I agree with you “that creativity, self-overcoming, and the affirmation of life” are not feelings. Instead and as I essentially said they are acts of will undertaken for the purpose of empowering one with an enhanced sense of well-being.
Feelings and desire do not constitute power. Instead poweris a feeling that in its highest human form is constituted by an enhanced sense of well being.
It seems to Nietzsche that creating, organizing, overcoming, interpreting, shaping, resisting, transforming, imposing, etc. are acts of the will undertaken for the purpose of providing one with an enhanced sense of well being (the highest form of power).
One will never understand what Nietzsche means by power if one does not understand what Nietzsche means by will and how the two are related.
To overcome a limitation, power cannot be merely a feeling. It must involve some effective capacity, even if that capacity is psychological, interpretive, bodily, social, or creative rather than simply physical.
Willing itself is already an expression of forces trying to expand or overcome resistance. Maybe that’s what you mean.
I interpret it simply as growth, which doesn’t necessarily mean being intent on amassing power. “Dissipating itself” sort of suggests a Buddhist-like intent, to extinguishing the flame.
It’s a reading of Nietzsche’s Will to Power common to Klossowski, Heidegger and Deleuze. Very different from the typical existentialist interpretation of Will to Power as a kind of self-actualization or personal growth.
Instead the self is a battlefield of competing drives which never coalesce into a subject.
The effective capacity of the feeling of power is one’s sense of well being. The effective capacity of feelings other than power fall short by comparison. Power is not merely a feeling. It is the feeling among feelings. All other feelings can only add to or detract from one’s sense of well being.
For Nietzsche, power as one’s sense of well being is the feeling that ought to be the organizing principle for channeling the force of the will. It really is that simple.
The Will to Power was assembled and published posthumously by Nietzsche’s sister 12 years after Nietzsche had gone mad. Most recent biographers are sceptical as to whether Nietzsche would have ever published it and certainly not in the form in which it was published by his sister. Unfortunately, many early interpreters, such as Heidegger, were unaware of the significant part his sister played in assembling voluminous and not well organized notes.
Pierre Klossowski is one of the major twentieth-century Nietzsche interpreters who was fully aware that The Will to Power was not a book Nietzsche himself completed.
The important point is that Klossowski’s use of the notebooks is fundamentally different from Martin Heidegger’s use of them.
Heidegger often treated The Will to Power as if it revealed Nietzsche’s final, systematic metaphysics. His lectures frequently speak of “Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power” as though the unpublished notes disclosed the culmination of Nietzsche’s thought.
Klossowski is doing almost the opposite. For Klossowski, the notebooks are valuable precisely because they are unfinished, fragmentary, experimental, and unstable. He is not looking for a completed doctrine. He is looking for the fluctuations, impulses, obsessions, and affective intensities that Nietzsche never fully stabilized into published arguments.
Klossowski’s central claim is that Nietzsche’s thought is not fundamentally a philosophical system at all. Rather, it is a series of changing “states” or “intensities” that later get translated into conceptual language.
Klossowski questions the assumption that there is a unified “one” whose will is being organized around a single feeling of well-being. For him, Nietzsche’s notebooks and published works reveal that the self is not a stable center directing forces. The self is an effect of competing impulses, drives, and affective intensities. The “I” that says “I seek power” is already a provisional organization of forces rather than their master.
Rather than there being an agent who channels the will toward a goal, what we call a person is a temporary configuration of forces. Klossowski would also argue that the feeling of well being is far from the only or central affect that will to power effects. For him, Nietzsche’s most important experiences are often experiences of disequilibrium, disintegration, excess, ecstasy, delirium, suffering, and self-overcoming. The eternal return, as Klossowski interprets it, is not a recipe for psychological well-being. It is a shattering experience that dissolves the unity of the self.
The key phenomenon is not happiness but intensity.
Fascinating. This makes sense to me. Consider also Derrida’s play with “I forgot my umbrella.”
I think young men in particular polish the fragile human being, Nietzsche as confused flesh in the world, into a shining super-ego or ego-ideal. I read Nietzsche as a “poet” whose poems don’t cohere, and that’s even a good thing.
In his manic mode, he takes himself all too seriously. In his most transcendent mode, which I’d maybe call ironic, he laughs with the gods. He can’t be pinned down.
I think his description of Christ is largely a description of this mode of himself.
This part in particular perhaps:
it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of God.” This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae
This is the enacted and felt transcendence of metaphysics. It’s something one might express with a saxophone or barbaric yawp. But it is also sayable in terms of the negation of fixed sayings.
Men should be divided into different castes and then bred to develop their intrinsic nature further. If you are born to obey, you should be raised to be content to obey unconditionally, i.e. to need or want to obey. The problem is that some people are fed or force fed with ideas that contradict their true nature. The men who should reign naturally are ruined through moral ideas (acc. to Nietzsche that is).
(Uncontrolled) inner anarchy is the symptom of degeneration. Strong persons have to master themselves too. They have the necessity to constantly become as unified Persons. They are not consciously acting subjects but personally unified and identified force fields which strongly affect their surroundings too. (Interpreting Nietzsche’s problematic thoughts.)
Boy is this wrong… You fell for the Nazi explanation of Nietzsche’s project and took their word for it.
Nietzsche wasn’t a social engineer… Hell he wasn’t even a political philosopher. He wasn’t in the business of coming up with nifty ways to create castes; he said modern society and Christianity we’re already doing that.
When he talks about Züchtung it’s to do with the cultural and psychological, not the biological.
That hits close to home… but it’s not a biological claim.
He speaks of castes positively. For Nietzsche, modern society was a form of decadent anarchy. He admired persons like Napoleon or Caesar. Both were autocrats. He probably viewed autocratic Russia under the tsars favorably.
This would mean that the natural basis would be absent. It would be conscious planning— an unnatural dominance of rational thinking. For N. t h i s would be social engineering.
For him, the cultural and psychological are dependent on the biological (physiological). He denies all conscious direction or rational motivation of human life. He is too extreme here. Everything is already a physiological symptom. Everything happens unconsciously. A Freudian sado-masochistically destructive personality should be considered inevitable, as belonging to flourishing “life”.
He said that m o r a l i t y is nihilism! There is no morality, i.e. no conscious action in life. What is, or what should be considered, good in life is everything that fosters our life, and in all its “questionable” appearances as well. All potentialities should be optimistically encouraged to flourish. Morality is an established, negatively regulative institution that inhibits everything that threatens the conventional, mediocre way of life, that is, life that most people can handle.
Instead of actively moralizing, we, ordinary people, should restrain ourselves simply to watch the aweful spectacle of life. That is, without adopting a negative or pessimistic attitude.
Yes, but what exactly did he admire about them? Was it their political enterprise or their will?
There’s a substantive difference there.
It isn’t, there’s no blueprint. Culture isn’t planned or a causal force to dictate behavior. For Nietzsche, Züchtung is a space where our myths, struggles and instincts can flourish into the future.
Yes, and then a hard no.
Yes, the cultural and psychological come from the physiological. Then he spends many books on the cultivation of those instincts. There’s definitely a conscious direction towards the mastery of the self.
Your reading of Nietzsche might be too extreme here. Yes, for a contemporary 21st century Western liberal he’s “a lot to deal with”, but his prescriptions don’t deal with social engineering whatsoever.
“But true philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it should be!” they are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people …” (Beyond Good and Evil, 211)