The Will to Power

The “Will to Power” was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's formula for what he claimed was the fundamental disposition manifested in human life, and essentially in all other phenomena as well. His notebooks declare: “This world is the will to power – and nothing besides!” It was Nietzsche's view that everything that happens in our lives, and in the world around us, can be interpreted in terms of power relationships that take place amongst configurations of forces where the basic tendency is to expand, expend or transform.

Let us make no mistake that Nietzsche's general moral position was very much in contrast to almost all ethical systems known – in fact, his life work was to achieve a “re-evaluation of all values”, and his final unfinished volume was focussed precisely upon this, under the title “The Will to Power”. However, Nietzsche was to go mad before he could complete this task, if indeed his goal was attainable at all. His popularity as a philosopher since his death has sometimes come from people sharing Nietzsche's desire to push in this direction (often when the individual shares Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity) and sometimes from the sheer perspicacity of Nietzsche's insightful and pithy observations (which I respect far more than his flagrantly elitist, egoistic beliefs).

In 1886, in Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote:

...life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation... “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society, it 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.

This accorded very well with Nietzsche's elitist beliefs, although a proportion of modern followers of his philosophical train of thought manage to put this idea together in a more egalitarian framework. There is no reason one cannot – in the view of the will to power, human rights (for instance) are just as much an expression of this conflict of wills as anything else.

The question remains to what extent we can meaningfully reduce all existence to this conflict of wills, the web of competing power relations. It is certainly the case that one may see the world this way, but of course this is not the only perspective available. Perhaps the interesting question here is whether it is possible to see the world without this element, or whether one must simply incorporate the will to power into other perspectives.

My experience is that anyone who tends towards the Rational temperament (the dominance of the orbito-frontal cortex) finds it hard to resist the draw of this point of view. Those who express Rational strongly cannot resist reducing complex situations to formulated systems, and behaviour, politics and nature can be expressed quite comprehensively in terms of the will to power. But the danger here, as with any lens we try to apply universally, is that by pre-supposing an interpretation in terms of power, one mistakes an applicable model for a fundamental truth – I would almost accuse Nietzsche of this error if it were not for his frequent insistence, throughout his notebooks, that “there are no facts, only interpretations.”

The trap in swallowing Nietzsche's “will to power” idea hook, line and sinker is to presume one knows with certainty what “power” means – for in the perspective he was advancing, it must take a specific meaning which need not accord with how that word is usually used. One may end up being forced into the corner whereby all actions are called “selfish” (or in this case “motivated by one's own will to power”), a perspective rather neatly disproved by Joseph Butler in 1726. If I do not receive a life-saving vaccine because I am terrified of needles, what is the meaning of this action in terms of “will to power” – that the force of my fear exceeds the force of my rationality? Indeed, this is the likely interpretation, since Nietzsche's will to power only requires us to interpret situations as networks of competing forces. What those forces might be – dominance, compassion, fear, fraternity – is entirely irrelevant to this perspective, and it is the blanching out of the details that is an arguable flaw of this view.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt offered a very different perspective on this subject. “Power” in Arendt's terms (which she always very carefully defined) was distinct from “strength”. She suggested: “Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular...” whereas power: “...corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.” This conception of power as the ability to act in concert proves to be highly valuable to Arendt in exploring her political issues.

The contrast between Nietzsche's view and Arendt's is striking, not least of which because the latter does not contradict the former's will to power viewpoint at all – indeed, Arendt deploys it to make her (very different) point in the essay What is Freedom?:

Because of the will's impotence, its incapacity to generate genuine power, its constant defeat in the struggle with the self... the will-to-power turned at once into a will-to-oppression. I can only hint here at the fatal consequences for political theory of this equation of freedom with the human capacity to will; it was one of the causes why even today we almost automatically equate power with oppression or, at least, with rule over others.

