What is will to power? A century after Nietzsche wrote the phrase, we are still asking ourselves this question. At one time, Nietzsche thought about writing an entire book concerning it. However, the book, The Will to Power, that we can purchase today is not the book he envisioned; it is merely a collection of unpublished notes put together by his sister and editors after his debilitating collapse in Turin. So we have no lengthy exposition by Nietzsche himself as to how he conceived will to power. As a result, will to power is still an enigmatic and often misunderstood notion. Even today there are those who think Nietzsche’s writings on will to power spawned the Third Reich.1 While Adolf Hitler’s propaganda machine used writings from Nietzsche (as did competing German social and political groups),2 the idea that Nietzsche’s philosophy by itself formed the ideological basis of Hitler’s regime is completely erroneous.
I would like to say that this book is an attempt to separate fact from fiction about will to power, but for reasons that will become clear through the course of this book, I cannot say this. Instead, this book is more an attempt to “corral” Nietzsche’s notion of will to power by tracing its development throughout Nietzsche’s writings, by preserving the contexts in which the phrase appears, and by sorting out which interpretations of will to power are textually supported and faithful to Nietzsche’s overall concerns.3 Although this method has its problems, it is a starting place and a context from which I hope to make clear where the problems with the method arise. Will to power is an integral part of Nietzsche’s critique on culture and morality, and how it is interpreted affects other key and central concepts, such as eternal recurrence, perspectivism, amor fati, and the Übermensch (the “overman”).
There is something seductive about the phrase. Will to power (Wille zur Macht) conjures up all sorts of images from sadomasochism to “ethnic cleansing” and global conquests. But is that all there is to it—“Übermensch, Übermensch über alles”? If so, will to power would not seem to be very interesting or original. But Nietzsche himself writes that sheer physical power is only one instance, and a very crude one at that, of will to power.4 There are other instances of it, and these are often the more intriguing and original. Nietzsche speaks of will to power in relation to values, truth, psychology, and the world, which span the traditional categories of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics in philosophy. Will to power permeates every aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
So what is will to power? It is difficult to answer this question for several reasons. First, Nietzsche’s own style works against easily answering this kind of question. Nietzsche rarely if ever defines his terms. He never says, “This is what I mean by . . . ,” and the closest he comes to doing this with will to power is followed by a spate of metaphors.5 He writes in aphorisms and short passages designed to provoke active thought and consideration of his positions rather than passive intake of them. He even recognizes that much of his writings will be misunderstood and misapplied. In many ways, his style is altogether appropriate for and contributes to his philosophy, but it can be terribly frustrating for the beginning reader.
Second, much of his writings are in the form of unpublished notes left in notebooks or on slips of paper. Many of these notes, and some that are quite relevant to our discussion of will to power, are dated rather early in relation to when the majority of his published works were written. This, it has been suggested,6 gave Nietzsche ample opportunity to include these thoughts in some published form, but Nietzsche chose not to include them. Some commentators have then inferred that Nietzsche was only experimenting with these ideas,7 and some believe that he found them unsatisfactory in some way.8 The question then becomes how much weight should be given those ideas that Nietzsche decided not to publish. Was he going to use them but never got the chance because he became ill rather suddenly and at a relatively early age? That question will never be answered definitively.
Finally, an answer to what will to power is poses problems because it assumes that there is one answer to this question. As you may have noticed already, I do not refer to will to power as “the” will to power, as many other commentators do. Nietzsche, of course, wrote in German, and proper German places the definite article in front of the noun. Translating German into English, however, is a bit trickier. Sometimes the definite article is omitted to render the sentence into everyday English. In the case of der Wille zur Macht, I think it would be better to omit der. Including the definite article in the English translation grammatically seduces the reader to think of will to power as a thing—one unified thing at that. It tempts one to start an answer to our question with, “It is. . . . ” If I make my case successfully enough, referring to will to power by it is an error. I find the singular verb is problematic as well. Again, it already suggests that an answer to the question will be in the singular, but, as Nietzsche himself contends, language is limiting because of its arbitrarily imposed linguistic and grammatical structures. 9 Perhaps a better way to put the question is, “Will to power—??” But because this is being written in English, I am constrained within English grammar. The best I can hope for is to mark these places where the marriage between Nietzsche’s thoughts and the rules of language become strained to the point of divorce.
