NIETZSCHE is OFTEN portrayed as the most critical and destructive of philosophers. He attacks Christianity. He savages Socrates. He wages war on morality. One of Nietzsche’s contemporaries rejected his philosophy as “waging war on every decent human feeling.” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his Persian prophet urge his followers to push what is falling. But pushing and destroying are a way of clearing the ground on which an affirmative philosophy can be built. Thus Nietzsche declares (in Beyond Good and Evil) that there must be new philosophers, philosophers who will “legislate values.” Throughout Zarathustra, there is the buoyant ecstasy of worship, but for this world, this life, not another one. Nietzsche rejects Judeo-Christian morality not because he rejects all values but because he rejects the nihilism of Judeo-Christian morality. Christianity, like Socrates before, judges life itself to be “no good.” Nietzsche aims, accordingly, to get us to appreciate a very different conception of morality, one that is born within us and not imposed upon us, one that celebrates life and doesn’t promise another one, one that acknowledges the unavoidability of suffering in life but without drawing the pessimist conclusion: life is no good. And while Nietzsche attacks Christianity in many of its manifestations he does not attack either Jesus or spirituality. Indeed, we tend to see Nietzsche as among the most spiritual philosophers, so long as we do not conflate spirituality with the herd sentimentality of organized religion.
The purpose of philosophy—and of life—is to create, not to destroy. And so in this chapter we have put together some of Nietzsche’s most exuberant, “life-affirming” theses. They include his celebrated love of fate, his doctrine of the “eternal recurrence,” and the very idea of philosophy as “the gay science.” Doctrines and approaches that are elsewhere used to attack are here viewed as celebrations, of moral psychology as a way of appreciating what is deep and marvelous about our moral existence, our passions, desires, ideals, and values, of perspectivism as a realm of open possibilities, of the revaluation of values not as a trick of slave morality but as the most important project facing humanity, and facing the “philosophers of the future,” whom Nietzsche anticipates with unbridled glee and enthusiasm. Then there is spirituality, considered not in terms of the superficialities and hypocrisies of slave morality but as a cosmic acceptance of life and a sense of “godlike power.” Thus the Übermensch as an ideal and the Will to Power itself, considered not as a diagnostic tool but as a celebration of the passionate life.
The love of fate can be understood in many ways, depending on which of Nietzsche’s several perspectives one adopts. It can simply refer to a free and easy attitude toward life—free of anxiety and worry, that is, easy in one’s acceptance of circumstances and other people. Not to be judgmental is one of Nietzsche’s most constant moral injunctions, whether in spite of or because of the fact that he was (like many of us) quite judgmental himself. “I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.”1 To love fate, in this view, means to accept with equanimity and even enthusiasm whatever happens, whatever people do, whatever happens to one. It is a judicious outlook for a writer wracked with infirmity, wholly ignored by the public, to dream of a generation of future readers, “philosophers of the future,” who would appreciate him.
Looking back to the Greeks, aesthetic acceptance would seem to be the meaning of amor fati. To reiterate a passage in which Nietzsche defines this expression, “[O]ne wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary … but love it.”2 The love of fate is rather the love of necessity, a keen eye for essences. But, then, what is necessary can also be understood historically and personally in terms of what Spinoza and others have called “destiny,” the necessary path to the future.
But destiny, like fate for the ancients, also allows multiple interpretations. In the Greek tragic theater, fate sometimes seemed like a mandatory plot outline, engraved in the heavens. Oedipus had no alternative but to kill his father and marry his mother, despite the fact that he had many apparent choices along the way to doing so. Antigone, inheriting Oedipus’s curse, was also destined for destruction, although she, too, had critical choices to make along the way. By contrast, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus insisted that “character is fate,” and so fate is not so much a narrative imposed from the outside but an itinerary determined from the inside, by the person and his or her heredity, upbringing, situation, and response. Nietzsche does not seem to mean any one of these meanings; rather, he implies all of them at once. Like so many of Nietzsche’s affirmative doctrines, amor fati is perhaps best understood as something of a mantra, part of a continuous pep-talk he gave to himself—and to us, too. Do not regret or resent. Do not worry or live in fear. Do not curse your life but accept it, whatever it may be. For it is life itself, not the pleasures and successes that are enjoyed in life, that gives life its ultimate meaning.
