Man would rather will nothingness than not will.
—GM 11:28
Nietzsche no doubt came across the term “nihilism,” which he began using in the 1880s, in a series of contemporary writers. Due to its use by the Russian anarchists, the term had acquired widespread popularity in the German-speaking region, too.1 The picture Nietzsche formed of those anarchists was mostly determined by his reading of Dostoevsky’s novels;2 but he also read, for example, publications of Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen (in Sorrento, by 1877 at the latest)3 and perhaps excerpted Peter Kropotkin.4 According to Charles Andler,5 Nietzsche’s use of the word “nihilism” resulted from his reading of Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine.6
Bourget, it should be noted, speaks of nihilism mainly with the Russian anarchists in mind. Yet he also relates this nihilism closely with other, in part very diverse, kinds of phenomena of his time, all pointing to one basic evil: disgust with the world. In his Baudelaire essay, Bourget seeks to discover the origin of this feeling. He identifies it as the discrepancy between the needs of the modern age that accompany the development of civilization and the inadequacies of existing reality. The universal outbreak of world-nausea in the nineteenth century was, he believed, caused by this outbreak. It manifested itself in different ways. Among the Slavs it was expressed as nihilism, among the Germanic nations as pessimism, and among the Romanic nations in an unusual nervous irritability.7 In all this, however, Bourget finds the same “spirit of the negation of life, which darkens Western civilization more and more each day.”8
Nietzsche recognized a kindred spirit in Bourget. Like Bourget he was concerned with diagnosing the “sickness” of the century and developing a “theory” of decadence. The horizon within which this happened in Bourget could, of course, not seem broad enough for him; the discrepancy between need and reality offered him no satisfactory explanation of the spirit of the negation of life. What supposedly comprised the background for that spirit, according to the “discrete psychologist” Bourget,9 had to be accounted merely foreground by Nietzsche.
More distinctly than Bourget, Nietzsche sums up the various “symptoms of sickness” under the name of nihilism. How far back he traces the pathological history of the modern European was described in our comments on his philosophy of history. In retrospect it can be said that the birth of moral man marks the beginning of Western nihilism.
Nietzsche, then, reaches further back than others who spoke of nihilism before him. And he no longer understands nihilism primarily as the result of reason’s exaggerated self-glorification, as it appeared in critiques of the philosophy of German Idealism by F. H. Jacobi, Franz von Baader, Christian H. Weisse, and Immanuel H. Fichte—of which critiques Nietzsche probably had no knowledge. Nihilism, detectable even prior to all reflection and speculation, cannot be refuted by merely rational arguments: “The real refutations are physiological” (Nachlaß XIV, 339).10 For if reason wages war on decadence, it does not thereby extract itself from decadence. Reason can, at best, change the expression of decadence, as Nietzsche tries to show by the example of Socrates (TI “Socrates” 10; cf. WP 435).
All consciousness is, as the last and latest phase of the development of the organic, much too unfinished and weak (GS 11) to be of any avail against what it stems from. “The growth of consciousness” often does appear to be a “danger,” indeed a “disease” (GS 354)—namely, in a genealogy of self-consciousness attempted by Nietzsche-yet he does not carry to extremes what the discussion of nihilism had discovered before him. He wants to seek the disease at its place of origin. The “weak, delicate, and morbid effects of the spirit” are for him ultimately merely symptoms of physiological processes (WP 899). In his view “the nihilistic movement is merely the expression of physiological decadence” (WP 38).
