If nothing got caught, I am not to blame, there were no fish.
Sunday 15 August 2010
The Will To Power
What is the status of the WP? What importance or validity do we attach to it? What are the main problems with the theory? What explanatory power does it have?
I thought it seemed appropriate to give the WP it's own thread, given that Narziss and I have been discussing the theory in the 'Suggested Topics' thread, thus i'll import the relevant content of that thread to here.
Narziss said: Although I believe it makes its appearance several times in the secondary literature, it is interesting to discuss the differences between the will to power (in Nietzsche’s philosophy) as either a metaphysical theory or a psychological one.
The metaphysical theory would be something of this sort: the universe is constituted of fluid quanta of power which are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting each other.
The psychological theory would be that power is only ever a second order aim. You can never want power-in-itself; it is always power-for-the-sake-of-which. First, each drive has a primary aim, and secondly, each drive has the aim of wanting the power to attain its primary aim.
I agree with the psychological theory which states that all of our drives, in seeking their corresponding aim, also seek the conditions for which to fully acquire or discharge themselves according to this aim. Thus, each drive inadvertently seeks the 'power' to manipulate conditions for the sake of attaining it's relevant aim.
Narziss, I don't myself accept the metaphysical reading of WP, for a whole variety of reasons, the principle one being i've never seen the theory qua theory sufficiently well articulated (by N or anyone else), never mind any empirical and methodological concerns. Do you think it plausible?
As for the psychological WP, are you saying that WP is to be understood in essentially instrumental terms, solely in relation to "first order" drives?
Nietzsche commonly suggests the opposite; are you saying he mistakes WP for a first order aim when it is, in fact, a second? He commonly views WP as the primordial form of affect, and all other affects and drives are sublimations, side-effects, consequences of this foundational tendency (of course, this veers back in the direction of a metaphysical reading of WP).
e.g. ". . . what one calls 'nourishment' is merely a derivative phenomenon, an application of the original will to become stronger" (WP.702).
(There is also a significant ambiguity or confusion in Nietzsche's understanding of the relation between power and happiness, which i'll simply note here in passing).
I'm not sure I understand you here, please elaborate. Does your understanding here have any affinity with John Richardson's work on drives and WP? Are you saying that because he doesn't have a right to the metaphysical reading of WP, he is thus not justified in positing it as a sort of ontological psychological/affective given?
As a metaphysical theory, I agree that it seems implausible, but then again, for me that brings into question what the term "metaphysical" even means. Is it an ontological term that describes the material of the world or an epistemological term that describes what we can know with certainty or know with universality?
If in the ontological case, all Nietzsche is saying is that the world is made up of some abstract material that is continuously redefining itself and has no fixed and eternal properties, that seems somewhat plausible. If in the epistemological case, Nietzsche is saying that all truth is influenced by perspectives and pragmatic/prudential/self-interested struggle, then that seems mildly plausible. While it is true that we are forced to take “perspectives,” that does not mean that there are not privileged interpretations. His metaphysical theory seems to be somewhat a combination of these ontological and epistemological aspects, with some empirial grounding in mechanistic "truths" like the laws of conservation.
This metaphysical theory, as articulated in his notebooks, seems like an interesting, speculative side-project Nietzsche had going on, but I don’t credit it with particularly profound insights, and it really doesn’t capture my curiosity as much as his psychological theory.
I haven’t yet read John Richardson’s book (Nietzsche’s System); I’m having a little trouble understanding what you are saying due to a lack of familiarity in how you use the words you’ve chosen. But for the most part, I think you have captured what I was trying to say in seeing the will to power as a second order drive.
For example, let’s say you want food, you must obtain money in order to purchase food. Let’s say you want to marry and have children, you must obtain a job to obtain money to support having a family. Money becomes a means to obtain the things that you want. Money is worthless without there being things that you really want and can obtain with this money. You want money only by virtue of the fact that you want something to purchase with this money.