Near the end of The Gay Science Nietzsche gives us his best description of what he calls “eternal recurrence”:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?3
The same proposition is repeated in Zarathustra: “not … a new life or a better life or a similar life” but “this same, selfsame life.”4 This phrase, “this same, selfsame life,” can be interpreted in a variety of ways. It certainly seems to mean, in every minute detail. We have all noticed, perhaps to our dismay, that changing even one small event in the past might have resulted in any number of dramatic alterations of the present. Indeed, if one had been born only five minutes earlier, so the argument goes, one would have been a different person. And so, if one regrets having gone to business school instead of pursuing one’s true love of literature, or wishes he or she had not gotten married and had children so young, the sense of who one might be, given those counterfactuals, is truly bewildering.
A different interpretation is this: since eternal recurrence is a thought-experiment, its significance lies not in the details but rather in the general outlines. If one had been born five minutes earlier, one would very likely be very much the same person. But if one had become a poet instead of an accountant, or traveled widely instead of establishing a household at the age of eighteen, the differences would be considerable. Maudemarie Clark gives a nice explanation of eternal recurrence in these terms: after a long marriage, which has recently ended in divorce, would you be willing to do it again? In other words, was it worth it, all things considered? A few minor changes here or there would not affect your view. It is, rather, the whole of the marriage—the whole of your life for that considerable amount of time—that is in question. If you would gnash your teeth and curse the very suggestion, we would have to say that your life has been a waste, to that extent. If, on the other hand, you claim to have no regrets, then that is what we would call a happy marriage, a happy life.
So, too, the question is whether the thought of eternal recurrence is intended only to measure one’s attitude, one’s evaluation of life, or whether it is an instrument for changing one’s life. Bernd Magnus once suggested that eternal recurrence served Nietzsche as an “existential imperative,” a kind of test—not unlike Kant’s Categorial Imperative—to evaluate whether this life, as one is now living it, would pass muster, or whether there are some basic things to be changed. (Magnus has since revised this view.) Nietzsche certainly has mixed feelings about changing, “improving” oneself, but he also insisted that one becomes who one is, which indicates change at least in the Aristotelian sense of realizing one’s potential. One can easily imagine, considering one’s life as one is living it—and here the present is much more important than the past that trails behind it—that one does not want to continue doing what one is doing. One’s life work—or one’s life—may not be painful or demeaning (in which case the decision would be more straightforward). Nevertheless, it may be, on reflection, meaningless or devoid of real interest.
The metaphor of weight here becomes an important piece in the puzzle. The idea of repetition is not to be taken literally but figuratively, as giving weight and substance to what otherwise might seem like no more than a fleeting moment. Thus Milan Kundera writes of “the unbearable lightness of being,” borrowing directly from Nietzsche the idea that an event that happens many times has more substance than one that happens only once. And yet Kundera, like Nietzsche, combines the idea of eternal recurrence with the equally heavy idea of fate, “es muss sein” (“It must be!”),5 and not for the trivial reason that something repeated innumerable times must be the same each time. To give such weight to the moment is to focus one’s attention, to block distracting projections into the distant future or the merely nostalgic past.
As presented, the eternal recurrence is not a theory about the basic structure of time, but a psychological test, “How would you feel if …?” To be sure, it is a model of time that has ancient and illustrious roots, back to the Indian Vedas and the pre-Hellenic Greeks, but there is little evidence that Nietzsche seriously intended to embrace the metaphysical systems of which this view of time is a part. He did not accept the distinction between appearance and reality on which the Vedic system is based, nor would he accept the doctrine that the world is an illusion. Nietzsche’s notebooks include some sketches for a “scientific” proof of eternal recurrence, but they are not well supported, even within the physics and mathematics of Nietzsche’s era. (Nietzsche’s basic “proof” supposes that time is infinite but the number of possible “energy states” is finite, and that therefore the sequence of energy states must eventually repeat itself. This might be interpreted as requiring the infinite linear extension of time, the very claim that Nietzsche seeks to disprove. More charitably, one might see this initial premise as supposing that from within time, the future stretches infinitely forward. On the assumption of cyclical time, the trajectory proceeding from the present moment would eventually circle back to the course that it had previously run.) Nietzsche did not, however, publish any of his scientific “proofs” of recurrence.
