Maudemarie Clark on Nietzsche’s Will to Power:
(Chapter 7, From: ‘Nietzsche – Truth & Philosophy’, 1990)
THE WILL TO POWER
A remaining problem for my interpretation of Nietzsche’s posi-
tion on truth is its apparent incompatibility with two of his most
important doctrines. As they are traditionally interpreted, the
doctrines of will to power and eternal recurrence are metaphysi-
cal theories. According to my interpretation, Nietzsche rejects
metaphysics. His denial of the thing-in-itself leaves no place into
which a metaphysical theory could fit. My final two chapters
interpret the doctrines of will to power and eternal recurrence so
that they are fully compatible with this rejection of metaphysics.
The first section of this chapter gives reasons to interpret will
to power as a metaphysical doctrine if it is supposed to be true.
The remaining sections argue that Nietzsche’s published works
give us reason to deny that he regarded it as a truth.
- Will to power as metaphysics
Most interpreters attribute to Nietzsche what I shall call the cosmo-
logical doctrine of will to power, the claim that the world, or at
least the organic world, is will to power. The Nachlass provides
ample evidence for doing so, including Nietzsche’s answer to the
question “Do you know what ‘the world’ is to me?”: “This world is
the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also
205
2O6 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
this will to power – and nothing besides” (WP 1067). The idea is
that the world consists not of things, but of quanta of force en-
gaged in something on the order of “universal power-struggle”
(Schacht, 221), with each center of force having or being a ten-
dency to extend its influence and incorporate other such centers.
It certainly seems to be a metaphysical theory, comparable, for
instance, to Leibniz’ monadology. Heidegger seems right that will
to power constitutes Nietzsche’s answer to the metaphysical ques-
tion concerning the essence of what is (see Chapter 1).
From the viewpoint of my interpretation, the main reason to
take it as a metaphysical theory is that its basis appears to be a
priori theorizing concerning the nature of reality. Although our
empirical theories tell us otherwise, Nietzsche evidently provides
us with a priori grounds for believing that the world is really will
to power. My analysis in section 2 shows that Nietzsche’s pub-
lished argument for the cosmological doctrine of will to power
begins from a premise that could only be known a priori, and I
see no reason to believe that the arguments in Nietzsche’s note-
books are any different in this regard. In that case, however,
Nietzsche’s theory is vulnerable to his own criticism of metaphys-
ics, for he claims that only acceptance of the thing-in-itself cre-
ates room for a priori theorizing about the nature of reality.
One common strategy for reconciling Nietzsche’s criticism of
metaphysics with his doctrine of will to power is to claim that the
former rejects only “true” or “other” worlds, whereas the latter
gives Nietzsche’s account of “this” world. This strategy seems to
be Schacht’s when he claims that will to power gives Nietzsche’s
account of “this” world (168). The problem is that we have no
way of making the distinction between “this” world and the
“other” one except in terms of the distinction between empirical
and a priori knowledge. Nietzsche’s insistence that “this” world is
the only demonstrable one means that the only world of which
we can have knowledge is the empirical world, the world accessi-
ble to empirical investigation (see Chapter 4, section 3). To claim
knowledge of the world on the basis of an a priori theory there-
fore amounts to belief in a “true” world, and is precisely what
Nietzsche rejects as metaphysical. According to Schacht’s recon-
struction of it, however, Nietzsche’s argument for the claim that
the world is will to power is a priori. None of its premises are
presented as empirical ones. Its first premise, for instance, is that
everything is in a state of becoming. This is not presented as a
THE WILL TO POWER 2O”J
hypothesis we formulate on the basis of experience, but as a
conclusion we must draw once we recognize, in effect, that any
notion of stability, aim, or unity belongs to our merely human
perspective, and that since we have projected permanence into
the world, we must “pull it out again,” thus leaving becoming as
the only reality (206). This is an a priori argument that I have
already criticized in my earlier treatment of Schacht as a viola-
tion of perspectivism (Chapter 5, section 5).
Another strategy for showing that will to power does not con-
flict with Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics is to argue that it
actually amounts to a rejection of metaphysics. Nehamas adopts
this strategy, which he makes quite plausible in broad outline. He
interprets the doctrine of will to power as a denial that a meta-
physical theory “of the character of the world and the things that
constitute it can ever be given” (1985, 80). He need not deny the
doctrine’s a priori character. Instead, he denies that will to power
is a theory as to the nature of reality.
Identifying it with the claim (made in the Nachlass) that a thing
is the sum of its effects, Nehamas takes the doctrine of will to
power as equivalent to Nietzsche’s denial of the thing-in-itself.
As I have interpreted the latter, this would give reason to deny
that the will to power is a metaphysical theory, for the denial of
the thing-in-itself merely gets rid of an excuse for devaluing the
empirical world. Nothing substantial follows from this about the
nature of the world. We are told merely that we have no excuse
for devaluing empirical knowledge in general, that is, no excuse
for constructing a priori theories of the nature of reality. But in
Nehamas’ interpretation, it seems that something substantial
does follow from Nietzsche’s rejection of the thing-in-itself: for
example, that nothing can exist by itself, that everything is inter-
connected, and that nothing can change without changing every-
thing else (81—83). If there is a way to show that these are not
really substantive claims about the nature of reality, Nehamas
has not provided it. His use of the last of these claims to justify
Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence (see Chapter 8, sec-
tion 5) makes it especially difficult to see how he can deny that
the doctrine of will to power says something about the way the
world is. But since his account makes will to power an a priori
theory derived solely from logical and conceptual consider-
ations, Nehamas seems to commit Nietzsche to an a priori or
metaphysical theory of the nature of reality.
2O8 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
His ultimate reason for denying this is his interpretation of
Nietzsche’s perspectivism. He thinks that because Nietzsche be-
lieves that the question as to what something is “can never have a
single answer that holds good for everyone,” his view that every-
thing is essentially interconnected (the will to power) “is part of
his effort to show that there is no ready-made world to which our
views and theories could be true once and for all” (81). In other
words, the will to power implies that what anything is depends
on what everything else is, and perspectivism entails that the
nature of everything else depends on one’s perspective. I have
already argued against Nehamas’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism (Chapter 5, section 5). But even if I accepted it, I
would not consider successful his attempt to deny metaphysical
status to the doctrine of will to power. For perspectivism does all
of the work in Nehamas’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s rejection
of metaphysics. Contrary to what he implies, will to power has no
essential role to play in it, for if perspectivism is true, he believes
there is no ultimate truth about reality – whether or not every-
thing is interconnected. Nehamas does not therefore give us
sufficient reason to equate the doctrine of will to power with
Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics, nor therefore to deny what
otherwise seems the case, that the doctrine makes a substantive a
priori and therefore a metaphysical claim about the nature of
reality.
Given my account of what for Nietzsche constitutes a “true”
world, and therefore a metaphysical theory, Kaufmann offers the
most promising way of rendering Nietzsche’s theory of will to
power consistent with his rejection of metaphysics. He claims that
Nietzsche’s will to power, unlike Schopenhauer’s metaphysical
will to existence, is “essentially an empirical concept arrived at by
induction” (1968, 204). According to Kaufmann, the will to
power first appears, in the aphoristic works prior to Zarathustra, as
“a psychological drive in terms of which many diverse phenom-
ena could be explained, e.g., gratitude, pity, self-abasement.” Suc-
cess in explaining such different types of behavior was the basis,
Kaufmann believes, upon which Nietzsche then formulated the
hypothesis that all human behavior could be explained in terms of
the will (which I take to be equivalent here to a motivating desire)
for power. This psychological doctrine is the core that Nietzsche
then widened to include the behavior of all living beings, and that
THE WILL TO POWER 2Og
he generalized into “the still more extreme hypothesis that will to
power is the basic force of the entire universe” (207).
According to Kaufmann’s interpretation, then, Nietzsche’s cos-
mological doctrine of the will to power is perfectly compatible
with his perspectivism and rejection of metaphysics. In contrast
to Schacht’s version, for instance, Kaufmann’s involves no a pri-
ori assumption that the human perspective on things is flawed. If
the world is will to power, it follows that our common-sense view
is flawed. But the claim that common-sense perspectives are
flawed follows from the truth of the will to power rather than
being its presupposition; therefore, Kaufmann’s interpretation
does not commit Nietzsche to a metaphysical theory. Nietzsche
claims not that the world in itself is will to power, but that the
latter is “the one and only interpretation of human behavior
[and reality in general] of which we are capable when we con-
sider the evidence and think about it as clearly as we can” (206).
In other words, will to power is the theory that best accounts for
the data available from the human perspective and is therefore
the one we have reason to consider true.
In fact, Kaufmann thinks it obvious that the cosmological
theory of the will to power is not true, and claims that it “need not
be taken seriously, not even in an effort to understand Nietzsche”
(1967, 510). Denying it any important role in Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy, he treats the cosmological theory as an over-enthusiastic and
ill-advised extension of the psychological doctrine to which he
does accord a central role. A major advantage of his interpreta-
tion is that it explains how Nietzsche could have arrived at the
doctrine without violating minimal standards of consistency, that
is, without violating his perspectivism or rejection of metaphysics,
and it insulates the psychological doctrine of the will to power
from the cosmological doctrine, so that we can legitimately regard
the former as worthy of the serious consideration Kaufmann and
I agree we should deny the latter.
