In Nietzsche, does "power" mean power-over-others, or something else?

Great Debates
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It’s almost a year since we’ve had a good Nietzsche thread.

In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell calls Nietzsche a “sycophant of aristocracy” – not of any established aristocracy in particular, but of the idea that human society should be ruled by strong, vigorous, arrogant aristocrats. And the idea that Nietzsche inspired the Nazis is a commonplace. And all this seems supported by a cursory reading of some of his stuff.

E.g., from The Antichrist:

That sure sounds like an ethic for a bully who dominates others. Especially when measured against the next passages:

I’m not sure exactly what Nietzsche means by this “higher type,” but it would appear to bear a far nearer resemblance to Genghis Khan than to Socrates. I.e., there can be no superman without submen, without slaves/subjects/servants to minister to him.

However, I have seen some Dopers argue, or imply, that “power” is a mistranslation or suboptimal translation and that what Nietzsche was really talking about was not power over others, but freedom – freedom from conventional moral and social (and even esthetic, I shouldn’t wonder) traditions, freedom to create, freedom to . . . well, I’m not sure what would come after that.

What exactly did Nietzsche mean by “power”?

And, for bonus points, what exactly did he mean by “the superman”?

It is no help here, that intelligent discussion of Nietzsche is a matter of obvious relevance, while, at the same time, he is such a bad writer – such a memorable but illucid writer – that having actually read any of his books cover-to-cover cannot reasonably be adjudged a prerequisite to participation in such a discussion. Cliff’s-Notes-level summaries will simply have to serve.

From John J. Reilly’s review of Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell:

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From An Incomplete Education, by Judy Jones and William Wilson:

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From Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy:

(In these terms, I suppose the truest heirs of Nietzsche now living are not neo-Nazis, but LaVeyan Satanists.)

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Russell next considers the main ethical problem raised by Nietzsche: “should our ethic be aristocratic, or should it, in some sense, treat all men alike?” (Unreflectingly sexist language – Russell, remember, is writing in 1945.) Russell notes in passing that an aristocratic ethic is not the same as an aristocratic political theory: A Benthamite might hold that an aristocratic form of government best promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number; but Nietzsche’s ethic discounts the happiness of the common people. “All that is good or bad in itself exists only in the superior few; what happens to the rest is of no account.”

Russell sums Nietzsche’s sociopolitical ethic as follows: “Victors in war, and their descendants, are usually biologically superior to the vanquished. It is therefore desirable that they should hold all the power, and should manage affairs exclusively in their own interests.” Russell analyzes this to show that “desirable” in this context means only “desired by Nietzsche” and “this is not a philosophy; it is a biological fact about a certain individual.”

Russell sees a practical objection to this, that as nowadays the idea of aristocracies of birth are discredited, the only practicable form of aristocracy is something like the Fascist or Nazi party, which must arouse opposition and turn into “a police State, where the rulers live in terror of assassination, and the heroes are in concentration camps. In such a community faith and honour are sapped by delation, and the would-be aristocracy of supermen degenerates into a clique of trembling poltroons.” But this is a modern objection; practically all governments of large states before the American and French Revolutions were aristocratic, and the principle unquestioned.

The more important objection Russell sees is ethical, as to sympathy. “Sympathy, in the sense of being made unhappy by the sufferings of others, is to some extent natural in human beings; young children are troubled when they hear other children crying. But the development of this feeling is very different in different people. Some find pleasure in the infliction of torture; others, like Buddha, feel that they cannot be completely happy so long as any living thing is suffering.”

Russell concludes with an imaginary debate between Nietzsche and Buddha, before God, trying to persuade him as to what sort of world He should create, one based on love or strife. Nietzsche accuses Buddha of having a purely “negative” ideal, the absence of suffering, which is the stuff of boredom and death; while Nietzsche loves life, and excitement, and the beauty of predatory beasts like the tiger, and positive heroes like Alcibiades Emperor Frederick II and Napoleon. Buddha responds that he does have his own heroes – Jesus and saints and scientists and “the poets and artists and musicians who have caught glimpses of the Divine beatitude. Love and knowledge and delight in beauty are not negations; they are enough to fill the lives of the greatest men who have ever lived.” Nietzsche, he charges, loves pain, and his purported love of life is a sham.

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BTW, check out the Nietzsche Family Circus: Random FC toons captioned with random Nietzsche quotes. The effect is surreal.

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I think I accidentally stumbled upon your personal diary BrainGlutton .
There are only posts by you in a thread started by you :).

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The Superman was not (a) a guy in red underwear from another planet who fights crime or (b) a caveman who wandered the earth crushing skulls or (c) a Conan-style barbarian king who rules his subjects with an iron rod. All of those are pop-cultural representations that missed the point.

Nietzsche imagined the superman as one who had shed all of the moral constraints and baggage of his civilization and his heritage and lives by a new order. Nietzsche did seem to believe that all old, ethical systems would have to die out. However, a reader shouldn’t leap from there to the conclusion that he was in favor of murder, rapine, and carnage. His most famous character, Zarathustra, is a loner who lives on a mountain and talks with animals more than with other humans. Aloof and indifferent to the lives of other humans, but not actively seeking to harm them in most cases.

