The Will to Power
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- This article focuses on the philosophical concept by Friedrich Nietzsche. For other uses, see Will to Power.
The will to power (German: "Der Wille zur Macht") is a concept prominent in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. It also is the title of a work that he planned to write, and the title given to a book consisting of selections from his notebooks or Nachlass. The first rendition of this collection was released with other unpublished writings in 1901, edited by Heinrich Köselitz, Ernst Horneffer, and August Horneffer, but under the pressure and influence of Nietzsche's antisemitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. This version has been judged more than dubious, and later editions are considered more subtle in their presentation of Nietzsche's intent.[citation needed] Walter Kaufmann's English edition is divided into four major parts: "European Nihilism", "Critique of the Highest Values Hitherto", "Principles of a New Evaluation", and "Discipline and Breeding". Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli, who edited the complete edition of Nietzsche's Posthumous fragments from the manuscripts themselves, have called The Will to Power a "historic forgery" artificially assembled by Nietzsche's sister and Peter Gast.
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[edit] The concept
The concept of the "will to power" in Nietzsche's thought has had many interpretations, most notoriously its misappropriation by the Nazis, which amounts to its characterization as a "desire for and of power" ("power" here specifically denoting the more limited concept of "dominance").
To understand the will to power, one must first of all take into account Nietzsche's background and criticism of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer posited a "will to live," in which living things were motivated by sustaining and developing their own lives. Nietzsche instead posited a will to power, a significant point of contrast to Schopenhauer's ideation, in which living things are not just driven by the mere need to stay alive, but in fact by a greater need to wield and use power, to grow, to expend their strength, and, possibly, to subsume other "wills" in the process. Thus, Nietzsche regarded such a "will to live" as secondary to the primary "will to power", and more generally there are varied manifestations of it, two prominent distinctions by Nietzsche are: a "life-denying" modality and a life-"enhancing" or -"affirming" one. Henceforth, he opposed himself to social-Darwinism, as he contested the validity of the concept of "adaptation", which he considered a narrow and weak "will to live".[1]
Another particular standpoint of the will to power is that it is a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that Nietzsche argued was the underlying – the "most fundamental fact" – "inner" force of nature. This is further coupled with his argument it is to be the fundamental causal power in the world ("cause" not in the sense of a kind of "initial cause", but rather as the interplay of forces within the process of becoming itself, which does not lend itself to the "cause and effect" theory, for Nietzsche denied its ontological status as only useful for "describing events"), the driving force of all natural phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers could be reduced. Indeed, the will to power can be understood anthropologically (as relates to others' drives), but this view is also a part of a more all-inclusive perspective. That is, Nietzsche in part argued for the will to power as a merited idea providing the most elemental foundations for explanations of everything from whole societies, to individual organisms, down to mere lumps of matter.[citation needed] (Also note the last paragraph in this section.)
Nietzsche perhaps developed the will to power concept furthest with regard to living organisms, and it is there that the concept is perhaps more inviting to understand by way of analogy. There the will to power is taken as an animal's most fundamental instinct or drive, even more fundamental than the act of self-preservation; the latter is but an epiphenomenon of the former.[citation needed] According to Nietzsche, the will to power is the basic means through which "interpretation" or interaction with the world becomes, and, in this sense, the "world is the will to power -- and nothing besides!" (The Will To Power, Kaufmann-Hollingdale trans., 1067).
Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.
—trans. Walter Kaufmann, Beyond Good and Evil
Furthermore, the will to power is something like the desire to exert one's will in self-overcoming, although this "willing" may be unconscious, for all things "desire to grow". Indeed, it is unconscious in all non-human beings; it was the frustration of this will that initially caused man to become conscious. The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto says that "aggression" is at least sometimes an approximate synonym.[citation needed] However, Nietzsche's ideas of aggression are almost always meant as aggression toward oneself, as the energy a person motivates toward self-mastery. In any case, since the will to power is fundamental, any other drives are to be reduced to it; the "will to survive" (i.e. the survival instinct) that biologists (at least in Nietzsche's day) thought to be fundamental, for example, was in this light a manifestation of the will to power.
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 efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.
—trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Will to Power, §636
Thus, rather than a conscious intention to 'dominate over others,' the "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' (a misinterpretation by Deleuze et al.), "will to power" is more accurately postioned 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 words are "seductions") within the process of self-mastery and self-overcoming. The "will to power" is thus a "cosmic" inner force acting in and through both animate and inanimate objects, but it may also take on many forms that could perhaps involve such mastery but in a "life-denying" modality. Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. In fact, Nietzsche considered consciousness itself to be a form of instinct. This includes both such apparently 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 other – though 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-affirming or a manifestation of nihilism, but it is the will to power all the same.
[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... 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... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.
—trans. Walter Kaufmann, Beyond Good and Evil, §259
As indicated above, the will to power is meant to explain more than just the behavior of an individual person or animal. It is not psychological, nor intentional or subjective. The will to power lends itself more to the view, though it be homogeneous in expression, its transformations are heterogeneous, based on the altering organizations of "quanta of power".