Nietzsche’s writings, like Plato’s, can be divided into three periods—early, middle, and late.10 The early period encompasses the works up to and including The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. The middle period begins with Untimely Meditations and ends with the first four parts of The Gay Science. The late period is everything from Thus Spoke Zarathustra on. Each period has a distinguishing feature. The early writings include his juvenilia, his philological writings, and his earliest philosophical writings, which are heavily influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. The middle period is characterized by Nietzsche’s supposed “positivism” and use of science to criticize metaphysics. Finally, the late period is Nietzsche’s “mature” thought: Nietzsche abandons his “faith” in science, and the ideas of eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and will to power are expressed. In the late period, certain strands of the earlier works can still be found. But here they are no longer lifted rather straightforwardly from other thinkers, for example, Wagner and Schopenhauer in the early writings, or influenced by the scientific movements of the time, as is the case with the middle period. Instead, ideas gathered through other sources, albeit scientific or philosophic, are transformed by Nietzsche’s own insights on the world. Thus, Nietzsche’s mature thoughts are an amalgamation of some of the ideas he encountered with his unique, personal stamp upon them. Thus, they are not wholly original, in the sense that his ideas were never affected by any other idea he read—if this is even possible; yet they are completely original in the way he thought them through and modified them in order to make his sense out of them. This is certainly true of “eternal recurrence,” a phrase that first appears in Nietzsche’s late period. As it has been persuasively shown elsewhere,11 eternal recurrence is not a wholly original idea. A form of it had been professed by the Stoics and others, and Nietzsche as a classics professor was certainly well steeped in Stoic writings. He had to have been familiar with at least the Stoic rendition of eternal recurrence. But Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is not that of the Stoics. There may be similarities, but there is not identity.
So, too, will to power is not wholly original. There are places in other nineteenth-century writings, philosophical and scientific, as well as earlier writings, where we can find similar themes, but they are not identical to Nietzsche’s. They may have exerted some influence on him, but he did not simply relocate them. Whatever scientific theories appropriated by Nietzsche that may have affected or supported his idea of will to power, they subsequently appeared in areas decidedly unscientific. Whatever philosophical readings that may have started Nietzsche thinking in a certain direction, the destination was clearly Nietzsche’s own by the 1880s. So as we proceed to determine what will to power means and why, we cannot say that will to power is simply rehashed Schopenhauer, Wagner, Friedrich Lange, or Ruggiero Boscovich.
Although the phrase will to power first appears in published form in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it did not suddenly pop into Nietzsche’s thought like he claimed eternal recurrence did. It evolved from philosophical and scientific writings Nietzsche read, and the idea can be found in pubescent form in his own writings prior to Zarathustra. The development of will to power does not seem to follow any clear linear progression. There seem to be two concurrent strains in the development of will to power: one consisting of discussions of “will” and “willing” and another linking power to different modes of being. It is difficult to discuss the two strains together, so I will concentrate on the latter strain in this chapter and switch to the former in the next chapter. What follows is an exceedingly brief introduction to Nietzsche and his thought. I hope only to get us to a place where we can discuss the evolution of Nietzsche’s use of power. For more detailed discussions of Nietzsche’s life and early influences, I direct the reader to the end of this chapter, where I recommend several books for additional information.
It was taken for granted that Friedrich Nietzsche would follow in his family’s occupational tradition. His father had been a Lutheran minister, as had his grandfather, and his mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister. His early training was in those skills helpful to preaching—oration and music. But in high school, Nietzsche’s interests changed to philology, what today we call “classics.” He was a classics major throughout college, and his first teaching position at Basel University was as a classics professor. While in college, however, he read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which was to influence him in some way throughout his productive life.
The largest effect Schopenhauer had on Nietzsche was simply to interest him in philosophy itself. As a classicist, Nietzsche had encountered the writings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the pre-Socratic and post-Socratic Greek and Roman philosophers. Philosophical thinking was not wholly new to him, but Schopenhauer’s book seems to have fanned the flame of Nietzsche’s philosophical fascinations. He began to read other philosophers, not just the ancient ones.
Schopenhauer saw The World as Will and Representation as an advancement on Immanuel Kant’s work in The Critique of Pure Reason. Schopenhauer was a steadfast defender of Kant in a time when it was unfashionable to be one. Schopenhauer had been a colleague of George Hegel at the University of Berlin. Hegel was at the height of his success and popularity, partly because of his criticism of Kant’s work. Schopenhauer deliberately scheduled his classes at the same time as Hegel’s, and while Hegel’s classes were always standing room only, Schopenhauer managed only a handful of students at best. Schopenhauer soon resigned from his teaching position and lived a rather solitary life in the country, continuing to write and publish. It was no secret that he was bitterly envious and resentful of Hegel’s philosophy and popularity. The conclusions that Schopenhauer reaches in his own writings—that the world is fundamentally meaningless and human life likewise—could be seen as a rationalization of Schopenhauer’s own depressing outlook on life.
What was it about Schopenhauer’s work that attracted Nietzsche? In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer basically accepts Kant’s bifurcation of experience into noumena and phenomena. The world the human mind encounters is purely phenomenal. What constitutes the noumenal realm is not entirely clear. While Kant posits the existence of a noumenal world, it is unknowable, for as soon as we encounter anything with our minds, it immediately is in the phenomenal realm. Thus, Kant says nothing about the noumenal world because it is theoretically impossible for him to say anything about the noumenal world, except that it “gives rise to” or “supports” the phenomenal one. The noumenal world, according to his philosophy, is unknowable.