Nietzsche poured at least as much of his attention into aesthetic doctrine as moral. In other words, he was at least as much concerned with overthrowing what he perceived as western society’s artistic pretensions as ethical and religious ones. One of the few pop culture references that does get Nietzsche correct is in Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway: “I’ve told you before a thousand times that guilt is a petty, bouregois emotion. The artist creates his own reality.” That’s something that Nietzsche might actually have said, though not a direct quote.

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But how, exactly? I mean, the earliest Christian saints did exactly that and Nietzsche never approved of them.

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Then we have the “Nietzscheans” from Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, who destroyed the old tri-galactic Systems Commonwealth.

Is that really Nietzschean thinking, or is it not?

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Reading the ancient Greek myths, one carries away the impression that the ancient Greek ideal of godliness was to be (as far as humanly possible) as powerful and beautiful as gods. That the goal was to realize in the physical world the perfect and eternal. Hence a loathing for the imperfect, especially the ugly and the weak. Were the ancient Greeks proto-Nietzscheans?

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Well, there’s the rub. For Nietzsche, the will is supreme. Christianity, ethics, intellectual activity, science, psychology, charity work, and almost everything else has been set up as an obstacle to those with a truly strong will. But what exactly should those few individuals strong-willed enough to break free from these constraints do with their will? That’s not entirely clear.

As you’ve already said, it’s very difficult to get anything definite out of Nietzsche’s works. I’ve read most of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the impression I got was that the author was hovering right on the border between sanity and insanity, sometimes straying a small distance in one direction and sometimes in the other. As best I can tell from biographical sketches, this impression is accurate. In the early 1880’s, when he wrote that and his other famous works, he suffered from a number of maladies and often wasn’t lucid for days at a time. By the end of the decade he was well and truly insane. (Incidentally a fair number of his best-known followers also went nuts.)

Nietasche’s writings–the more sane parts, that is–have a certain intensity. They mix powerful images, vivid word choice, allusions to obscure works of literature and mythology, and a definite sense of fire. Perhaps because of these properties, many people simply assume that he must have concealed some brilliant meaning in everything he wrote. But we should remember that not everything written with memorable style necessarily contains great meaning. (Think about Jabberwocky, for instance.) Take this quote:

So, that’s as clear an answer as you’ll ever get from him.

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Then again sometimes the captions seem quite appropriate.

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Greek gods were perfect only in their power and beauty. They were very humanlike beings, and not anything like Greek philosophers. They acted pretty much like half-civilized Bronze Age royalty would act if they had supernatural powers. They were greedy, vain, wrathful, jealous, lecherous, spiteful, vindictive, occasionally stupid, and in all ways bad role-models.

Would a Nietzschean superman be like that?

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To briefly answer the thread title, Nietzsche’s concept of power definitely involved power over the self. It could include power over others as well, but that wasn’t really the point. I don’t think “freedom” is quite what he was getting at, but it was more “the power to do…” than “the power to make someone else…”

Defining a Nietzschean Übermensch is difficult, but an Übermensch would have used his power to mold himself into something greater. He’s called the “Over-man” because he has overcome himself, or overcome human nature. An Übermensch doesn’t need to surround himself with inferior people just so he’ll look good in comparison. He’d look good all on his own, because he’s an Übermensch. Nietzsche talked about treating yourself/your life like a work of art, and an Übermensch would have made himself into a great work of art.

I’m not sure what you mean by that. It could be inspired by Nietzsche’s work in the sense that it sounds like Nietzsche’s description of “master morality”. However, it’s important to recognize that while Nietzsche considered master morality preferable to “slave morality”, it was not his ideal. Master morality was part of his description of human history, and the conflict between “masters” and “slaves” was how we wound up with 19th century Western morality. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not the man of the past though, he’s the man of the future. IIRC, Nietzsche did not believe that anyone who had ever lived qualified as a true Übermensch.

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Oh, as far as the actual word Nietzsche used then I believe it’s the German “Macht” that’s being translated as the English “power”. “Macht” is related to the English “might”, as in strength or authority, so “power” is a reasonable translation. However, it’s my impression that “Macht” is also related to the German verb “machen”, which means “to do” or “to make”, and thus may have different connotations than the English “power”.

I hope someone who speaks German better than I do can ring in on this.

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G.K. Chesteron meets the Superman.

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From Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw:

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I quite agree that if one looks at Nietzche, one can find his descendant in LaVey. And, therefore, theoretically, in Scientology.

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Macht could be translated as “power” or “force”, but also as “strength” or “might”. The latter has less of the hierarchical dynamic, of “power-over-others”, we usually associate with Will-to-Power. Personally, I lean to the “Power-over-Oneself” interpretation, but without sinking into the Crowleyesque sense that “Do as thou wilt” being the whole of the Law (of the Overman). The Overman still answers to a higher power, in a sense, but that power is aesthetic rather than moral.

I don’t know, I put that badly…

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You have your Will to Power, I have mine.