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The Will to Power

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The first thing to understand is that The Will to Power is not Nietzsche's magnum opus. It is a collection of his unpublished writings from the 1880's, collected by his sister and published under the title The Will to Power. I've studied Nietzsche for over two and half years now, extensively reading and comparing his works, specifically from The Gay Science on to The Will to Power. Those who say that this work presents ideas that contradict his published works are wrong. Nietzsche certainly does elaborate on certain concepts that are not introduced in detail in his published works. But this is to be expected. Being his notes, one can expect that these passages,aphorisms, quotes, and notes are rather unpolished and therefore lack the kind of sophisticated poetical style that characterizes his published work. However attempts to refute these notes as mere propaganda perpetuated by his sister is simply ludicrous. Certain concepts such as nihilism, breeding, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence are covered more. The writings do not usually go into great detail, and are often ambiguous, but this is what one should expect from one's notes. However you will not find ideas in this book that are really different from those in his published works. There have been two main errors that have been perpetuated upon this book. First, some take this as his magnum opus and therefore overlook his other writings, however others ignore this book and pass it off as propaganda that represented his sister's agenda. Most scholars of Nietzsche agree that this work is very important as long as one also reads his published works. From my studies,I have come to believe that this work merely represents ideas and passages that were not fully worked out, ideas that were still in process of being elaborated, and even ideas that were perhaps too extreme to put in his published writings. One must remember that Nietzsche was criticized over the extreme content of his published writings, and he probably knew that some of his material should be kept unpublished. However his most extreme ideas such as the glorification of war and conflict, his hypothesis of the will to power as the basic essence of life, his defense of aristocracy as a superior form of government, hatred of christianity and other institutions that preserve christian moral ideals,i.e.,democracy, socialism, his praise of master morality and the virtues associated with it..pride,domination,violence,cruelty,hardness,are all put forth in his published works as well, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, the Antichrist, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. So if you have enough intelligence to read all of his works and comparatively study them and look beyond the mere raw form of these passages, you will find many notes and aphorisms that elaborate on the detailed work already put forth in his published writings.

This book changed my life. Philosophy has always interested me, but it has always seemed that most philosophical systems were so dry and abstract to be devoid of any real implications to one's life. This book, I dare say, is more pratical, but not in a common everyday sense of that term. I would say this work is mystical, for lack of a better word. This is a collection of notes by a man, who not only interpreted the world in a unique way, but really felt it. To Nietzsche this was not just some various thought experiments. This work and his other works, particular his later material, are an attempt to provide a new worldview, a new way to interpret life that is almost the complete opposite of the traditional worldviews that have dominated the world, such as christianity, judaism, buddhism, i.e. the philosophies of world renunciation and the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche reveals how the world really is, not some ideal of the world, namely that the world is violent, chaotic, without any kind of teology. He then proceeds to affirm this world, otherwise affirming life for those very characteristics that had led others to deny it. The ultimate value by which all is measured in his works, particular in this work, is power. Life is seen as the will to power. In other words, life's essence is the drive, impulse to grow, to conquer, to dominate, and accumulate force, to increase and grow in every possible way, phsyically, mentally, and spiritual (remembering that all these are all still physiology to Nietzsche). ONe of the best ideas can be found when he contrasts the Dionysian worldview with the christian worldview, namely Dionysus vs. The Crucified. He says that the christian sees suffering as a means to an end, as necessary to attain holiness and heaven. The disciple of Dionysus however sees existence as holy enough to justify a monstrous amount of suffering. I often feel a mystical state of being, or as Nietzsche would say, intoxication, upon reading this book. NOthing has every touched me so closely, so personally, so intensely as this work. Do yourself a favor, if you are brave enough, and hard enough, and desire a alternative to the degenerate ascetic philosophies that dominate today, pick this up and revel in its utter tragic beauty.