The core notion behind eternal recurrence—that the sequence of events recurs again and again—quite brilliantly underscores Nietzsche’s insistence on the “affirmation of life.” (The placement of the passage from The Gay Science, cited above, supports this emphasis, for it is positioned between an attack on Socrates’ claim that “life is a disease” and the introduction of life-affirming Zarathustra, which ends the first edition of the book.) Relishing one’s life, with all of its pains as well as its pleasures, is the affirmation of life. Resentment, regret, and remorse, by contrast, suggest an unwillingness to live one’s life again, exactly as it has been. There is a difference implied here between loving one’s life because of its achievements and enjoyments and loving one’s life for the sake of life itself. This is a theme that goes through Nietzsche’s philosophy from his beginnings in classical philology and tragedy to his last autobiography. Life is suffering, Nietzsche asserts (with Schopenhauer), but the proper response to this is not resentment or disengagement (as Schopenhauer proposed), but instead wholehearted “Dionysian” acceptance.
Perhaps no other thesis in Nietzsche is as appealing or as captivating as the usually unstated theme which defines how Nietzsche conceives of and does philosophy: gay science. To state this concept in contemporary terms (which neither Nietzsche nor any respectable German philosopher would have used): philosophy is fun. This is not to say that it does not deal with the most sobering and serious of questions: the meaning of life and death; how we should live our lives and how we should think of and treat other people; whether or not we should believe in God and what this means; what tragedy and suffering are all about; and what is the future of humanity. But the caution and excessive sobriety of so much of philosophy, not to mention the self-righteousness of so much of moral theory and theology, is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Philosophy requires Apollonian clarity, to be sure, but it also demands Dionysian gaiety and intoxication.
One never misses this when reading Nietzsche: he is in love with what he is doing, in love with the words, in love with the ideas, in love with the way that the sentences and the segments flow together, in love—as he once said of Spinoza—with his own wisdom. In philosophy as in science, he encourages experimentation, flirtation now with this hypothesis, now with that one. So, too, with moral “theories.” The question is not so much “Are they true?” It is, rather, “What kind of life results from them?”—and the only way to find out is to try them. What Nietzsche calls “gay science” (fröliche Wissenschaft, or gaya scienza) refers directly to the singing of the troubadours in twelfth-century Provence, and what he displays in his writing is no less passionate. As Nietzsche says, what a philosopher does is ultimately more important than—and indeed the test of—what he says.
To call himself “the first philosopher who is a psychologist” was an outrageous claim, writing at the same time as John Stuart Mill and after La Rochefoucauld and Montaigne. But one of Nietzsche’s themes was to appreciate the “deep” psychology that underlay even the most banal of actions and feelings. Like Freud, who followed him, Nietzsche often argued that these deep impulses were hateful and humiliating. His diagnosis of morality and Christianity in terms of ressentiment is a case in point. But by no means is all motivation ignoble, according to Nietzsche, and his inspirational appeal is based on the fact that he so often suggests that there is something great in us, waiting to be realized. (Thus some suffering is a disease, “but as pregnancy is a disease.”) Unfortunately, Nietzsche suggests that this is true of only a “few” of us: still, we (the millions of Nietzsche’s readers and fans) nurture the fantasy that he is, of course, talking about us.
Apart from the vague grand promises, however, what Nietzsche has bequeathed to moral psychology is a keen sense of the analyzable unconscious, a sense in ourselves of complex and sometimes suspicious motivation, even when we believe our motives to be most commendable. Much of what Nietzsche says about pity is quite outrageous, but at least some of what he says strikes us as exactly on the mark. How often is our supposed compassion a mask for our sense of superiority, or at least, our relief that the victim wasn’t us? At what point does our love turn into possessiveness and our admiration into envy? To what extent is our morality motivated by self-righteousness rather than by “duty for its own sake,” and how often are our judgments based on resentment rather than moral rectitude? But also, how much heroism, aspiration, idealism, and profound beauty is lurking in the depths of the human mind? These are thorny personal questions, not to be answered (as Nietzsche occasionally seems to do) with broad, generic strokes. But as philosophical ethics once again tends toward the merely formal language of obligation and “ought,” the insistence that a moral philosopher should first of all be a keen psychologist has never had so much to recommend it.