One of Arendt's most unique observations is that the person at the head of a totalitarian regime is as much a prisoner of the system as anyone else, and indeed, this is perhaps why totalitarianism has shown a marked tendency to self-destruct. This kind of nuanced perspective on the subject of power is absent in Nietzsche's writings perhaps because the political realities that Arendt had lived through – the tumult of the twentieth century – occurred in the wake of Nietzsche. Arendt herself asks that we not hold Nietzsche accountable for what was to come, even though some prominent Nazi's did seize upon Nietzsche's ideas and bend them to their purpose. She suggested that:

To hold the thinkers of the modern age, especially the nineteenth-century rebels against tradition [i.e. Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard], responsible for the structure and conditions of the twentieth century is even more dangerous than it is unjust. … their own departure from tradition, no matter how emphatically they proclaimed it (like children whistling louder and louder because they are lost in the dark), was no deliberate act of their own choosing either... But the thunder of the eventual explosion [i.e. the wars of the twentieth century] has also drowned the preceding ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not “What are we fighting against”, but “What are we fighting for?”

Perhaps, the most fruitful way to face the idea of the will to power is not to attempt to show how the world is not this interplay of power relationships, although many such alternative views are certainly attainable, but rather to consider how we should like our will to power to be expended: to ask, as Arendt dares us to do, “what are we fighting for?”

The opening image is The Power of Red by Nadine Rippelmeyer, which I found at the Fine Art America website. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Comments

[Mory Buckman]

I don't like defining everything in terms of power.

Let's imagine a theoretical person whose job is to decide whether his country should go to war. Whenever the politicians want to send their army around, they need to go to him for approval. He says "yes" or "no", and that's it. He never appears in public, so that he can't be influenced by public opinion.

Now, the reason for this admittedly silly scenario is that if life is about power, this job ought to seem glamorous. Deciding whether a war will be fought is power over the course of history! But it seems like an awful job, because there's no opportunity in it except that one choice.

I suggest an alternate perspective: the appeal of power is that it leads to many opportunities. I think we naturally want to make ourselves useful. That's not all there is to life, but that's a lot of it. When you see people moving ever-upward on the ladder of power, the reason they do it is because they can find more use for themselves on the higher rung.

This is why simulation strategy games are so addictive, even though we understand they have no effect on the real world. The more complex the system the more opportunities to use it. So games like Civilization or The Sims become more engaging than real life, because they offer more frequent opportunities to apply oneself.

[one billion daleks]

Another fine piece of prose there ...

But sorry, I don't quite follow your closing remarks Chris ... "Perhaps, the most fruitful way to face the idea of the will to power is not to attempt to show how the world is not this interplay of power relationships, although many such alternative views are certainly attainable, but rather to consider how we should like our will to power to be expended: to ask, as Arendt dares us to do, “what are we fighting for?” "

er, given it is not difficult to develop hypotheses that persuasively counter Nietzsche's worldview, then the need "to consider how we should like our will to power to be expended" is rendered redundant surely. For whilst Nietzsche's doctrines are legitimate as a point-of-view, they're only one facet of a set of far more sophisticated perceptions. But frankly, by themselves - they're a load of simplistic stuff 'n' nonsense really!

Still, an interesting post!

OK then,
All The Best!

[zenBen]

Yes, I have to say that unless we play enormously untraditional language games with the words 'will' and 'power', I don't see this theory as a particularly good description of how everything works.

I mean, if Nietzche's power is similar to force, force is necessarily causal, but chance is non-causal and highly influential from most people's perspective. So where does it fit?

[Chris]

Mory: I like your perspective here, although I find it quite hard to see politicians as solely motivated by a desire to be "more useful". :)

obd: I suppose my point here is that I don't think feel that Nietzsche's perspective here is invalid, and so I am proposing a response to it that pushes into a more positive space.

I'm not sure I'd call Nietzsche's view "simplistic" though - it can be read simplistically, but it's clear from Nietzsche's writing that he has quite a complex view of the world. And indeed, that's what fuels continued discussions about his philosophy even today! :)

zenBen: the question of how chance fits into Nietzsche's concept of "will to power" seems to me to shift his idea away from a way of thinking about morality or behaviour and into the space of attempts to model the world (science, if you like, although this attempt predates what we now call science). The "will to power" is not intended as a scientific idea but rather as a foundation against which a different morality could (potentially) be developed.

