Learn about Friedrich Nietzsche's "Will to Power." Explore Nietzsche's philosophical concepts about biology, metaphysics, psychology, and more through his quotes. Updated: 11/21/2023
Will to Power by Nietzsche | History, Quotes & Criticism
Table of Contents
- Will To Power and its History
- Will To Power by Nietzsche
- Quotes from Nietzsche's Will to Power
- Criticism of Nietzsche's "Will to Power"
- Lesson Summary
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the metaphysical meaning behind Nietzsche's will to power?
The metaphysical meaning behind Nietzsche's will to power is that the entire world is driven by the will to power. That is, the will to power is not a feature inherent in any one person's mind, but rather, it is a principle that drives all things. Thus, everything seeks to augment and transform itself in its relationship with other things.
Did Nietzsche write "Will to Power"?
In one sense, Nietzsche wrote Will to Power insofar as his writings constitute its material. However, he did not assemble, edit, or complete the work. Rather, his sister assembled the work from more scattered, unfinished writings.
What is the underlying concept of Nietzsche's will to power?
The underlying concept of Nietzsche's will to power is overcoming. The will to power is a drive to overcome resistance in the world while simultaneously embracing that resistance. Thus, the will to power necessitates that the person willing overcomes an obstacle and overcome their own limitations weaknesses to triumph.
Table of Contents
- Will To Power and its History
- Will To Power by Nietzsche
- Quotes from Nietzsche's Will to Power
- Criticism of Nietzsche's "Will to Power"
- Lesson Summary
Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher. He is most famous for being a critic of Western metaphysics, religion, and morality. For example, Nietzsche thought that the moral demands of Christianity were so extreme that they would lead to the abandonment of all values. Christian morality requires complete renunciation of one's bodily self in submission to a supreme, external being. Or in other words, he argued that any morality that required minimizing one's own desires and body would eventually lead to people rejecting morality.
In several of Nietzsche's later writings, he introduced the idea of the will to power, which held that strength and power were sources of moral value. His notion of the will to power provided a moral alternative to Christianity and the morality of other philosophers. Specifically, the notion of the will to power contrasted with the notion of the will used by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. While Schopenhauer was not a religious figure, he nevertheless advocated a kind of morality that valued compassion and self-renunciation while condemning competition and struggle.
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For Arthur Schopenhauer, the world could be understood from the perspective of the will, and this is to say that one's own body and the world around it do not simply object to being apprehended. Rather, one moves one's body in a single act. Moreover, the objects of the world appear as objects of desire or aversion. In this view, a bear is not simply an animal to be classified and contemplated. Rather, it is (usually) a danger to be avoided. Such an aversion is not the result of intellectual reflection; it is instinctive.
For Schopenhauer, the body is constantly beset by desires that return after they have been satisfied. Thus, hunger returns at some point after eating. Further, the world is a competition that is often violent and drives people to satisfy their own wants at the expense of other people. In short, Schopenhauer claimed the willed world is one of endless suffering and frustrated desires. Thus, he advocated for an ascetic morality, meaning he thought it best to minimize one's desires. Further, Schopenhauer claimed that compassion was something that could lead people to detach themselves from the immediacy of willing life.
