Nietzche's "will to power" ... I don't understand it (the phrase, that is)

[toadspittle]

I came across a reference to Nietzche’s concept of “the will to power” again today, and it made me realize that I just absolutely do not understand the construction of the phrase itself.

Now, I looked through the wikipedia entry and I understand the concept itself, but the phrase “the will to power” just seems to make no sense to me. I understand that it’s a translation of “Wille zur Macht”, and so maybe it was poorly translated and then caught on and never corrected. Should it be something more like “the will to create”? Or “the will to exert/gain power”? It’s meant to be a parallel construction to other common biological/philosophical concepts, like the “will to survive,” isn’t it? What’s going on here? Is “macht” here a noun or a verb?

[Mort_Furd]

That phrase is translated quite accurately. It is also translated literally. It is not all that common for translations to work that way - a literal translation won’t often convey the same meaning as the original phrase.

“Macht” in this cas is a noun, just as in English.

I don’t think I want to get into the philosophy behind this, though.

[toadspittle]

@Mort Furd

That phrase is translated quite accurately. It is also translated literally. It is not all that common for translations to work that way - a literal translation won’t often convey the same meaning as the original phrase.

“Macht” in this cas is a noun, just as in English.

No offense to Nietzche, then, but I just can’t understand how this could make sense. “the Will to power?” That’s like saying “the will to success” or “the will to procreation” or “the will to refrigerator.” How can there be a noun there, and not a verb? Now, the will to LIVE, to PROCREATE, to SUCCEED, to EXERCISE POWER … those make sense. “The will to power” just doesn’t, by my lights. “The desire for power”, maybe.

[Liberal]

Nietzsche’s will to power is the fundamental drive and causal agent of nature. He believed that every dynamic and every power could be reduced to it. He thought that it explained the metaphysical nature of everything from the whole universe to the smallest unit of energy — behavior, essence, ontology, the whole ball of wax. Basically, it was his universal theory of everything. Everything that happens and everything that exists does so and is the way it is because of the will to power.

[Liberal]

Looking at the OP again, it occurs to me that this is more of a linguistics question than one of general metaphysics. Sorry for the intrusion.

[Lamia]

@toadspittle

No offense to Nietzche, then, but I just can’t understand how this could make sense. “the Will to power?” That’s like saying “the will to success” or “the will to procreation” or “the will to refrigerator.” How can there be a noun there, and not a verb? Now, the will to LIVE, to PROCREATE, to SUCCEED, to EXERCISE POWER … those make sense. “The will to power” just doesn’t, by my lights. “The desire for power”, maybe.

Maybe it sounds better in German. My German isn’t good enough to be able to tell, but Mort Furd is correct that “will to power” is a direct translation of “Wille zur Macht”. I can’t guess at Nietzsche’s reasons for preferring this phrase over some other one, but it may help to think of “will to power” as something like “train to Weimar”. Power is what we’re moving towards, and our will is what we are using to get there.

[BrainGlutton]

@toadspittle

No offense to Nietzche, then, but I just can’t understand how this could make sense. “the Will to power?” That’s like saying “the will to success” or “the will to procreation” or “the will to refrigerator.” How can there be a noun there, and not a verb? Now, the will to LIVE, to PROCREATE, to SUCCEED, to EXERCISE POWER … those make sense. “The will to power” just doesn’t, by my lights. “The desire for power”, maybe.

It’s not at all hard to imagine a writer in English using a phrase like “will to success.” It might be ungrammatical, but it carries a bit more oomph than “will to succeed.”

Maybe my grammatical sensibilities have been corrupted by Madison Avenue, Anthony Robbins, and the all-pervasive American business culture.

[Liberal]

@Lamia

I can’t guess at Nietzsche’s reasons for preferring this phrase over some other one, but it may help to think of “will to power” as something like “train to Weimar”.

I think I can speak to that somewhat, by providing the context in which he conceived the phrase. Nietzsche was heavily influenced by the famously pessimistic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and took his “will to power” directly from Schopenhauer’s “will to live”. Many consider Nietzche’s reading of Schopenhauer to be a misinterpretation — namely, that he advocated denial of the will over affirmation of it. But Schopenhauer’s claim was an aescetic one, not an epistemic one.

