Will to Power
권력의지
A concept Nietzsche introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) and extended in Beyond Good and Evil and his notebooks: everything living does not merely seek to survive but strives to discharge and increase its strength. Revising Schopenhauer's "will to life", Nietzsche wrote that "life itself is will to power". After his death his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast published a compilation of notes under the same title, but that is not a book Nietzsche wrote.
In depth
What does the will to power say?
"Will to power" sounds like the ambition to seize political power, but the Macht Nietzsche meant is much wider: the strength to accomplish something, to impress one's form on other things, to grow beyond oneself. In "On Self-Overcoming", in Part Two of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra says: "Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master."
Wo ich Lebendiges fand, da fand ich Willen zur Macht; und noch im Willen des Dienenden fand ich den Willen, Herr zu sein.
Nietzsche set this against his teacher Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw the essence of the world as a blind "will to life". In the same chapter Nietzsche corrects him: "Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but, so I teach you, will to power!" Section 13 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) puts the idea in biological terms: "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 of this." Where Darwinists spoke of the struggle for existence, Nietzsche held that growth and mastery come before survival.
Vor allem will etwas Lebendiges seine Kraft auslassen – Leben selbst ist Wille zur Macht –: die Selbsterhaltung ist nur eine der indirekten und häufigsten Folgen davon.
Psychology or worldview?
The idea has roots in passages of Daybreak (1881) analysing the motives of human action, and the phrase first appears in the notebooks in 1876–1877. At first it was a psychological concept, explaining by the feeling of power why people seek others' recognition, why they pity or practise asceticism. In section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche tentatively extends it to the whole world: if all effective force could be defined as one thing, "the world would be 'will to power' and nothing besides." In notes from around 1885 the idea goes as far as a cosmology.
die Welt auf ihren »intelligiblen Charakter« hin bestimmt und bezeichnet – sie wäre eben »Wille zur Macht« und nichts außerdem.
How to read the concept is still sharply disputed. Martin Heidegger saw the will to power as Nietzsche's answer to the question of "the ground of all beings", the last form of Western metaphysics. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, noting that Nietzsche criticised all metaphysics, argued that it should be read not as one principle but as many "wills to power" that fight, swallow one another and form temporary organisations; present-day Nietzsche scholarship is mostly closer to Müller-Lauter. Michel Foucault took the idea further in The Will to Knowledge (1976), understanding the will to knowledge as a will to power.
What is the problem with the book The Will to Power?
"The will to power" names three things. The first is this concept. The second is the title of a major work Nietzsche planned in the late 1880s, subtitled "Revaluation of All Values", which he never wrote: he dropped the plan in 1888, and about two thirds of the material went into Twilight of the Idols and one third into The Antichrist. The third is the compilation that, after Nietzsche's collapse in 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast assembled from his notebooks, published in 1901 and greatly expanded in 1906.
The compilation cuts and pastes Nietzsche's notes according to a system Nietzsche never fixed. Elisabeth presented it as his "main work", and for a long time many readers understood the will to power through it. The Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler used it to read the will to power as a principle of Germanic heroism. The critical edition that Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari began publishing in 1967 restored the notes to the order in which they were written, and Montinari argued that The Will to Power is not Nietzsche's work and criticised even Heidegger's reading, which relied on it, as a "macroscopic Nietzsche". Scholars today therefore distinguish strictly between the will to power as a concept and the compilation The Will to Power.
How did Marxism view the will to power?
What Marxists noticed first was how the will to power accounts for exploitation. In section 259 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche aimed directly at the socialists: "People now rave everywhere, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society from which 'the exploitative character' is to be absent." To him this sounded like promising to invent a life that refrained from all organic functions. He went on: "'Exploitation' does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of the living, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power proper, which is precisely the will of life."
Die »Ausbeutung« gehört nicht einer verderbten oder unvollkommnen und primitiven Gesellschaft an: sie gehört ins Wesen des Lebendigen, als organische Grundfunktion, sie ist eine Folge des eigentlichen Willens zur Macht, der eben der Wille des Lebens ist.
For Marx, exploitation was a particular relation of production, a historical relation in which the class owning the means of production appropriates the surplus labour of others, and so it could disappear along with that relation. Nietzsche made exploitation eternal as the essence of life. This passage is why Franz Mehring in 1891 called Nietzsche "the social philosopher of capitalism", and why György Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason, saw the will to power as a mythologisation of the worldview of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The Nazis' appropriation of the will to power as a slogan of conquest and domination lent weight to such criticism.
Within the Marxist tradition there were other readings too. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer treated Nietzsche as a thinker who saw through the entanglement of domination and reason, and power theory after Foucault drew from Nietzsche the view of power not as a thing owned by the state or a class but as relations spread through the whole of society. The will to power was thus criticised as a justification of exploitation and also used as a tool for analysing domination.