When Nietzsche says, “The world is the will to power and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides!” (1968, 550), he is not referring to the traditional notion of the ‘will’ as a causal agent. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche rejects the idea of an immaterial substance or will that commands our bodies to act in certain ways. “Is ‘will to power’ a kind of ‘will’ or identical with the concept ‘will’?” he asks. “Is it the same thing as desiring? Or commanding? … My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all. … [It is] a mere empty word” (692). For Nietzsche, will to power refers to the plurality of drives and forces behind all forms of life, revealing that every living thing is striving to grow, flourish, and dominate. Everything, he says, “want[s] to grow, to reach out around itself, pull towards itself, gain the upper hand — not out of some morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life simply is the will to power” (1998, IX, 259). It is important here not to confuse this notion with Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) evolutionary theory of ‘survival of the fittest.’ Nietzsche makes it clear that living things are not simply trying to preserve themselves in order to survive. If this were the case, then when a species evolved to a state where it could comfortably exist, the species would stop striving, growing, and developing. But this is not the case. “Every living thing,” says Nietzsche, “does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more” (1968, 688). He repeatedly attacks the ‘English Darwinists’ because he believes the struggle for self-preservation is an exception in the natural world, not a rule, and he believes Darwinists miss this point. “Wanting to preserve oneself expresses a situation of emergency,” writes Nietzsche, “a constriction of the real, fundamental drive of life, which aims at extending its power, and in this willing, often enough puts self-preservation into question and sacrifices it” (1995, 349).
On Nietzsche's account, living things are not just trying to survive but to flourish and thrive and to realize greater possibilities of power and abundances of strength. The roots of the oak tree, for instance, do not just reach into the soil in order to keep the tree upright; the tree is always striving to become more than it is by expanding, overcoming, and dominating its surroundings until it reaches some resistance (Guignon and Pereboom 2001, 113). Indeed, the struggle entailed in overcoming resistances is crucial to the dynamic structure of power because without some resistance or counterforce power cannot be expressed. “Will to power,” as Nietzsche writes, “can manifest itself only against resistances therefore it seeks that which resists it” (1968, 656; see Hatab 2012). The result of such of view, for Nietzsche, is that life simply is “that which must always overcome itself” (2006, 11, 12).
As a manifestation of will to power, human beings, like all other forms of life, are driven by an instinct to overcome resistances and overflow with abundances of power. “What man wants,” says Nietzsche, “what every smallest part of the living organism wants, is an increase in power” (1968, 702). Yet critics have argued that this appears to be a justification for violence, domination, and cruelty, and there is ample textual evidence to support this (e.g., Schütte 1985). In On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, Nietzsche writes,
To talk of right and wrong as such is senseless; in themselves, injury, violation, exploitation, destruction can of course be nothing “wrong,” in so far as life operates essentially — that is, in terms of its basic functions — through injury, exploitation, and destruction, and cannot be conceived in any other way. (1996, II, 11)
But this literal or ‘hard’ interpretation fails to acknowledge the crucial distinction between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ expressions of power. Will to power is healthy, for Nietzsche, when it is active and creative, when it is spontaneously discharged from within in a way that goes beyond one's own limitations for the sake of greater strength and expanded possibilities for living. By contrast, a manifestation of power is unhealthy when it is reactive. In these cases, the discharge of power is dependent on others, always coming from something external or outside itself. Nietzsche explains these two manifestations in terms of two different moralities, that of the ‘master’ and the ‘slave.’ “In order to exist at all,” writes Nietzsche, “slave morality … always needs an opposing, outer world; in physiological terms, it needs external stimuli in order to act; its action is fundamentally reaction” (I, 10). But the opposite is the case for the master morality. The master actively creates and affirms his or her own life based on the idiosyncratic needs and projects that matter to them as individuals. For Nietzsche, then, the highest form of power is not reactive and other-directed and has little to do with one's ability to dominate and brutalize others. The strongest and healthiest individuals are self-directed; they are the artists, poets, musicians, and philosophers who have power over themselves to create their own values and meanings. The power to ‘overcome oneself,’ then, is the highest value, and it is actualized by those who have the strength to control their base drives, and to sublimate or re-channel them in acts of — artistic and philosophical — creation. This is why, as commentators like Robert Solomon have suggested, the clearest incarnation of this kind of individual is not necessarily the great warriors that Nietzsche often praises, such as Napoleon or Caesar, but figures like “Socrates, Mozart, and even Christ” (1972, 135).
For Nietzsche, the pre-Platonic Greeks were the embodiment of this kind of active self-creation. Here was a culture that wholly accepted the cruel and tragic dimensions of the human situation but sublimated and released these dimensions in artistic and creative ways, balancing the conflicting elements of Dionysian passion with Apollonian self-discipline. “Oh, those Greeks!” says Nietzsche. “They knew how to live. … Adorers of forms, of tomes, of words! And therefore — artists” (1954a, 683). But with the spread of Christianity and the conversion of the Romans under Constantine, the master morality degenerated through what Nietzsche calls a “transvaluation of values” (1996, I, 10), a historical reversal or inversion of Greek and Roman values. With inborn feelings of repressed envy or ‘ressentiment,’ the early Christians expressed their power by determining that creative, self-assertive, and independent values were ‘evil’ and that the meek, obedient, and selfless values of Christianity were ‘good.’ For Nietzsche, it is this reversal that has created the tame bourgeois society that we inhabit today, one that is standardized and weak, incapable of exhibiting any style or originality. But Nietzsche is hopeful about the future. He understands that slave morality requires subservience to an absolute moral authority, and it for this reason that ‘God's death’ is a cause for celebration. It provides an opening for what Nietzsche calls the ‘overman’ (Übermensch).
The Übermensch is a reference to a human ideal in a post-Christian, post-nihilistic future. Nietzsche describes him as one who will redeem us as much from the previous ideal as from what was bound to grow out of it, from the great disgust, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism, this midday stroke of the bell, this toll of great decision, which once again liberates the will, which once again gives the earth its goal and man his hope, this Antichristian and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness — he must come one day. (1996, II, 24)