From my viewpoint, Kaufmann’s interpretation also has the
advantage of fitting the published works much better than do
Schacht’s and Nehamas’. When Nietzsche first talks about the
will to power, it is in psychological contexts. His point is to ex-
plain specific kinds of human behavior. There is no attempt to
give a cosmological theory (either the will to power or anything
else) in these works. Nietzsche’s concern is the human world, not
2 1O NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
the cosmos. In Z, will to power first appears as a view of the
cosmos, but even here the cosmological view is introduced by
psychological considerations (Z II, 12). Further, the cosmology
has more the character of a vision, a poetic conception of reality,
than a cosmological theory, and Z is a work of fiction. It articu-
lates Zarathustra’s cosmological vision, which may or may not
also be Nietzsche’s. In BG, Nietzsche does give an argument –
the only one in his published works —for the conclusion that the
world is will to power (see section 2). But he also claims to under-
stand psychology as the doctrine of the development of the will
to power (BG 23). In his later works, for example, GM, the will to
power seems to function largely as it did in the ones in which he
first formulated it: to explain various human behaviors and ten-
dencies in terms of the desire for a sense of power. It is difficult
to deny therefore that the theory of will to power originated in
attempts to account for various human behaviors.
Despite these advantages, I believe that Kaufmann’s theory
must be rejected. One of its major aims is to answer the objection
that Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power does not explain
anything, that by finding the will to power at work everywhere, it
empties it of all meaning and reduces it to a “mere phrase,” devoid
of explanatory power or cognitive significance. Kaufmann’s an-
swer is that “on the contrary, it is surprising how much of human
behavior Nietzsche illuminates by calling attention to the will to
power and its hidden workings” (1967, 511). One may agree with
Kaufmann here, yet claim that the enlightening character of ex-
planations of behavior in terms of the desire for power is depen-
dent on an implicit contrast with other motives, and is therefore
lost as soon as all other motives are interpreted as expressions of
the will to power. The enlightening character of contemporary
accounts of rape in terms of power, for example, seems depen-
dent on the implied contrast between the desire for power and the
desire for sex. What the rapist fundamentally wants is not sexual
gratification but a sense of power. This explanation loses its en-
lightening character if one goes on to say that all behavior is
motivated by a desire for power, for then the motive for rape has
not been differentiated from any other motive.
The empiricist interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine can be
maintained in the face of this kind of objection only if the will
to power is defined so that at least some possible motives are
not instances of it, and the contrast between power and other
THE WILL TO POWER 211
possible motives is preserved. We can understand the will to
power in such terms if we define “power” as the ability to do or
get what one wants. The satisfaction of the will to power, a
sense of power, has then nothing essential to do with power
over others, but is a sense of one’s effectiveness in the world.
This understanding of the desire for power not only allows the
possibility of other desires, but actually demands it, because it
requires us to distinguish the desire for power – for the ability
to satisfy one’s desires —from the other desires one wants to be
able to satisfy. It amounts to thinking of the will to power as a
second-order desire for the ability to satisfy one’s other, or first-
order, desires (cf. Frankfurt).
This would not rule out by definition the truth of the claim that
all behavior is motivated by a desire for power. For it is not
impossible – in the sense of logically contradictory – to have a
desire to be able to satisfy whatever first-order desire one might
come to have even though one has never had a first-order desire.
The existence of a second-order desire for power does not there-
fore entail the existence of any first-order desires, and is compati-
ble with the empirical hypothesis that in the case of human beings,
“whatever is wanted is wanted for the sake of power” (Kaufmann,
1967, 511). If there is nothing contradictory in this hypothesis,
however, it is surely undeserving of serious consideration. It
would make human life an attempt to gain the ability to satisfy
first-order desires even though we have no such first-order de-
sires, or only those first-order desires we have invented or created
as an excuse for satisfying our second-order desire for power. It is
not seriously entertainable that human beings would have devel-
oped a desire for power (or perhaps more accurately, for a sense
of power) unless they already had other desires that they were
sometimes unable to satisfy. It seems obvious that the desire or
need for power develops on the foundation of other desires and
needs, even though in human beings obsessed by power it may
come to have more importance than any of them and may operate
in all human beings in some contexts in which no first-order
desire exists.
I conclude that Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power may be
construed as an empirical hypothesis that all human behavior is
motivated by a desire for power, but only at the cost of depriving
it of all plausibility, which would mean that Nietzsche was less
astute about psychological matters than many (including Freud)
212 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
have thought. I agree with Kaufmann’s suggestion that Nietz-
sche’s doctrine of the will to power must be empirical if it is to
cohere with his rejection of metaphysics and that it originated in
his reflections on human motivation —in his recognition of the
desire for power, or for a sense of power, as an important human
motive. I also agree that in calling our attention to this motive,
Nietzsche does illuminate large areas of human life and behav-
ior. I resist, however, the idea that Nietzsche believed that all
behavior is motivated by the desire for power because I do not
see any way in which this could be a plausible or interesting
hypothesis about human behavior. Of course, Nietzsche might
have believed it anyway. But, if we confine ourselves to the works
Nietzsche actually published, I will argue that we find little rea-
son to believe he did, and quite a bit to think he did not.
- The published argument for the world as will
to power
For determining Nietzsche’s published doctrine of the will to
power, Beyond Good and Evil seems the most important source.
Because Zarathustra’s conception of life as will to power is too
metaphorical and anthropomorphic to take seriously as a literal
account of the essence of life and gives us no reason to assume
that Nietzsche accepts it, we would naturally look for Nietzsche’s
own doctrine of the will to power in Beyond Good and Evil, the
first book published after Zarathustra. BG does not disappoint in
this regard. It not only contains the first articulation of the doc-
trine of will to power in Nietzsche’s own voice, but its first two
parts contain four relatively detailed sections that provide a
more sustained reflection on the doctrine than we find in any of
Nietzsche’s other books (BG 9, 22, 23, 36). It also discusses the
will to power by name in at least eight other sections (BG 13, 44,
51, 186, 198, 211, 227, 259), and in several others without men-
tioning it by name (BG 230, 257). The will to power is mentioned
much less frequently in Nietzsche’s later books, and it never
again receives sustained discussion or explanation.
If we had to choose one of BG’s passages on the will to power
as the most important, 36 would be the obvious choice. It pres-
ents a detailed argument for the cosmological doctrine of will to
power, and is the only passage in all of Nietzsche’s published
writings to do so. I will argue, however, that if we look at the
THE WILL TO POWER 2 13
argument carefully, we find overwhelming reason to deny that
Nietzsche accepts it.
In the first place, he formulates both premises and conclusion
in hypothetical form. He begins by asking us to “suppose noth-
ing else is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions,
and we can not get down, or up, to any other ‘reality’ besides the
reality of our drives.” After a relatively long argument, he con-
cludes that “the world viewed from inside, the world defined
and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’ —it would
be ‘will to power’ and nothing else” (BG 36). This passage cer-
tainly tells us how one could argue for the conclusion that the
world is will to power. But it asserts neither the premises nor the
conclusion. It tells us that if we accept a number of premises –
that no reality is “given” to us except that of our passions or
affects (i.e., our will), that the will is a causal power, and that our
entire instinctive life can be explained as a development of one
form of will, will to power —then we have a right to “determine
all effective force univocally as will to power” and thus to regard
will to power as the world’s “intelligible character.” At most, the
passage itself gives us reason to believe that Nietzsche accepts the
last of these premises, which he apparently calls “my proposi-
tion.” But as he does nothing to assert any of the other premises,
nothing in the passage commits Nietzsche to the argument. Of
course, if the other premises are obviously true, or if Nietzsche
claims they are true elsewhere, we would have strong reason to
suppose that he accepted the argument. In fact, however, the
other two premises I have mentioned have little plausibility, and
Nietzsche argues against them in BG and other works.
The first premise —that only the world of our desires and
passions is “given” as real, and that we cannot get up, or down, to
any other “reality” than that of our drives —seems to mean that
we have knowledge regarding the existence and nature of our
drives, but not regarding anything else, that is, the external or
material world. The basis for accepting this premise cannot be
experience – for it challenges what experience has to teach us
about the external world, but must be an a priori account of what
constitutes “true knowledge,” an account that gives the inner
world priority over the outer. Why would anyone think we had
reason to accept such a position?
The only plausible answer would have to be some variation on
Descartes’ granting of priority to the inner world because of its
214 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
alleged indubitability. The reality of our own thoughts is “given”
to us, immediately certain, according to Descartes, whereas the
existence of the external world can be doubted. To make it even
halfway plausible that we cannot get up or down to a “reality”
other than the world of our drives, Nietzsche would have to
offer a similar argument, with desires or drives playing the role
Descartes gave to thoughts. He would have to claim, much as
Schopenhauer did, that the fact that “I will” (effectively desire) is
directly present to me, thus “given” or “immediately certain,”
whereas all knowledge of the external world is mediated by ob-
servation and is therefore dubitable. In that case, the first prem-
ise would openly conflict with Nietzsche’s denial in BG 16 that
there are any “immediate certainties,” including “I think” or “I
will.” BG 34 returns to the issue of “immediate certainties,” claim-
ing that faith in them is “a moral naivete that reflects honor on
us philosophers,” though “apart from morality, this faith is a
stupidity that reflects little honor on us.”
Even if we could find a way of defending the first premise of
BG 36 without commitment to “immediate certainties,” it would
still be incompatible with BG 19’s criticism of philosophers like
Schopenhauer who “speak of the will as if it were the best-known
thing in the world.” For that is exactly what the premise asserts.
The argument of BG 36 is, in effect, that because the will is the
only thing we really know, we must make the experiment of
explaining the rest of the world in terms of its type of causality. I
do not see how we can seriously believe that Nietzsche accepted
the doctrine of the will to power on the basis of this argument.