What does Nietzsche mean by the “physiological,” which he tries to “draw forth” (D 542), not only from behind consciousness “as such” and its logical positings (BGE 3), but also from behind the moral (D 542; cf. GM I: 17n) and aesthetic (GM III:9) valuations? Physiological processes are “releases of energy” (Nachlaß XIII, 263). But this means power struggles of will-quanta. Physiology, rightly understood, is thus the theory of the will to power (BGE 13), just as is psychology, rightly understood, which amalgamates with the former into a “physio-psychology” (BGE 29). Thus, we can here refer back to the discussions in chapter 1.11
Consciousness is, under such a physio-psychological aspect, still inadequately characterized as a weak late phenomenon. It is the “instrument” of a “many-headed and much divided master” (Nachlaß XIII, 257), a “means and tool by which not a subject but a struggle wants to preserve itself” (Nachlaß XIH, 71; cf. 164f). Quanta of will organize themselves into relatively independent units. Man is such an especially complex organization, which invests a consciousness for its service.12
Now the nature of this decadence, whose “logic” is nihilism (WP 43), can be clarified. It is a particular mode of physiological “releases of energy.” The wills to power, previously held together in a unity, now strive to separate. Nietzsche describes this centripetal tendency as the “disintegration [Disgregation] of the instincts” (TI “Skirmishes” 35). The concept of Disgregation is already familiar to us. We have repeatedly come across the term and its problematic in the first two chapters.13 This problematic now needs closer analysis.
Our starting point will be Nietzsche’s portrayal of literary decadence. The very style of a work of art can reveal “that life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence; the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page; the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.” Something similar applies to all modes of manifestation of decadence. “The anarchy of the atoms” and “Disgregation of the will” go hand in hand in them. The leading will that previously organized the unity of the whole loses its power. Subordinate forces press for independence. Nietzsche finds these signs, for example, in the moral claim for freedom of the individual, as in its expansion to political theory with the demand for “equal rights for all” (CW7).
Decadence, described as Disgregation, is not a state but a process. To be sure, in it the dissolution of an organization is intended. But once this actually is completed, once a unity has disintegrated into a plurality without cohesion (which cohesion is possible only as a hierarchical structure), then we can no longer speak of decadence. This term can designate only the phases of the disintegration process of a whole, insofar as unity still remains despite all dissolution tendencies.
Therefore the question must be asked: What still holds together that which is in the process of disintegrating on the way to its actual disintegration? This is a specific process and not simply the mechanical disassembling of components. Nietzsche rules out a mechanical interpretation. Pressure and stress are “something unspeakably late, derivative, unprimeval.” They already presuppose something “that holds together and is able to exert pressure and stress” (WP 622). This original thing is the “aggregate herd-condition of atoms”; in it “is precisely non-stress and yet power, not only of counter-striving, resistance, but rather mainly of arrangement, placement, attachment, transferring and coalescing force” (Nachlaß XII, 72f). Mechanics is, however, oriented on the model of the persistent thing, which stems from logic inflated into metaphysics. Its concept of force remains an empty word as long as an inner will is not ascribed to it (cf. WP 619).
The nihilistic disintegration process, too, is characterized by cohesion, and this cohesion too is established by an inner will. All cohesion presupposes the rule of one “drive,” which subjugates a multiplicity of drives and forces them under itself. If the Disgregation of what was originally held together under such a rulership is to be carried out, that is possible only if the dominant “drive” gives the corresponding instruction. Otherwise the efficacy common to the subordinate drives to detach themselves from the union of the whole would be incomprehensible. Perishing thus takes the form of a “self-destruction, the instinctive selection of that which must destroy” (WP 55). The ruling will in such a whole must therefore be a will to disintegration, which strives for the end or nonexistence of the unity it had organized. It is the will to the end (A 9) or the will to nothingness or for nothingness (WP 401, cf. 55).
All drives subject to the will to nothingness promote disintegration. This common trait is, however, not uniform. Each drive has its “own law of development” that is determined by the conflict immanent within the whole. Each promotes the downfall in its particular way. The “rate of speed” of disintegration is different in each of them. Indeed, like every drive, the ruling will to nothingness arouses drives against itself among the drives ruled by it. If such a “counterdrive” is strong enough, it will seize the rulership for itself. Its function is, however, strangely discordant when it remains subject to the will to nothingness and nonetheless fights against it.
Nothing other than such discordant willing is expressed in the decadence phenomenon of asceticism, which Nietzsche investigates in the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. What concerns him there is the meaning of the ascetic ideal: “what it indicates; what lies hidden behind it, beneath it, in it; of what it is the provisional, indistinct expression, overlaid with question marks and misunderstanding” (GM III:23). This meaning becomes evident when Nietzsche analyzes the type of the ascetic priest: he finds on the ground of the ascetic ideal “a discord that wants to be discordant” (GM III:11).