[WordMan]

I think the bottom line to the concept of Will to Power is: What is the driving force that motivates and influences all actions?

To Nietzsche, it was power - we all want more power within the context of our lives.

To others, I have seen:

Will to Meaning - we want to have a sense of meaning in our lives
Will to Love - we want love
Will to Procreate - a “selfish gene” few - we want to live long enough to ensure the survival of the gene pool
Will to F**k - a variant on Will to Procreate, this take the biological basis for procreation but says that we are so suffused with the need to “do it” that it informs all our actions…
There are plenty of others…

To me, a better philosophical question might be - can an individual’s/group’s/species’ motivation be reduced to single factor across all situations and actions? IANAPhilosopher, but that seems simplistic and only of value from a “thought experiment” basis…

[toadspittle]

Again, this is really a grammar question. I just don’t see how you can have a noun following “Will to” and have it make sense. You need a verb. Else we have:

The will to refrigerator.
The will to puppy.
The will to gambling.
The will to donuts.

It should be the Will to EXERT power, or ACQUIRE power, etc. Or better, the DESIRE FOR POWER.

@WordMan

Will to Meaning - we want to have a sense of meaning in our lives
Will to Love - we want love
Will to Procreate - a “selfish gene” few - we want to live long enough to ensure the survival of the gene pool
Will to F**k - a variant on Will to Procreate, this take the biological basis for procreation but says that we are so suffused with the need to “do it” that it informs all our actions…
There are plenty of others…

No, Will to Meaning makes no sense. DESIRE FOR MEANING makes sense.
Will to Love makes sense if you mean “will to love [object].” if you WANT love, then it’s DESIRE for love.
Will to procreate: Now this works. But following the ridiculous construction of Will to Power, this phrase should be rendered “Will to Procreation.” Dumb.
Will to FK–again, good. In will to [noun] form, though, we wind up with "the will to fking", which is patently stupid.

I have no problem with Nietzche’s idea that Power, and the desire to acquire and exert it (esp. for mastery of oneself) is a valid concept. But the grammatical construction “Will + to + power” is just plain wrong.

[NoPretentiousCodename]

Power can be a verb.

Batteries power my laptop.

I power my way to victory.

I guess I don’t see a problem here.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@toadspittle

I understand that it’s a translation of “Wille zur Macht”, and so maybe it was poorly translated and then caught on and never corrected.

If I remember my high school German correctly, isn’t “zur” a contraction of “zu der,” which means “to the” (preposition + definite article, in the dative case)? Not sure if this helps—different languages use definite articles differently.

And maybe you should think of the word “will” here as in “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”?

[Liberal]

@Thudlow Boink

And maybe you should think of the word “will” here as in “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”?

That’s exactly the classical philosophical meaning of the term — a fixed and persistent intent or purpose. It is not a decision or choice, but the faculty for deciding and choosing.

[BrainGlutton]

@toadspittle

Again, this is really a grammar question. I just don’t see how you can have a noun following “Will to” and have it make sense. You need a verb.

Oh, go verb yourself!

[SPOOFE]

Again, this is really a grammar question. I just don’t see how you can have a noun following “Will to” and have it make sense. You need a verb.

It’s more like a chapter header for the rest of his philosophy… otherwise, instead of just saying “Oh, Nietzche’s Will to Power philosophy states blah blah blah” you have to explain the entire philosophy.

Basically: We have a will to exert power and dominance over others. It is the evolutionary drive to pass on our genetics expressed through strength (as opposed to, say, love). Using one’s power over another to guarantee one will triumph over another.

[toadspittle]

@BrainGlutton

Oh, go verb yourself!

[BrainGlutton]

@SPOOFE

Basically: We have a will to exert power and dominance over others. It is the evolutionary drive to pass on our genetics expressed through strength (as opposed to, say, love). Using one’s power over another to guarantee one will triumph over another.