The second part of the argument —that we must attempt to
explain the rest of the world in terms of the will’s kind of
causality —is even more obviously incompatible with Nietzsche’s
views than the first premise. For Nietzsche does not believe in
the causality of the will. Consider GS 127:
Every thoughtless person believes that will alone is effective; that
willing is something simple, a brute datum, underivable, and intel-
ligible by itself. He is convinced that when he does something —
strikes something, for example —it is he that strikes, and that he
did strike because he willed it. He does not see any problem here;
the feeling of will seems sufficient to him not only for the assump-
tion of cause and effect, but also for the faith that he understands
that relation. He knows nothing of the mechanism of what hap-
THE WILL TO POWER 2 15
pened and of the hundredfold fine work that needs to be done to
bring about the strike, or of the incapacity of the will in itself to do
even the tiniest part of it. The will is for him a magically effective
force; the faith in the will as the cause of effects is the faith in
magically effective forces.
Nietzsche could not have made clearer that he denies the causal-
ity of the will [Maudemarie does not distinguish here between free will and ‘will’ in the determinist sense, thus her error.]. Later works refer to “the great calamity of an error
that will is something which is effective,” and insist that today we
know it is “only a word” (TI II, 5), or only “a resultant” (A 14).
His point is the same when he responds as follows to the “old
belief” that we are “causal in the act of willing.”
Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The “inner world” is
full of phantoms and will-o’-the wisps: the will is one of them. The
will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything
either – it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent (TI
VI, 3).
In BG itself, Nietzsche explains that what we actually refer to
when we talk of “the will” is a complex of sensation, thought, and
the affect of command (the feeling of commanding an action).
But because we use one word for this complex, and it appears, in
the vast majority of cases, only when the action was to be expected,
we are able to deceive ourselves into believing that “willing suf-
fices for action” (BG 19), that is, that we experience in ourselves
something that commands and thereby brings about actions.
Nietzsche’s problem with this seems clear from BG 3. He does not
deny that something within us has causal power. But he denies
that the ultimate causes of our actions are conscious: “most of the
conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced
into certain channels by his instincts” (BG 3). The ultimate causes
of our actions, then, are not the conscious thoughts and feelings
with which Nietzsche claims we identify the will.
Given these passages, we cannot reasonably attribute to Nietz-
sche the argument of BG 36. The problem is not that it makes
use of the idea of will, but that it depends crucially on what
Nietzsche has explicitly and repeatedly rejected, a belief in the
causality of the will. “The question,” according to this argument,
2 l 6 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether
we believe in the causality of the will: if we do – and at bottom our
faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself- then
we have to make the experiment of positing the causality of the will
as the only one. “Will,” of course, can effect only “will” —and not
“matter” (not “nerves,” for example). In short, one has to risk the
hypothesis whether will does not affect will whenever “effects” are
recognized —and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, inso-
far as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will (BG 36).
This may give the impression that Nietzsche supports the causal-
ity of the will because otherwise he would have to give up some-
thing we cannot do without, “our faith . . . in causality itself.” If
so, it seems to me that Nietzsche is playing with us, for he clearly
believes we can do without this faith. Consider TI VI, 3:
People have believed at all times that they knew what a cause is;
but whence did we take our knowledge – or more precisely, the
faith that we had such knowledge? From the realm of the famous
“inner facts,” of which not a single one has so far proved to be
factual. We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing: we
thought here at least we caught causality in the act.
Nietzsche makes the point repeatedly that we have interpreted
causality in terms of our experience of willing (this would mean,
in particular, the feeling of commanding an action). Our “faith in
causality” is our faith in this interpretation of the causal relation.
But BG 21 has already urged us to abandon this “faith”: “one
should use ’cause’ and ‘effect’ only as pure concepts, that is to say,
as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and
commmunication.” Nietzsche’s formulations in this passage may
still belong to stage 5 of his tale of the “true world,” because he
does not in any later book call causal concepts “fictions” or deny
their role in explanation. But his point in this passage —to rule
out “the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the
cause press and push until it effects its end” (BG 21) – does not
require these formulations. It is the same point Hume designed
his analysis of causality as constant conjunction to serve: as Nietz-
sche puts it, that the idea of an ” ‘unfree will’. . . amounts to a
misuse of cause and effect.” In other words, our resistance to the
idea of human behavior as determined comes at least in part
from our misunderstanding of causal relations as involving “con-
THE WILL TO POWER 217
straint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom”
(BG 21). Nietzsche differs from Hume only in claiming that our
misunderstanding of determinism comes from our projection of
our own experience of willing, and of being subject to the will of
others, into our idea of causality.
I conclude from this that Nietzsche encourages us to continue
to think in causal terms (going so far as to equate the “sound
conception of cause and effect” with “science” and “knowledge”
in A 49) but to abandon the interpretation of causality we derive
from our experience of willing. BG 36 therefore gives us no
reason to retain belief in the causality of the will, nor any way of
reconciling its argument with Nietzsche’s repeated rejection of
that causality. Various means of reconciliation have been sug-
gested, but none seem plausible. Schacht implies that the causal-
ity at issue in BG 36 is of the type Nietzsche was prepared to
accept (185). However, this ignores the fact that Nietzsche explic-
itly makes the argument of BG 36 depend on the causality of the
will, something he nowhere accepts. Schacht denies that Nietz-
sche’s use of “will” to describe the world’s “intelligible character”
conflicts with his dismissal of will as “just a word” on the grounds
that “will” is used here as a metaphor, with the conceptual con-
tent of “will to power” specified and exhausted through the idea
of a tendency or disposition of forces “to extend their influence
and dominate others” (220—2). But even if we accept this, it will
not save the argument of BG 36. For the latter depends on an
appeal to our intuition of ourselves as causal in the act of willing
as a basis for interpreting the material world as will to power,
and that is precisely the appeal for which Nietzsche accused
Schopenhauer of enthroning a “primeval mythology” (GS 127).
1
- Two other strategies of reconciliation may seem promising. First, one could
argue that Nietzsche rejects the causality of the will only in the sense of mental
causes or conscious acts of will (TI VI, 3, e.g.). In that case, as long as willing is
not interpreted so that it must be conscious, Nietzsche need not reject its
causality. The problem is that if willing is not conscious, it becomes impossible
to understand how BG 36 would support its first premise: that only willing is
“given,” and that we cannot get up or down to any world beyond our drives.
Danto’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s argument for the will to power suggests
a second strategy (231): that Nietzsche rejects the will’s capacity for acting on
matter, but does not deny its ability to have an effect on other wills. “Will can
only effect will, of course” (BG 36). The problem is that the idea that will
affects only will is clearly part of the primitive mythology —”one can have an
effect only on beings who will” – that Nietzsche claims Schopenhauer en-
throned (GS 127).
2 18 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
Perhaps Nietzsche left us a different and better argument for
interpreting the world as will to power in his notebooks. But BG
36 contains his only published argument for this interpretation,
and it is a quite clear and extended argument, and it therefore
deserves to be looked at in its own terms before we start decid-
ing that we can understand it better in terms of the Nachlass. If
what I have been arguing is correct-that Nietzsche gives us
very strong reason to deny that he accepts the argument of BG
36 —it follows not that we should try to fix up the premises, but
that we should try to understand why he presented us with this
argument. Surely there is something in need of explanation
here, if the only argument he published for the cosmological
doctrine of will to power appears to depend on premises he
rejects in the same work. I suggest that this is quite deliberate,
and that Nietzsche is challenging us to look for an explanation. I
am encouraged in this interpretation by a number of the pas-
sages that surround BG 36: by Nietzsche’s praise of masks (BG
40), his stress on the importance of the distinction between the
esoteric and the exoteric (BG 30), his admission that he does
everything to be “difficult to understand” combined with ex-
pressed gratitude for “the good will to some subtlety of interpre-
tation” (BG 27), and even by his claim that refutability is not “the
least charm of a theory” (BG 18). The best place to look for an
explanation is surely not the Nachlass, which only gets us side-
tracked into more arguments of the same kind, but the sur-
rounding material of BG.
- Philosophy and the doctrine of will to power in
Beyond Good and Evil
Nehamas aptly calls Beyond Good and Evil a work of “dazzling
obscurity,” insisting that individual sections dazzle with their bril-
liance, yet “we do not understand its structure, its narrative line”
(1988, 46). I believe we may be able to get clearer on a major part
of its structure, and at least one of its narrative lines, if we come
to it with questions posed by section 36: Namely, what is the
function of its argument in the larger work? And why does
Nietzsche present to us in such detail an argument he does not
accept?
Consider the characterization of philosophers in BG 5:
THE WILL TO POWER 2 i g
What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously,
half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how
innocent they are —how often and how easily they make mistakes
and go astray; in short, their childishness and childlikeness —but
that they are not honest enough in their work, although they
make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is
touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered
and reached their real opinions through the self-development of
a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the
mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish —and talk
of “inspiration”); while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch,
indeed a kind of “inspiration” —most often a desire of the heart
that has been filtered and made abstract – that they defend with
reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates
who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen
for their prejudices which they baptize “truths” – and very far
from having the good courage of the conscience that admits this,
precisely this, to itself; very far from having the good taste of the
courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy
or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself.
Given this criticism, we would expect Nietzsche to deny that he
has arrived at his own philosophical views through a “divinely
unconcerned dialectic” – that is, solely through rational consider-
ations and concern for truth without regard to what he would
like to be true – and to exhibit “the good taste of the courage to
let this be known.”
We can fit these expectations with the puzzling nature of BG
- Its argument is exactly of the type one would expect Nietz-
sche to give for the cosmological doctrine of the will to power if
he claimed to arrive at it through a “divinely unconcerned dialec-
tic.” I suggest that by constructing the argument so that it relies
on premises he rejects earlier in the very same book, Nietzsche
seeks to display the courage and self-knowledge to warn us that
his doctrine is “a desire of the heart that has been filtered and
made abstract,” a “prejudice” he has baptized “truth.”