Obviously, Mr. Strohm, in his absurd repudiation of Nietzsche's "will to power", failed to recognize the true meaning of "power" as N conceived it. Power, to N, is not political or physical; it has nothing to do with how "power is gained in human society". N himself declared that the desire to have power over others is itself a form of weakness, insofar as it serves as an escape to overcome oneself, which is true power. N even declares that the ascetic, who turns his back to society and "social power", represents one of the highest manifestations of the will to power. The will to power is about self-realization, overcoming the passions, creating [internal] order out of chaos, mastering one's fate; it is most certainly not about political power. Mr. Strohm's "glaring stupidity" concerning one of the greatest and most individualistic philosophic conceptions, leads one to conclude that even well-read "know-it-alls" fall embarrassingly short of N's persistent concern: "Please do not misunderstand me!"

Nietzsche saw political correctness ("the values that judge") coming over a century before it started taking hold. It is only in this book of his notes that his ideas about the consequences of the feminism, physiological exhaustion, and degeneracy of our 'leading lights', and the passive and active nihilism that it brings forth, are expressed.

This one extract says far more than all of the books by the modern 'philosophers' and 'psychologists' put together do about the nature of what we are still blindly staring in the face...

37 (Spring - Fall 1887)

"The development of pessimism into nihilism. - Denaturalisation of values. Scholasticism of values. Detached and idealistic, values, instead of dominating and guiding action, turn against action and condemn it. Opposites replace natural degrees and ranks. Hatred against the order of rank. Opposites suit a plebeian age because easier to comprehend. The repudiated world versus an artificially built "true, valuable" one. - Finally: one discovers of what material one has built the "true world": and now all one has left is the repudiated world, and one adds this supreme disappointment to the reasons why it deserves to be repudiated. At this point nihilism is reached: all one has left are the values that pass judgement - nothing else.

"Here the problem of strength and weakness originates:

1. The weak perish of it.
2. Those who are stronger destroy what does not perish.
3. Those who are strongest overcome the values that pass judgement.

"In sum this constitutes the tragic age."

If you have read all of Nietzsche's completed works you should have a good idea of the full compass of his thinking, and a good feel for his unique ability to express himself. You should be able to tell if two people with no such genius - his sister, Elizabeth, or his associate, Peter Gast - who were responsible for compiling this book - were in any way responsible for altering any of these notes in order to add weight to Nazi philosophy. If those talentless people had added ideas to these notes that Nietzsche would not have agreed with, the changes would have been all too apparent. For instance, all of a sudden Nietzsche would have been shown to hold anti-Semitic views. Views that he deplored. In fact, on one notable occasion, Wagner's anti-Semitism made him feel physically ill, and it was one of the reasons he ended his friendship with the composer.

There could be no better antidote to the modern ills than this book.

Eric Legge

Perhaps no one thinker has been as creative, poetic, and yet so extreme and, dare I use the word, evil as Nietzsche. I bought this after Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After I read this, I went out and bought On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo,Twilight of the Idols, and The Gay Science. The book is certainly a necessity for Nietzsche scholars, philosophers, and those who have a love for VERY unconventional thought. Don't believe the hype that this book was just a propaganda tool for the nazis. People like to talk big but they rarely have evidence to back it up. People often have a adverse reaction to this book, particularly after having read his other works. Well, that is because this is really just a collection of Nietzsche's unpublished notes. Every major scholar of Nietzsche; Kaufman, Detwiler, Schutte, Gillespie, sees this work as important. Certainly Heidegger went to far to push this out as Nietzsche's magnum opus, which it certainly isn't. But if you read this, keeping in mind that Nietzsche's more speculative, not fully fledged out ideas are contained within, perhaps waiting for the day when the great thinker would polish them up and give them that great poetic and passionate flourish which characterized his published works. If you have focused on Nietzsche's middle period, Human, All Too Human, and Daybreak, you may be surprised and shocked at the extremity of some of these ideas. However those who are very familiar with his later works will find the same basic ideas. Certain topics are spelled out and analyzed that are not contained within his published works, but for all that I have studied this work (almost two years), I find that none of these ideas are inconsistent with the ideas expressed in his published works. As for the supposedly metaphysical twist of the work, I really don't see this. Certainly he takes the hypotheses of the will to power and eternal recurrence and poses them as interpretations of the intelligible character of existence, especially in a cosmological sense, but this is not metaphysical (keeping in mind what the term metaphysical connotated at that time; the term has often been used by various philosophers to refer to different methods, Nietzsche seems to characterize metaphysical as attempts to find out the true nature of reality as opposed to the apparent nature of reality,--a distinction he believed he did away with). Another word of caution: Many people like to read Nietzshce and pick out and concentrate on what they agree with and pass over his more violent and questionable material. Nietzsche himself talked of how he was misinterpreted in his own day. In Ecce Homo, he talks of how his alter-ego of Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality has been understood with the utmost of innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent. This work represents thought that is honest about the nature of the world. It doesn't try to make it look pretty,moral, and good. Nietzsche whole philosophical system and morality were based on his interpretation of life as a chaos of becoming, of the world as will to power and eternal recurrence, of a world with no objective values, meanings, etc. A world ruled by the tyrannical ruthless enforcements of power relationships as he says in a aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil. This book helps culminate his thought, showing passages, quotations, and aphorisms not yet worked out, and perhaps ideas that he considered too extreme to be published.