Discord now emerges in full clarity in Nietzsche’s arguments. On the one hand, life denies itself in ascetic practice. For asceticism serves only as a bridge to a completely different, indeed opposite kind of existence (GM III:11). For it employs force “to block up the wells of force” (GM III:11). An aversion to life is dominant here (GM III:28). On the other hand, the ascetic ideal is an “artifice for the preservation of life” (GM III:13). For even if life is to be merely a bridge, that bridge must be constructed and thus life must be maintained. The ascetic priest is, by the power of his desire “to be different, to be in a different place,” chained to this life. Thus “this denier is among the greatest conserving and yes-creating forces of life” (GM III: 13).
The ascetic simultaneously denies and affirms life. Naturally, it is not a matter of the simultaneity of a total No and a total Yes. His No and Yes are interwoven in a way that keeps in check the absolute claim of either side. The Yes restricts the No: in the ascetic ideal “the door is closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism” (GM III:28). And the No restricts the Yes: degenerating life that needs protection and healing (GM III:13) cannot be healed by ascetic practice (GM III:16). The ascetic priest as a “nurse and physician” (GM III:14) does not fight “the real sickness” (GM III:17), he merely tries in his way to alleviate the suffering itself. The means he uses to treat the patients are: reducing the feeling of life to impede depressive affects from taking their full toll (GM III:17), distraction from suffering by mechanical activity (GM III:18), careful dosages of petty pleasure (GM III:18), orgies of feeling (GM III:19). The last means makes the patients even sicker afterward (GM 111:20; cf. 21). And even the prior ones merely alleviate the symptoms of the illness. Indeed, the ascetic priest, as “he stills the pain of the wound ... at the same time infects the wound” (GM III:15). His practice, then, finally brings “fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering” (GM 111:28).
The possibilities and limits of a counterdrive dominated by the will to nothingness thus become clearly discernible. The ascetic priest is sick himself (GM III:15) yet must on the other hand still be healthy enough to be able to ward off immediate disintegration. His will must be strong enough to organize the still resistant vital instincts. In the struggle against depression, he strives for the formation of the herd (GM III:18). He fights “against anarchy and ever-threatening disintegration within the herd” (GM III:15). He seeks to vent ressentiment—this explosive material that threatens to blow up the herd—in such a way that it changes direction. This is done by shifting the cause of suffering into the sufferer himself (GM III:15). The result of all this, however, is merely that a chronic disease replaces a rapid death. The dominant will to nothingness still wins out at the core of the drive that is directed against it.14 As long as it rules one must “go forward, which is to say step by srep further into decadence.... One can retard this development and, through retardation, dam and gather up degeneration itself and make it more vehement and sudden: more one cannot do” (TI “Skirmishes” 43). Asceticism leads to such impediments and disturbances. These, in turn, prepare the way for explosions of active nihilism, which will be discussed below.
As for the root of the ascetic ideal, the will to nothingness must be examined in terms of what originally constituted it. And since Nietzsche traces back not only this ideal, but all manifestations and forms of decadence to it, his analysis is of decisive significance for the problem of nihilism. According to the foregoing reflections, nihilism can basically be nothing else but the will to nothingness, and in fact it is always so characterized by Nietzsche (GM II:21, 24; GM 111:14).
First, it must be asked: How can nothingness be willed at all? How must the will be constituted so as to be directed toward nothingness? Again we can refer back to remarks in chapter 1. There is no mere will that would occur as something simple, simply given, as a characteristic or as pure potency. In such a conception “the wither?’” has been “subtracted” (WP 692). The “willing whither” means “willing an end,” which includes willing “something” (WP 260).15 As such a willing, it cannot not will. Therefore Nietzsche, in the context of his investigation of the ascetic ideal, characterizes it as “the basic fact of the human will” that the will needs a goal: “And it will rather will nothingness than not will” (GM III:1). Can the will at all intend nothingness? For even if we concede that nothingness could be “something” in the sense of being intendable, we must observe that, for Nietzsche, to want “something” means to want power.
