The will to power () is the core concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. He never systematically defined it, leaving its interpretation open to debate. His use of the term can be summarized as self-determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto oneself or one's surroundings, and it coincides heavily with egoism.
Kraft vs. Macht
Some of the misconceptions of the will to power, including Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, arise from overlooking Nietzsche's distinction between Kraft ('force' or 'strength') and Macht ('power' or 'might'). Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything possessing it, while Macht is, within Nietzsche's philosophy, closely tied to sublimation and "self-overcoming", the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes.
Early influences
Nietzsche's early thinking was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whom he first discovered in 1865. Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis on will and in particular has a concept of the "will to live". Writing a generation before Nietzsche, he explained that the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results in a desire in all living creatures to avoid death and to procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality – more fundamental even than being.
Another important influence was Roger Joseph Boscovich, whom Nietzsche discovered and learned about through his reading, in 1866, of Friedrich Albert Lange's 1865 Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism). As early as 1872, Nietzsche went on to study Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophia Naturalis for himself. Nietzsche makes his only reference in his published works to Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil, where he declares war on "soul-atomism".Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1886; New York: Vintage Books, 1966), §12. Boscovich had rejected the idea of "materialistic atomism", which Nietzsche calls "one of the best refuted theories there is". The idea of centers of force would become central to Nietzsche's later theories of "will to power".
Appearance of the concept in Nietzsche's work
As the 1880s began, Nietzsche began to speak of the "Desire for Power" (Machtgelüst); this appeared in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) and Daybreak (1881). Machtgelüst, in these works, is the pleasure of the feeling of power and the hunger to overpower.
Wilhelm Roux published his The Struggle of Parts in the Organism (Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus) in 1881, and Nietzsche first read it that year. The book was a response to Darwinian theory, proposing an alternative mode of evolution. Roux was a disciple of and influenced by Ernst Haeckel,Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, "The Organism as Inner Struggle: Wilhelm Roux’s Influence on Nietzsche", in Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 161–82. who believed the struggle to survive occurred at the cellular level. The various cells and tissues struggle for finite resources, so that only the strongest survive. Through this mechanism, the body grows stronger and better adapted. Rejecting natural selection, Roux's model assumed a neo-Lamarckian or pangenetic model of inheritance.
Nietzsche began to expand on the concept of Machtgelüst in The Gay Science (1882), where in a section titled "On the doctrine of the feeling of power",Section 13. See David Simonin, "Affektivität und Hermeneutik der Macht: Ein Kommentar zum Aphorismus 13 von der “Fröhlichen Wissenschaft”: Zur Lehre vom Machtgefühl", Nietzsche-Studien 52 (2023), p. 171-193. he connects the desire for cruelty with the pleasure in the feeling of power. Elsewhere in The Gay Science he notes that it is only "in intellectual beings that pleasure, displeasure, and will are to be found",Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (1887; New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §127. excluding the vast majority of organisms from the desire for power.
Léon Dumont (1837–77), whose 1875 book Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité, le plaisir et la peine Nietzsche read in 1883,Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 166. seems to have exerted some influence on this concept. Dumont believed that pleasure is related to increases in force.Small, Nietzsche in Context, 167. In The Wanderer and Daybreak, Nietzsche had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty are pleasurable because of exercise of power. But Dumont provided a physiological basis for Nietzsche's speculation. Dumont's theory also would have seemed to confirm Nietzsche's claim that pleasure and pain are reserved for intellectual beings, since, according to Dumont, pain and pleasure require a coming to consciousness and not just a sensing.
In 1883 Nietzsche coined the phrase Wille zur Macht in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The concept, at this point, was no longer limited to only those intellectual beings that can actually experience the feeling of power; it now applied to all life. The phrase Wille zur Macht first appears in part 1, "1001 Goals" (1883), then in part 2, in two sections, "Self-Overcoming" and "Redemption" (later in 1883). "Self-Overcoming" describes it in most detail, saying it is an "unexhausted procreative will of life". There is will to power where there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power. This suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive.
Schopenhauer's will to live (Wille zum Leben) thus became a subsidiary to the will to power, which is the stronger will. Nietzsche thinks his notion of the will to power is far more useful than Schopenhauer's will to live for explaining various events, especially human behavior—for example, Nietzsche uses the will to power to explain both ascetic life-denying impulses and strong life-affirming impulses as well as both master and slave morality. He also finds the will to power to offer much richer explanations than utilitarianism's notion that all people really want to be happy, or the Platonist notion that people want to be unified with the Good.