It will seem strange that Nietzsche would construct an argu-
ment he does not accept to warn us of the motivation behind his
doctrine. After all, whatever his motives for accepting it, his job
as a philosopher is to explain the reasons anyone would have to
accept it. The construction of an argument he knows is bad for
his doctrine suggests he believes there are no good reasons to
22O NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
accept it. But the motives philosophers have had for construct-
ing their theories seem irrelevant to whether there are good
reasons for accepting them. To answer this objection, I will argue
that Nietzsche’s claim in BG 5 concerns not merely the motiva-
tion of philosophers, but also the status of their doctrines. When
read in light of the sections that follow, BG 5 makes it reasonable
to conclude that Nietzsche denies the truth of the cosmological
doctrine of will to power and that he seeks to warn us of this by
constructing the argument of BG 36.
Consider BG 6, which I have already discussed in Chapter 6
(section 3). Nietzsche claims that the moral or immoral intentions
of a philosophy constitute “the real germ of life from which the
whole plant” grows. He illustrates what he means when he pro-
ceeds to treat Stoicism as a model of philosophy. You Stoics, he
writes, “pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in
nature” (BG 9). That is, Stoics claim to derive from the study of
nature reasons for accepting the moral law “live according to
nature.” After arguing against the plausibility of their claim, Nietz-
sche explains that the Stoics really “want something opposite.”
Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal on nature –
even on nature – and incorporate them in her; you demand that
she be nature “according to the Stoa” and you would like all
existence to exist only after your own image —as an immense
eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your
love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently,
so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely, Stoi-
cally, that you can no longer see her differently. And some abys-
mal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that
because you know how to tyrannize yourselves – Stoicism is self-
tyranny – nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic –
a piece of nature?
But this is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened
with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy
begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own
image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive
itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the
world,” to the causa prima (BG g).
2
- I ignore the reference to the will to power in the last line of this passage for
now, but discuss it in detail in section 4.
THE WILL TO POWER 221
Nietzsche’s point is that though philosophers claim otherwise,
their theories are not even designed to arrive at truth. They are
attempts to construct the world, or an image of the world, in
terms of the philosopher’s values. I have already interpreted
Nietzsche as saying this about metaphysics (Chapter 6, section 3).
The metaphysician is not, contrary to what he claims, driven by a
desire for knowledge of ultimate reality, of things as they are
themselves. Because we have no conception of any such thing, it
could be of no cognitive interest to us, and Nietzsche does not
believe that metaphysics has been based on a mere mistake about
this. He believes that philosophers have used the idea of things-
in-themselves to create the appearance of room for a “true” or
metaphysical world, thus as an excuse for baptizing as the
“truth” what is only their prejudices read into the world. In the
passage I have just quoted, Nietzsche claims that this is true of all
philosophy. If he is consistent about this, he must admit that his
cosmological doctrine of the will to power is an attempt to read
his values into the world and that he does not consider it to be
true. His acceptance of it is inspired not by a will to truth, but by
a will to construct the world in the image of his own values. The
Stoics construct the world by picturing nature as subject to law.
Nietzsche pictures the same nature as will to power.
He pretty much admits this in BG 22, a passage famous for its
apparent admission that the doctrine of will to power is “only
interpretation.”
Forgive me as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mal-
ice of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation: but
“nature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so
proudly, as thought – why, it exists only owing to your interpreta-
tion and “bad philology.” It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but
rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of
meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the demo-
cratic instincts of the modern soul! “Everywhere equality before
the law; nature is no different in that respect, no better off than
we are” —a fine instance of ulterior motivation . . . But as was said
above, this is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come
along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation,
could read out of the same “nature,” and with regard to the same
phenomena, rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless
enforcement of claims of power – an interpreter who would pic-
ture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all “will to
222 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
power” so vividly that almost every word, even the word “tyranny”
itself would eventually seem unsuitable, or a weakening and at-
tenuating metaphor – being too human – but he might, neverthe-
less, end by asserting the same about the world as you do, namely,
that it has a “necessary” and “calculable” course, not because laws
obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every
power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment. Suppos-
ing that this too is only interpretation —and you will be eager
enough to make this objection? – well, so much the better (BG 22).
It is easy to misunderstand the kind of “interpretation” discussed
in this passage. For Nietzsche, because all knowledge is interpreta-
tion, physics is interpretation too. As I have argued (Chapter 5),
this amounts to anti-foundationalism and therefore to the claim
that knowledge, and therefore physics too, is always subject to
revision. But Nietzsche does not use “interpretation” in this sense
in the above passage, as he shows by not including physics as
interpretation (in contrast, e.g., to BG 14). Instead, the theories
and mathematical formulas in terms of which the physicist calcu-
lates and predicts the relations between various phenomena here
count as the “text,” which Nietzsche claims can be interpreted in
(at least two) different ways, as nature’s conformity to law or as will
to power. The interpretation one gives these mathematical formu-
las, he claims, depends on which moral values one reads into
them. We regard the physicist’s formulas as “laws” that nature
must obey because we read democratic prejudices – that is, demo-
cratic values – into them (though BG 9 makes clear we might get
the same result from the values of Stoicism). That is, we construct
or use metaphors to imagine or “picture” the text provided by
physics as analogous to something in our own experience, and
which metaphors we use reflect and depend upon our moral
values. The passage suggests that such metaphors have no cogni-
tive function, but only extend to the universe our sense of moral-
ity, generalizing and therefore glorifying what we consider impor-
tant. This in no way denies that physics provides knowledge or
truth. Not physics itself, that is, physical theories, but the meta-
phors in terms of which we interpret them read moral values into
nature.
When Nietzsche argues that “with opposite intentions and
modes of interpretation,” we could, in effect, construe the same
THE WILL TO POWER 223
nature as will to power, he means that we could arrive at the
cosmological doctrine of the will to power by reading into the
same text provided by physics values opposed to democratic
ones. When he suggests that the will to power, too, is “only inter-
pretation,” therefore, he puts it on a par not with physics, but
with a belief in nature’s “conformity to law,” which owes its exis-
tence to “bad ‘philology’ ” and democratic values. I therefore
take his “so much the better” as an admission that his doctrine of
the will to power does read his values into nature, that he there-
fore does not regard it as any truer than the idea that nature
conforms to law, but that this is fine with him since he thereby
remains consistent with everything he has said about knowledge
and philosophy.
Of course, if one believes that Nietzsche denies all truth, it will
come as no surprise that he denies the truth of the cosmological
doctrine of will to power. But my whole interpretation argues
against the larger claim. I therefore interpret Nietzsche’s admis-
sion in BG 22 that his doctrine is “only interpretation” as a warn-
ing that, in contrast to the claims he makes, he does not regard the
cosmological will to power as true, or as belonging to the realm of
knowledge. Although he does not mention “philosophy” in BG
22, the metaphor of nature’s obedience to law is the very same one
he stresses when presenting the projection of the Stoics’ values
into nature as the model of what philosophers always do. If my
interpretation of it is correct, therefore, BG 22 implies that philo-
sophical theories are not true, that they do not belong to the realm
of knowledge. It suggests instead that philosophers always take a
“text” provided by some form of knowledge and read values into
it by constructing the appropriate metaphors.
It is not difficult to interpret the cosmological will to power so
that it fits this pattern. In at least two passages of BG, the will to
power is presented as if it had value implications. In BG 186, the
fact that the essence of life is will to power is taken to show “how
insipidly false and sentimental” Schopenhauer’s basic principle
of morality is. In BG 259, the fact that life is will to power is
presented as showing the impossibility of overcoming exploita-
tion, and therefore the life-negating character of the demand
for its overcoming.
According to the usual interpretation and the one immediately
suggested by these passages, Nietzsche gives reasons against cer-
224 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
tain value judgments (hurting anyone is wrong; exploitation is
wrong) by appealing to the truth about life, that its essence is will
to power. In that case, Nietzsche would be doing what the Stoics
claimed to be doing, namely, basing value judgments on knowl-
edge of nature. But if Nietzsche’s own case fits what he claims
about all philosophy, he has actually arrived at his characteriza-
tion of nature by reading his values into it. He wants nature to live
only after his own image, as an eternal generalization and glorifi-
cation of what he finds valuable.
To pursue this line of interpretation, we must take the world
as will to power as a generalization and glorification of the will to
power, the psychological entity (the drive or desire for power)
discussed in section 1. Because he considers this drive so impor-
tant, I suggest, he glorifies it by picturing all human motivation,
all of nature, and sometimes, all of reality, as its expression.
When he appears to reject Schopenhauer’s morality on the
grounds that life is will to power (BG 186), we can read him as
rejecting it instead because he values the will to power, which
Schopenhauer’s morality condemns. And when he rejects the
demand for an end to exploitation on the grounds that life is will
to power (BG 259), we can interpret this as a claim that the
strengthening of the will to power, which he values, makes exploi-
tation inevitable.
TI’s comments on the Greeks support this reading. “I saw
their strongest instinct, the will to power,” Nietzsche writes, “I
saw them tremble before the indomitable force of this drive.”
This implies that the Greeks had other instincts, thus that the
will to power was one among other drives, albeit the most impor-
tant one. Because the passage proceeds to identify this drive with
“inner explosives” and a “tremendous inward tension” that “dis-
charged itself in terrible and ruthless hostility to the outside
world,” one may doubt that Nietzsche values it so highly as to
generalize and glorify it in his picture of the world as will to
power. But the same passage gives an indication of why he
would, by presenting the will to power as responsible for the
Greeks’ political institutions and other cultural achievements.
Their political institutions grew out of preventative measures
taken to protect each other against the will to power, Nietzsche
claims, “and with festivals and the arts they also aimed at nothing
other than to feel on top, to show themselves on top” (TI X, 3).