For Schopenhauer, however, the noumenal world is not completely unknowable. According to Schopenhauer, the noumenal world is a world of complete chaos, of which the human mind attempts to grab hold and make sense. It does so by categorization and delineation, by trying to make something stable out of the instability. The mind must do this in order for us to function amid the chaos. But any order that the world seems to have is order our minds have imposed phenomenally on it, not order we discover in it. As the noumenal world is unknowable, in principle, for Kant, why does Schopenhauer think that he can say anything about it? Schopenhauer believes that human beings, being part of the world, are chaotic, too. Thus, we can have a glimpse of the noumenal world through our own noumenal aspect—our will.
Will, for Schopenhauer, is the ultimate metaphysical substance of the world. Will is essentially chaotic, and it is our minds that create any order and stability. Even our own will can be tamed and directed by our minds through reason. Also, will can express itself through a medium that is entirely transcultural—music. Music is the representation of the chaotic noumenal world bursting into the ordered phenomenal one.
Music plays an important role in both Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies. Nietzsche studied piano in his youth and had dreams at one time of becoming a famous composer. He had flirted with majoring in music before settling on philology. During his days at Basel University, he met and then spent weekends with Richard Wagner, who exerted considerable influence over Nietzsche at that time. Perhaps Nietzsche saw Wagner as a father figure, but beyond that psychologism, both men seemed to recognize the other’s creative genius. The influences of both Schopenhauer and Wagner were converging on and greatly influencing Nietzsche. It comes as no surprise that the ideas of both men are prominent in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, in which Nietzsche explicitly praises them. Schopenhauer’s valorization of music would appeal to Wagner, too, and Nietzsche saw music as a way to induce cultural change. At one time he believed that Wagner’s music might usher in a whole new era of German culture, the grandeur of which would rival or surpass Greece’s Golden Age. This is the stuff of youthful dreams, and while Nietzsche abandoned his uncritical infatuation with both Schopenhauer and Wagner, he never completely abandoned his vision of a Golden Age. However, he did abandon his ideas that it would be a German Golden Age and that music would be the primary catalyst of it.
As previously mentioned, Nietzsche’s “early period” comprises Nietzsche’s juvenilia, some more or less polished but unpublished pieces (such as “Homer’s Contest” and “Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense”), and The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music and finally culminates with Untimely Meditations. One of the characteristics of this stage of Nietzsche’s writings is Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Greek culture, although this is not universally the case. As we shall see, there is no univocal characteristic of any of Nietzsche’s “periods,” but traditionally Nietzsche scholarship has divided them in these general ways.
In The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music Nietzsche divides the world of art into two parts, just as Schopenhauer did with his metaphysical worlds, with Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” art nicely corresponding to Schopenhauer’s chaotic noumena, and Nietzsche’s “Apollonian” art corresponding to the more ordered and “artificial” phenomenal realm. Nietzsche basically says as much when he writes,
In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of art, I shall keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and conspicuous representatives of two worlds of art differing in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. I see Apollo as the transfiguring genius of the principii individuationis through which alone the redemption in illusion is truly to be obtained; while by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things. This extraordinary contrast, which stretches like a yawning gulf between plastic art as the Apollonian, and music as the Dionysian art, has revealed itself to only one of the great thinkers, to such an extent that, even without this clue to the symbolism of Hellenic divinities, he conceded to music a character and an origin different from all the other arts, because, unlike them, it is not a copy of a phenomenon, but an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore compliments everything physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the thing in itself. (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I, 310) (BT, 16)
Im Gegensatz zu allen denen, welche beflissen sind, die Künste aus einem einzigen Princip, als dem nothwendigen Lebensquell jedes Kunstwerks abzuleiten, halte ich den Blick auf jene beiden künstlerischen Gottheiten der Griechen, Apollo und Dionysus, geheftet und erkenne in ihnen die lebendigen und ansschaulichen Repräsentanten zweier in ihrem tiefsten Wesen und ihren höchsten Zielen verschiedenen Kunstwelten. Apollo steht vor mir, als der verklärende Genius des principii individuationis, durch den allein die Erlösung im Scheine wahrhaft zu erlangen ist: während unter dem mystischen Jubelruf des Dionysus der Bann der Individuation zersprent wird und der Weg zu den Müttern des Sein’s, zu dem innersten Kern der Dinge offen liegt. Dieser ungeheuere Gegensatz, der sich zwischen der plastischen Kunst als der apollinischen und der Musik als der dionysischen Kunst klaffend aufthut, ist einem Einzigen der grossen Denker in dem Maasse offenbar geworden, dass er, selbst ohne jene Anleitung der Hellenischen Göttersymbolik, der Musik einen verschiedenen Charackter und Ursprung vor allen anderen Künsten zuerkannte, weil sie nicht, wie jene alle, Abbild der Erscheinung, sondern unmittelbar Abbild des Willens selbst sei und also zu allem Physischen der Welt das Metaphysische, zu aller Erscheinung das Ding an sich darstelle. [Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, 310] [KGW III/1, 99–100]
Thus we can see that Nietzsche’s division of the art world self-consciously parallels Schopenhauer’s division of the real world. The plastic arts are part of the phenomenal world because they are representations of representations. Music originates from the noumenal world because it is a representation of will. Thus, music shares a unique and esteemed place in both Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies at this rather early stage in Nietzsche’s writings. Music is transcultural because it is translingual. Native American flute music or Zulu drumming can move a person as profoundly as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But that is not to say that music cannot be Apollonian. We can take the more primitive and chaotic Dionysian music and make a representation of it by structuring it into particular forms, for example, sonata or concerto forms, and by emphasizing only the harmonic sounds and discarding any dissonance.