Perspectivism is the view that every “truth” is an interpretation from some particular perspective. There is no neutral, all-comprehending, “God’s-eye” view available (even for God). There are only perspectives. There is no world “in itself,” and even if there were such a world, we would not know it or even know of it. Science accepts this tacitly in its conviction that scientific theory must always follow the evidence that supports it. Science never claims absolute but only tentative truths, even in its most basic laws—for example, the principles of conservation of matter, energy, and more recently, energy-matter. But science, too, goes wrong when it claims itself as the only perspective for getting at the truth, and Nietzsche gives up his scientific enthusiasm when he realizes that “scientism” can be just another dogmatism. In his middle writings (Human, All Too Human to Gay Science), where Nietzsche takes science to be the epitome of experimentalism, he is impressed by the fact that science never rests, never reaches a final conclusion. But today we know that in science, too, every theory finds itself immersed in experimental techniques, burdened by a catalogue of prior observations, established dogmas, and other theories, none of them immune to the prejudices of the times. Even “revolutionary” science depends on anomalies and incongruities in existing science. Despite its intrinsic safeguards, science can find itself as much in danger of dogmatism and absolutism as any other discipline.
But science is not the only (or best) perspective for seeking out the truth. Nietzsche suggests that scientific claims to truth can conflict with aesthetic claims to truth, that science and aesthetics are two different perspectives and give rise to two different kinds of truth claims. One can imagine a South Pacific sunset and two very different accounts of it, one in terms of the refraction of light and the other in terms of the brilliant glow of colors. Is one more true than the other? To so insist is to become a kind of dogmatist. It depends on your purpose, on the context, on the nature of the demand for “an account.” Nietzsche often prefers the aesthetic perspective, if only because it is, he thinks, so often neglected in the modern world. But his perspectivism requires that it, too, be understood to be only one perspective, one set of interpretations, and nothing more.
In the realm of morals, one might juxtapose both the aesthetic and the scientific perspective against what one contemporary ethicist has called “the moral point of view.”6 In the confrontation or conflict between moral and aesthetic perspectives, one might think that something is morally wrong but also find that it is beautiful, breathtaking, awe-inspiring, sublime. A moralist would have no patience with this. Kant suggests that compassion is beautiful even if it is not, strictly speaking, of any “moral worth,” but the idea that what is evil or obscene might nevertheless be beautiful would be abhorrent to him. Yet Nietzsche sees that even in cruelty and in suffering, there may be a kind of beauty. For example, the cruelty of Brutus toward both Julius Caesar and himself strikes Nietzsche as beautiful if also tragic. Indeed, the aesthetic task—exemplified by the Greeks but denied by Christianity—is to find or create beauty in suffering and tragedy. One might say that Nietzsche, like some ancient Chinese philosophers, sought to transform morals into aesthetics, to replace an absolutist perspective with one that was more straightforwardly perspectival.
We have seen that Nietzsche describes in some detail two different perspectives on morality (that of the master and that of the slave) and the two very different moralities that arise from each. But one might say that the perspective of master morality is in fact an aesthetic perspective. It has to do with what is beautiful and excellent rather than what is right or obligatory. Slave morality, by contrast, has only to do with good and evil; aesthetic considerations are ruled out, and the ominousness of evil dominates the conversation. The addition of religious considerations complicates matters even further, adding an absolutist metaphysics to an already defensive ethical perspective. Morality, consequently, cannot but conceive of itself in uncompromising, nonperspectival terms. Morality is not, from its own standpoint, a “point of view” at all. And to see it as such is already to weaken its claims considerably.
Nietzsche’s idea is that perspectivism and the excitement of finding and exploring ever new perspectives should replace the dogmatic comforts of a supposedly secure perhaps eternal truth. With the end of an absolute conception of truth, Nietzsche writes, we will face a “new dawn,” an open horizon, “the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea.’ ”7
Who are Nietzsche’s readers? There is no doubt in his mind who those readers ought to be: his “philosophers of the future,” philosophers who would also be “legislators,” inventing new values.8 What these new values might be—apart from the fact that they would be free from resentment—is by no means clear. Indeed, it is not clear what “inventing” or “legislating” new values might mean. After all, what are the values Nietzsche most avidly encourages—the good old-fashioned values of courage, honesty, courtesy, and the like? But, in our own terms, it is clear enough what Nietzsche intends. He is sick and tired of “academic” philosophy, philosophy without a point or any goal other than to enhance the reputation of the philosopher, philosophy without any evident concern for the plight of modernity and the future of humanity. The philosophers of the future, in other words, should once again be philosophers, lovers of wisdom and, despite what Nietzsche says elsewhere, the improvers of mankind.