Following this analogy, power is necessary in order to satisfy drives, but you only want power by virtue of the fact that your drives have first order desires that want to be satisfied. In addition, power is worthless if you lack first order desires.
Here is Reginster’s summary of the view as it appears in the work of Clark:
“The third view, developed by Maudemarie Clark, proposes to answer this question by inviting us to conceive the will to power ‘as a second order desire for the ability to satisfy one’s other, or first-order desires.’ If it is a second-order desire, the will to power requires the existence of other, first-order, desires for the sake of which power can be sought. This interpretation nicely explains the privileged position of will to power in comparison with other drives. Different human beings could have different drives, but they will all have the will to power, simply by virtue of having drives, because the occurrence of a certain desire will naturally spawn a desire for the ‘power’ to satisfy it” (The Affirmation of Life: 128).
But such a psychological theory seems comprehesive enough to possibly be considered a metaphysical-psychological theory since it satisfies the condition of universality.
It's been a while since I read Clark, but from what you and her seem to be saying, it looks to me as if you've erased the WP in all but name!
That seems to be, implicitly, Reginster's view also in the passage you quote (I haven't read Reginster), hence his quotation marks around "power" in the last line.
You say that "power is necessary in order to satisfy drives". Couldn't you just replace the word "power" here with the word "something" and the integrity of the sentence would remain intact? What is achieved by the use of the word "power" in this schema?
At the psychological/affective level, the sensation of power could easily be absent while the instrumentally desired goal is pursued and achieved. "Power" here seems to be being understood functionally, literally, as being objectively necessary.
i.e. I profoundly desire A, but it can't be accessed directly. In order to acquire A I objectively need to acquire B, C, and D. Thus I pursue B, C, and D not for their intrinsic worth but as the circuitous route to A, my genuinely desired goal.
Surely the same logic can also be applied to the attainment of B, C, and D, indefinitely? i.e. In order to get B, I must get B2, B3, and B4 etc. One could proceed in this manner, breaking every goal down into smaller and smaller, more localised tasks. As far as I can see, none of this need produce the affect of WP, since, according to this schema, it is not the affect of WP that is at issue, but the acquisition of specific external, concrete situations/objects in pursuit of my ultimate goal A.
This seems to me to take the "will" out of WP. I don't see what this positing of WP actually explains, or why it is necessary?
Surely N was drawn to WP as a psychological theory because it sought to account for what were otherwise apparently baffling and irrational behaviours and beliefs?
Let's take a rather crass example: a man with a pronounced sex-drive, dominated by erotic thoughts almost beyond his control. This predisposition, given his historical and social location, constantly leads him into unstable and unpredictable situations, some of which themselves greatly frustrate his sexual urges and prevent them finding suitable objects for his desires. The psychological and societal anarchy that his predicament necessitates leads him to experience all kinds of debilitating deprivations. He suffers tremendously. Thus, one day he becomes the most resolute ascetic. He may even reach a point were all manner of erotic temptations may be placed in front of him, yet he is calmly unperturbed, and enjoys a tremendous sensation of WP. (e.g. D.109, which you cited, comes to mind).
How would such a scenario be explained with the model you and Clark are proposing? In what way would it help?
My own view of the status of WP is inconclusive in many respects, and whatever interpretation I may adopt I am left with some important unanswered questions. Nevertheless, the most persuasive reading of WP that i'm aware of is Henry Staten's "Towards a Will To Power Sociology" from 'Nietzsche and Ethics' 2007. I know Leiter has a low opinion of Staten generally, and I offer no judgement as to whether Staten's critique of Leiter is universally valid, but, regardless, I think if WP has lasting value it is somewhere along the lines outlined by Staten.
If you're interested and can't get hold of Staten's essay, let me know and i'll try to summarise the basics.
Let's say we take power to mean something like "the ability to manipulate things". So very simply, if you want e.g. food, then you must also want the ability to manipulate conditions in order to attain food.
This ability can come in different forms: strength, intelligence, etc. And such abilities grant you an edge on being able to attain some goal/end.