Further, the beginning of The Antichrist leaves no doubt that
THE WILL TO POWER 225
Nietzsche did place the highest value on this drive when it gives
this answer to the question “what is good?”: “Everything that
heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power
itself.” What Nietzsche here puts forward as the good seems to
be exactly what he found in such abundance among the Greeks:
the will to power – a psychological entity, one drive among oth-
ers (though in the Greeks, the strongest drive) – and the satisfac-
tion of this drive, “the feeling of power in human beings” and
“power itself.” It is clearly a particular component of human life,
rather than life or the world as a whole, that Nietzsche here
values under the title of “the will to power.” It is this component
of human life, I am claiming, that Nietzsche “generalized and
glorified” in his picture of life and the cosmos as will to power.
In addition to its line of argument about the nature of philoso-
phy, BG offers more specific support for my reading in the first
section after BG 36 to mention “will to power.” After describing
those who call themselves “free spirits” but want only “security,
lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone,” Nietz-
sche writes that “we with opposed feelings” (wir Umgekehrten)
having opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and
how the plant “man” has so far grown most vigorously to a
height – we think that this has happened every time under the
opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerousness of a situa-
tion must grow to the point of enormity, his power of invention
and simulation (his “spirit”) had to develop under prolonged pres-
sure and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life-will had
to be changed into an unconditional power-will (BG 44).
The distinction drawn here between a “life-will” and a “power-
will” constitutes very strong evidence for the interpretation I have
suggested. It amounts to an admission that life itself is not will to
power, because it says that a power-will does not automatically
come with life, but must be developed by enhancing one’s life-
will.
3
The passage also shows that Nietzsche believes there is rea-
- Nietzsche suggests the same point in the passage in which he explains the
Greeks’ will to power. He writes that “one needed to be strong; danger was
near, it lurked everywhere. The magnificent physical suppleness, the auda-
cious realism and immoralism which distinguished the Hellene constituted a
need, not ‘nature.’ It only resulted, it was not there from the start” (TI X, 3).
This means that certain effects of the will to power were not there from the
start, and it implies that the will to power itself was something that grew
226 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
son to value the will to power that has nothing to do with cos-
mology (or metaphysical biology/psychology), namely, that every
enhancement of the human type depends on a strengthening of
the will to power. Nietzsche evidently finds in the will to power the
source of everything “for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on
earth, for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality —
something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine” (BG 188). He
believes that these enhancements of the human type require “the
craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul
itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote,
further-stretching, more comprehensive states” (BG 257), and
that this would have been impossible without that “pathos of dis-
tance’ that grows out of the “ingrained difference between strata”
that one finds in an aristocratic society. The idea seems to be that
the desire for, hence the development of, such higher states of
soul requires a spiritualized version of the will to power.
This claim requires much more explanation and examination
than I can give it within the scope of this book. But the passages I
have discussed provide strong evidence that Nietzsche gives a
reason for valuing the will to power that in no way implies that the
world or life is will to power, or that human beings want only
power, namely, that this drive is the source of what is most valu-
able in human life, the activities and states of soul that make life
worth living. They also help us to see the following passage, which
begins with a description of psychology as the “doctrine of the
forms and development of the will to power,” as a partial explana-
tion of why Nietzsche was not more forthright about his position:
The power of moral prejudice has penetrated deeply into the
most spiritual world, which would seem to be the coldest and most
devoid of presuppositions, and has obviously operated in an inju-
rious, inhibiting, blinding, and distorting manner. A proper
physio-psychology has to contend with the unconscious resistance
in the heart of the investigator, it has “the heart” against it: even a
doctrine of the reciprocal dependence of the “good” and the
“wicked” drives, causes (as refined immorality) distress and aver-
sion in a still hale and hearty conscience —still more so, a doctrine
of the derivation of all good impulses from wicked ones. If, how-
ever, a person should regard even the affects of hatred, envy,
stronger under the conditions of Greek life, that it was not their “strongest
instinct” as a matter of “nature.”
THE WILL TO POWER 2 27
covetousness, and the lust to rule as conditions of life, as factors
which, fundamentally and essentially, must be present in the gen-
eral economy of life (and must, therefore, be further enhanced if
life is to be further enhanced) – he will suffer from such a view of
things as from seasickness (BG 23).
Finally, the passages discussed here allow us to see how Nietz-
sche’s cosmological doctrine of will to power fits the characteriza-
tion he gives of philosophy in his discussion of the Stoics: He
pictures life as will to power because he values the will to power,
not because he has reason to believe that life is will to power (or
that power is the only human motive). The argument of BG 36,
in the context of the account of philosophy in part one of BG,
can therefore be read as Nietzsche’s way of letting it be known —
“whether to warn an enemy or friend” (BG 5) —that his doctrine
of the will to power is a construction of the world from the
viewpoint of his moral values.
- The psychology of the will to power and its
relation to the will to truth
I have argued that Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power is not a
doctrine at all. Although Nietzsche says that life is will to power,
he also gives us clues that he does not regard this as a truth or a
matter of knowledge, but as a construction of the world from the
viewpoint of his values. However, this is only half the story, for it
is not plausible to interpret everything Nietzsche says about
power in this way. He clearly claims all sorts of knowledge of the
human desire for power, for example, and this is the other side
of the story.
What Nietzsche claims knowledge of, I suggest, is the will to
power, a second-order drive that he recognizes as dependent for
its existence on other drives, but which he generalizes and glori-
fies in his picture of life as will to power. The knowledge Nietz-
sche claims of the will to power belongs to psychology rather
than to metaphysics or cosmology. In BG 23, he writes that he
understands psychology as “the doctrine of the forms and develop-
ment of the will to power” identifies this psychology as a “proper
physio-psychology,” to differentiate it, I assume, from anything
metaphysical, and asserts that psychology is “the path to the
fundamental problems.” Interpreting the will to power as a
228 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
second-order drive allows us to see that Nietzsche’s claims to
knowledge of it are perfectly compatible with his claims about
knowledge. His psychology of the will to power does not depend
on denying the relevance of sense testimony, or on the assump-
tion of a thing-in-itself, and is therefore not a metaphysical doc-
trine or a violation of his perspectivism. Although I cannot un-
dertake a systematic exploration of Nietzsche’s psychology here,
I will examine enough of it to explain why he considers it “the
path to the fundamental problems.”
I will focus on Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to truth in its
relation to his claim that philosophy is the “the most spiritual
expression of the will to power” (BG 9). This claim about philoso-
phy has a prominent place in the treatment of the will to power
in both BG and Z. BG first mentions the will to power to charac-
terize the drive responsible for philosophy (BG 9). Z introduces
it to characterize what lies behind a people’s values – what the
people call “good and evil,” Zarathustra says, reflects their “will
to power” (Z I, 15) – but mentions it next to claim that the peo-
ple’s values reflect the will to power of the wisest (Z II, 12),
among whom philosophers are at the very least included. In the
same section, Zarathustra calls the will to power of the wisest
their “danger.” He then proceeds to formulate the cosmological
version of will to power, in the obviously metaphorical and an-
thropomorphic language mentioned earlier. An interpretation
of these claims about values, philosophy, and the will to power
will help to explain why Nietzsche considers knowledge of the
will to power “the path to the fundamental problems” (BG 23)
and why he generalizes and glorifies this drive in his cosmologi-
cal doctrine of will to power.
First, why does Zarathustra portray values as the voice of a
people’s will to power (Z I, 15)? The point does not seem to be to
explain the act of valuing. About that, Zarathustra says merely
that a people could not survive without esteeming. The will to
power is introduced to explain why a people esteems as it does.
Zarathustra has already said that a people must not esteem as its
neighbor esteems, presumably because it would then have no
identity as a separate people. So what a people values depends in
part on what its neighbor values. The other major factor that
determines values, he suggests, is what gives a people the great-
est sense of its power or effectiveness. But that depends on sev-
eral other factors. Because power is a second-order desire, it
THE WILL TO POWER
depends, to begins with, on their first-order desires. If there is
no perceived need or desire for something, the ability to do or
get it will not give a sense of power, and therefore, according to
Zarathustra’s account, it will not be esteemed. A second factor he
mentions is what they find difficult. If something comes easy, the
ability to do it will not give much sense of power either. Finally,
Zarathustra says a people value what makes them “rule, and
triumph, and shine to the envy of their neighbor” (Z I, 15).
Various forms of winning in competition with others – including
ruling over them – provide very obvious ways of confirming
one’s power in the world. Zarathustra’s stress on this factor
seems to show that Kaufmann’s account of the will to power is
too moralistic when he says (1958, 119) that what is meant by
“power” in this context “is clearly power over self,” or, as he calls
it elsewhere, “self-overcoming.” Nothing Zarathustra says in this
first passage on the will to power suggests the possibility that
power over oneself would satisfy the will to power, much less that
it has the kind of privileged status Kaufmann gives it. What the
will to power aims at is evidently a sense of effectiveness in rela-
tion to the world, a sense of one’s ability to have the world satisfy
one’s (first-order) will.
Self-overcoming is not connected to the will to power until
Zarathustra claims in part 2 that the people’s values reflect the
will to power of the wisest. This means that the people’s values
are determined by what gives those they recognize as the wisest
(priests and philosophers) the greatest feeling of power or effec-
tiveness. Because Nietzsche argues in GM that priests and phi-
losophers have been proponents of the ascetic ideal, this seems
to mean that the self-overcoming or self-denial required by the
ascetic ideal has given priests and philosophers the greatest sense
of their power or effectiveness. This suggests that priests and
philosophers connected the will to power to self-overcoming,
diverting it away from more obvious ways of acquiring a sense of
power.
