Mark Moran

John Axcelson, Rob Genter

Colloquium F2007y – Industrialism and Modernity

March 20, 2001

Beyond The Will to Power

Like his concept of the superman, Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power is controversial, confusing, and profoundly influential.  Outlined in his books Beyond Good and Evil, On The Genealogy of Morals, and his notes posthumously published as The Will to Power, the idea suggests that society should celebrate rather than suppress an individual’s natural urges and desire to greatness.  Perhaps the epitome of the 17^th- and 18^th-century search for natural man, this concept has taken numerous variations in the twentieth century, from various self-empowerment movements to liberating one’s inner child to profound personal searches for meaning.  What these drives all share is the ideal of validating one’s natural inclinations rather than repressing the potential energy they represent.  Nietzsche was repulsed by the herd mentality that forces everyone to compromise down to the lowest common denominator under the naïve pretext of trying to make us all equal.  The remedy for this wearisome, depressing subsistence is to unleash our natural ambition and strength.  What Nietzsche seems to ignore, however, is that conformity, repression, and self-denial are not the only sources of unhappiness.  Earlier philosophers such as Schopenhauer, inspired by ancient eastern philosophies, considered the will to power to be the source of man’s problems, not the solution.  Likewise, 20^th-century existentialist philosophers, who to some extent took Nietzsche’s ideas as a point of departure, became even more depressed when they concluded that the strong and ambitious can never find satisfaction or meaning because the human will is insatiable.  The closest Nietzsche comes to addressing this seems to be his strange suggestion that the übermensch should have no memory, perhaps implying that to be truly happy man must lose his consciousness and devolve into a more primal creature.

Much of Nietzsche’s writing is criticism of a weak, reactive slave mentality in favor of a stronger, more natural will to power.  But like Marx criticizing capitalism in favor of communism, Nietzsche has much to say about what is wrong with the current mentality and very little to say about how a society of unrestrained supermen will actually work.  Mimicking the language of religious prophets, he can only predict that the overman of the future will redeem us from our nihilism, “the great nausea, the will to nothingness.”[1]  Ironically, his writings may have helped to inspire the angst and nihilistic despair of many later thinkers, who concluded that free will may be even worse than the mediocrity Nietzsche so detested.

To move beyond something requires one to explore what he is attempting to surpass.  Thus, the main purpose of Beyond Good and Evil is actually to examine what it is that constitutes good and evil.  Such is the case with the post-Niezschean goal of moving beyond the will to power.  Ever since Nietzsche’s death, scholars have been debating what the will to power actually means or entails.  His academic reputation has certainly not been helped by the Nazis’ adoption of many of his ideas, even though most critics believe the Nazis misunderstood him and misapplied his polemical writing to suit their own goals.  But therein lies one of the central problems of understanding Nietzsche – his ideas, almost by their very nature, defy simple comprehension.  Although he writes in a fairly straightforward manner, Nietzsche finds the very concept of language troublesome, since the act of reducing a thought to words limits and confines it.  Historical linguistics is an important tool for Nietzsche to analyze the development of moral thoughts such as good and evil, and he is also therefore aware that the limitations of language will similarly hinder the understanding of his own ideas.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche attempts to trace the historical progression of human ethics.  A similar strategy was used by several philosophers in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, who hypothesized man in his natural, pre-society state in order to explore how our notions of property, or equality, or morality originate and therefore which beliefs are philosophically legitimate and which are merely the result of tradition.  This led Rousseau to the conclusion that the only universal natural drives are the will to survive and a revulsion against seeing a member of one’s species killed.  Nietzsche goes beyond this and declares that there is no absolute morality, that all of our values are defined only in terms of each other.  All ethics are relative: “Affirmative acts and negative acts belong together. One is good on condition one also knows how to be evil; one is evil because otherwise one would not understand how to be good.”[2] 

Nietzsche elaborates that the judgment “good” is not natural but was created by “the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions … in contradiction to all the low, low-minded, command, and plebeian.”[3]  The good is that which is egoistic, or willed, not that which is unegoistic and selfless, as the twisted values of the slave revolt have perverted us into believing.  Tragically, to Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian emphasis on self-sacrifice and ascetic denial have created a herd mentality that is weak and reactive almost to the point of complacent nihilism.  “The diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger,” he wrote, “for the sight of him makes us weary.  We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent.”[4]  This downward-spiraling process began when man found himself caged “within the walls of society and of peace,” when man turned inward and violent against himself because his animal instinct had been confined.[5]  The only solution according to Nietzsche is the restoration of our primal will to power, which today is kept in check by social institutions such as church and state.

