Will to power is not a little subject controlling an ant’s behavior by willing the domination of the ant over others. It is the outcome of a system of competing drives, with one temporally gaining dominance over the others. It is not the wanting of power.Deleuze explains:
we must avoid at aIl costs the misinterpretations of the Nietzschean principle of the will to power. This principle doesn’t mean (or at least doesn’t primarily mean) that the will wants power or wishes to dominate. The will to power, says Nietzsche, consists not in coveting or even in taking but in creating and giving. Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will (Dionysus himself). The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as weIl as their respective quality in a complex whole. Thus it is always given as a mobile, aerial, pluralist element. It is by the will to power that a force commands, but it is also by the will to power that a force obeys.
For Klossowski, what we call the “I” is a temporary organization of competing drives, impulses, affects, and bodily intensities.
The will to power is the fluctuating relation of forces among these impulses. Every impulse seeks to interpret and organize the others from its own perspective. There is no central subject standing above them.
Klossowski writes:
“The soul is only a social structure of drives and affects.”
The “self” is merely the provisional result of a struggle among forces.Each drive wants to impose its own interpretation of reality.
I think the will to power is the part of us that is headed into the future, so it faces the unknown. It’s creative, and to some extent blind.
The beginnings of good and evil are in contemplation of the past, and comparing those events to ideals. Judgment is backward facing, but because Eros is forward facing, it has nothing to judge.
Kant said morality is based on duty. But Nietzsche said morality must be based on freewill. Morality based on duty or sympathy is not true morality.
Morality has two sides. One is how the action is motivated. And the other is how it is judged.
True morality must be motivated by freewill. And will to power judges all moral actions. To judge something, there must be criteria and foundation. It is will to power.
For me one of the deeper moments in Nietzsche is “life is exploitation.” This is already in Schopenhauer, but Nietzsche wants to affirm life, which means affirming the guilt of being an evolved social predator.
I just discovered this killer track, and it’s relevant ( read her wild story if you like it ) :
I feel guilt, I feel guilt
Though I know I’ve done no wrong, I feel guilt
I feel guilt, I feel guilt
Though I know I’ve done no wrong, I feel guilt
I feel bad, so bad
Though I ain’t done nothing wrong, I feel bad
I feel bad, so bad
Though I ain’t done nothing wrong, I feel bad
I never lied to my lover
But if I did I would admit it
If I could get away with murder
I’d take my gun and I’d commit it
I never gave to the rich
I never stole from the poor
I’m like a curious child
Give me more more, more, more, more, more, more
I feel blood, I feel blood
Though I feel it in my veins, it’s not enough
I feel blood, I feel blood
Though it’s streaming through my veins, it’s not enough
I never stole a scarf from Harrods
But if I did you, wouldn’t miss it
I never stole a doll from Lovecraft
But if I did you know I’d kiss it
I never stole from the rich
I never gave to the poor
I’m like a curious child
Just give me more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more
I feel guilt, I feel guilt
Though I know I’ve done no wrong I feel guilt
I feel guilt, I feel guilt
Though I ain’t done nothing wrong I feel guilt
So, you may have harmed your enemy to protect yourself under self defence. Could it be morally good?
It might be legal and justified to do so, and certainly you have done self defence act motivated by your freewill.
However, Will to Power will judge you as morally evil, because your act still has harmed someone else. Will to Power has the final say on the moral judgement.
Yes, the undercurrent of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is that satisfaction is the death of the Will. Once you attain perfection, there’s no where else to go, no questions left to answer, no hunger left to fill. The realm of ideals is oblivion.
This is why we fixate on bad news. It’s why we seek out stress and blood and gore. Fundamentally, war and genocide happen because we love it. Human life doesn’t need to be fixed. It’s exactly what we want it to be.
So the UN is a death cult. Crazy, but in a way, true.
Your question is constructed out of conflicting systems. You take Nietzsche’s will to power, where he had the concept of the Übermensch as a creator of morality, and where he criticized Christianity as a religion of the weak, and you oppose it to a provocative political thesis that exists within a specific political culture. Plus, judging by the context, you also seem to have concrete events in mind, especially given the reference to the UN.
I mean that the common American justification is that the bombings saved lives by avoiding a land invasion of Japan. But this is not universally accepted. Many people see the bombings as a demonstration of power, a political message to the USSR, or an unnecessary act against civilians.
Of course not. The will to power applies to a subject, not to a state or a political force. Moreover, Nietzsche has already given the answer here: he would never have called for sacrificing oneself for the sake of the weak.
Your post as a whole looks like this: once there was Nietzsche and his philosophy — does that mean we should start a nuclear war?
That is your post. You should defend it, not ask others to do it for you.
The will to power does not hang in the air. It is part of a specific theory involving the death of God and the Übermensch. To me, your reasoning does not really connect. You mention Nietzsche, and then immediately ask whether atomic bombs should be launched.
Your reference to Nietzsche can be easily set aside, because you do not build any logical connection between Nietzsche and atomic bombs. You simply mention him.
In substance, your question seems to ask whether one should support the atomic bombing of some unnamed country if it could “save lives.” It is hard to answer that in the abstract, because the question of starting a nuclear war cannot be treated as a purely abstract moral puzzle.
Existentialists tend to read Nietzsche this way, but my reading of him agrees with Klossowski and Deleuze. They argue that Nietzsche wants to do away with the language of moral guilt.
It’s not that life is predatory and we should courageously accept that fact. Rather, Nietzsche uncovers that the very notions of “agent,” “responsibility,” “guilt,” and even a stable “self” are interpretations imposed upon fluctuating forces. Nietzsche’s point is more radical than the idea of a subject who is guilty for being predatory. Instead, the subject itself is a fiction produced by a temporary organization of impulses. There is no predator standing behind the predation. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche proclaims
“There is no doer behind the deed.”
This changes the sense of ‘affirming life’ from the drive towards self-preservation to consenting to the incessant metamorphosis of forces, even the dissolution of one’s identity. This is why Nietzsche pushes back against Darwin’s thinking of ‘struggle for existence’.
Heidegger differs from Nietzsche in bringing guilt back in, but when he says Dasein is guilty, he explicitly doesn’t mean moral guilt. He is not saying that humans are blameworthy, sinful, exploitative, or predatory. Instead, Dasein never chooses the fact that it exists. Yet it must choose among possibilities. Every choice excludes other possibilities.Therefore Dasein is always the ground of a nullity, a “not,” a lack. To exist is to be responsible for these exclusions.
I’m used to discussing Nietzsche on the Nietzsche subreddit where you don’t need to explain what any of the terms mean because the posters there (at least the people I would engage) are fairly deeply informed.
Here, you can’t mention the will to power without taking everyone back to square one, which is really Schopenhauer’s pessimism. It’s kind of hard to get very far in this kind of setting.