_Der Wille zur Macht_ consists of selections from the notebooks of Friedrich Nietzsche originally intended to compose a series of books by Nietzsche and published posthumously by his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. Originally considered to be Nietzsche's magnum opus, this book has now been relegated to an entirely different but still important status in the corpus of Nietzsche's writings. This book influenced the thought of such European thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade. Nietzsche's call for an overcoming of nihilism through the affirmation of the eternal recurrence was taken up by Nazi intellectuals in their quest to breed a superior race. Nietzsche argues for the creation of the "overman" through discipline and breeding. In this work, Nietzsche attempts his "revaluation of all values" by examining the rise of European nihilism and the decline of Christian morality summed up in Nietzsche's infamous phrase: "God is dead". Nietzsche writes, "Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of guests?" Nietzsche tackles head on the issue of nihilistic decadence, the overturning of all values hitherto regarded as the highest values. He offers a powerful "Critique of Religion", "Critique of Morality", and "Critique of Philosophy". In this aspect, he finds the source of nihilism to be the Christian religion itself, a sort of Semiticized Platonic idealism for the herd - "the little people". These "little people" gave rise to Christian morality - a leveling of society -which Nietzsche thoroughly criticizes. From the Semitic myth of "the chosen", arose the Christian moral ideal. Against this "negative Semitic" religion of the New Testament, Nietzsche contrasts the "positive Semitic" religions encoded in the laws of Mohammed and certain parts of the Old Testament, the "negative Aryan" religion of Buddhism, and the "positive, affirmative Aryan" religion encoded in the Laws of Manu. Nietzsche views this "negative Semitic religion" as contrary to the existence of the state and the aristocracy, and as having given rise to nihilism. Against morality, moralistic idealism, weakness, and hypochondria, Nietzsche opposes the nihilistic affirmation of the eternal recurrence. To Nietzsche, the eternal recurrence is the boldest idea, that when faced can lead to an overcoming of nihilism. Nietzsche writes, "Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: "the eternal recurrence"." For Nietzsche, the Will to Power is considered as knowledge, as nature, as society and the individual, and as art. Nietzsche presents a biologistic interpretation of the Will to Power as life. Nietzsche's final section of the book devoted to the matter of "Discipline and Breeding" outlines Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence and how this must be faced by the "overman". Nietzsche writes, "I [Nietzsche] write for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the "masters of the earth"." It is this call to overcome nihilism through the affirmation of the eternal recurrence which is the fundamental message of Nietzsche's thought. Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity is indeed harsh, and I believe it to be wrong-headed, however his understanding of the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence present the most interesting aspect of this philosophy. Indeed, it has been suggested that rather than being the atheist as he is so often called, Nietzsche does in fact have a god . . . however it is this "god" which is fundamentally distinct and opposed to the God of Christianity (cf. Paul Tillich).

For further reading on the matter of nihilism, see the book _Nihilism Before Nietzsche_ by Michael Gillespie. In this book, it is suggested that the roots of nihilism rest in the philosophy of nominalism as was originally expressed in the medieval period. Also, it is suggested that a new understanding of God as Infinite Will is necessary, contrary to Nietzsche's mere assertion "God is dead".