In his later works Nietzsche takes as his central concern what he calls the “revaluation of all values,” which, as he works it out, has mainly to do with the revaluation of moral values: “What is the value of morality for life?” The language of the revaluation of all values is misleading. Some value—say, the value of life—must remain steady as a criterion for the evaluation of the others. We might compare this process to the repair of a boat at sea, where we would always be using some stable parts of the structure to repair others, shifting our stance—our perspective—as need be. One might well read Nietzsche this way. He does endeavor to evaluate even the value of life in his work as well as the value of beauty, the value of suffering, the value of health, the value of compassion, the value of happiness.
But the underlying question is one toward which all philosophers should find themselves driven: What is the value of values? If the question is ultimately unanswerable (like the metaphysical puzzle, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”), the effort is nevertheless salutary. It prevents us from becoming dogmatic and opens our eyes to the shifting complexity of our interpretations of our world. It makes us appreciate the inescapability of values and thus protects us from nihilism.
The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism. “Everything lacks meaning.” … What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The goal is lacking; the answer is lacking to our “Why?”9
Because Nietzsche is so often considered an anti-Christian, and thus an anti-religious, thinker, it is too readily assumed that he had no room in his thinking for spirituality. True, he makes many sarcastic comments about the German spirit, and various references to Hegel’s Geist and Luther’s heilige Geist; yet it is also possible to view Nietzsche as the most spiritual of philosophers, and this is how he sometimes views himself. In order to understand this, we have to forgo all tendency to identify spirituality with otherworldliness, or with submersion in one or another organized religion.
One can perhaps get a grasp of what Nietzsche understands by spirituality by looking to music, the art form Nietzsche considered the most uplifting, the most in tune with the inner truth of things. One is not speaking only metaphorically when he or she claims to have a spiritual experience while listening to a great piece of music. Indeed, that is what spirituality is all about. It is neither selfless nor selfish; that contrast seems not to apply at all. One reaches beyond oneself; one overcomes one’s everyday conception of oneself as one is overcome by the music; one is neither active nor passive (even as performer) but, rather, enlarged.
Nietzsche’s conception of this-worldly spirituality involves a similar enlargement of one’s sense of self. A naturalistic spirituality involves an appreciation of one’s world and other beings in a manner that transcends the contrast between the self and the not-self. Nietzsche’s description of his image of earthly happiness, significantly employing a beautiful image from nature, suggests something of this transformed sense of self.
Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health.… But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune,… if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling—this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far; the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called humaneness.10
One way to think about the grandness within us is, of course, to think of ourselves as the parent to something greater than ourselves, the Übermensch. But although it is one of the best-known features of Nietzsche’s philosophy (in part due to George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman), the Übermensch, or “overman” or “super-man,” in fact plays a very small and obscure role in Nietzsche’s thought. The coming of the Übermensch is announced in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. We have noted (in chapter 1) that the Übermensch represents strength and courage but also “nobility,” style, and refinement. And that is all. Nietzsche talks much more often about “higher men,” but often to lament the fact that even they, too, are “human, all too human.” Nevertheless, this, like so many of Nietzsche’s other affirmative theses, is more of a regulative ideal—something to inspire and strive for—than a concrete prescription for action or transformative behavior.