While Nietzsche appreciated that Schopenhauer rejected an interpretation of human beings as aloof, contemplative beings, he did not endorse ascetic morality. In his own theory, Nietzsche advanced a notion of the will to power, rather than the will to live that Schopenhauer used. What is the will to power? In brief, the will to power is the continual effort to overcome, which means overcoming obstacles that get in one's way and overcoming oneself. Thus, a person is not simply seeking to satisfy their desires only to find those desires return, e.g., hunger. Rather, when a person wills, they seek to augment their own strength and become something greater than they were. Nietzsche's will to power aimed to valorize strength and competition while de-emphasizing compassion. Nietzsche mentions the will to power in several works, including,
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the first time he used the term)
- The Gay Science
- Beyond Good and Evil
- The Antichrist
- The Will to Power (a book drawn from his unfinished writings by his sister, not actually prepared for publication by Nietzsche himself)
Will To Power and Personal Psychology
The will to power can be understood as a psychological principle. In this interpretation, the will to power is a basic instinct that all people (and perhaps all animals) have. Instinctually, we regard things that increase our own strength as good and things that diminish it as bad. Thus, eating too little is bad, and so is overeating. That is, over-eating and under-eating diminish our capacity for action. Eating the right amount, however, contributes to one's abilities. Obviously, Nietzsche would be opposed to religious fasting simply for the sake of renouncing the body. But he also would not advocate for blind indulgence either. One of the clearest expressions of this view can be found in the quote,
- "What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself." (The Antichrist)
Will To Power and Biology
Nietzsche's works also provide material for interpreting the will to power as a basic principle of all living things. There is an affinity with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution since Darwin claimed that all living beings were changing and adapting to survive. However, Nietzsche took his notion of the will to power to replace Darwin's understanding of the basis of evolution. Nietzsche wrote,
- "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength-life itself is the will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results." (Beyond Good and Evil)
In Nietzsche's view, organic beings are constantly engaged in acts of creation (or re-creation). The fact beings survive through change is a side-effect of the more basic drive to transform themselves and grow stronger.
Will To Power and Metaphysics
The will to power could also be understood as a basic principle of the universe. Because it could be a principle to explain all things, it would be called a metaphysical principle. Nietzsche writes,
- "My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space, extend its force (its will to power), and thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it. Thus, they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on." (The Will to Power)
Note that the will to power is not simply a desire inside a person. Nor is it a drive of all organic life. It is a tendency of all bodies as such in their spatial relationship to all other things. Thus, all bodies strive to conjoin with what makes them stronger and deflect or eliminate those things that make them weaker. Whether metaphysical or not, virtually all interpretations of the will to power were part of Nietzsche's rejection of Christianity. Nietzsche writes,
"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race." (The Antichrist)
Nietzsche's notion of the will to power is nuanced. On the one hand, it is an idea meant to criticize ascetic morality and Christianity. Thus, it is a concept set against a prohibition against pleasure. But it is also a notion that is set against the prohibition against pain. For Nietzsche, a good life will be characterized by an artful affinity for pleasure and pain. Nietzsche's Will to Power quotes evoke the meaning of the concept he intended.
"A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?-- This world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!"
"I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage."
"In the teaching of socialism, "a will to the denial of life" is but poorly concealed: botched men and races they must be who have devised teaching of this sort. In fact, I even wish a few experiments might be made to show that in socialistic society life denies itself, and itself cuts away its own roots. The earth is big enough and man is still unexhausted enough for a practical lesson of this sort and demonstratio ad absurdum-even if it were accomplished only by a vast expenditure of lives-to seem worthwhile to me."
Perhaps the most serious and enduring criticism of Nietzsche's will to power is that it seems to celebrate and encourage domination and oppression. The fact that the Nazi regime in Germany adopted (perhaps unfairly) Nietzsche's ideas seemed to further undermine the plausibility of the will to power. Thinkers who make this criticism think that human life should not be defined or organized around the acquisition of power and overcoming resistance.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a 20th-century German philosopher. He is famous for criticizing ascetic morality, meaning moral systems that encourage renouncing the body and minimizing desire. In his criticism of ascetic morality, Christianity, and the celebration of weakness, Nietzsche develops the notion of the will to power, which is the drive to augment one's own strength, overcome obstacles, and recreate oneself. Nietzsche's will to power contributed to his critique of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose moral system held that competition and desire were bad because they lead to suffering. Nietzsche first used the term the will to power in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The will to power could be interpreted in various ways. It can be understood as a psychological principle that applies specifically to human values and desires. It could also be understood as a biological principle that explains the fundamental principle of living things. In this view, the will to power is one way of understanding evolution. Finally, the will to power could be understood as a metaphysical principle meant to explain how all physical bodies relate to each other. Nietzsche's work has been criticized for celebrating domination and oppression. According to this criticism, Nietzsche's work lends itself to the ideology of Nazi Germany.
