by Roy Jackson
Such a reading of Nietzsche is inevitably problematic as we are then faced with the dilemma of when, if ever, he is not talking metaphorically. Are we to say that all of his philosophy – his views on slave morality, on the Superman, on tragedy and so forth – is his own prejudice; that there are no genuine truth-claims in any of his writings at all? Even if we accept that this is the case, it does not necessarily follow that we should reject Nietzsche’s writings, any more than we should reject anyone else’s writings on the basis that they are value-preferences.
The importance of a doctrine, of a teaching, lies here with the reader: Nietzsche often said that he was addressing a small audience, a ‘select few’ (although he was not so lacking in vanity as to not wish that more people would buy his books), and so, provided they found something appealing in his writings, he has succeeded. Novels, the best novels anyway, tend to reveal something about the world or/and about human nature, and the same can be said about many religious texts, whether you believe in the truth-claims of religion or not. The Bible, for example, can be read on many levels; at one level the reader may read it from an ‘anti-realist’ stance, that is, rejecting the theological claims that there is a God or that Jesus is the son of God, while still reading the book as revealing ‘truths’ about human beings, their motives, drives and so on. It is therefore perhaps not that surprising that Nietzsche often writes in a poetical, literary and – certainly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra –biblical manner, frequently resorting to parables. ‘Truths’ are revealed at the psychological level. That is to say, the will to power tells us a lot about how human beings – and possibly other organic species – interact with one another, what motivates them, and it may well help to explain the origin of our beliefs and values. In that sense, Nietzsche’s writings are a valuable contribution to knowledge.
If we see Nietzsche’s views as a subjective interpretation that some of his readers can relate to, what does this reveal about the nature of the will to power? It will help if it can be determined what Nietzsche is not saying: we are not, for example, striving for power all the time. That would imply that even when we are sleeping we are striving for power, or that every activity – however seemingly pointless – is an expression of the will to power. In addition, we are not always motivated by power. For example, watching a programme on TV or sightseeing in Paris does not seem to have any power-motivation behind it, although, in given circumstances, presumably it can. The will to power, rather, is one drive among many, albeit an important one.
Given the importance of language and communication for Nietzsche, it seems appropriate to look to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as it is here that we can find Nietzsche’s more systematic elaboration of the will to power as interpretation. In the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra – the chapter entitled ‘Of Self-overcoming’ – Zarathustra declares: ‘Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power.’ The importance of the title of this chapter in his elaboration of the will to power should not be overlooked: of self-overcoming, or self-transcendence. Rather than the will to power being conceived as some underlying principle of the world, it is seen first and foremost as the power over one’s self.
Reading the story of Zarathustra, we have a character in the process of creation: creation of a new kind of world with new values. In this sense, Zarathustra can be seen as mirroring Nietzsche’s own philosophical enterprise. When faced with a world that no longer had meaning or credibility in his eyes (and, Nietzsche believed, in the eyes of a select, although growing, number of others), he creates a world that does have meaning for him. Again, the issue of whether it is ‘true’ or not is something of an irrelevance or, at best, merely highlighting the whole problem of trying to look at the world in polar opposites of ‘true’ or ‘false’. Nietzsche often saw his Supermen as creative artists, painters and musicians and so the importance of creating a world for oneself that has value is a philosophical and artistic enterprise.
Related to this self-overcoming is self-enhancement. While we can possibly survive in a world that lacks meaning, Nietzsche questions whether such a life is worth living. Self-preservation is one thing, but self-enhancement – the bettering of one’s self – is another. In fact, mere self-preservation will inevitably lead to decay and destruction, whereas enhancement ensures that we survive, and survive as better human beings. The will to power is when we say ‘yes’ to life and go on the offensive against mediocrity and what Nietzsche saw as decadent values.
Nietzsche’s first exploration into the will to power has its origins in The Birth of Tragedy, when he talks of the interaction of the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic life forces (see Chapter 4). An expression of the will to power is to make sense of the world, to give it meaning. By making sense of the world, humankind overpowers it and brings it into a form that is in accordance with the self. The world reflects the self and the self recognizes its role within the world. Nietzsche saw this as a dangerous enterprise – life threatening and sanity threatening – because most people, Nietzsche believed, prefer to live life ‘herd-like’ and unthinking, rather than confront their place in the world.
What is understood by ‘truth’, then, is whatever overcomes the world, whatever view of the world prevails. Truth is a mental construct; it is what is psychologically bearable. Early on in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet – rather naively, it turns out – says the following: ‘To lure many away from the herd – that is why I have come. The people and the herd shall be angry with me: the herdsmen shall call Zarathustra a robber’ (TSZ, I.9).