The “doctrine of the Will to Power,” says Walter Kaufmann, the dean of American Nietzsche scholarship, is the very core of Nietzsche’s philosophy. “Properly understood, Nietzsche’s conception of power may represent one of the few great philosophic ideas of all time.”11 The Will to Power, according to the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger, is the core of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Recently several analytic philosophers have tried to explicate “Nietzsche’s system” in terms of this doctrine, and Gilles Deleuze, to name but one of several prominent French philosophers, took the “play of forces” to be the heart of Nietzschean thought. Unfortunately, once one has taken the dubious text of that name, The Will to Power, out of play, there is surprisingly little in Nietzsche’s writings to support these views. The phrase, to be sure, recurs with considerable frequency. Nietzsche was clearly struck by it. And the hypothesis—that people often act for the sake of power rather than, say, pleasure—is surely a thesis that ties together a great deal of what Nietzsche says about morality, emotions, politics, and even religion. (“Luke, 18:14 corrected. He that humbleth himself wills to be exalted.”12)
The fact is, most of what Nietzsche says about the will to power is to be found in his unpublished notes, and it is therefore to be regarded with considerable suspicion. Nietzsche sometimes talks as if the will to power is the cornerstone of his philosophy, yet it does not have much to do with that mysterious metaphysical entity called “the will,” which Nietzsche’s mentor Schopenhauer elevated to the highest place in his rather gloomy philosophy, and which Nietzsche frequently and explicitly rejects as nonsense. If we may be particularly perverse, we might add that the to in “the will to power” is quite un-Nietzschean insofar as it suggests a teleological, goal-oriented impulse, something Nietzsche rejected; nor does the definite article, the, help much, as it indicates a singularity and uniformity that Nietzsche also rejects. (This is one of his many differences with Schopenhauer). Nevertheless, having thus dissected the phrase, let us go on to say some useful things about it.
What Nietzsche has in mind is, first of all, a rejection of ordinary hedonism, the reduction of all emotions, indeed all human (and animal) behavior, to striving for pleasure and avoidance of pain. Here he rejects a long line of English thinkers who have suggested that, ultimately, pleasure and pain are the most basic emotions, or emotion-components. In Nietzsche’s view, pleasure is an accompaniment of satisfaction, not its goal, and what moves us more often are other motives, specifically the need to expand and express ourselves. Nietzsche talks about “will” in order to emphasize “drive” (Trieb), which has a strong flavor of the biological, of instinct, of purposive but unthinking behavior. Not surprisingly, Nietzsche adapted a strong predilection for evolutionary explanations (although he was not a Darwinian for a variety of reasons). Nietzsche objected to overly intellectual interpretations of human behavior in which all purposive action was immediately elevated to the status of rationality, articulated or at least articulable plans and strategies. Indeed, since Aristotle (and his concept of the “practical syllogism”), this hyper-intellectualization of human behavior had become the philosophers’ bread-and-butter. Nietzsche wanted to remind us, in a philosophical era defined by hyperidealism, that, to put it perhaps too simply, we are still animals, still part of nature, still driven by impulses and instincts not of our choosing and sometimes beyond our understanding. (Freud would become an apt student, needless to say.)
To be sure, in his notes Nietzsche makes some extravangant metaphysical-sounding claims for the will to power; for example: “this world … a monster of energy, without beginning, without end.… This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!”13 But to take this and a few other unpublished notes and turn them into the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy is perverse, to say the least, and it goes against so much else he says (and published) about the mistake of looking for “the true world” behind its various appearances. Even where Nietzsche publishes such claims, they are overwhelmed by his own objections, even in the same book. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil:
Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power. The world viewed from the inside, the world defined and determined according to its “intelligible character”—it would be “will to power” and nothing else.14
Even as a general claim about life, given the post-Darwinian atmosphere of the time, the claim is dubious:
[A] living body 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 of life.15
What the will to power means varies too. “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”16 In the case of human beings, will to power manifests itself in every other endeavor. Artists are also among Nietzsche’s primary examples of individuals expressing will to power.
Not need, nor desire—no, the love of power is the demon of man. One may give them everything—health, nourishment, quarters.… [T]hey remain unhappy.… One may take everything away from them and satisfy this demon: then they are almost happy.…17
Even love is the will to power:
They are cheered by the sight of another person and quickly fall in love with him; therefore they are well disposed toward him, and their first judgment is: “I like him.” What distinguishes these people is a rapid succession of the following states: the wish to appropriate (they do not scruple over the worth of the other person), quick appropriation, delight in their new possession, and action for the benefit of their latest conquest.18
But although this psychological hypothesis pervades much of Nietzsche’s work, any more systematic and metaphysical claims are rather dubious, however ingeniously they might be reconstructed.