This book is a better anti-depressant and energizer than any antidepressant in the market. This book will give you more physical and mental strength than any visit to your therapist, any prozac and zoloft. I say this because i suffer from depression and low self esteem, and any time i read this book, it makes me want to lift weights and do something great. So if you feel low, and want to overcome your low self esteem, try to read this book. This book is so great that i have read it 9 times already :-)

This is Nietzsche at perhaps his best. Although these notes are a little rough around the edges, lacking the great brilliant imagery and poetical style of his published material, some of these notes are some of his most lucid and provacative ideas. Frankly, I do not know if we will ever be able to decide on Nietzsche's final philosphical position. Some try to ignore these notes while others focus ignore his writings. One thing I see wrong with the common approach is why should we only be interested with what he wanted his philosophy to mean? Granted, he did have a certain perspective and interpretation he desired his work to be understood in, but because of circumstances, we can't find out this perspective without making some assumptions. Nietzsche has meant many things to many people, therefore I see this work as some of his most crucial material. When I firsted got interested in philosophy, I used to carry small notebooks around with me, and write down all manner of ideas, quotes, etc, in them. If one were to look at these notes and compare them to be current philosophy, some would not fit while others would still be true. Thus when we approach the Will to Power notes, we should see how much of this material has some connection with his published material. Most of it does. Thus I don't really see much of a problem with considering many of the ideas expressed in these notes for his actual philosophical position, when one sees the consistency between the notes and his published material. I consider this book to be akin to what the bible is for others. It is a unique way of looking at the world, and Nietzsche himself believed that he was not writing for everyone, he was writing for the few, those small elite number of men who were superior. His philosophy is not about goodness, or morality, or any of the ideals that we so intensely value today. His philosophy is based on a naturalistic conception of the world, a world of chaos, a world goverend not by laws or gods, but by the will to power, by power relationships, all events as a becoming master, a subduing. HIs praise of power, war, violence, harshness, severity, and intolerance will offend most very deeply, because it flies in the face of the modern democratic ideals that have been propogated for so long. this should be a book you either deeply love or deeply hate. If you do not have this reaction, you must not understand the material. Do not read this book innocently. He was not concerned about the greatest good for the greatest number. In fact he says that one has to be quite lenient to accord the good any place at all in the great economy of the whole, while the terrible aspects of reality, such as the will to power, affects (passions), are tremendously much more necessary and important. And this comes from a passage in Ecce Homo. Think about it, he criticized christianity, not just because of its ignorant metaphysical views, but mostly because of the ideals and values it had praised and raised to be superior, which he viewed as symptomatic of decadence, degeneration, as life at its weakest. His concern was to create men who represented the ascending line of life, as he says in Twilight of the Idols. Men who represent life at its fullest, exemplifying the great aspects of life. As he says once again in Ecce Homo, man can only achieve greatness by exemplifying reality, which means especially exemplifying all that is terrible and questionable in it.

As I have read many books by Nietzsche and other books by authors that cite this book by Nietzsche, I was a bit shocked by Kaufmann's postface to this book. I've known that this was not a completed work by Nietzsche, but I was not aware as to how far it was from being complete, which is quite substantial. 5 stars for Kaufmann's wonderful and truthful to the text translations, but as for the "philosophy" in it, I recommend one read Nietzsche's words in His released books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, Beyond Good and Evil etc... and Kaufmann's translations are always the best for that.

My God! The passion, the intensity, the sheer force of this material is amazing. Never have I read a philosopher who puts himself into his work so much. This work is extremely refreshing in an age of overly scholastic mumbo-jumbo. Unfortunately people think that all philosophy is about now is overly abstract mental masturbating. Nietzsche shows that philosophy has a much more divine mission, to create values, to interpret the world, to give the why and whither of man. Many may find this highly passionate subjective of Nietzsche's works irritating or ridiculous. But they are mere scholarly worms who think that life is just about accumulating tons of worthless facts into ones head. NO...a thousand times, NO! Life is much more and if we want to have a taste...go for this book. You will either fall in love with the philosophy or more likely hate and despise it because of its intense deadly beauty.