Der Wille zur Macht, The Will to Power.
Arc's latest post ended with the postulation that power is ultimately what dictates right and wrong, moral and immoral. As you all know, I am quite enamoured by the concept of power and its prime position in all life as we know it.
An extremely simple, and extreme, example of this would be moral tenets of a major religion. Without specifying any one religion in this example, let us assume that I have the power to end the life or lives on any number of people I choose to. Religion A have a say 5 billion followers who profess that my need for pre-marital sex is sinful and evil, and that my propensity for consuming alcohol and indulging in orgies must be stopped. I exercise my aforementioned power to kill every single follower and believer of Religion A. Their mortal postulates wither and cease to exist altogether. Of course its not quite so simple in real life, power is exercised through the use of money and manipulation, but the result is very much the same, if you have power, principles of morality do not apply to you unless you choose to allow them to. The weak have no real choice, the choices presented to them are farcical illusions created by those with power.
I've been reading articles on the book Der Wille zur Macht or "The Will to Power" by Friedrich Nietzsche (in a way, it was a collection of his writings published posthumously), one of my favourite authors.
To understand the will to power, we must first look at the more common doctrine of "the will to live" which postulates that all living things are motivated by sustaining and developing their own lives. The will to power on the other hand is the principle that living things are not driven by a mere need to stay alive, but in fact by a greater need to wield and use power, to dominate others, and to make them weaker.
"Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results"
Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (another of his books)
"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on."
The Will to Power
"[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. "
Beyond Good and Evil
"Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation"
The Will to Power
"Exploitation" does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society; it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life. "
The Will to Power
"Life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character. "
The Will to Power
"Hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species "man" as much as its opposite does. Indeed, we do not even say enough when we say only that much."
The Will to Power
"Truth is hard. Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth has so far begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption. In the beginning the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul--they were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, "more whole beasts"). "
The Will to Power
Hope the extracts are a little thought provoking. Understand that the will to power is not some anti-morality text, Nietzsche was trying to generate a theory to explain all things on a cosmic level, although it is more apparent in an observation of living things.
Since we've been on the topic of religion a number of times, let me end this with one of my more favoured quotes, "There cannot be a God for if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He" |
At 3:10 PM,
Evidently, Nietzsche believes that "evil" acts serve the betterment of the species even more that acts of altruism, kindness, and love--about all of which Nietzsche is generally suspicious. For Nietzsche the "truth" of the matter is that in its essence, life wants to dominate; it matters not what. It does not want to be controlled, channeled, contained, or negated as, he argues, the slave morality and its proponents would have it.
At 3:11 PM,
Interestingly enough, physical strength is not the principal attribute that Nietzsche values. Rather, it is "strength of the soul," the kind of strength that comes from a lack of guilt about one's being, a wholehearted embrace of life in all its fecundity and wantonness, a will to dominate (as opposed to the force necessary to dominate), and a will to action that Nietzsche values. Life unrestrained by a life-negating slave morality is the key for Nietzsche. That which is life-affirming is "noble" for Nietzsche, and the society that is most capable of affirmation is that which embraces a rigid social hierarchy, namely, the aristocracy
At 7:19 PM,
Very thought provoking. I've always pondered about the basics of power itself. Didn't realize someone already wrote a book about it. Damn! Now I gotta think of new ideas for my up coming bestselling book. Crap! Anyway, gotta love the final quote man.