The will to power

The teaching

As Friedrich Nietzsche teaches it.

More than survival

Nietzsche's teaching begins as a correction. Those who study living things, he says, should think twice before naming self-preservation the basic drive of life. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength: life itself is will to power, and staying alive is only one of its indirect and frequent results. He finds the same drive in growth and in contest, and even in the thinker's will to truth, which Zarathustra calls a will to make all being thinkable.

The tablets of the peoples

In Zarathustra's speech on the thousand and one goals, every people hangs a tablet of values over itself, and it is the tablet of its overcomings, the voice of its will to power. What a people finds hard and indispensable it calls good, and what frees it from its direst need it calls holy. One people set itself always to be first and to excel all others; one, to speak truth and be skilled with bow and arrow; one, to honour father and mother and do their will from the root of the soul; one, to keep faith even at the risk of honour and blood.

Valuing is creating. Values are not found but made, and whoever must create must also destroy. There have been a thousand goals for a thousand peoples, he says, and humanity still lacks one goal of its own.

Life that must surpass itself

In the speech on self-overcoming, Zarathustra reports a secret that life told him: 'I am that which must ever surpass itself.' Wherever he found a living thing he found will to power, and even in the will of the servant the will to be master. The lesser yields to the greater to have power over the least, and the greatest stakes life itself for power. Life is not will to existence, he concludes, but will to power, and every value, good and evil included, must keep overcoming itself.

Master and slave valuations

In Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche separates two ways of valuing. A noble or master morality begins from a yes to itself: it calls itself and its own ways good, and calls bad, almost as an afterthought, whatever is low, cowardly or mean. A slave morality begins from a no to what is outside it: it first names the powerful evil, and then calls itself good as their opposite. The first pair is good and bad; the second is good and evil.

Behind the second he finds ressentiment, the rancour of those who cannot act, which takes its revenge in valuation. Turned inward, the will to power that cannot discharge itself outward becomes bad conscience, a cruelty directed at oneself. Even the ascetic ideal, the denial of the body and the world, is in his reading a form of the same drive, for a human being will sooner will nothingness than not will at all.

Power over others as a sign of lack

We exercise power over others, he writes in The Joyful Wisdom, by doing them good or by doing them ill. But the state in which we do ill is seldom as pleasant as the one in which we are kind; it is a sign that we still lack power, or a sign of ill humour at that lack. From this passage comes the reading in which the one who bullies is the one who has too little power, and the strong are those who need not keep proving it.

The hard sayings

Nietzsche does not soften the drive. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes that to refrain from injury, violence and exploitation, and to set every will level with one's own, may be good conduct among equals, but taken as the basic principle of society it would be a will to deny life; life itself, at bottom, is appropriation, conquest of the strange and the weak, and, at the mildest, exploitation. These passages belong to the teaching and are given here as he wrote them. They describe life as he saw it. They are no instruction to exploit a neighbour, and his highest examples of power lie elsewhere.

Giving style to one's character

The highest form of the will to power, in Nietzsche's books, is mastery of oneself. The drives are not to be killed but organised under one ruling taste, so that a chaotic nature becomes a shaped one. One thing is needful, he writes: to give style to one's character, a great and rare art. The one who practises it surveys all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fits them into a plan, adding second nature here by long exercise and daily work, taking away some first nature there, concealing what cannot be removed or reinterpreting it until even the weaknesses delight the eye.

The overman

Zarathustra's first teaching in the market place is the overman. Man is something that is to be surpassed, a rope stretched between the animal and the overman, a bridge and not a goal. The overman is the meaning of the earth, and Zarathustra asks his hearers to remain true to the earth and not to believe those who speak of hopes beyond it. The figure stands for the human being who has overcome the old values and created new ones: the self-overcoming of life carried to its end.

Become what you are

Two sayings of The Joyful Wisdom give the teaching its personal shape. 'What saith thy conscience?' he asks, and answers: 'Thou shalt become what thou art.' The task is not to become someone else but to grow into one's own nature by overcoming what stands in its way.

And he offers a test of whether one has done it. Suppose a demon came in your loneliest hour and told you that you must live this life again, and innumerable times, every pain and every joy in the same order. Would you curse him, or answer that you had never heard anything more divine? To be able to will one's life again, as it is, is in his teaching the strongest yes a person can say. His name for it is amor fati, the love of fate: to want nothing to be other than it is, neither forward nor backward.

Two kinds of power

The teaching thus holds two kinds of power. The crude kind seeks to rule others, and by Nietzsche's own analysis betrays a lack. The refined kind orders one's own drives, creates values and says yes to life. Books of tactics describe the first; Nietzsche's highest praise goes to the second.