the technology is discovered by the player.
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The 2016 4x strategy game Stellaris also includes a technology with this name.
Bob Rosenberg, founder of freestyle music group Will to Power (band) chose the name
Will to Power for the group as an homage to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's
theory of an individual's fundamental "will to power".
The first title in the Xenosaga trilogy is Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht.
See also
The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power (manuscript)
Schopenhauer's concept of will to live
Each of the following Viennese schools of psychotherapy advocate a very dierent
main driving force in man:
Sigmund Freud's will to pleasure pleasure principle
Alfred Adler's will to power individual psychology
Victor Frankl's will to meaning logotherapy
Heinz Ansbacher
Power (social and political)
Aggression
References
1. ^ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/
2. ^ Golomb, Jacob (2002). Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and
Abuses of a Philosophy.
3. ^ Whitlock, Greg (1996). "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich
Nietzsche: The Untold Story". Nietzsche Studien 25 (1): 200220.
doi:10.1515/9783110244441.200.
4. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1886; New York:
Vintage Books, 1966), 12.
5. ^ Anderson, R. Lanier (1994). "Nietzsches Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of
Science". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 (5): 738 "Boscovich's
theory of centers of force was prominent in Germany at the time. Boscovichs theory
'is echoed in Immanuel Kants Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, which
reduces matter to force altogether. Kants view, in turn, became very influential in
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German physics through the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers. By
the time Nietzsche wrote, treating matter in terms of fields of force was the dominant
understanding of the fundamental notions of physics.'"
6. ^ Moore, Gregory (2002). Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor. New York: Cambridge
University Press. ISBN 0521812305.
7. ^ Wolfgang Mller-Lauter, "The Organism as Inner Struggle: Wilhelm Rouxs
Influence on Nietzsche", in Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the
Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1999), 16182.
8. ^ Section 13
9. ^ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (1887; New York: Vintage
Books, 1974), 127.
10.
11.
12.
13.
^ Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 166.

^ Small, Nietzsche in Context, 167.
^ Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 47.
^ Thomas H. Brobjer, "Nietzsches Reading and Private Library, 18851889",
Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (Oct 1997): 66393.
14. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 259.

15. ^ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 22, 23 36, 44 ("Macht-Willen," translated
"power-will"), 51, 186, 198, 211, 227, 257 ("Willenskrfte und Macht-Begierden",
translated "strength of will and lust for power"), 259.
16. ^ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 349.
17. ^ Brobjer says it is the most heavily annotated book of his 1886 reading,
"Nietzsches Reading and Private Library", 679.
18. ^ Quoted in Horn, Anette (2005). "Nietzsches interpretation of his sources on
Darwinism: Idioplasma, Micells and military troops". South African Journal of
Philosophy 24 (4): 260272. doi:10.4314/sajpem.v24i4.31426.
19. ^ Horn, "Nietzsche's Interpretation of his Sources", 26566.
20. ^ Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 55.
21. ^ Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 13; Gay Science, 349; Genealogy of
Morals, II:12.
22. ^ The phrase will to power appears in "147 entries of the Colli and Montinari
edition of the Nachlass. ... one-fifth of the occurrences of Wille zur Macht have to
do with outlines of various lengths of the projected but ultimately abandoned
book". Linda L. Williams, "Will to Power in Nietzsche's Published Works and the
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Nachlass", Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 3 (1996): 44763, 450.
23. ^ Whitlock, "Boscovich, Spinoza and Nietzsche", 207.
24. ^ cf. Williams, "Will to Power in Nietzsche's Published Works and the Nachlass".
25. ^ For discussion, see Whitlock, "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and
Friedrich Nietzsche"; Moles, "Nietzsches Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian
Cosmology"; Christa Davis Acampora, "Between Mechanism and Teleology: Will to
Power and Nietzsches Gay 'Science'", in Nietzsche & Science, 171188
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovichs Natural
Philosophy"; and Small "The Physics of Eternal Recurrence", in Nietzsche in
26.
27.
28.
29.
Context, 135152.
^ Nietzsche, The Will To Power, 1067
^ Friedrich Nietzsche. Nachlass, Fall 1880 6 [206]
^ Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche (1974), 121.
^ Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 636
30. ^ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II:11

31. ^ Adler, Alfred (19121917). "The Neurotic Constitution". New York: Moat, Yard and
Company: ix.
32. ^ Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic
Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology". Mater Dei Institute
33. ^ Ansbacher, Heinz; Ansbacher, Rowena R. (1956). The Individual Psychology of
Alfred Adler. Harper Perennial (1964). pp. 132133. ISBN 0-06-131154-5.
34. ^ Frankl, Viktor (1959). Man's Search for Meaning. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon
Press. p. 154. ISBN 0-671-02337-3.
35. ^ Bronson, Fred (2003). The Billboard Book of No. 1 Hits, 5th Edition (Billboard
Publications), page 715.
External links
Der "Wille zur Macht" kein Buch von Friedrich Nietzsche, a selection of texts from
Nietzsche's estate related to his philosophical concept and book projects "Wille
zur Macht" ("Will to Power"), edited by Bernd Jung based on the Digital Critical
Edition of Nietzsches Works, 2012/13
"Nietzsche Will to Power", a video explication of the will to power concept.
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Kraft vs. macht