In striving for nothingness, however, the will is carrying on its own “self destruction” (WP 55). Can it, then, still be will to power? That is certainly Nietzsche’s conviction. He does indeed write: “The will to nothingness has become master over the will to life, more precisely over the ‘ascending instincts’” (WP 401; cf. WP 685). But the very formulation of this sentence (“has become master over”) makes it clear that the will to nothingness, in so doing, acts as will to power. And in his characterization of Christianity, Nietzsche expressly states that in it “the will to the end, the nihilistic will ... wants power” (A 9). The will to power must thus again and again be clearly distinguished from the will to life as understood by Schopenhauer. The will to life is “merely a special case” of the will to power (WP 692). Even this “process of decline” still stands “in the service of” the will to power (WP 675).
Even the will to nothingness is thus will to power. Its intention thereby merely becomes more incomprehensible. How can what wants power strive for nothingness ? If Nietzsche were speaking of the will to power as a simple metaphysical basic principle that develops out of its own self and intensifies intrinsically, the assertion that there is a power-will to nothingness would be absurd. Nietzsche, however, starts with a multiplicity of wills to power engaged in conflict with one another and forming parties. In this struggle there are victors and vanquished. A victorious and dominant will is a strong will; a defeated and subjugated will is a weak will. Neither strength nor weakness belong to the wills as a property. They merely express the outcome of a struggle in which two wills have been engaged against one another. The victory of the stronger does not at first lead to the destruction but rather to the subjugation of the weaker.16 It establishes a ranking order in which the two depend on each other; indeed, both are indispensable to one another (Nachlaß XIII, 170). Victory and rank are, however, never final; the struggle continues incessantly. In a reversal of the power relations, the subjugated will can become the dominant one, and the previously dominant will can be subjugated.
Of course, to speak of a conflict between a strong will and a weak will is a crude simplification of what is in truth a multiply gradated organization of will-quanta. It must always be remembered that “there is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and Disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a ‘weak will’; their coordination under the hegemony of a single predominant impulse results in a ‘strong will”’ (WP 46). The simplifying way of speaking that Nietzsche employs again and again does not, however, impair his possibility to expound on the problematic of decadence and to make clear an essential concretization of an antithesis that determines his philosophical thinking. The simplification, must, however, not be carried so far that the multiplicity is traced back to one will to power. For then Nietzsche’s basic idea is reversed. We can do justice to this problem only if we see at least “two ‘wills to power’ in conflict” (WP 401).17
Nothingness is intended by an initially defeated, weak will. This intention must be understood as a reaction to the strength of a victorious and at first dominant will. Thus the ressentiment-moraliry stems from a kind of denial of the noble morality (A 24). Although it may be “creative,” it remains in its ground a reversal of values that is bound to what it reverses.18
The will to nothingness is a counterwill. The weak do not deny for the sake of denial as such. By their denial they want to conquer the strong and rule over them. For the stronger and weaker are the same in this: “They extend their power as far as they can” (Nachlaß XII, 273). For the purpose of domination, denial must act as a condemnation. The weak condemn the will to power in the values of the strong. But the condemnatory will is itself will to power. It can absolutely not be anything else, for basically all reality is will to power. Thus the only reality is condemned. How can that happen? Only by the decadent will to power inventing another reality from which point of view the condemnation can be made. The fictional world must appear with the claim to be the true world.
The possibility of this fiction is given in man’s biological need, in the stream of becoming, to grasp the similar as the same and fixate what moves. What is supposedly the same or constant can then be detached from becoming as something existing by itself. What is so detached, in truth “an apparent world,” is constructed “out of contradiction to the actual world” (TI “World” 6). Man “invents a world so as to be able to slander and bespatter this world: in reality he reaches every time for nothingness and construes nothingness as ‘God,’ as ‘truth,’ and in any case as judge and condemner of this state of being” (WP 461). Thus, as Nietzsche sees it, in the Christian concept of God “nothingness [is] deified, the will to nothingness sanctified” (A 18).