This connection to the ascetic ideal also explains why Zara-
thustra warns the wise that the will to power is their “danger.” For
this ideal appears to turn the activity of valuing, which Zara-
thustra presents as necessary for, and directed by, life, against life
itself. Both Zarathustra and Nietzsche turn to the psychology of
the will to power to understand how this is possible.
Nietzsche explains asceticism as an internalization of the will
23O NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
to power. In BG 51, he tells us it was the ” ‘will to power’ that
made [the most powerful human beings] stop before the saint”
(BG51).
Why did they bow? In him —and as it were behind the question
mark of his fragile and miserable appearance —they sensed the
superior force that sought to test itself in such conquest, the
strength of will in which they recognized their own strength and
delight in dominion: they honored something in themselves when
they honored the saint. Moreover, the sight of the saint awakened
a suspicion in them: such an enormous amount of denial, of anti-
nature will not have been desired for nothing, they said to them-
selves and asked themselves. Perhaps there is a reason for it, some
very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret
comforters and visitors, might have inside information?
That is, the powerful perceived the saint’s asceticism as an ex-
pression of his will to power, even though he turns this will
against his own impulses. In his discussion of the bad conscience,
Nietzsche makes it explicit that this self-denial expresses an inter-
nalized will to power (GM II, 18). He claims that “the delight that
the selfless man, the self-denier, the self-sacrificer feels . . . is tied
to cruelty,” and that the force involved is the same force that is
“at work on a grander scale in those artists of violence and orga-
nizers who build states”:
namely, the instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power);
only here the material upon which the form-giving and ravishing
nature of this force vents itself is man himself, his whole ancient
animal self and not, as in that greater and more obvious phenome-
non, some other man, other men (GM II, 18).
The will to power described here expresses itself by disciplining,
castigating, forming, and otherwise getting power over the self.
How did this come about? Nietzsche evidently believes that one
condition for this internalization of the will to power is that
“outward discharge was inhibited” (GM II, 16). He traces the bad
conscience to the change that occurred when human beings were
“finally enclosed within the walls of society and peace,” and the
bulwarks of political organization kept them from satisfying the
“instincts of wild, free, prowling man.” These instincts – “hos-
tility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in
THE WILL TO POWER 23 1
destruction” —could be satisfied only by being turned back
against their possessors. Given that Nietzsche explicitly claims
that this is a matter of internalizing the will to power, he must
count the instincts civilization suppressed as external expressions
of the will to power. When such external expression was blocked,
human beings got their sense of power by directing the same
instincts against the self—by hurting and persecuting themselves
rather than others. In this project, they had help from the priests
who invented the ascetic ideal.
Nietzsche treats the priests as the real experts in the internal-
ization of the will to power. In their case, it is internal rather than
external barriers that kept them from directing the will to power
outward. There is “from the first something unhealthy in such
priestly aristocracies and the habits ruling in them which turn
them away from action and alternate between brooding and
emotional explosions” (GM I, 6). The priests are the “most evil
enemies,” Nietzsche claims, “because they are the most impotent,”
i.e., the ones who have the greatest problem giving direct or
external expression to their will to power. “It is because of their
impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny
proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred”
(GM 1,7). The priests’ inability to exercise their will to power in
direct ways strengthens it, so that it requires for its satisfaction
incredible acts of “spiritual revenge,” and is “ultimately satisfied
with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’
values” (GM I, 7).
The priests’ asceticism is another way in which their strong will
to power is expressed. Nietzsche makes clear that the priest’s
self-denial aims for power not merely over the self, but also over
life:
here rules a ressentiment without equal, that of an insatiable in-
stinct and power-will that wants to become master not over some-
thing in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful,
and basic conditions; here an attempt is made to employ force to
block up the wells of force; here physiological well-being itself is
viewed askance, and especially the outward expression of this
well-being, beauty and joy; while pleasure is felt and sought in ill-
constitutedness, decay, pain, mischance, ugliness, voluntary de-
privation, self-mortification, self-flagellation, self-sacrifice. All
this is to the highest degree paradoxical: we stand before a dis-
232 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
cord that wants to be discordant, that enjoys itself in this suffering
and even grows more self-confident and triumphant the more its
own presupposition, its physiological capacity of life, decreases
(GMIII, 11).
But, contrary to what the ascetic believes, Nietzsche claims that
asceticism is itself “an artifice for the preservation of life” (GM III,
12). The ascetic ideal “indicates a partial physiological obstruc-
tion and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life,
which have remained intact, continually struggle with new expe-
dients and devices.” The ascetic ideal is one such expedient, and
it engages human beings in a “physiological struggle against
death (more precisely: against disgust with life, against exhaus-
tion, against desire for the ‘end’).” This means that the ascetic
ideal actually promotes the affirmation of life – by which I mean
the sense of life’s value, the feeling that life is worth living – even
though its message is precisely that life itself has no value. And it
does this, according to Nietzsche’s theory, because it gives its
followers a sense of power.
I believe we find throughout GM the view that a sense of
power promotes, and is perhaps necessary for, the affirmation of
life. Nietzsche gives his most explicit statement of this view when
he calls the will to power the “most life-affirming drive” (GM III,
18). I take this to mean that the best way to promote the affirma-
tion of life – to overcome depression or disgust with life, to boost
one’s willingness to go on, to keep acting, willing, changing —is
to satisfy the need for a sense of power or effectiveness.
In the same passage, Nietzsche also makes clear that the priest
provides the people with alternatives to the more obvious ways
of satisfying their will to power that involve hurting each other.
An alternative is necessary because the more obvious expressions
of the will to power threaten to “blow up herd and herdsmen”
(GM III, 15), whereas the inability to express it at all threatens
human beings with depression or sickness of the will (e.g., GM
II, 16; III, 28). The point seems to be that without a sense that
our will matters, that we can be effective in the world, it will be
difficult to work up a great deal of enthusiasm for living and
doing.
4
The ascetic ideal evidently works to provide a sense of
- My formulations in this paragraph may distort the causal picture somewhat if
the feeling of power belongs to the level of consciousness, because Nietzsche
denies that the ultimate causes of our actions are found at that level. It would
THE WILL TO POWER 233
power, thereby promoting such enthusiasm for living, as Nietz-
sche suggests in the following account of the asceticism of early
philosophers:
cruelty towards themselves, inventive self-castigation —this was
the principle means these power-hungry hermits and innovators
of ideas required to overcome the gods and tradition in them-
selves, so as to be able to believe in their own innovations. I recall
the famous story of King Vishvamitra, who through millennia of
self-torture acquired such a feeling of power and self-confidence
that he endeavored to build a new heaven (GM III, 10).
Nietzsche thus explains asceticism as an “artifice for the preser-
vation of life” (GM III, 12). But why was the ascetic ideal needed
for this? That is, why couldn’t ascetics just internalize their will to
power and gain a sense of power without denying the value of
human life? The problem seems to be that an ascetic who be-
lieved he engaged in asceticism simply in order to get a sense of
power would no longer be able to get a sense of power from it.
As Nietzsche presents him, the priest is not satisfied simply by
having a sense of power over his other instincts; he needs a
feeling of power over life itself. This he gets by interpreting the
then be more in accord with Nietzsche’s views on these matters to think of a
sense of power as a phenomenological or epiphenomenal reflection of our
actual doings rather than a cause of them. In other words, we will have a sense
of power sufficient for enthusiasm in living and doing if there are no obstruc-
tions to acting, whereas we will suffer from physiological depression and its
psychological or conscious reflection, a sense of powerlessness, if such obstruc-
tions do block our path(s) to action. This fits Nietzsche’s physiological empha-
sis in his description of the ascetic ideal’s fight against disgust with life. He
claims that the ascetic ideal fights “profound physiological depression” {GM
III, 17) by allowing otherwise blocked impulses to be expressed against the
self. As a result “[t]he old depression, heaviness, and weariness were indeed
overcome through this system of [ascetic] procedures; life again became very
interesting: awake, everlastingly awake, sleepless, glowing, charred, spent and
yet not weary” (GM III, 20). The connection to a sense of power seems to be
that the latter is the reflection in consciousness of success in satisfying one’s
impulses. The ascetic ideal evidently works to promote a sense of power and
the affirmation of life by providing alternate ways of satisfying impulses. If
this is correct, we should formulate Nietzsche’s general thesis about the will to
power as a claim that a satisfaction of this drive, namely, a sense of power, is
the reflection in consciousness of whatever is necessary for the affirmation of
life. The ascetic ideal saved the will —fought depression, which amounts to
promoting the affirmation of life —by providing a way to satisfy otherwise
blocked impulses by directing them against the self, and the reflection in
consciousness of its success is a sense of power. I ignore this complication in
the remainder of my discussion.
234 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
denial of his other instincts as a triumph over life. This is what
the ascetic ideal allows him to do, by holding out self-denial as
the ideal, and life itself as without value unless it turn against
itself. The ascetic needs the valuation and interpretation of life
offered by the ascetic ideal in order to get a sense of power from
self-denial. It would not work to say to himself “I value self-
denial only because I get a feeling of power from it.” Because the
will to power is a second-order drive, being able to do something
furnishes a sense of power only if there is some independent
reason to want to be able to. Nietzsche says that the powerful
people who honored the ascetic thought that he must have some
“inside information” precisely because they could not interpret
his self-denial as a sign of strength or power unless they believed
he got something out of it besides a sense of power (BG 51).
Thus ascetics needed a way of interpreting their activity of self-
denial that gave it value quite apart from any sense of power
they got from it, which is what the ascetic ideal provided.