Nietzsche read William Rolph’s Biologische Probleme around mid-1884, and it clearly interested him,Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 47. for his copy is heavily annotated.Thomas H. Brobjer, "Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library, 1885–1889", Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 4 (Oct 1997): 663–93. He made many notes concerning Rolph. Rolph was another evolutionary anti-Darwinist like Roux, who wished to argue for evolution by a different mechanism than natural selection. Rolph argued that all life seeks primarily to expand itself. Organisms fulfill this need through assimilation, trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of themselves, for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment. Life forms are naturally insatiable in this way.
Nietzsche's next published work was Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where the influence of Rolph seems apparent. Nietzsche writes,
Beyond Good and Evil has the most references to "will to power" in his published works, appearing in 11 aphorisms.Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 22, 23 36, 44 ("Macht-Willen," translated "power-will"), 51, 186, 198, 211, 227, 257 ("Willenskräfte und Macht-Begierden", translated "strength of will and lust for power"), 259. The influence of Rolph and its connection to "will to power" also continues in book 5 of Gay Science (1887) where Nietzsche describes "will to power" as the instinct for "expansion of power" fundamental to all life.Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §349.
Carl Nägeli's 1884 book Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre, which Nietzsche acquired around 1886 and subsequently read closely,Brobjer says it is the most heavily annotated book of his 1886 reading, "Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library", 679. also had considerable influence on his theory of will to power. Nietzsche wrote a letter to Franz Overbeck about it, noting that it has "been sheepishly put aside by Darwinists".Quoted in Nägeli believed in a "perfection principle", which led to greater complexity. He called the seat of heritability the idioplasma, and argued, with a military metaphor, that a more complex, complicatedly ordered idioplasma would usually defeat a simpler rival.Horn, "Nietzsche's Interpretation of his Sources", 265–66. In other words, he is also arguing for internal evolution, similar to Roux, except emphasizing complexity as the main factor instead of strength.
Thus, Dumont's pleasure in the expansion of power, Roux's internal struggle, Nägeli's drive towards complexity, and Rolph's principle of insatiability and assimilation are fused together into the biological side of Nietzsche's theory of will to power, which is developed in a number of places in his published writings.Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 55. Having derived the "will to power" from three anti-Darwin evolutionists, as well as Dumont, it seems appropriate that he should use his "will to power" as an anti-Darwinian explanation of evolution. He expresses a number of timesCf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, §13; Gay Science, §349; Genealogy of Morals, II:12. the idea that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, behind the desire to expand one's power – the "will to power".
Nonetheless, in his notebooks he continues to expand the theory of the will to power.The phrase will to power appears in "147 entries of the Colli and Montinari edition of the Nachlass. ... one-fifth of the occurrences of Wille zur Macht have to do with outlines of various lengths of the projected but ultimately abandoned book". Linda L. Williams, "Will to Power in Nietzsche's Published Works and the Nachlass", Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 3 (1996): 447–63, 450. Influenced by his earlier readings of Boscovich, he began to develop a physics of the will to power. The idea of matter as centers of force is translated into matter as centers of will to power. Nietzsche wanted to slough off the theory of matter, which he viewed as a relic of the metaphysics of substance.Whitlock, "Boscovich, Spinoza and Nietzsche", 207.
These ideas of an all-inclusive physics or metaphysics built upon the will to power do not appear to arise anywhere in his published works or in any of the final books published posthumously, except in the above-mentioned aphorism from Beyond Good & Evil, where he references Boscovich (section 12). It does recur in his notebooks, but not all scholars treat these ideas as part of his thought.cf. Williams, "Will to Power in Nietzsche's Published Works and the Nachlass".
Will to power and eternal recurrence
Throughout the 1880s, in his notebooks, Nietzsche developed a theory of the "eternal recurrence of the same" and much speculation on the physical possibility of this idea and the mechanics of its actualization occur in his later notebooks. Here, the will to power as a potential physics is integrated with the postulated eternal recurrence. Taken literally as a theory for how things are, Nietzsche appears to imagine a physical universe of perpetual struggle and force that repeatedly completes its cycle and returns to the beginning.For discussion, see Whitlock, "Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche"; Moles, "Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as Riemannian Cosmology"; Christa Davis Acampora, "Between Mechanism and Teleology: Will to Power and Nietzsche’s Gay 'Science, in Nietzsche & Science, 171–188 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich’s Natural Philosophy"; and Small "The Physics of Eternal Recurrence", in Nietzsche in Context, 135–152.