But Dionysian music has a power that the plastic arts and Apollonian music lack—it has the power to evoke dithyrambs in us in a way that paintings and sculpture cannot. Parents never object to their children attending an art museum, but attending a rock concert is another story. Things can get “out of control” at a rock concert and “go too far.” Rock concerts have been known to induce people to shed their inhibitions and self-consciousness and become “one with the music.” The individual loses her or his sense of individuality, identity, and becomes an undifferentiated part of the whole. This loss of consciousness of the self is the criterion for being in Nietzsche’s Dionysian state, which is described as “ecstatic,” “primeval,” and “intoxicating.” Apollonian music is all structure and harmony; Dionysian music is all frenzy and beat—if there is harmony, it is unplanned. Greek choruses had the power to evoke dithyrambs in the ancient Greeks; some rock bands can do the same for their fans.
Thus we can see that even in Nietzsche’s first book the ideas of chaos and power are joined; however, they are united only in the case of music. While Nietzsche takes Schopenhauer’s ideas on the world and music and expands on them as he applies them to Greek tragedy, chaos and power themselves are not critically discussed. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and the association with Wagner combined to indelibly stamp upon Nietzsche the power of the interaction between art and chaos. Although the later Nietzsche found serious, irreconcilable problems with both Schopenhauer’s and Wagner’s ideas, he continued to address their beliefs throughout his productive life. Nietzsche believed the Schopenhauerian idea that the apparent stability of the world we experience is a deception, and Schopenhauer’s notion of a primordial will resonates throughout Nietzsche’s notion of will to power.
In the works prior to will to power’s debut in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we can see an increase in Nietzsche’s use of the term power and an increase in the areas in which this term is employed. The middle period is supposedly Nietzsche’s “positivistic” stage, generally characterized by Nietzsche’s estimation of science. Scientific positivism is a valuable tool for criticizing metaphysics during this period. In Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche’s use of the word power (Macht) is quite conventional: he uses it to describe the state’s or government’s ability to act. A typical example is as follows:
Resurrection of the Spirit—A nation usually rejuvenates itself on the political sickbed and rediscovers its spirit, which it gradually lost in its seeking for and assertion of power. Culture owes this above all to the ages of political weakness. (HAH, 465)
Auferstehung des Geistes—Auf dem politischen Krankenbette verjüngt ein Volk gewöhnlich sich selbst und findet seinen Geist wieder, den es im Suchen und Behaupten der Macht allmählich verlor. Die Cultur verdankt das Allerhöchste den politisch geschwächten Zeiten. [KGW IV/2, 310]
This aphorism juxtaposes political power and weakness with politics and culture, so that political power is cultural weakness and vice versa. Here Nietzsche is using power in a way that fits nicely in our everyday connotations of power—sheer physical authority or control over others.
In the last part of Human, All-Too-Human, entitled “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” Nietzsche begins using the phrase the lust for power. This change seems rather abrupt and extraordinary until we remember that “The Wanderer and His Shadow” was written sometime after the original chapters of Human, All-Too-Human. What is now known as “volume 1” was the entire book Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits when it was first published in 1878. It was reissued in 1886 with the addition of “volume 2,” which is composed of two previously published pieces, Assorted Opinions and Maxims (originally published in 1878) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (originally published in 1880).
The dates are important because in 1880 Nietzsche also published Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. In Daybreak, Nietzsche uses Machtgelust (which Hollingdale rather titillatingly translates as “lust for power” but which can be rendered as “desire for power”) quite often, so it is no surprise that The Wanderer and His Shadow includes it as well. The difference between the first volume of Human, All-Too-Human and The Wanderer and His Shadow and Daybreak is that the word Machtgelust is now used usually to connote a psychological motivation.
In Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche’s first chapter is devoted entirely to a critique of traditional metaphysics along positivistic lines—there is no empirical or scientific proof of any metaphysics, whether it be Plato’s Forms or Kant’s noumena. Much of the rest of Human, All-Too-Human is taken up with a discussion of the impact on the nature of truth and morality if one abandons metaphysics. Again, Nietzsche’s main concern throughout his writings is the cultural and spiritual health of humankind. Nietzsche saw the European culture as stifling to some individuals, and he thought that the cause was the metaphysical underpinnings of the European culture. If he could show the errors of the underpinnings, then many other areas of the culture are affected, especially European morality.
In this phase it seems that Nietzsche does hold science in high regard and that he thinks that, with science’s help, a true picture of the world can be attained. That there could be a true picture of the world is also a differentiation between this period in Nietzsche’s writings and his later period. Nietzsche is against traditional Western metaphysics, and science allows him ammunition for his attack on what he sees as transcendental philosophy, so at this point science is an ally.
The natural sciences flourished in the nineteenth century, but they had their detractors, too. It is hard to say that any one event in the sciences was the focal point for that century, although Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species seems to be the culmination of a trend toward nihilism that Nietzsche believes started with Copernicus. Nietzsche cites the astronomer as having a profound impact on Western culture. With Copernicus’s “revolutionary” arrangement of the solar system, the earth and humankind were no longer the center of the universe, which severely undermined religious theory and authority:
Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into—what? into nothingness? into a “penetrating sense of his nothingness?” (GM III, 25)
Seit Kopernikus scheint der Mensch auf eine schiefe Ebene gerathen,—er rollt immer schneller nunmehr aus dem Mittlepunkt weg—wohin? in’s Nichts? in’s “durchbohrende Gefühl seines Nichts”? [KGW VI/2, 422]
The advances in the microscope were also important. Naive realism, the idea that humans perceive exactly what is going on, was shattered. Boyle’s corpuscular theory was but one example of the blows to naive realism. To find that blood was not simply a red liquid, that it actually contained solid, microscopic “corpuscles,” opened up a huge wave of scientific speculation and imagination. If blood was not exactly as it looked, what else in the world was other than it seemed? Of course, there had been theories that everything was composed of small “stuff” since the ancient Greeks. Heraclitus had talked about everything being composed of elementary “atoms.” But these kinds of theories had been just that—theories—abstract and debatable. Now there was the prospect of scientific “proof,” and as microscopes became more powerful, more and more data were being gathered to support the burgeoning theories of the microscopic world. This world was never directly experienced by humans; yet its workings could greatly affect humans. The microscopic world established certain parameters for humans; yet humans had little or no control over it.
As science continued to inspect and dissect the world, the place of humans in the cosmic scheme became less and less significant. Theologically, humans had been placed on earth to have dominion over it, but as the scientific studies showed, humans looked less dominating than dominated by forces unseen, and for many centuries unknown, by them. Then with the publication of The Origin of the Species, Darwin suggests a plausible alternative to the “divine plan” explanation as to why there are humans at all. Instead of a loving God designing humans and the world and placing them in the world, the cause of human existence was postulated as evolution, a value-blind happenstance of favorable biological factors. As science progressed, the absolute authority of the Bible as an accurate historical document was questioned, and religious leaders were quick to denounce Darwin’s and other scientists’ ideas.
Science also invaded the realm of morality. As more and more of the world was seen strictly in terms of cause and effect, people’s behavior and, indeed, people themselves were seen as mechanisms—their actions determined by preceding causes. That people are conscious is only a complicating factor. It makes people more complex than other living organisms, but it does not alter the underlying assumption—that human actions are the products of physical causes even if those causes are quite complex. A social scientist, Charles Fourier, began “scientifically” cataloging every human emotion and the causes that determined each one with the hope that “negative” emotions could be avoided by cutting off the environmental and biological causes that lead to them. In that way, vices could be eliminated and virtues could be more scientifically encouraged by arranging society in such a way as to favor the “positive” emotional causes. “Social realism” became quite popular in the mid–nineteenth century as people looked to science to create a utopian society where the causes of immorality and unhappiness never arose.