This explains why Nietzsche thinks that the will to truth over-
comes the ascetic ideal (Chapter 6, section 5). If his psychology
of asceticism is correct, once the will to truth exposes it, ascetics
can no longer get what they wanted from the ideal except by
denying or ignoring the truth. To believe fully that asceticism is
an expression of the same impulses that the ascetic ideal con-
demns, that is, the will to power, would make it impossible to get
a sense of power from ascetic practices, since it would make it
impossible to interpret them as a triumph over life. Nietzsche’s
psychology makes them appear instead as “an artifice for the
preservation of life,” a way in which life detains “its creatures in
life and compels them to live on” (BT 18). Rather than giving
mastery over life, asceticism amounts to being outsmarted or
mastered by life. This explains why Nietzsche considers psychol-
ogy the “path to the fundamental problems” (BG 23). Those
with the will to truth cannot go back to explicit acceptance of the
ascetic ideal once they accept Nietzsche’s claim that their will to
truth is itself an expression of the ascetic ideal. The difficulty
here is psychological: one would feel foolish rather than power-
ful embracing a life-devaluing ideal if one accepted Nietzsche’s
theory that one’s motive was to get a sense of power necessary
for feeling better about life. I have argued in the previous chap-
ter that those with the will to truth must therefore create a new
ideal. An examination of Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to
THE WILL TO POWER 235
truth will reinforce this point, and will help us to see the grounds
he has – in addition to his belief that the world needs such an
ideal – for thinking that philosophers need to create one.
Nietzsche claims, of course, that the will to truth is itself the
latest expression of the ascetic ideal. This means that the will to
truth expresses the will to power, as BG 230 also makes clear. In
the previous section, Nietzsche has explained that all of higher
culture is a spiritualization of cruelty, and that
even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize
things against the inclination of his spirit, and often enough
against the wishes of his heart – by saying No where he would like
to say Yes, love, and adore – and thus acts as an artist and trans-
former of cruelty. Indeed, any insistence on profundity and thor-
oughness is a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of the spirit
which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial – in all
desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.
This suggests that in the case of knowing, the will to power is
directed back against the knower. The knower gets a sense of
power by hurting “the basic will of the spirit.” But this seems
strange. If knowing is motivated by the desire for power, one
would expect it to be a desire for power over the objects of
knowledge.
In fact, the next section, which sets out to explain Nietzsche’s
claim about the “basic will of the spirit” because it “may not be
readily understood,” seems to admit that knowledge is first di-
rected by the need for a sense of power in relation to the exter-
nal world.
That commanding something which the people call “the spirit”
wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel
that it is master; it has the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will
that ties up, tames, and is domineering and truly masterful.
In thus explaining the will to knowledge in its first stage, Nietz-
sche ignores an earlier stage, where “knowing” is directed by
more immediately practical needs, the need to know how to
build a fire, kill an animal, bake bread, and so on. His concern in
this passage is to explain what motivates knowledge when we get
to a more theoretical level, where knowledge is wanted quite
apart from the obvious practical purposes it serves. The original
236 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
intent in such knowing, Nietzsche suggests, is to “appropriate
the foreign,” that is, “to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify
the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally con-
tradictory.” What it is after is growth, “or, more precisely, the
feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power” (BG 230).
On Nietzsche’s view, then, the desire for theoretical knowl-
edge is not originally directed by a will to truth. What the knower
wants is not truth, but the feeling of intellectual appropriation or
command over the world. Therefore, “an apparently opposite
drive serves this same will” (the will to power that intellectual
appropriation of the world serves):
a suddenly erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of deliberate
exclusion, a shutting of one’s windows, a kind of state of defense
against much that is knowable, a satisfaction with the dark, with
the limiting horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance – all of which
is necessary in proportion to a spirit’s power to appropriate, its
“digestive capacity,” to speak metaphorically —and actually “the
spirit” is relatively most similar to a stomach (BG 230).
Thus, the intellectual appropriator is too easily satisfied with a
feeling of command over the world to count as having a will to
truth. Of course, intellectual appropriation may happen upon the
truth, but Nietzsche claims that the will behind it is the same will
that lies behind avoidance, ignorance, masks, and so on. What
follows is a point already made in Chapter 6, that the will to
truth – the commitment to truth at any price – is a late develop-
ment. Originally, the discoverer of theoretical truths is satisfied at
least as much by simplification, falsification, flight into ignorance
(as Nietzsche seems to think the history of philosophy attests).
How to explain the emergence of a will to truth is the question
with which Nietzsche begins BG: “What in us really wants
‘truth’?” He gives his most direct answer in BG 230.
This will to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to
cloaks, in short, to the surface —for every surface is a cloak —is
countered by that sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge
who insists on profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a
will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and
taste. Every courageous thinker will recognize this in himself, as-
suming only that, as fit, he has hardened and sharpened his eye
for himself long enough and that he is used to severe discipline, as
THE WILL TO POWER 237
well as severe words. He will say; “there is something cruel in the
inclination of my spirit”; let the virtuous and kindly try to talk him
out of it.
This is the psychological side of the analysis of the will to truth as
the latest expression of the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche claims that a
will to knowledge or truth, as opposed to a will to what I have
called “intellectual appropriation,” requires the internalization
of the will to power, the ability to get a sense of power out of
denying oneself the satisfaction of interpretations one would like
to be true because of what one actually has reason to believe.
But how does this occur? Nietzsche does not answer this ques-
tion here, but the answer suggested by both BG and GM is that it
developed out of philosophers’ commitment to the ascetic ideal.
Zarathustra’s talk to the wisest suggests that philosophy in-
volves two different orientations expressive of the will to power.
A will to the thinkability of all beings; this I call your will. You
want to make all being thinkable, for you doubt with a well-
founded suspicion that it is already thinkable. But it shall yield
and bend for you. Thus your will wants it. It shall become smooth
and serve the spirit as its mirror and reflection. This is your whole
will, you who are wisest: a will to power – when you speak of good
and evil too, and of valuations. You still want to create a world
before which you can kneel: that is your ultimate hope and intoxi-
cation (Z II, 12).
Zarathustra here attributes two different desires to philoso-
phers, first, the desire for the intellectual appropriation of the
world, a desire to make the world fit into its categories. Secondly,
there is the desire “to create a world before which [they] can
kneel,” that is, to construct a picture of the world that reflects the
philosopher’s values. The first of these tendencies or desires
differentiates philosophers from mythmakers. But BG 5 makes
clear that in the case of philosophers, the desire for knowledge
or intellectual appropriation is subordinate to the second desire,
of constructing the world in the image of its values. This means
that the categories into which philosophers have attempted to
force the world have been determined by the ascetic ideal. For, as
I have already argued in detail, Nietzsche thinks philosophy has
been an expression of that ideal.
238 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
Consider again GM’s claim that the typical doctrines of dog-
matic or metaphysical philosophy are exactly what one would
expect if the ascetic priest, “this incarnate will to contradiction
and antinaturalness[,] is induced to philosophize.”
Upon what will it vent its innermost contrariness? Upon what is felt
most certainly to be real and actual: it will look for error precisely
where the instinct of life most unconditionally posits truth. It will,
for example, like the ascetics of the Vedanta philosophy, down-
grade physicality to an illusion; likewise pain, multiplicity, the en-
tire conceptual antithesis “subject” and “object” – errors, nothing
but errors! To renounce belief in one’s ego, to deny one’s own
“reality” —what a triumph! not merely over the senses, over appear-
ance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and cruelty
against reason – a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height when
the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares:
“there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!”
(GMIII, 12)
The philosophical doctrines mentioned here are ones BG counts
as projections of the philosopher’s values. We see from this pas-
sage one of Nietzsche’s reasons for thinking that this philosophy
expresses a spiritual will to power – like the ascetic, the philoso-
pher’s desire for a sense of power or effectiveness turns against
the self, forcing it to give up the satisfaction of its natural inclina-
tions (e.g., by reducing physicality to an illusion, or renouncing
belief in one’s ego). Because Nietzsche explicitly calls this philoso-
phy a way in which the spirit has “raged against itself,” it seems
clear that he considers it an internalization of the will to power.
But it also is a will to power directed against the world. For the
world is forced to accept categories that devalue it, allow it value
only as a means to, or condition of, something that is its own
negation. As in the case of more obvious ascetics, the philoso-
pher’s internalized will to power is evidently interpreted in a way
that gives a sense of power in relation to the world.
When the ascetic priest is induced to philosophize, he is in-
duced to use the means for intellectual appropriation, the re-
sources of logic, concepts, thinking, for carrying out ascetic
projects. Some independent development of thinking, that is,
of intellectual appropriation, is necessary, but it is taken over by
the ascetic ideal for its own purposes (to devalue the empirical
world). Yet, the ascetic ideal ultimately pushes the spirit far
THE WILL TO POWER 239
enough in its asceticism that the will to intellectual appropria-
tion becomes a will to truth.
This is why Nietzsche suggests in BG 2 that the will to truth
grew out of the will to deception. We are liable to misunderstand
this claim —in ways that support radical interpretations of Nietz-
sche’s position on truth – if we do not recognize that Nietzsche
means by the “will to truth” the commitment to truth at any price
and that he considers this a late and rare development. His
suggestion in BG 2 is not that one who wants truth really wants
to be deceived, or wants something that does in fact deceive, or
that such a person is bound to find illusion rather than truth.
The point is rather that the commitment to truth that we find in
Nietzsche’s own writings, for instance, grew out of the ascetic
ideal’s use of the will to intellectual appropriation and the will to
deception this involved. This deception was the pretense that
what was actually a matter of reading their own ascetic values
into the world was instead devotion to truth. Nietzsche claims
that an actual will to truth grew out of this pretended will to
truth.
