The Will to Power (compilation)
권력의지 (유고 편집본)
Not a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche but a compilation that his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz) selected from his notebooks of the 1880s after his mental collapse and presented as if it were his systematic main work. It first appeared in 1901 with 483 fragments; the version enlarged to 1,067 fragments in 1906 became the standard one. Nietzsche had once planned a book with this title but abandoned the plan at the end of August 1888. In the 1950s Karl Schlechta, and from the 1960s Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, showed that it was a compilation that selected, cut and altered fragments without regard to Nietzsche's intentions.
In depth
Why is Nietzsche's "main work" not a book by Nietzsche?
For readers in the first half of the twentieth century, The Will to Power was the completion of Nietzsche's philosophy, the systematic main work he had spent his life preparing. Martin Heidegger based his interpretation of Nietzsche as the last thinker of Western metaphysics on it, the Nazi interpreter Alfred Baeumler read the philosophy of National Socialism out of it, and in the English-speaking world it long served as the representative edition of Nietzsche's notebooks. But it is not a book Nietzsche wrote. After Nietzsche's mental collapse in Turin in January 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Heinrich Köselitz (pen name Peter Gast) selected some of the thousands of notes from the 1880s and arranged them under a table of contents of their own.
This entry is about that compilation. The will to power as a concept Nietzsche actually developed is treated in the separate entry on the will to power. Keeping the two apart is crucial to reading Nietzsche: the concept is plainly present in books Nietzsche published himself, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, but no "book" that completes it as a system exists. In Korea the compilation has been translated under two titles, rendering Macht as "power" in one and as "force" in the other.
What book did Nietzsche plan, and why did he give it up?
According to the German Wikipedia, after printing the last part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1885 Nietzsche began to plan a larger, systematic work, for which from 1886 he mostly intended the title "The Will to Power". In section 27 of the third treatise of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) he announced it: "a work I am preparing: The Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values."
ich verweise dafür auf ein Werk, das ich vorbereite: Der Wille zur Macht, Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe
Nietzsche's notebooks contain many plans for the book. One written at Nice on 17 March 1887 has four books: "First book: European nihilism. Second book: Critique of the highest values. Third book: Principle of a new valuation. Fourth book: Discipline and breeding." This is the plan that his sister and Gast later used as the framework of the 1906 edition.
Erstes Buch. Der europäische Nihilismus. Zweites Buch. Kritik der höchsten Werthe. Drittes Buch. Princip einer neuen Werthsetzung. Viertes Buch. Zucht und Züchtung.
Yet after piling up notes for the book from autumn 1887 to spring 1888, Nietzsche was dissatisfied with the result. His last plan is a draft for "The Will to Power. Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values" written at Sils Maria "on the last Sunday of the month of August 1888" (26 August).
Entwurf des Plans zu: der Wille zur Macht. Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe. — Sils Maria am letzten Sonntag des Monat August 1888
A few days later he changed course. He gathered the manuscript he had already fair-copied and published it as Twilight of the Idols, and in a new plan of early September 1888 he retitled the project "Revaluation of All Values" in four books, the first of which was The Antichrist.
Umwerthung aller Werthe. Erstes Buch. Der Antichrist. Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums.
At the end of November Nietzsche dropped this plan as well and declared The Antichrist itself to be the whole "revaluation". In the last lucid months of his life, then, a book called "The Will to Power" had already vanished from his plans.
How was the compilation made?
According to the English Wikipedia, in November 1893 Köselitz proposed to Elisabeth that Nietzsche's notebooks be put in systematic order and published. Elisabeth founded the Nietzsche Archive at Naumburg in 1894 (in Weimar from 1897) and published Nietzsche's collected works, the so-called Großoktavausgabe, placing the compilation in its volumes of posthumous writings. The first version of 1901, edited by the brothers Ernst and August Horneffer and Köselitz under Elisabeth's direction, had 483 fragments. In 1906 Elisabeth and Köselitz published a greatly enlarged version of 1,067 fragments in four "books", which hardened into the "canonical" one. The German Wikipedia reports that in 1931 Elisabeth had a court confirm her co-authorship of the book so that she could go on receiving royalties.