Nietzsche’s will to power has its most direct origins in the writings of the early 19^th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who rejected Kant’s doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself and declared the ultimate reality to be human will.[6]  For Schopenhauer, humans are active creatures who are compelled to love, hate, desire, and reject.  Inspired by the Hindu Upanishads, he believed that the will is not free, but rather is all-consuming and pointless, leading Schopenhauer to declare that “all life is suffering.”  Man’s will is an insatiable burden because once one desire is satisfied, it simply gives rise to another, and so on.  The only goal of living, then, must be the abolition of the will, which led him to admire the asceticism of Buddhism and Christianity, despite his being a declared atheist.[7]

Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also sees the will as the fundamental quality of all living things, although his conclusions are almost completely opposite those of Schopenhauer.  Nietzsche considers activity, striving, and desire as positive aspects of our nature, rather than a desperate attempt to fill a void at the center of our being.  According to critic Craig Beam, “for Nietzsche, all that proceeds from weakness, sickness, inferiority, or lack is considered reactive and resentful, while that which proceeds from health, strength, or plenitude is characterized in positive terms.”[8]  Pessimism and despair can only be overcome through exertion of the will.  As the god-hero says in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “my will always comes to me as my liberator and joy-bringer. Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and liberty".[9]

Beam suggests that many readers incorrectly associate the will to power with domination and conquest, instead of asserting that it is “essential to such Niezschean themes of amor fati, eternal recurrence, and the affirmation of life.”  Beam defends Nietzsche’s attitudes toward other people as far more charitable than the existentialists who followed him.  Despite the occasional nasty remark against a historical figure, “most of [Nietzsche’s] polemical fury is directed against ideas, dogmas, and institutions rather than individuals.”[10]  This is seen in Zarathustra’s instructions not to kill priests for “among them too are heroes,” as well as his criticism of those who denounce a city’s inhabitants for “where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.”[11]

On the other hand, many readers view Nietzsche as a Hobbes-like cynic, instead interpreting his will to power as nothing more than man’s natural desire to subjugate all those around him.  Because Nietzsche places so much emphasis on the slave revolt and the overturning of the master/slave dynamic as the moment when our moral values became weak and corrupt, some scholars conclude that Nietzsche’s solution is simply for the strongest to abandon any feelings of shame and guilt and go back to oppressing the weak.  According to writer Travis Denneson, Nietzsche believes that “every action toward another individual stems from a deep-down desire to bring that person under one's power in one way or another.  Whether a person is giving gifts, claiming to be in love with someone, giving someone praise, or physically harming someone, the psychological motive is the same: to exert one's will over others.  This presupposition entails that all human beings are ultimately and exclusively egoistic by nature.  Therefore, according to Nietzsche, there are no truly altruistic actions.”[12]

Beam’s kindler, gentler version of the will to power sees Nietzsche’s philosophy as more of a will to self-realization, which fits with Nietzsche famous motto “Become what you are!”  This interpretation seems to coincide well with Nietzsche’s optimism for the supermen of the future.  As he described in The Gay Science, “we want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”[13]  Further supporting this rendition, Nietzsche regards the artist as a higher embodiment of the will to power than either the politician or the conqueror, and he calls philosophy “the most spiritual will to power.”[14]  Thus, a follower may feel empowered by subordinating himself to a leader or group, and even the ascetic priests or resentful moralists whom Nietzsche despised can be seen as fulfilling their own will to power.[15] 

But even the more ruthless take on Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, sees an inherent optimism that is lacking from Schopenhauer and the later existentialist movement.  While Schopenhauer considered the will to be the source of all suffering and evil in the world, writes Denneson, Nietzsche's will to power “is a life-affirming view, in that creatures affirm their instincts to acquire power and dominance, and suffering is not seen as evil, but as a necessary part of existence which is to be embraced.  Lasting pleasure and satisfaction come about as a result of being able to live according to one's instincts—the ability to exert one's will to power.”[16]

Like Schopenhauer, Jean-Paul Sartre concludes that “human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.”[17]  Sartre pessimistically concludes that humanity’s insatiable will to power leaves us with no goal but to acquire, consume, violate, and destroy.  Likewise, Nazi sympathizer and fellow existentialist Martin Heidegger scathingly criticizes Nietzsche’s will to power as underlying everything that is despicable about modernity, the driving force in humanity’s quest to subjugate nature, mechanize the world, and enjoy ever-increasing material progress.[18]  Angst concerning this realization may have been what led Nietzsche to the perplexing solution that the overman must have no memory or conscious agency, that he should act as a lion without contemplating any sort of moral consequence.[19] 

For Nietzsche, the will to power is the only solution to the mediocrity and passivity promoted by the dominant Judeo-Christian morality.  For Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Heidegger, the will to power is not a solution at all, but an even more prominent reminder of our pointless existence.  In the Hegelian spirit of synthesis, however, one might argue that the modern compromise is a society that embraces restrained ambition and regulated capitalism.  We look back at Nietzsche’s Victorian era as a period of repression and frustration, and instead emphasize personal empowerment and ambition without infringing upon the rights of others or succumbing to nihilist angst.