Daybreak continues Nietzsche’s high estimation of science, although some cracks in this position are beginning to appear. Nietzsche explicitly criticizes authoritarian thinking in morality, although at this point science is not seen as authoritarian. As its subtitle, “Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality,” suggests, Daybreak is more concerned with exposing the “imaginary” foundations of morality. Most of Nietzsche’s writings on science in this book, as science is at this point seen as value neutral, are favorably disposed. But even so, there are passages in Daybreak that make it clear that Nietzsche does not see science as the last word, as the sole creator of knowledge.12
It is in Daybreak that Nietzsche begins to speak of “desire for power” (Machtgelust) and “feeling of power” (Gefühl der Macht) as psychological motivation:
But because the feeling of impotence and fear was in a state of almost continuous stimulation so strongly and for so long, the feeling of power has evolved to such a degree of subtlety that in this respect man is now a match for the most delicate gold-balance. It has become his strongest propensity; the means discovered for creating this feeling almost constitute the history of culture. (D, 23)
Aber weil das Gefühl der Ohnmacht und der Furcht so stark und so lange fast fortwährend in Reizung war, hat sich das Gefühl der Macht in solcher Feinheit entwickelt, dass es jetzt hierin der Mensch mit der delicatesten Goldwage aufnehmen kann. Es ist sein stärkster Hang geworden; die Mittel, welche man entdeckte, sich dieses Gefühl zu schaffen, sind beinahe die Geschichte der Cultur. [KGW V/1, 30–31]
When a man possesses the feeling of power he feels and calls himself good: and it is precisely then that the others upon whom he has to discharge his power feel and call him evil! (D, 189)
Wenn der Mensch im Gefühle der Macht ist, so fühlt und nennt er sich gut: und gerade dann fühlen und nennen ihn die Anderen, an denen er seinen Macht auslassen muss, böse! [KGW V/1, 162]
Feeling of power.—Be sure you mark the difference: he who wants to acquire the feeling of power resorts to any means and disdains nothing that will nourish it. He who has it, however, has become very noble in his tastes; he now finds few things to satisfy him. (D, 348)
Gefühl der Macht.—Man unterscheide wohl: wer das Gefühl der Macht erst gewinnen will, greift nach allen Mitteln und verschmäht keine Nahrung desselben. Wer es aber hat, der ist sehr wählerisch und vornehm in seinem Geschmack geworden; selten, dass ihm Etwas noch genugthut. [KGW V/1, 240]
Effect of happiness.—The first effect of happiness is the feeling of power: this wants to express itself, either to us ourselves, or to other men, or to ideas or imaginary beings. The most common modes of expression are: to bestow, to mock, to destroy—all three out of a common basic drive. (D, 356)
Wirkung des Glückes.—die erste Wirkung des Gluckes ist das Gefühl der Macht: diese will sich äussern, sei es gegen uns selber oder gegen andere Menschen oder gegen Vorstellungen oder gegen eingebildete Wesen. Die gewöhnlichsten Arten, sich zu äussern, sind: Beschenken, Verspotten, Vernichten,—alle drei mit einem gemeinsamen Grundtriebe. [KGW V/1, 242]
These passages illustrate the change that occurs from Human, All-Too-Human to Daybreak. When Nietzsche uses the word power (Macht) in the first volume of Human, All-Too-Human, the contexts are always about some physical control or social authority, usually in connection with the state. In Daybreak Nietzsche discusses power in the context of feelings, drives, and desires—a more subtle rendering of power than merely physical power. Power becomes a psychological motive; it explains actions, whether those actions are individual or collective. But Machtgelust is not identical to Wille zur Macht. When does Nietzsche make the transition to will to power, and what is gained or lost by doing so?
We can find the phrase will to power in The Gay Science, book 5, aphorism 349, so it might be reasonable to assume that Nietzsche introduced this phrase publicly around 1881–82 when he was writing The Gay Science. This would be a mistake, however, because the fifth book was written at a later time—1886—in between Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. In the first book of The Gay Science, Nietzsche is still discussing Gefühl der Macht, although in this section he calls it a Lehre (teaching/doctrine):
On the doctrine of the feeling of power.—Benefitting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one’s power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. (GS, 13)
Zur Lehre vom Machtgefühl.—Mit Wohlthun und Wehethun übt man seine Macht an Andern aus—mehr will man dabei nicht! Mit Wehethun an Solchen, denen wir unsere Macht erst fühlbar machen müssen; denn der Schmerz ist ein viel empfindlicheres Mittel dazu als die Lust:—der Schmerz fragt immer nach der Ursache, während die Lust geneigt ist, bei sich selber stehen zu bleiben und nicht rückwärts zu schauen. [KGW V/2, 58]
This passage echoes those in Daybreak with its treatment of power. Here again power seems to be equated with physical power and the hurt equivalent to physical pain, although psychological power and pain should not be discounted. Indeed, psychological power may be more prominent in the latter part of the aphorism where Nietzsche associates truth with power. When one feels that he or she possesses the absolute Truth, one feels powerful and willing to do anything to retain the powerful feeling. According to Nietzsche’s Lehre, those who possess the absolute Truth believe they are more powerful and hence more valuable than those who believe differently from them.
Nietzsche makes two important points in this lengthy aphorism. The first is that brute physical force over others is a lack or poverty of power. This is the only aphorism that explicitly states that physical power over others is a lower form of power than power over oneself. Personal power is tenuous if it is solely dependent on others to achieve. If one is able to generate and control one’s own power, then one has more power than those who derive it from others’ pleasure or pain, for one does not need to rely on others to have it.