The editing had many faults. As the German Wikipedia summarises them, the editors selected and discarded fragments, often did not follow Nietzsche's plans, left misreadings standing, printed excerpts Nietzsche had copied from other books as his own aphorisms, and added titles, changed the order and inserted text. Several fragments, for example, are transcriptions from Leo Tolstoy's My Religion (1885), with the source suppressed. A text titled "European Nihilism", which Nietzsche had divided into sixteen sections and dated, was cut into four pieces and scattered in the 1906 edition. Montinari found that of the 374 fragments Nietzsche himself had numbered with this book in mind, 104 were left out of the compilation, and of the 270 included, 137 were incomplete or arbitrarily altered.
Who read it, and how was it exposed?
The compilation's influence was great. Nietzsche's published books contain only scattered political remarks, but The Will to Power gathered notes under headings such as "Discipline and Breeding" and "The Lords of the Earth" and made it look as if Nietzsche had a political system. The Nietzsche Archive spread this image, and the German Wikipedia's article on Nietzsche's reception holds that Elisabeth admired Mussolini and that the Archive's interpretation bears part of the responsibility for the selective reception of Nietzsche by fascism and Nazism. Baeumler wrote the afterword to Kröner's 1930 edition of The Will to Power and the following year compiled an even more selective anthology of notes, The Innocence of Becoming, leading the effort to make Nietzsche a forerunner of Nazism. Heidegger, too, repeatedly cited fragment 617 of the compilation, "Recapitulation", as the conclusion of Nietzsche's whole philosophy; but the title "Recapitulation" had been added by Köselitz.
Doubts about the compilation arose early. Fritz Koegel, Rudolf Steiner and the Horneffer brothers, all of whom had worked at the Archive, criticised its editorial methods. But the problem became known to the public only after Karl Schlechta, in his three-volume edition of Nietzsche's works of 1954–1956, dissolved the compilation and reprinted the fragments in (not quite) chronological order, and exposed Elisabeth's forgeries in his "Philological Afterword" of 1957. The decisive work was done by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. From 1961 they deciphered Nietzsche's manuscripts held in Weimar in East Germany at first hand, and from 1967 they published the Nietzsche Critical Edition, which prints all the notes notebook by notebook in chronological order. Montinari called The Will to Power a "historical forgery", and a collection of his essays bears the title "'The Will to Power' Does Not Exist".
Gilles Deleuze welcomed Montinari's work, yet according to the German Wikipedia his own Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) had relied on a misreading in the compilation. Nietzsche's notebook says that the concept of "force" must be given "an inner world"; the compilation misread this as "an inner will", and Deleuze, calling the sentence one of Nietzsche's most important texts, commented on it almost word by word. Karl Löwith, conversely, defended the compilation's structure against Schlechta's dissolution, arguing that chronological order obscured the architecture of Nietzsche's thought.
What did the compilation mean for Marxists?
The Marxist critique of Nietzsche was formed to a large extent through this compilation. Mid-twentieth-century criticism, including György Lukács's The Destruction of Reason (1954), saw Nietzsche as a thinker who systematised the world view of the bourgeoisie of the imperialist age, and passages of The Will to Power such as "Discipline and Breeding" or "The Lords of the Earth" were the handiest evidence for that interpretation. At the same time, the fact that the book was made into Nietzsche's main work by the Nietzsche Archive and its political patrons, nationalist right-wingers such as Elisabeth and Baeumler, shows that Nietzsche's "fascist" image was manufactured in large part through editing and appropriation. As it happens, Montinari, who dismantled the compilation, remained a member of the Italian Communist Party all his life, and his party membership helped him gain access to the archive in Weimar in East Germany.
In Nietzsche scholarship today The Will to Power is not cited as a work of Nietzsche's. Scholars cite the notebook fragments printed in the Nietzsche Critical Edition or its study edition by notebook and fragment number. Even so, the compilation is still reissued by several publishers and, since there is no complete English translation of the critical edition, remains widely read in English. Its significance lies less in Nietzsche's thought than as a document of how Nietzsche was made in the twentieth century.