In many ways, the mission of Zarathustra – and that of Nietzsche, too – is like that of Socrates as Plato pictured him in his famous analogy of the cave. Briefly, in this analogy, prisoners are tied together at the bottom of the cave and spend their lives staring at shadows on the wall. The prisoners take these shadows to be reality. One day a prisoner is released and exits the cave. The released prisoner is then ‘enlightened’ to what the world is really like and feels duty bound to return to the bottom of the cave and free his fellow prisoners. Plato uses this analogy to illustrate the role of the philosopher, and the freed prisoner can be seen as embodied in the character of Socrates who saw it as his duty to go among the people of Athens and to question their deeply set values. Zarathustra saw his role in a similar manner, but the key difference between Socrates and Zarathustra (or, more accurately, between Plato and Nietzsche) is that the former saw ‘truth’ in a metaphysical way, whereas the latter saw ‘truth’ as a subjective, psychological phenomenon: a turning into one’s self rather than gazing at the stars above.
The empirical interpretation
So far two possible interpretations of the will to power have been presented:
• the objective interpretation of the world: a metaphysical picture
• the subjective interpretation of the world with psychological implications.
A third interpretation is that, although Nietzsche did not intend to propose the will to power as metaphysical, he nonetheless wanted to say that it is much more than merely subjective. That is, he wanted to present it as an empirical, scientific explanation of the physical world without any reference to a metaphysical world: that is, that our experience tells us that the world can be explained by the will to power. Through our senses and our observations of nature and how it operates, is it possible to explain its goings-on as will to power and nothing else? This seems much more scientific than speculative, in the same way that some scientists today look for a ‘theory of everything’. Also, Nietzsche was not so anti-science, and could be quite positive about the role of science generally.
This view that the world, or at least the organic (which does, of course, also include the human) world, is will to power has been labelled the ‘cosmological’ doctrine of the will to power by the scholar Maudemarie Clark, although Clark goes on to say that Nietzsche does not actually present us with a cosmological doctrine at all. However, some would argue, the passage from Section 36 of Beyond Good and Evi
l quoted above does seem to suggest at least a biological conception of the will to power. In another part of Section 36, Nietzsche says, ‘all mechanical events, in so far as energy is active in them, are really the energy of the will, the effect of the will’, and in the previous paragraph in the same section he talks about ‘organic processes’ in a similar manner. Given this, is Clark right to deny the cosmological view?
We need to consider what kind of picture the ‘cosmos’ would be if we were to say it is the ‘will to power’? One analogy that has been used is that, just as the state is made up of a collection of individuals, the world is made up of a collection of ‘wills’. This form of analogy was not an uncommon one in Nietzsche’s day: while sociologists saw society as an organism, biologists compared the organism to how society functions; and Nietzsche certainly liked reading the contemporary theories of biologists, zoologists, embryologists, physiologists and the like. It is nonetheless difficult to picture Nietzsche’s world, despite the use of analogy. One scientist with whom Nietzsche was familiar is Charles Darwin, and there is a possibility that Nietzsche’s world is Darwinian: the will to power as a product of natural selection whereby the world is made up of components fighting for dominance over one another. However, it is still unclear what these ‘components’ are. What, in other words, does Nietzsche mean by the will? Is the biological world made up of lots of ‘little wills’ striving for dominance and, if this is the case, do these wills have any sense of self-awareness?
Spotlight
Nietzsche certainly had an enthusiasm for science, but it must be kept in mind that, at that time, all philosophy was considered to be ‘science’ in some respects. Today we make a distinction between what we regard as the ‘natural sciences’ (such as physics and chemistry) and the ‘spiritual-intellectual sciences’, which we may now call philosophy. While Nietzsche certainly found pleasure in his reading of the natural sciences, he was nonetheless critical of the belief that scientists are able to discover what the world is really, objectively like. No doubt, if Nietzsche were alive today, he would have little patience for Richard Dawkins.
The suggestion that the will involves someone or something willing does not seem to fit with Nietzsche’s views on the self – the ego. For example, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) argued famously for a self in his expression: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In other words, for there to be thoughts there must be a thinker. Similarly, for there to be will, there must be a subject doing the willing. In this sense, ‘will’ can be equated with ‘desire’. But Nietzsche clearly rejects the idea that there is a self at all; he does not accept the seemingly logical consequence that a thought requires a thinker and therefore his talk of ‘will’ does not need to be seen in terms of subjects desiring something. ‘Will’ is not a conscious thing but something much more abstract. Perhaps ‘will’ is better described as ‘drives’, one of which is the drive for power. Other drives may, for example, include the sex drive, the survival drive and the pleasure drive.