The second important point of aphorism 13 of The Gay Science is that compassion (Mitleid), normally considered one of the most virtuous traits, can be thought of in terms of power. At this point, Nietzsche says only that pity is a sentiment for the weak, but he reiterates and expands on this theme in future books. Those who possess great power harden themselves against compassion; they reserve it only for those who are capable of becoming their enemies. On the other hand, as he writes of those who possess little or no power,
Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests: for them easy prey—and that is what all who suffer are—is enchanting. (GS, 13)
Mitleid ist das angenehmste Gefühl bei solchen, welche wenig stolz sind und keine Aussicht auf grosse Eroberungen haben: für sie ist die leichte Beute—und das ist jeder Leidende—etwas Entzückendes. [KGW V/2, 60]
Eventually, pity will become an expression of power for the strong over the weak—by expressing sympathy toward weak people, one expresses one’s difference and superiority over them. Extending compassion shows others that you are not in their sorry circumstances, that you are “wealthy” enough to expend some of your power toward them. This is only one instantiation of the concept in Nietzsche’s Lehre of power.
Sometime in between the publication of the first edition of The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Machtgefühl is replaced by Wille zur Macht. Why? There are really no clues in the published writings as to why Nietzsche makes this seemingly sudden switch, so this looks like the perfect place to investigate the unpublished notes, called the Nachlass. Nietzsche’s notes are little help here. The first instance of the phrase Wille zur Macht is found during a period of writing that Nachlass editors Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari label as the end of 1876 to the summer of 1877. Walter Kaufmann translates this initial reference in his book on Nietzsche: “Fear (negative) and will to power (positive) explain our strong consideration for the opinions of men.”13 This sentence is part of a longer notebook entry that deals with ambition and the desire for power (Lust an der Macht) arising from the dislike of dependency and powerlessness. Here Nietzsche is talking about power in terms of psychological motivations and explanations at precisely the time when he moves to the more psychological aspects of power designated by Gefühl der Macht in Human, All-Too-Human and Daybreak.
What is interesting is that the second occurrence of Wille zur Macht was written in the summer of 1880, at least three full years and 1,485 notebook entries later, according to the Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke. In fact, the aphorisms containing Wille zur Macht are quite few and far between until the spring/summer of 1885. There are another 1,041 notebook entries between the second and third citings of Wille zur Macht, 450 entries between the third and fourth citings, and 898 entries between the fourth and fifth entries, the fifth one written between November 1882 and February 1883. Clearly, will to power was not an all-consuming concept at first. Interspersed among these spotty references of will to power are a spate of “will to”s. During the last six years of his productive life, Nietzsche attached will to to over 150 different nouns.14 There are the ones that appear in his published works, such as “will to truth” and “will to life.” But Nietzsche also paired less common nouns with will to: creation, destruction, misunderstanding, faith, pleasure, cruelty, self-overcoming, and death. Finally, there are obscure pairings with will to: victory, hibernation, urination, and “the lowland.”
So there is no decisive moment when “will to power” bursts on Nietzsche’s writings and becomes a dominant theme. In fact, will to power is in only a tiny minority of aphorisms or phrases. It is found only thirty-two times in the published works and 147 times in the unpublished entries, and about twenty-five of these latter entries are simply book titles or brief outlines for his book The Will to Power. This means that less than 5 percent of Nietzsche’s entries in the Nachlass contains the phrase Wille zur Macht. Of that paltry amount, one-fifth of the occurrences of Wille zur Macht have to do with variously lengthed outlines of the projected but ultimately abandoned book of the same title rather than with aphorisms that would be helpful in understanding what Nietzsche means by the term. Given the small percentage of references, one would think that will to power would not have gained the prominence it currently enjoys had not Nietzsche talked about writing a book with that as the title, as well as exalting the phrase in Ecce Homo. Nevertheless, will to power has garnered more notoriety, perhaps, unfortunately, from the Third Reich associations than “will to truth,” which has more entries in the Nachlass.
The Gay Science is more than just a transitional book to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Gay Science is a definite break from the previous books in Nietzsche’s “positivism” stage. In book 3 of The Gay Science Nietzsche argues that his problem with morality is not that God is not the right foundation but, rather, that the entire notion of a foundation at all is erroneous. Thus, science can be no better foundation for anything, truth and morality included, than God. Like Christianity, science is built on faith, except in the case of science, the faith is in the notion of cause and effect rather than a supreme being.15 In The Gay Science the idea of cause and effect is a “necessary error” that helps the human species to survive. Whatever positive status science holds in Human, All-Too-Human and Daybreak, it has disappeared by the time The Gay Science is published.
In the famous aphorism in which the madman announces the death of God (GS, 125), it is not just the Christian God’s elegy. The shadow of God, which Nietzsche refers to in the first aphorism of book 3 (GS, 108), supposedly casts its shadow for thousands of years. But this shadow takes many different forms, including science. Immediately preceding the madman aphorism, Nietzsche writes metaphorically of leaving the land, indeed, “burning” the land like burning bridges behind us, and being on an infinite sea. We may get homesick for land—we may invent foundations—but, as Nietzsche informs us, “there is no longer any ‘land’” (GS, 124). As a foundation for objective truth or knowledge, science is as dead as God, although the longing for an objective base for truth and knowledge may “cast its shadow” over humankind for centuries, so great is our “will to truth.”