One might just as well ask: "how does chance fit into morality"? :)

---

No Peter? Guess he's busy.

Thanks for the comments!

[Peter Crowther]

He's mad busy on www.uhsm.nhs.uk and hopes to comment over the weekend.

[Sirc]

Man, Chris, this piece isn't controversial enough! You're not going to get any flame wars like this :s

It makes sense that power belongs to a group. After all, humans are very weak by themselves. If two people with the same ideals join forces they will be stronger than if they were alone. You seem to suggest that Arendt equating power with the group gives a twist to the Will to Power, but did Nietzsche really see power as a property of the individual? Your explanation in the first paragraph suggests otherwise:

"It was Nietzsche's view that everything that happens in our lives, and in the world around us, can be interpreted in terms of power relationships that take place amongst configurations of forces where the basic tendency is to expand, expend or transform."

This doesn't make it sound like Nietzsche was talking only about an individual's power! Even if we can understand a group of people acting in concert as a single entity, that still doesn't mean it's a single person.

Anyway, it seems you don't necessarily disagree with the will to power, only that you're not too keen on how it might simplify potentially more complicated situations?

[Chris]

Sirc: I don't think I was fishing for controversy with this piece. :)

You're absolutely right - Nietzsche doesn't see *power* as an individual property, and he talks in terms of people whose will to power align working together... But I think by conceptualising as *will* to power, the tendency is to fall into egoistic spaces, while Arendt's take on power feels more aligned with the potential for social justice. (This may be a consequence of other perspectives in Nietzsche's work - a crosstalk effect, if you will).

I have no problem with the "will to power" perspective, but it's one of those lenses that for me doesn't click and crackle with the potential for great things, but rather seems just another available point of view. I think some people wield views of this kind to support rather self-defeating political positions, which is why I prefer Arendt's spin on it.

I suppose I use something like this perspective when I think of the business world as being essentially a feudal system, but this is just one of the ways I look it... I would never assign priority to this one perspective, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I have now discharged my duty to bring up this topic in its own post. ;)

Cheers!

[Jordan H. Z.]

IMHO, the whole point of the induvidualistic perspective of "the will to power" is an argument in a circle - which many great arguments are. In a sense they are complete:

An induvidual has to define for him/herself what "will to power" is, for him/herself, and others. That in itself is what a will to power can only be.

The questions "What is will? What is power?" can only result in some type of contradiction in one sense or another...unless the induvidual defines them in terms of the greatest good for him/herself. That will be the greatest good for for his/her community; not becuase of the obviously resulting conflict, but becuase no community can properly and happily function when only one, or a few will in a such way.

[Chris]

Jordan H.Z.: thanks for your comment; for some reason circular arguments are often more compelling because they feel "grounded" - it's not always apparent that being grounded circularly is not actually a very secure footing! :)

I'm not sure that one is forced to take a "greatest good" reading here, though, although certainly moving into this space makes it easier for a community to function. But Nietzsche was largely against such reasoning, but not obviously against community... on the other hand, you are only talking about the "greatest good" from an individual, personal, perspective - and that, frankly, could mean anything. :)

Best wishes!

[Jordan H. Z.]

"on the other hand, you are only talking about the "greatest good" from an individual, personal, perspective - and that, frankly, could mean anything. :)"

That's my point Chris - it can and should be something that is hard to define in a sure 'popular' sense. One person's 'will' or 'power' would not be another's. It is not extremely hard to understand the 'elitism' of the "Will to Power" if a person understood from a moral sense we are all elitists and non-elitists. The poor man often does not like to understand the rich, vice versa.

It is for the above reason(s) that "The Will to Power" is often thought of as the first major existential peice of work. :)

Thoughts? Comments? Thanks!

[Chris]

Jordan: thanks for expanding your point here; I understand what you are saying.

And yes, Nietzsche's philosophy was certainly fundamental to existentialism (although "the Will to Power" is merely a Nietzschean *concept*, not an actual work) - but Kierkegaard was dabbling in this considerably earlier than Nietzsche. A letter in 1835 discusses these themes, while Nietzsche has no major philosophical works prior to 1870. :p

Best wishes!