In all this, the will to nothingness is a will to power that hides itself as such. In order to rule, it demands that the will to power that admits itself as such must abdicate. It acts as the absolute opposite of life in order to work against life within it. In reality it does not exit from life, for all opposites are immanent in life. We have in truth no situation “outside life,” from which we could oppose it. Therefore “a condemnation of life by the living ... is after all no more than a symptom of a certain kind of life” that is condemned to perish. The condemnation of life is a judgment made by condemned persons (TI “Morality” 5).
That the condemning will is a will to power may have become clear, but the question arises: Can the fiction of a “true world,” the self-orientation by something nonexistent that this will performs, be equated with the will to self-destruction spoken of above? In both things, Nietzsche sees the will to nothingness at work. But whereas the latter instinctively seeks to destroy itself, the fiction established for the purpose of condemnation serves the self-preservation and power-instincts of the weak.
That the will to nothingness-in the sense of the will to self destruction-has taken the upper hand may be all the less clear since Nietzsche himself shows that in “reality” the strong are weak and the weak are strong: “The strongest and most fortunate are weak when opposed by organized herd instincts, by the timidity of the weak, by the vast majority” (WP 685). Against Darwinism, which he once called “a philosophy for butcher boys” (KSA 8:12[221) compared with his own theory, he writes that selection did not take place in favor of the strong; rather, it marshaled up “the inevitable mastery of the mediocre, indeed even of the sub-mediocre types.” Nature “is cruel toward her children of fortune, she spares and protects and loves les humbles” (WP 685; cf. TI “Skirmishes” 14). Therefore Nietzsche must ask himself whether the “victory of the weak and mediocre” does not offer “perhaps a stronger guarantee of life, of the species” (WP 401), than the rule of the strong, who in ruinous struggles endanger not only themselves but also the very existence of the species (WP 864).
Everything suggests that this question must be answered in the affirmative. But is this not a grotesque reversal of what Nietzsche wanted to expound? Does not “life” condemn those who affirm it unreservedly? Does it not justify those who condemn it?
To counter such a supposed self-contradiction of Nietzsche’s, we must refer back to what became evident in his analysis of the ascetic ideal. It was shown there that the weak remain weak even when they mobilize their still resistant vital forces against decline; all they can do is prolong the agony. Now it must be added that even their triumph over the strong, even their previous indispensableness for the preservation of the species must not hide the fact that they bring about their own self-destruction and hence the destruction of mankind. Their victory may be presented as a “slackening of tempo”; it may be “a self-defense against something even worse” (WP 401); nonetheless, the worst must happen at last, if they stay in power. They have preserved the “species” by redirecting the human aggressive instincts from outside to inside.19 But the forces that formerly were exhausted in conflict are now dissipated. Finally they must dry up completely.
Thus neither the strong type nor the weak type seem able to prevent the downfall of mankind. But like the strength of the strong, according to Nietzsche, now the weakness of the strong, too, must in its necessity remain restricted to previous history, where chance prevailed.20 Only a future “strong race,” which will withdraw its power from chance by planning and discipline, will no longer surrender that power to the superior numbers of the weak. Such strong humans will stand in full agreement with “life,” which in its genuine form is nothing other than the rule of ascendant wills to power over the descending wills to power.
As the will to the truly nonexistent “second world,” which guides the weak, is a disguised will to power in the only real world, it is also a disguised will to nothingness, in the radial sense of the word. “With your good and evil,” Nietzsche shouts to the weak, “you have forfeited life and weakened your wills; and your valuation itself was the sign of the descending will that longs for death” (Nachlaß XII, p. 262). The longing can swing into action. Then the weak destroy so as to be destroyed. Self-destruction is the consequence of condemning life.21 The process of wasting away that leads to self-destruction is the history of nihilism. It brings to light more and more what the ressentiment-values really imply, at first without the knowledge of their representatives.
