WTF is Will To Power?

There are quite a few philosophical terms you find thrown about when people are pretending to have a serious discussion. Sometimes it can be too much. I recently had a frustrated friend yell at a dinner party “What the fuck is will to power?”

Hmmm, I thought to myself, what (the fuck) is it?

Friedrich Nietzsche, the twisted man who gave birth to this idea, was famous for his explosive, yet often hard to understand writing. So, it’s no surprise that there is some confusion about exactly what is meant by this well-known term. To put it bluntly, Will to Power is everything. Or at least, according to Nietzsche, it is the driving force that empowers all things to be. It defies total definition because it is the creator of definitions; yet, we still attempt to define it. Now I’m being obscure on purpose, just to show you how much of a mind-fuck reading Nietzsche can be. It might be all well and good for a mad-genius like Nietzsche to talk in these kinds of riddles, but let’s stop pretending we’re smarter than we are and get down to basics.

The easiest form of Will to Power to understand is its function as a psychological driver to human action. Simply put, Nietzsche proposes that everything we do is an attempt to assert our selves onto the world. In other words, we are projecting the authority of our ego over and above the authority of the egos of others.

This can be seen easily in the opening of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche discusses our need to realise that all philosophical ideas are actually “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” What our friend Freddy means here, is that the underlying motivation behind creating philosophies is not just to make sense of the world, but behind that, an attempt on the philosophers’ part to distinguish themselves from others, by putting forth their ideas. They’re saying: “look at me and how amazingly good I am at thinking!” A perfect example of this is Aristotle’s theory of the highest life being one spent in the contemplation of knowledge. Of course Aristotle would reason that this is the case, since that is how he has spent his life!

Ironically, even the philosophy of ‘Will to Power’ can be seen in this light: It is Nietzsche’s ultimate memoir to us. He himself even states this explicitly “-as is will to power, as is my theory.” It is, however, a testament to Fred that he recognises this fact and is honest about it, rather than pretending he is putting forth this idea with more ‘noble’ intentions.

Some critics of the all-encompassing nature of Will to Power may point to Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘the will to live’ as being above this. Would it not be more accurate to say that our need to survive outweighs our need to assert our difference from others? In fact, Schopenhauer’s idea was a huge influence on Nietzsche’s formulation of thought. Time and again Nietzsche demonstrates that Will to Power trumps any motivation of our Will to Live. Here is one excerpt from his work Daybreak:

“…if three quarters of the upper classes indulge in a permitted fraud and have the stock exchange and speculations on their conscience: what drives them? Not actual need, for they are not so badly off, perhaps they even eat and drink without a care — but they are afflicted day and night by a fearful impatience at the slow way with which their money is accumulating and by an equally fearful pleasure in and love of accumulated money. In this impatience and this love, however, there turns up again that fanaticism of the lust for power…”(204)

This passage displays how the need for power dominates over a human’s desire to simply keep safe and keep our hearts pumping. It shows that we would risk our safety to gain more power in this world. The idea of Will to Power may also help explain why people risk their lives for rewards in mortal conflicts such as war. Suicide might even be seen as a type of Will to Power, as a final assertion of ourselves being in control of our own destiny. In this way Nietzsche’s theory outshines Schopenhauer’s ‘Will to Live’.

The question now may be rightly asked that; if Will to Power is about distinguishing ourselves as unique and above others, then why do we sometimes strive to become a part of a group? Why do we seek some kind of similarity to others? Would this not be a contradiction of Will to Power? The answer here is nein! The way in which we are able to distinguish ourselves apart from others in the first place, is by creating a reference point to which we might be compared. This might explain why all ‘non-conformist’ hippies seem to have the same non-haircut, or why individualist philosophy professors all feel compelled to wear corduroy jackets with leather elbow-patches. We root ourselves in easy-to-spot groups, if only to break away from them again. This way, people can make sense of ‘who’ we are by forming an opinion based on a known stereotype. We then rise above these stereotypes in a show of Will to Power, to become individual again. This distinction from others goes all the way down to the tiniest level. It is something which Nietzsche acknowledges:

“The striving for distinction is the striving for domination over the next man, though it be a very indirect domination and only felt or even dreamed. There is a long scale of degrees of this secretly desired domination, and a complete catalogue of them would be almost the same thing as a history of culture, from the earliest, still grotesque barbarism up to the grotesqueries of over-refinement and morbid idealism.” (Daybreak, 113)

This is where Will to Power starts to become more complex, straying further into being a cosmological force, and dare I say, a metaphysical one. In what is regarded as one of the more important statements about Will to Power, Nietzsche asserts:

“The victorious concept ‘force’, by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power’.” (Will to Power, 619)

Nietzsche is saying here that Will to Power is a force, which does not need another force to make it act. When we look at a normal external force, we generally see it as a thing that makes an event happen. For example, if someone opens a beer in my presence, they force me to have a drink with them. However, all forces are caused by another force. A twisting of the hand opened the beer. The hand was propelled by the mind, which is propelled by the desire of thirst, and so on and so on forever and ever. Will to Power is the first force that makes events happen. It is the internal will, which creates the need for a force to act. In this sense it is the ‘Will’, which dictates what the force should do. It doesn’t let itself be delegated by another subject or regressed back to anything else. Even the theory of Will to Power is created ultimately by Nietzsche’s will to power to assert himself on the world.

To take this idea to the next level, let us look at one of the greatest supposed metaphysical forces: God. It could be argued that Will to Power precedes God, since God would have needed the driving motivation of Will to Power to want to exert himself (and thus the world) into existence. Rather than go into debating the existence of God here, I would rather say that Nietzsche often acknowledges the existence of God, even if just to state that he is now ‘dead’, since how can you be dead if you never existed in the first place?

If we take Nietzsche’s idea of Will to Power as ‘the force which creates all forces’, it has huge cosmological implications. The theory ceases to become just a psychological driver, but the driver of all natural things. Lightning then has a will to power, where it makes itself different from any other lightning strike. Each snowflake makes itself unique because of Will to Power. Lady Gaga dresses like a retarded Liberace, not because she’s weird, but because of Will to Power. It is the system by which we are able to place things into similar groups but also differentiate things from each other. It forms the basis of our ability to order our own reality in a sensible way. It is: “The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its ‘intelligible character’ — it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else.” (Beyond Good and Evil, 36)

So, there you have it. Three simple words ‘Will to Power’, basically describe the whole universe and why it is that way. Some see this as intensely profound, others as ridiculous nonsense. You can make up your own mind. At least now, if someone yells in your face at a party: “What the fuck is will to power?” You can answer: “it’s everything.” With a nonchalant sip of your single-malt whiskey, you can bask in your superiority over this uncultured swine. After all, that is Will to Power in its simplest form.

If you want to read some more on Will to Power, the following were books referenced when writing the above:

Deleuze, G 1983, Nietzsche and philosophy, H Tomlinson translation, Athlone Press, London

Lingis A, The Will to Power, in DB Allison (ed.), The new Nietzsche: contemporary styles of interpretation, Dell, New York, 1977

Nietzsche F, Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin Classic Edition, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 1973

Nietzsche F, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Cambridge University Press, RJ Hollingdale translation. 1997