Actually, I don’t think that’s what Nietzsche’s philosophy is about. Not that you couldn’t make a case for it. N. was not the clearest writer in the history of philosophy. From the Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche:

The "Will to Power"

One of Nietzsche’s central concepts is “the Will to Power” (Wille zur Macht), a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he believed was the basic driving force of nature. He believed it to be the fundamental causal power in the world: the driving force of all natural phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers can be reduced. That is, Nietzsche in part hoped Will to Power could be a “theory of everything,” providing the ultimate foundations for explanations of everything from whole societies, to individual organisms, down to mere lumps of matter. In contrast to the “theories of everything” attempted in physics, Nietzsche’s was teleological in nature. Nietzsche perhaps developed the Will to Power concept furthest with regards to living organisms, and it is there where the concept is perhaps easiest to understand. There, the Will to Power is taken as an animal’s most fundamental instinct or drive, even more fundamental than the will to self-preservation. The Will to Power is something like the desire to exert one’s will in self-overcoming, although it may well be unconscious. Arthur C. Danto says that “aggression” is at least sometimes an approximate synonym. However, Nietzsche’s ideas of aggression are almost always meant as aggression toward oneself, as the energy one motivates toward self-mastery. In any case, since the Will to Power is fundamental, any other drives are to be reduced to it; the “will to survive” (i.e. the survival instinct) that biologists (at least in Nietzsche’s day) thought to be fundamental, for example, was in this light a manifestation of the Will to Power. Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the Will to Power. This includes both such apparently harmful acts as physical violence, lying, and domination, on one hand, and such apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love, and praise on the other. In Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that philosophers’ “will to truth” (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their Will to Power; when it is not, the will to truth is nothing more than nihilism. As indicated above, the Will to Power is meant to explain more than just the behavior of an individual person or animal. The Will to Power can also be the explanation for why water flows as it does, why plants grow, and why social classes behave as they do.

Similar ideas in others’ thought

With respect to the Will to Power, Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and his concept of “the Will to live”, but he explicitly denied the identity of the two ideas. Other ideas similar to Nietzsche’s are Taoism, which holds that to follow one’s own natural wills will bring about a happier existence, and Hegel’s theory of history.

Criticism of the idea

Although the idea may seem harsh to some, Nietzsche saw the “will to power” – or, as he famously put it, the ability to “say yes! to life” – as life-affirming. Creatures affirm the instinct in exerting their energy, in venting their strength. The suffering borne of conflict between competing wills and the efforts to overcome one’s environment is not evil, but a part of existence to be embraced. It signifies the healthy expression of the natural order, whereas failing to act in one’s self-interest is seen as a ‘sickness’. Enduring satisfaction and pleasure result from living creatively, overcoming oneself, and successfully exerting the Will to Power.

His ethics, likewise, are not as harsh as people often assume:

Ethics

Nietzsche’s work addresses ethics from several perspectives; in today’s terms, we might say his remarks pertain to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics. As far as meta-ethics is concerned, Nietzsche can perhaps most usefully be classified as a moral skeptic; that is, he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and “moral facts” is illusory. (This is part of a more general claim that all facts are false, roughly because none of them more than appear to correspond to reality.) Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) are mere “interpretations”. Sometimes, Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what is moral or immoral. Note, however, that Nietzsche’s moral opinions may be explained without attributing to him the claim that they are true. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn’t disregard a statement merely because it is false. On the contrary, he often claims that falsehood is essential for “life”. In the juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between “master morality” and “slave morality”. Although he recognizes that not everyone holds either scheme in a pure fashion, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality:

“good” and “bad” vs. “good” and “evil”

“aristocratic” vs. "part of the “herd”

determines values independently of predetermined foundations (nature) vs. determines values on predetermined, unquestioned foundations (Christianity).

Public perception of Nietzsche’s thought has been somewhat distorted by the meddling of his sister, who outlived him and revised some of the works he left behind before publishing them:

Politics

Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s heavily edited Nietzsche’s work in order to promote him as a proto-Nazi thinker (she was herself an ardent German nationalist and pro-Nazi); this bastardization was largely to blame for Nietzsche being associated in the 1930s with the Nazis, who primarily took Elisabeth’s deliberately misconstrued versions of his works as their source.