We cannot go into details here on the history of this concept. Some hints, however, should be given. In France this history goes back to the French Revolution, where the word nihiliste was used to designate an attitude of political or religious indifference. The philosophical use of the term is first found in F. H. Jacobi, who in his Sendschreiben an Fichte (1799) labels his idealism as nihilism. From then on the term plays a role in various philosophical and political disputes. Its application to the movement of French socialism in the nineteenth century and to the “left Hegelians” (who are the heirs to the reproach of nihilism that had first been leveled against the idealist philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) determined the use of the word in the social and political struggles in Russia. From there it radiated back to the central European language area, so blurring the ongoing history of the term that I. Turgenev, in his Literatur- und Lebenserinnerungen (German edition of 1892, 105) could state that he had invented the word, an error that was repeated after him until our time (e.g., by G. Benn, Nach dem Nihilismus, 1932, GW I, 1959, 156f, and by A. Stender-Petersen, Geschichte der russischen Literatur, II, 1957, 251). Turgenev, however, was not even the first to use the word in Russia; quite a few authors used it there before him.
The spiritual relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky has frequently been brought out since the turn of the century, especially in France, occasioned above all by the translation of D. S. Mereshkovski’s book on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (1903). A. Suarès, A. Gide, and L. Shestov have taken up this theme. On this topic cf. H. F. Minssen: “Die franzö-sische Kritik und Dostoevski.” E. Benz discussed Dostoevsky’s influence on Nietzsche in Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums, 83–93, with consideration of the works of Minnssen and Ch. Andler. Benz published an expanded and partly revised version of his book under the title Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums und der Kirche in the year 1956. He also cites works of Shestov and Tshizhevski on the Nietzsche-Dostoevsky problem (92). This problem is quite as inadequately treated in both versions of his book as in the two authors he cites. The extent of Dostoevsky’s influence on Nietzsche had to remain unknown in any case, as long as there was incomplete knowledge of Nietzsche’s reading of Dostoevsky. Only recently have G. Colli and M. Monrinari, in Volume VIII/2 of the KGW (383–95), published the excerpts that Nietzsche copied from the French translation of Dostoevsky’s novel Les Possédés. Only by taking into consideration Nietzsche’s knowledge of The Demons can one do justice to his understanding of Dostoevsky, and moreover Russian nihilism.
Cf. M. Montinari, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches in den Jahren 1875–1979 [sic]. Chronik, in KGW IV/4, 27. I additionally owe M. Montinari important references to sources inaccessible to me about Nietzsche’s reading of these two Russian authors. Unfortunately they do not provide information as to whether Nietzsche read Turgenev’s novels Fathers and Sons (1862) and New Land (1872), in which that author uses the term “nihilism.” But I consider it highly probable.
F. Würzhach states this in vol. XIX of the Musarion-Ausgabe, 432. Cf. however O. Weiß, in GA, XVI, 515f. [Ed. Note—The abbreviation GA in this essay refers to Großoktavausgabe, edited by the Nietzsche Archive, 19 vols. in three divisions (Leipzig, 1894–1912). Citations designated as Nachlaß refer to this edition.]
Ch. Andler, Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensée, 6 vols., 1920ff., III:418, 424.
The first volume appeared in 1883; the second, in 1885. H. Platz, “Nietzsche und Bourget,” 177–86, cannot confirm Ch. Andler’s assumption that Nietzsche read not only the second, but also the first volume of Bourget’s Essais (181). But there is no doubt about it. Among other authors, Bertram (Nietzsche, 231) called attention to the fact that Nietzsche’s description of literary decadence is “a paraphrase of sentences” from Bourget’s first volume. Proof that Nietzsche read this volume is found in a still unpublished fragment in a notebook from the summer of 1887, which information I owe to M. Montinari: “Style of decadence in Wagner: the individual turn of phrase becomes sovereign, subordination and adjustment become accidental” (Bourget, 25).
Essais I, 1887, 13ff. As an example of the “universal nausea before the inadequacies of this world,” Bourget names “the murderous rage of the St. Petersburg conspirators, Schopenhauer’s books, the furious arsenies of the Commune, and the implacable misanthropy of the naturalist novelists.”
Ibid., 15.
Nietzsche writes thus about Bourget in EH, “Why I Am So Clever,” 3.
Ed. Note—Nachlß in this essay refers to the material published in Großoktavausgabe edition of Nietzsche’s works; see note 4.
Ed. Note—The reference is to the chapter titled “Apparent Contradictions and Real Contradictions of the Will to Power.”
Here we must forego a further investigation of Nietzsche’s understanding of consciousness.