Finally, in book 4 Nietzsche introduces us to the idea of eternal recurrence and to the character Zarathustra, which erases any notion that there is a clean break between Nietzsche’s middle and late periods. The walks Nietzsche took in the winter of 1881–82, while he was in the middle of writing the first four books of The Gay Science, inspired the plan and many of the ideas of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
But if there is no moment of epiphany for his idea of will to power, like he reported there was for the idea of eternal recurrence, then why does Nietzsche change terms from Machtgelust and Machtgefühl to Wille zur Macht? There may be several explanations. First, the phrase Wille zur Macht appears in the Nachlass at a time when Nietzsche was attaching Wille zur to many different nouns. Attaching it to Macht, then, would be much less surprising than attaching it to Niederung (the lowland), which he does as well. Nietzsche could have become more taken with the new phrase once he saw it attached to will to. However, Machtgefühl continues to be used in Nachlass entries postdating the appearance of Wille zur Macht’s published debut. This suggests that the two terms are not synonymous to Nietzsche and cannot be thought of as interchangeable.
As I have suggested, Machtgefühl is used in those contexts in which Nietzsche is emphasizing psychological motivations. In these contexts, it is the gefühl (feeling) part that is crucial. Many times people behave in certain ways to engender or avoid particular feelings. So, as a psychological observation, Machtgefühl is an apt description of human behavior. In Daybreak Nietzsche describes humans as composed of drives (Triebe). The first part of this extremely interesting aphorism begins as follows:
Experience and invention—However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flow, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown to him. This nutriment is therefore a work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold—the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. (D, 119)
Erleben und Erdichten—Wie weit Einer seine Selbstkenntniss auch trieben mag, Nichts kann doch unvollständiger sein, als das Bild der gasammten Triebe, die sein Wesen constituiren. Kaum dass er die gröberen beim Namen nennen kann: ihre Zahl und Stärke, ihre Ebbe und Fluth, ihr Spiel und Widerspiel unter einander, und vor Allem die Gesetze ihrer Ernährung bleiben ihm ganz unbekannt. Diese Ernährung wird also ein Werk des Zufalls: unsere täglichen Erlebnisse werfen bald diesem, bald jenem Triebe eine Beute zu, die er gierig erfasst, aber das ganze Kommen und Gehen dieser Ereignisse steht ausser allem vernünftigen Zusammenhang mit den Nahrungsbedürfnissen der gesammten Triebe: sodass immer Zweierlei eintreten wird, das Verhungern und Verkümmern der einen und die Überfütterung der anderen. [KGW V/1, 109]
Conceiving humans to be constituted by drives was not a wholly original idea on Nietzsche’s part. Several German thinkers had described the human psyche as being composed of drives, Johann Herder and Johann Fichte most notably. Nietzsche begins using Machtgefühl and Triebe at the same time in his writing. This suggests that during this period Nietzsche was thinking primarily in psychological terms. Machtgefühl certainly conveys a more psychological connotation than simply Macht alone.
However, Wille zur Macht has certain advantages over Machtgefühl for Nietzsche. First, because Machtgefühl does stress feelings, Nietzsche may have become less comfortable with it. Feelings are by no means primary or foundational human states for Nietzsche; they are parts of many other states, such as willing, thinking, wishing, dreaming, and so on. To associate power with only one of these human states would too severely limit the role of power. Second, because Machtgefühl stresses the psychological aspect of human behavior, it describes what motivates human behavior. This assumes that human beings have motivations and that these motives are causally efficient. Both these assumptions are questioned in Nietzsche’s later works. Thus, Nietzsche may have seen the more ambiguous Wille zur Macht as a better term than Machtgefühl because it does not beg either of these questions. At any rate, the use of Machtgefühl decreases, although it does not entirely disappear, as the use of Wille zur Macht increases in both the published and unpublished writings (keeping in mind, of course, that Nietzsche’s use of either term is extremely sparse given the entire corpus of writings).
We now turn to Nietzsche’s later works, in which Wille zur Macht makes its first appearance in the books that Nietzsche authorized for publication. What do the contexts in which Wille zur Macht appears tell us about the meaning of the phrase? Are there any conflicting or contradictory uses of Wille zur Macht? The major question for the next chapter is how and in what directions does Nietzsche expand the notion of power.
For biographical information, see the following:
Hayman, Ronald. Nietzsche: A Critical Life. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1980.
Hollingdale, R. J. Nietzsche. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Pletsch, Carl. Young Nietzsche. New York: The Free Press, 1991.
For Nietzsche’s early writings, see the following:
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1979.
For Schopenhauer’s philosophy, see the following:
Janaway, Christopher. Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. and ed. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969.
Zimmern, Helen. Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy. London: G. Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1932.