The psychological hypothesis in question takes several different forms, thus already undermining claims that Nietzsche defended a single systematic thesis about power. In its most straightforward presentation, it can simply be read to mean that one of the dominant drives (if not the dominant drive) in human psychology is the desire for mastery—of its environment, of its social group, of its own drives and instincts. (There is the very real possibility of a circle here, namely, that the will to power might itself be one of the drives demanding mastery. Nietzsche actually embraces this suggestion, thus complicating the picture further.) The need to master one’s environment is not a surprise, nor a radical thesis in the climate of German idealism and “expressivism” in the nineteenth century and in the mind-set of the Industrial Revolution. With only slight modification, the Darwinian notion of adaptation might fit here quite comfortably.
More problematic is the notion of power within one’s social group. On the one hand, one thinks immediately of power over other people and power institutionalized as Reich. It is worth noting again that the word Nietzsche uses is Macht, not Reich, and thus might better be understood as personal strength rather than political power. It does not mean “power” in the nasty, jackbooted sense that still sends flutters up the European spine. The term means something like effective self-realization and expression. Nietzsche stresses that when a person is successful in pursuing such “power,” aggressive and domineering methods are not necessary.
Be sure you mark the difference: he who wants to acquire the feeling resorts to any means.… He who has it, however, has become very fastidious and noble in his tastes.…19
Nevertheless, the claim that what people want is power in a social context is fraught with ambiguities. Is social status itself to be understood as power? Are respect and admiration to be identified with power? Is manipulating people an expression of the will to power? What about persuading and convincing them with well-formulated rational arguments? At times Nietzsche suggests that logical arguments are straightforward manifestations of the will to dominate, as when he characterizes “logic” as “compelling agreement by force of reasons.”20 Indeed, scholarship and philosophy count for Nietzsche as paradigms of the will to power:
“Will to truth” you call that which impels you …? A will to the thinkability of all being: this I call your will. You want to make all being thinkable, for you doubt with well-founded suspicion that it is already thinkable. But it shall yield and bend for you.… That is your whole will … a will to power—when you speak of good and evil too, and of valuations.21
Philosophy is this tyrannic urge itself, the most spiritual will to power.22
What Nietzsche does tell us is tantalizing but obscure. For example, he remarks: “Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases.”23 “Our love of neighbor—is it not a lust for new possessions?”24 “The striving for excellence is the striving to overwhelm one’s neighbor, even if only very indirectly or only in one’s own feelings or even dreams.”25 Here, as often, Nietzsche suggests that one is frequently motivated to pursue the feeling of power, not necessarily power itself. “The means of the craving for power have changed, but the same volcano is still glowing … and what one did formerly ‘for God’s sake’ one does now for the sake of money … which now gives the highest feeling of power.”26 But how do we distinguish power from the feeling of power? For instance, Nietzsche condemns pity for a variety of reasons, among these his observation that one who pities is also expressing his superiority over the person pitied. But is this so only when one externally expresses pity, or does a mere feeling of pity involve an expression of superiority?
Perhaps most startling is Nietzsche’s claim that even ascetics manifest the will to power: “Indeed, happiness—taken as the most alive feeling of power—has perhaps nowhere on earth been greater than in the souls of superstitious ascetics.”27 Nietzsche sometimes considers the effort to “master” oneself as a special case of the drive for power.
Indeed, self-mastery is, in Nietzsche’s opinion, one of the most effective strategies that the will to power employs; and he insists that it is essential to accomplishing anything great. Certainly, a wide range of different practices might be put under the general rubric of “self-mastery,” including self-discipline, self-criticism, even self-denial. Many of Nietzsche’s examples indicate that self-mastery is not itself the primary goal, but that such self-discipline, and even self-denial, typically aims at some further end, artistry or virtue. This may lead us to wonder whether the will to power is indeed a primary drive or motive in such cases, or whether it is an overly simple name for a wide range of instrumental values.
At the very least, however, the will to power is Nietzsche’s expression for whatever it is that human beings fundamentally want (and sometimes for what other living creatures want as well). A human being wants to have an impact on the world, to operate freely within it, and to feel as though he or she is effectively expressing their real nature by doing so. Nietzsche sees all our efforts as having this basic aim in view, diverse though we find their aims and expressions.