Ed. Note—For the first chapter, see note 11. The second chapter is titled “The Problem of Contradictions in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History.”
As an example of how one can simplify the antitheticalness of the real, which Nietzsche is trying to show, into the absurdity of his philosophical thinking, L. Klages’s statements on the “priestly will to power” can be cited: “If it were not the Christian in Nietzsche who with his doctrine of the will to power is addressing confessors of the will to power, namely, Christians, even his sparkling dialectics and incomparable art of description would hardly have sufficed to hide the self-contradiction even where it emerges very openly from within to the outside. The will to life is supposed to be life; life, the will to power. Now precisely the priest proclaims the most stubborn, relentless will to power that never fails even under the most difficult conditions, ... becomes master over warriors, kings, over all mankind: then he would most clearly be the mode of appearance of life that is most worthy of respect. But he supposedly represents the power will of a sickness, indeed a power will of weakness and a will to nothingness. Is one to believe that anyone except Nietzsche himself... fails to notice the complete vacuity of such turns of phrase” (Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches, 196).
See chapter 1, note 32. [Ed. Note—Müller-Lauter refers here to the discussion in which he notes the “difference from a concept of will marked by the idea of entelechy,” citing a note “aimed against Hegel’s teleologically determined idea of history. In this context [Nietzsche] writes: ‘That my life has no purpose is clear from the accidentalness of my origin: that I can set a purpose for myself is another matter. But a state is not a purpose; rather, only we give it this purpose or that one’ (Nachlaß X, 275).”]
“First conquering the feeling of power, then mastering (organizing) it—it regulates what has been overcome for its preservation and thus it preserves what has been overcome itself” (Nachlaß XII, 106).
The cited passage does not speak of one “will to power” engaged in a “struggle with itself” and thereby doubled, as E. Biser, says, interpreting it as a “principle” (Gott ist tot, 169ff).
E. Fink finds in Nietzsche’s writings after Zarathustra an ambiguity in the use of the terms life and will to power. Thus Nietzsche speaks of power ”brilliantly ... in the sense of ontological universality and then again in the sense of the ontological model” (Nietzsches Philosophie, 128). Fink accordingly distinguishes between the “transcendental value-plan of existence” and “a ‘contentual,’ ‘material’ interpretation of life” in Nietzsche. The transition from the one to the other is, for Fink, “perhaps the most disputable point in Nietzsche’s philosophy.” This disputableness also crept into his dual understanding of the will to power. The will to power was, first, “the basic tendency in the movement of all finite being,” expressing itself, for example, as much in the heroic-tragic valuation as in Christian morality. ”So understood, everything is will to power.” Second, it was given a particular content and meaning, such as that of the heroic mode of thinking. Nietzsche did not succeed in overcoming such ambiguity. The estimation according to strength and weakness was nothing but a valuation of Nietzsche’s, which represented only one possibility of life’s valuating activity of life, of the “great player.” Fink asks whether from the standpoint of the universal as the “ultimate gambler” and “player,” “all values are not of equal rank”? “Are they not all equally forms in which life tries its hand for a period of time?” (122). The ontological dimension of life or of the will to power, prior to anything ontic, is a construction of Fink’s. Nietzsche not only does not need the presupposition of such a universal; it contradicts his thinking, as was shown above. The ambiguity that Fink discovers in Nietzsche was inserted into the philosopher he is interpreting by Fink himself.
But the species did not preserve itself through them. In truth ”there is no species“—in the sense of such an active subject—“but solely sheerly diverse individual beings.” There is also no “nature,” “which wants to ‘preserve the species,”’ but rather only the fact that “many similar beings with similar conditions of existence” more easily preserve themselves “than abnormal beings” (Nachlaß XII, 73).
See chapter 2, note 54. [Ed. Note—Müller-Lauter refers here to Nachlaß X, 402: “Whoever does not grasp how brutal and meaningless history is will also not understand the urge to make history meaningful.” And to KSA 8:5[150], which treats, in part, the effort to rationalize history as motivated by religion.
A logical consequence of Nietzsche’s thinking is that even the act of suicide is the expression of a power-will: in his self-extinction the suicidal person wants to triumph over life.