Video Transcript
Nietzsche's Compassion
As the story goes, one January day in 1889, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown over a horse in the streets of the Italian city of Turin. Nietzsche had witnessed the horse being beaten; overcome with suffering for the animal, Nietzsche tried to protect the horse before he collapsed to the ground. The frail philosopher would spend the rest of his life either cared for by his family or in a clinic. Perhaps the strangest thing about this story is the seeming inconsistency between Nietzsche's compassion for the animal, and his philosophical writings, including the concept of ''the will to power.''
Schopenhauer's Influence
Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the most famous philosophers of the 19th century and a significant influence on Nietzsche. As a young man, Nietzsche was a strong admirer of Schopenhauer's work, although he later broke with Schopenhauer over the idea of ''the will.'' Schopenhauer wrote that the world was the result of the will. By the will, Schopenhauer meant human wants, desires, and efforts. It is through the will that human beings find suffering, because their desires can never be satisfied. Nonetheless, human beings should try to reduce their desires. This approach has been termed asceticism.
Nietzsche's 1881 work Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices contains the germ of what would become known as the will to power. Here, Nietzsche attributes the ancient Greeks' good health to ''agon'' or competition. Rather than giving competition a negative connotation, as with the desires of Schopenhauer's ascetic approach, Nietzsche gives it a positive inflection.
The Theory of the Will to Power
Two years later, Nietzsche articulated the will to power (the ''Wille zur Macht'' in the original German) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche described the will to power as the ''unexhausted procreative will of life.''
In The Antichrist, a work written to oppose Christianity and intended to be the first volume of a series titled ''The Will to Power,'' Nietzsche wrote, ''Whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names.'' Elsewhere in the book, Nietzsche defined good and bad, asking, ''What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome.''
Nietzsche uses the will to power to oppose both Christianity and its focus on compassion for the weak, and Schopenhauer, who not only based his philosophy of morals on compassion for other people's suffering, but also used an ascetic approach to the idea of the will.
Interpretations and Criticism
There are many interpretations of the will to power. Some philosophers, like Martin Heidegger, believe Nietzsche was concerned with metaphysics, or the study of existence. These philosophers believe that Nietzsche was either trying to create his own version of metaphysics, or rejecting traditional metaphysics. At the time of his death, Nietzsche had been writing furiously about the will to power, and those incomplete writings revealed that the will to power is more than a simple human desire to live, but a complex system of power encompassing all of human existence.
Other philosophers believe that Nietzsche was making a statement about psychology—either by trying to explain human behavior in general, or by explaining his own behavior in particular.
Even though during his life Nietzsche opposed the sort of political views later advocated by Hitler and Nazi Germany, Nazi philosophers such as Alfred Baeumler could focus on quotes, such as those from The Antichrist that said ''power itself'' is good and ''everything that is born of weakness'' is bad, to justify the ideas and actions of Nazis. The language of The Antichrist could easily be used to support the view that might makes right.
The philosophers Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick have gone so far to say that will to power ''raises suspicions about Nietzsche as a serious philosopher.''
Lesson Summary
Nietzsche's will to power opposed both Christianity and Arthur Schopenhauer's form of asceticism, which suggested that humans find only pain through their desires, and therefore should try to reduce their wants. Schopenhauer was one of the most famous philosophers of the 19th century. The will to power, which Nietzsche defined as the ''unexhausted procreative will of life,'' has been understood as both a metaphysical theory and a psychological theory. Some suggested that the concept was the result of his interest in metaphysics, or the study of existence. Nietzsche explored the idea in his work, The Antichrist, which was written to oppose Christianity and intended to be the first volume of a series titled ''The Will to Power.'' Though the will to power has been much criticized, it is one of Nietzsche's most well-known and influential ideas.
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