Will To Power (Nietzsche) The will to power (German: der wille zur mancht) is widely seen a5 2 prominct! concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force In mary achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life; these are all manifestations of the will to power ly influence from Schopenhauer, whom he first ‘on ‘will’ and in particular d that the universe and in alll living Friedrich Nietzsche found earl discovered in 1865, Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis has the concept of ‘the will to live’. Schopenhauer explaine everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results creatures’ desire to avoid death and procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality. e holds the view that the desire where hy wer. He and the hunger to overpo in the feeling of power. Nietzsche because of the speaks of the “desire for power”, pleasure of the feeling of powe! asure {ty are pleasurable fal beings that pleasure, rority of organisms from Nietzsche for power is the e desire for cruelty with the ple h as crue is only in the intellectu: connects thi had speculated that pleasures suc that it exercise of power. He notes ¢ found, excluding the vast maj displeasure, and will are to the desire for power. 1 in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The hose intellectual beings that can ower in its ned the phrase will to powe! to only t it applies to all life. The will to P to power where In 1883 Nietzsche coi point, is no longer limited power, it creative will to life. There is will ives for more power. concept at this actually experience the feeling of most detail is an unexhausted pro there is life and even the strongest This suggests that the will to power is 5 living things will risk their Ii tronger than the will to survive Jeful than Schopenhauer's ion of the will to power is far more us for example especially human behavior ~ richer explanation than utilitarianism’ y. Nietzsche describes will to power as damental to all life. In his notebooks, Nietzsche thinks his noti will to live for explaining various events, He also finds the will to power offers much notion that all people really want to be happ’ the instinct for the ‘expansion of power’, fun nvietesche continues to expand the theory of the will to power. 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. Some interpreters have emphasized the will to power as a psychological princ because Nietzsche applies most frequently to human behavior. However, Nietzsche sometimes seems to view the will to power as a more general force, undertyi reality not just human behavior, thus making more directl ‘ ae Schopenhauer’s will to live. For example Nietzsche claims the “ Uke wie power and nothing else.” Nevertheless, in relation to the bey ot deroate's works, many scholars have insisted that Nietzsche's pri es ike less metaphysical and more pragmatic than Sch oe eh ea lopenhauer’s will to live. WhileSchopenhauer thought the will to five was what was most 1 al inn the: universe a particularly Nietzsche can be understood as claiming only that the will to power useful principle for his purposes Some other interpreters also upheld a biological interpretation of the will to power, 1 biological makin conception of the will to power, Nielsche wrote master over all space and to extend its force But it continually encoun! it equivalent with some kind of social Darwinism. Opp My idea is that every specilic (its will to body strives to become power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (union) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they ( conspire together for power. And the progress goes on.” t rather than an attempt to dominate over others, It would be possible to claim that qquilibrium in a system of the will to power is better understood as the tenuous & forces. While a rock, for instance, does not have a conscious will, it nevertheless acts as asite of resistance within the will to power. The will to power, is inner force acting in and through both animate and inanimate objects Not instincts but also higher level behaviors {even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. This includes both such apparent harmful acts as physical violence, lying and ‘and; and such apparent non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love ntly, such thus, a ‘cosmic domination, on one hi ‘on the other ~ though its manifestations can be altered significa! and praise d Evil, he claims hat ‘as through art and aesthetic experience. In Beyond Good an philosophers’ will to truth that is their apparent desire to seek objective absolute truth, is actually nothing than a manifestation of their will to power. The world Nietzsche asserts is the will to power and nothing else, but though the expression is of course correct in @ sense, we must not understand Nietzsche as meaning that the world is an appearance of a metaphysical reality which transcends orld, for he is never tired of attacking the distinction between this world the w his really real. The identified as merely phenomenal and a transcendent reality whicl world is not an illusion nor does the will to power exists in a state of transcendence The world, the universe is a unity, a process of becoming and it is the will to power in the sense that this will is its intelligible character. Everywhere and in everything we can see the will to power expressing itself and though one can perhaps say that for Nietesche the will to power is the inner reality of the universe, yet it exists in manifestation. Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power is thus an interpretation of the universe, a way of looking at it and describing it rather than a metaphysical doctrine about a reality which lies behind the visible world. In Beyond Good and Evil, he remarks that logical method compels us to inquire whether we can find one principle of explanation, one fundamental form of causal activity through which we can unify vital phenomena. And he finds this principle in the will to power. A living thing above all seeks to discharge its force, life itself is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most common consequences thereof. Nietzsche then proceeds to extend this principle ofexplana e ‘planation to the world as a whole. Granted that we succeed in explaining, our whole inst 2 ; le instinctive life and ramification (development) in one fundamental form of will namely the namely the will to power as my thesis says, granted that one could refer all organic is Banic function to this will to power, one would have thereby acquired the right Lo id as seen from define unequivocally all active forces as will 10 power. The w within, the world as defined and characterized according to its intelligible charac would be precisely the will to power and nothing else. Thus Nietzsche's theory of the will to power is not an a priori metaphysical thesis Knowledge, Nietzsche insists works as an instrument of power. It is, therefore obvious that it grows with every increase of power. The desire for knowle will to know depends n the will to power, that is the being’s impulse to master a certain field of reality. The aim of knowledge is not to know in a sense of grasping absolute truth for its own sake, but to master. We desire to schematize, (0 impose ‘order and form on the multiplicity of impression and sensation to the extent required by our practical needs. Reality is becoming, it is we who turned it into being, by imposing stable patterns on the flux of becoming. And this activity & an expression of the will to power. Science can thus be defined or described as the transformation of nature into concept for the purpose of governing nature ‘According to Nietzsche there is no absolute truth, truth is an illusion. The Cartesian search for certainty was also connected with what Nietzsche believed to be ¢ fundamental error in the concept of human being. For Descartes, man is composed of two elements, the mind and the body. The mind is completely and totally distinct from the body, two different substances the mind is lodged in the body and piercing out from it, perceived the world directly through the medium of the senses. But genuine certainty comes from the mind's own operation within itself, The greatest difficulty of Descartes was to explain how the mind co-operated with the body, how perception and action occur. For Nietzsche there is no such problem. The ghost in the machine was abolished and the concept of man is unified so that cognition and action were not two separate operations but were part of.the same operation that is the operation of the will to power. The pre-eminence of the will as the characteristic feature of man in Nietzsche is important because whatever activity of man one is considering the willis not a cause of action, for one cannot consider the will and the act as sufficiently separated for a causal relation between them to be intelligible. One should not think of the will as identifiable active force but simply as the man. Introspection is not more likely to give us,dertain truths than is perception of the outside world. The apparent inner world is manipulated with just the same forms and procedures as the external world, We never hit upon facts. Our whole life cognitive, ethical, practical and creative is the concern of our will which just is the power to change things. The will to power is thus similar to Schopenhauer’s will to live. If we live and are conscious, then we must plan and aim to master our world. We experience it as a world to be ogre iggeeis we een practical and from it arises naturally not y and description of the world but also our decision to behavior.