Nietzsche admits, therefore, that his own will to truth is an
expression of the will to power, but this introduces no paradoxes
into his position. To say that the will to truth is an expression of
the will to power is not to deny that it is a will to truth or that it
arrives at truth. The will to truth expresses an internalized will to
power, after all. It makes the knower give up comforting or
desirable views precisely because they conflict with what there is
reason to believe. It is quite different in the case of the external-
ized will to power with which Nietzsche first identifies philoso-
phy (BG 9): the desire to create the world in the image of one’s
values. The latter will is not constrained by considerations of
truth, but constructs the world to fit its own will, though it pre-
tends to be concerned only with truth.
The main question for understanding Nietzsche’s view of the
future of philosophy concerns what happens to this externalized
will to power, the will to construct the world in its own image,
when the will to intellectual appropriation becomes the will to
truth. Several passages of BG indicate that when the will to intel-
lectual appropriation becomes the will to truth, it belongs to
science or scholarship rather than to philosophy (consider the
contrast between philosophy and science or scholarship in BG 6,
and throughout part 6). Thus Nietzsche’s will to truth is dis-
24O NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
played in his psychology of the will to power, for instance, not in
his philosophical “doctrine” of will to power. It is certainly clear
that the will to construct the world in the image of the philoso-
pher’s values can no longer pretend to be a will to truth.
Nehamas has argued in effect that we must go further and say
that Nietzsche has no place for this will with which he identifies
philosophy (1988, esp. 56 ff.). According to Nehamas, BG es-
chews argument and merely exemplifies Nietzsche’s own values
in order to avoid doing that for which he criticizes other philoso-
phers, namely, reading his own values into the world. The inter-
pretation I have offered suggests a quite opposed answer. What
Nietzsche objects to in previous philosophers is not that they
read their values into the world, but that they pretended to be
doing something else, that they were not “honest enough in their
work” (BG 5). If my interpretation is correct, what BG attempts
to exemplify is precisely the compatibility between the will to
impose the philosopher’s values on the world and the will to
truth. The cosmological doctrine of the will to power is the kind
of construction of the world Nietzsche claims philosophers have
self-deceptively engaged in. The difference is that Nietzsche
knows perfectly well it is not the truth and that he gives us the
clues we need to figure out that it is actually a projection of his
life-affirming (and self-affirming) ideal.
Nietzsche suggests not only that the will to truth can coexist
with the philosopher’s will to impose values on the world, but
that the former may actually require the latter. Consider BG
230’s account of the task of those with a will to knowledge or
truth. After claiming to find in every courageous thinker “a will
that is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience,” Nietz-
sche writes that it would “sound nicer . . . to be distinguished
not by cruelty but by ‘extravagant honesty,’ we free, very free
spirits —and perhaps that will actually be our —posthumous
reputation.” But Nietzsche claims that “we hermits and mar-
mots have long persuaded ourselves in the full secrecy of a
hermit’s conscience” that such “moral tinsel words” belong to
“the gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under
such flattering colors and make-up the basic text of homo natura
must again be recognized.”
To translate human beings back into nature; to become master
over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and
THE WILL TO POWER 241
connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over the
eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that we henceforth
stand before human beings as even today, hardened in the disci-
pline of science, we stand before the rest of nature, with intrepid
Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of
old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at us all too
long, “you are more, you are higher, you are of a different
origin” – that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task –
who would deny that? Why did we choose this insane task? Or,
putting it differently, “why have knowledge at all?”
Everyone will ask us that. And we, pressed this way, we have put
the same question to ourselves a hundred times, we have found
and can find no better answer (BG 230).
The ultimate task of those committed to truth is evidently to
“become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic inter-
pretations” of their own will to truth, to recognize the latter as an
internalized will to power, a matter of cruelty against the self. We
can explain why this might appear as an “insane task” to Nietz-
sche in terms of the fact that it undermines the ascetic ideal that
is responsible for the existence of the will to truth. So why this
task? Because Nietzsche does not fill in this blank, he evidently
wants the reader to do so on the basis of the surrounding mate-
rial. Alderman suggests that the next section shows the task has
not been chosen but given, for Nietzsche writes that “at the
bottom of us, really ‘deep down,’ there is, of course, something
unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined
decisions and answers to predetermined selected questions” (BG
231). But then the question is: What is it about us that gives us
this task, and why can we not simply abandon it? It seems to me
that Nietzsche must expect us to fill in the blank at least partly
from what he has been saying in this section about cruelty: that
what has given us this task is a tremendous and tremendously
internalized will to power. This will has put the whole of our
ability for intellectual appropriation in the service of the truth.
In BG 227, he even refers to “us” as “we last Stoics.” And he calls
on “us” to “remain hard” should our honesty, the “virtue from
which we cannot get away” and “the only one left us” (the last
virtue we share with traditional morality?), “grow weary one
day” and want things “better, easier, tenderer.” To do this, we
must “come to the assistance of our ‘good’ with our ‘devils,’ ”
namely, “our adventurous courage, our seasoned and choosy
242 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
curiosity, our subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to
power and overcoming of the world.”
This “most spiritual will to power and overcoming of the
world” cannot refer to our will to truth, because it is supposed to
keep the will to truth from growing “weary.” Nietzsche’s wording
suggests that the will to truth requires the aid of an externalized
will to power, one that provides a sense of power in relation to
the world. Such a will always accompanies an internalized will to
power in Nietzsche’s account of philosophers. The internaliza-
tion of the will to power was promoted by the ascetic interpreta-
tion of existence, which gave philosophers a way of overcoming
the world by devaluing it. As one would expect of the successors
to the ascetic priest, Nietzsche’s philosophers need a sense of
power in relation to the world, not just in relation to themselves.
I suggest that this is Nietzsche’s final argument for why we must
propose new ideals. As BG 10 suggests, if they are going to live
“vigorously and cheerfully,” philosophers cannot confine them-
selves to the truth, to what science and scholarship can reveal.
Philosophers need to be able to “create values,” to put their
stamp on the world. They have done this through their adher-
ence to the ascetic ideal, by devaluing the world, making it accept
the philosopher’s devaluing categories. But this required a cer-
tain self-deception, a failure to understand their own psychol-
ogy. They cannot both face up to the truth about themselves and
get a sense of power over the world from the ascetic ideal.
Hence, the necessity of inventing a new ideal – if we agree with
Nietzsche that we cannot pursue truth simply for its own sake.
The creation of an alternative to the ascetic ideal would give
philosophers a sense of power in relation to the world insofar as
they get to decide what is valuable, but it would also give them an
ideal in whose service they could pursue truth. An externalized
will to power could thus come to the aid of the will to truth.
I assume that Nietzsche himself has brought to the aid of his
own will to truth his doctrine of life as will to power. For though
he presents it as if it were true (perhaps exemplifying the sugges-
tion of BG 4 to “recognize untruth as a condition of life”), it is
actually his “creation of the world,” a construction of the world
from the viewpoint of his own ideal. I will discuss this ideal in my
final chapter, but have already made clear that it is Nietzsche’s
alternative to the ascetic ideal. It should therefore be easy to see
why Nietzsche would regard the world as will to power as an
THE WILL TO POWER 243
alternative to the ascetic ideal’s interpretation of life (which he
sometimes calls the “moral world-view”). According to Nietz-
sche’s theory, the ascetic interpretation of life is a construction of
the world from the viewpoint of the ascetic ideal. Since it ideal-
izes the denial both of life and of the value of life, the ascetic
ideal gives us an interpretation of life that deprives it of value. I
have argued that Nietzsche also considers the world as will to
power a construction of life from the viewpoint of an ideal. He
believes this construction of the world expresses an opposed
ideal, I suggest, because it glorifies the will to power, a drive he
thinks aims at what is necessary for affirming or finding value in
life.
This line of interpretation also helps to explain the embarrass-
ing material of part 6 of BG in which Nietzsche suggests that
philosophy should “dominate” (BG 204) and that”genuine philoso-
phers are commanders and legislators” (BG 211). The point is not to
denigrate the “objective person,” who is called a “mere instru-
ment” (BG 207), or the scientists, scholars and “philosophical
underlaborers” who are supposed to be “servants” of philosophy
(BG 211) —for these are clearly components of the philosophical
soul. Nietzsche’s point is that knowledge is not enough for ascetic
priests who have been “induced to philosophize.” Even when
they have developed a real will to truth, and have therefore
pursued knowledge rigorously, they have done so in service to an
ideal that gives them a sense of power in relation to the world,
and they cannot pursue it rigorously without commitment to
some ideal that establishes the value of a commitment to truth.
Because they can no longer pursue truth in service to the ascetic
ideal, they must, if they are to remain truthful, invent a new
ideal to serve. But this is clearly not “pure invention,” as Nietz-
sche’s ideal philosopher is constrained by a commitment to truth,
and the truth destroys the old ideal and shows us the form that a
new ideal must take. If there is still room for decision or “com-
manding” here, it is because rational considerations alone cannot
tell us that we ought to pursue the truth or affirm life, and in any
case, we might choose instead to be “puritanical fanatics of con-
science who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain some-
thing to lie down on – and die” (BG 10). But if philosophers are
to continue the vigorous pursuit of truth, Nietzsche’s claim
seems to be that they must do so in service to a new ideal.
Nietzsche does not deny therefore that philosophers could
244 NIETZSCHE ON TRUTH AND PHILOSOPHY
abandon the will to truth. But it seems unlikely that those with
such a strong and strongly internalized will to power could live
“vigorously and cheerfully” by simply relaxing the demands of
their will to truth. What is more likely for philosophers who
refuse to invent a new ideal, I think Nietzsche would say, is that
they will continue to serve the ascetic ideal in various disguised
forms (for instance, devoting their work to showing that philoso-
phers cannot do what they have wanted, namely, to establish a
priori the truth about reality and to provide a rational foundation
for values). As my next chapter will show, Nietzsche was very
aware of the possibility of serving the old ideal while claiming
devotion to a new one.
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