It is worth noting that Nietzsche’s thought largely stands opposed to Nazism. In particular, Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism (which partially led to his falling out with composer Richard Wagner) and nationalism, took a dim view of German culture as it was in his time, and derided both the state and populism. He was also far from being a racist, believing that the ‘vigor’ of any population could only be increased by mixing with others. In “Twilight of the Idols,” Nietzsche says, “…the concept of ‘pure blood’ is the opposite of a harmless concept.”

As for the idea of the “blond beast,” Walter Kaufman has this to say: “The ‘blond beast’ is not a racial concept and does not refer to the ‘Nordic race’ of which the Nazis later made so much. Nietzsche specifically refers to Arabs and Japanese, Romans and Greeks, no less than ancient Teutonic tribes when he first introduces the term…and the ‘blondness’ obviously refers to the beast, the lion, rather than the kind of man.”

While some of his writings on “the Jewish question” were critical of the Jewish population in Europe, he also praised the strength of the Jewish people, and this criticism was equally, if not more strongly, applied to the English, the Germans, and the rest of Europe. He also valorised strong leadership, and it was this last tendency that the Nazis took up.

Whilst his use by the Nazis was inaccurate, it should not be supposed that he was a good democrat either. One of the things that he seems to have detested the most about Christianity was its emphasis on pity and how this leads to the elevation of the lower classes, the weak and the disabled. He wrote in “The Anti-Christ”, “The weak and the deformed shall perish: first principle of our philosophy. And we shall aid their demise.” Similar comments can be found in “Ecce Homo” and “The Will to Power”; it could be argued that he would have agreed with the Nazis’ sterilisation of the disabled. He also referred to the common people as “the rabble” and liberalism as “reduction to the herd animal”. Whilst he had a dislike of the state in general, he made it clear that only certain individuals should break away from it in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.

It is, however, hard to classify Nietzsche’s politics, as he did not see this as his main concern. He seems to have very little interest in the economy. There are also some liberal strands to his beliefs, such as his distrust of strong punishment for criminals and even a criticism of the death penalty can be found in his early work.

But, for all of that . . . yeah, dude was one sick fuck, no shit.

[Melchior]

@Mort_Furd

That phrase is translated quite accurately. It is also translated literally. It is not all that common for translations to work that way - a literal translation won’t often convey the same meaning as the original phrase.

“Macht” in this cas is a noun, just as in English.

I don’t think I want to get into the philosophy behind this, though.

No, it is *not *translated correctly. ‘Will to’ is never used before a noun in English. Wille zur Macht means ‘desire for power’. ‘Will to’ in English is used only before verbs.

[Melchior]

@toadspittle

No offense to Nietzche, then, but I just can’t understand how this could make sense. “the Will to power?” That’s like saying “the will to success” or “the will to procreation” or “the will to refrigerator.” How can there be a noun there, and not a verb? Now, the will to LIVE, to PROCREATE, to SUCCEED, to EXERCISE POWER … those make sense. “The will to power” just doesn’t, by my lights. “The desire for power”, maybe.

Correct!

[Melchior]

@toadspittle

Again, this is really a grammar question. I just don’t see how you can have a noun following “Will to” and have it make sense. You need a verb. Else we have:

The will to refrigerator.
The will to puppy.
The will to gambling.
The will to donuts.

It should be the Will to EXERT power, or ACQUIRE power, etc. Or better, the DESIRE FOR POWER.

No, Will to Meaning makes no sense. DESIRE FOR MEANING makes sense.
Will to Love makes sense if you mean “will to love [object].” if you WANT love, then it’s DESIRE for love.
Will to procreate: Now this works. But following the ridiculous construction of Will to Power, this phrase should be rendered “Will to Procreation.” Dumb.
Will to FK–again, good. In will to [noun] form, though, we wind up with "the will to fking", which is patently stupid.

I have no problem with Nietzche’s idea that Power, and the desire to acquire and exert it (esp. for mastery of oneself) is a valid concept. But the grammatical construction “Will + to + power” is just plain wrong.

Correct!