The biological interpretation of the will to power, however, is but one of many possible interpretations – indeed, Nietzsche scholarship is overflowing with contrasting interpretations, largely due to either Nietzsche's elusive style. Others might suggest that the will to power is not really as central a concept in Nietzsche's thought. For example, Nietzsche himself suggests, in Ecce Homo, that his notion of "eternal recurrence of the same" is his most central thought, and the central theme of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, Heidegger and Deleuze would argue that both concepts, the will to power and the "thought of the eternal recurrence", are to be conceived together. Additionally, one interpretation (which lends significant credence to the view of the will to power as the most central concept of Nietzsche's thought) says that if attention were given to the will to power "as pathos", according to Nietzsche's own definition, as the fundament of his conception of becoming, then such concinnity vis-à-vis his work suggests a more thoroughgoing interrelation to the ideas prevalent throughout his work in its entirety and how other ideas might be shown to be based upon it. Such a view is then taken further to view Nietzsche's ontology as a part of a much larger conception of a process philosophy. The degree to which these current interpretations stand is still tentative and debated among scholars.
[edit] The Will to Power manuscript
In 1894 (after Nietzsche's mental breakdown), his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, founded the Nietzsche-Archiv in Naumburg, which she would later transfer to Weimar. The culmination of this organization was the publishing, in Leipzig between 1894 and 1926, of the Großoktavausgabe edition. It was first edited by C. G. Naumann, then by Kröner. In these 20 volumes, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche included part of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which she gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. With Peter Gast, she claimed that Nietzsche had died before completing his magnum opus, which he allegedly would have wanted to name "The Will to Power, in Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". This compilation of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, selected and ordered under his sister's authority, led to the book commonly known as The Will to Power. Until Colli & Montinari's edition, this would form the basis for all successive editions, including the 1922 Musarion edition, often commonly used even today.
While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari decided to go to the Archives in Leipzig to work with the original documents. From their work emerged the first complete and chronological edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which Förster-Nietzsche had cut up, mixed and paste together, according to her own antisemitic views (which were a bone of contention between her and Nietzsche himself). The complete works comprise 5,000 pages, compared to the 3,500 pages of the Großoktavausgabe. In 1964, during the International Colloquium on Nietzsche in Paris, Colli and Montinari met Karl Löwith, who would put them in contact with Heinz Wenzel, editor for Walter de Gruyter's publishing house. Heinz Wenzel would buy the rights of the complete works of Colli and Montinari (33 volumes in German) after the French Gallimard edition and the Italian Adelphi editions.
Before Colli and Montinari's philological work, the previous editions led readers to believe that Nietzsche had organized all his work toward a final structured opus called The Will to Power. In fact, if Nietzsche did consider producing such a book, he had abandoned such plans before his collapse. The title of The Will to Power, which appears for the first time at the end of the summer of 1885, was replaced by another plan at the end of August 1888. This new plan was titled "Project for a reversion of all values", and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
In fact, according to Montinari, the previous editions, which all depended of the Großoktavausgabe, were technically nonsense, as Nietzsche's fragments were cut up in various places and ordered according to his sister's will; and a case of revisionism, as it was left to his sister to artificially combine Nietzsche's fragments into an unified opus magnum (which very concept is alien to Nietzsche's philosophy and style of writing), whose meaning was distorted according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's anti-semitic and Germanist biases. Gilles Deleuze himself saluted Montinari's work declaring:
- "As long as it was not possible for the most serious researcher to accede to the whole of Nietzsche's manuscripts, we knew only in a loose way that the Will to Power did not exist as such (...) We wish only now that the new dawn brought on by this previously unpublished work will be the sign of a return to Nietzsche [2]
Not only did this critical philological work, a milestone in Nietzsche studies, prove case-by-case the distortions accomplished by Nietzsche's sister on his posthumous fragments, it also called into question the very conception of a Nietzschean magnum opus, given his style of writing and thinking. So The Will to Power was not written by Nietzsche. But the concept of "will to power" is certainly in itself a major motif of Nietzsche's philosophy, so much that Heidegger considered it to form, with the thought of the eternal recurrence, the basis of his thought. [3]
[edit] References
- ^ Barbary Stiegler, Nietzsche and Biology, PUF, 2001
- ^ Deleuze: "Tant qu'il ne fut pas possible aux chercheurs les plus sérieux d'accéder à l'ensemble des manuscrits de Nietzsche, on savait seulement de façon vague que La Volonté de puissance n'existait pas comme telle (...) Nous souhaitons que le jour nouveau, apporté par les inédits, soit celui du retour à Nietzsche in Mazzino Montinari and Paolo d'Iorio, "'The Will to Power' does not exist" Centro Montinari (Italian)
- ^ Mazzino Montinari and Paolo d'Iorio, "'The Will to Power' does not exist" Centro Montinari (Italian)