The drive for power over others can in one way be seen as a separate drive, but also it could be seen as that which is common to all drives, for all kinds of drives ‘want’ to dominate other drives. The world, then, is seen as a collection of organisms with distinctive drives that compete against one another for dominance. The human being, likewise, is seen as composed of a collection of competing drives.
The picture of the world as a bundle of organisms striving for power over one another may have its advocates, but it nonetheless remains open to speculation and a series of unanswered questions. If nothing else, it seems a rather simplistic and naive picture that is neither philosophical nor particularly empirical. Are there really any grounds to suggest that every action in the world, every event, every cause and effect, has as its impetus in the will to power in the sense Nietzsche seems to suggest? Fortunately, various passages in Nietzsche’s works suggest that he did not consider that the world was ‘will to power and nothing besides’. For example, take the following passage:
‘Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, 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.’
The Anti-Christ, 6
The passage is enlightening because, on the one hand, Nietzsche says that life itself is the instinct for power, but he also states that the will to power can be ‘lacking’. If something is lacking the will to power, then it does not make sense to say that everything is the will to power. In the same way, one molecule of water is two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom. If you then say that one molecule is lacking an oxygen atom, then it makes little sense to still call it ‘water’. Indeed, there are a number of other references in Nietzsche’s works that suggest that the will to power is not the one underlying substance of the world, but rather one characteristic of the universe among others (such as desires, effects and so on).
Conclusion
Is the subjective understanding of the will to power the most accurate account of this enigma? While a metaphysical understanding of the will to power seems way off the mark, given what Nietzsche has to say about metaphysics and those philosophers who subscribe to a world ‘out there’, we also need to be cautious in arguing that Nietzsche was entirely proposing a subjective, psychological account. His eagerness to devour the writings of his contemporary theorizers in the realms of biology, physiology, embryology and the like, points to a certain degree of empathy for their views. Nietzsche at times can come across as strongly empirical and it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that, although he emphasized the subjective account of the will to power above all else, he ambitiously hoped – perhaps vainly – to underpin it in an empirical account of how the world actually seemed to operate.
Key ideas
Will to power: a concept elaborated in the works of Nietzsche where, at the most basic level, he regards it as an important driving ‘force’; however, what he means by that is subject to different interpretations
Material monism: the view that the universe consists of only one substance
Arche: the Greek word for an underlying principle that governs the universe
Things to remember
• Opinion is divided over how important the will to power is for Nietzsche, and even over what it means exactly. Nonetheless, Nietzsche spent a lot of time on the concept, especially in his notes.
• When we read what Nietzsche has to say about the will to power in his notes, we need to treat these views with caution, as they were never intended for publication.
• One interpretation of the will to power is that it is an attempt to explain everything in a metaphysical sense, but this is unlikely given Nietzsche’s views on metaphysics.
• Another, more likely, interpretation of the will to power is that it is a subjective interpretation. By ‘subjective’, Nietzsche means that there are no objective truths, and so he cannot make claim to the will to power as objectively true. However, the ‘truth’ of the will to power can nonetheless be achieved at the psychological level in that it tells us something about ourselves and the world we live in.
• A third possible interpretation of the will to power is that it is based on available, empirically observable data.
Fact-check
1 Which one of the following is not a Nietzsche doctrine?
a The will to power
b The Superman
c Existence precedes essence
d Ressentiment
2 Which one of the following is a definition of material monism?
a The desire for material things
b That the universe consists of only one substance
c That the universe consists of many substances
d That the universe is driven by capitalism
3 Which one of the following works by Nietzsche is a collection of his unpublished notes?
a Ecce Homo
> b The Anti-Christ
c The Will to Power
d Beyond Good and Evil
4 What is the name of Plato’s analogy in which a prisoner is freed and becomes ‘enlightened’?
a The cave analogy
b The ship analogy
c The tunnel analogy
d The mountain analogy
5 Which Greek philosopher can be compared to Zarathustra’s mission to go among the people and question their values?
a Thales
b Socrates
c Aristotle
d Apollo
6 Which one of the following is a definition of metaphysics?
a The unifying force of the universe
b Speculation on what exists beyond the physical world
c The study of physics by really intelligent people
d The belief that God exists
7 Which philosopher said, ‘I think, therefore I am’?
a Immanuel Kant
b Friedrich Nietzsche
c René Descartes
d Socrates
8 Which philosopher believed that the universe consists of one underlying substance of water?