I think the term "will" in "the will to power" stands for the notion that at a top-level, we can see that the organism as a whole fundamentally strives for power (regardless of what the power is for).
Just like "weak willed" and "strong willed," the use of the term "will" in "will to power" is meant as a top-level description that simplifies what is going on.
In a "weak willed" individual, they are easily distracted and tempted by different aims because there is disorganization among their drives.
In a "strong willed" individual, they pursue their goal with resolve because a master drive has sublimated all the weaker drives to its own end.
With the "will to power," power is being sought in order to satisfy the first order demands of the drives.
"I think the term "will" in "the will to power" stands for the notion that at a top-level, we can see that the organism as a whole fundamentally strives for power (regardless of what the power is for)".
If I understand you correctly, that sentence could be rewritten thus (without compromising its integrity):
"I think the term "will" in "the will to power" stands for the notion that at a top-level, we can see that the organism as a whole fundamentally strives for those things necessary, whatever their determinate content, for the successful attainment of first-order drives, and those "things" (regardless of what they are) we shall call "power".
As previously indicated I have a problem with calling this a "psychological theory" at all, since the AFFECT is, for Nietzsche, the alpha and omega of things. The WP for Nietzsche is first and foremost an affect, a pathos, a striving for the feeling of difference, an overcoming of obstacles etc. Subsequently, Nietzsche extends this into all biological functions in nature and even into the realm of the inorganic.
If one rejects the extension and primacy of WP into all nature (as I do), and also as the sole determining factor at work in the psychological and affective realm (as I do),then I can understand the motivation behind "correcting" the theory in order for it to remain plausible. Otherwise, one is bound to ask, how and why did the WP come into being at all? Nietzsche seeks to avoid this problem by denying that WP has "become" at all. According to his most speculative thoughts, WP simply IS. It's the most elemental ontological "thing" there is.
Very few interpreters (yourself, Clark and I included)can accept this, with good reason.
The question we have to answer, if we are to grant any significance and novelty to Nietzsche's theory of WP (in whatever form) is this: what hitherto puzzling phenomena does the theory contribute to understanding? What do we "know" now that we didn't know previously?
I think we have, if we grant the purely psychological relevance of parts of the theory, a better (though still very incompletely understood) appreciation of certain otherwise apparently non-utilitarian, illogical, ascetic and self-destructive behaviours and ideas.
I gave the example of the former sex-addict, turned ascetic, or, more prominently, we can see the motivation behind the adoption of slave morality by the largely resentful, inhibited, inferior, and vengefully powerless masses. I still don't see how you or Clark advance us towards understanding this behavioural and psychological transformation.
Might I also ask which drives are to count as "first-order" and why? You mention food, what about the ascetic who all but starves himself?And how is the apparently teleological nature of these first-order drives to be understood?
will to Power! Read the last pages of will to power to answer the essential question posed by Nietzshe. "and do you know what "the world" is to me? shall I show it to you in my mirror?". read what he writes, read it as you would a poem, read it over and over and you will have an understanding of his World.
declaring something isn't the same as demonstrating it, and there's plenty of evidence to support the idea that Nietzsche had severe doubts about the most outrages claims he occasionally made for WP. Join the discussion by all means, but to simply quote a piece of hyperbolic unpublished text doesn't get us very far. . .
The "first order", "second order" schema, as a means of demarcating the WP, seems to me have certain obvious problems.
The first is the sheer obviousness of saying that the goal of attaining A (a "first order drive") can rarely be instantaneously and directly accomplished, and will usually require the acquisition of things necessary as a means in order to attain one's primary goal of attaining A. This is true but trivial, and has surely been known to preliterate humanity since day one. The universe doesn't instantly satisfy our whims and desires and if we wish to actualise and attain our desires we must do more than simply and passively wish-it-so, we must involve ourselves with those things instrumentally necessary in order to attain our desired end.
This is so self-evidently true that I don't see why it was necessary to wait until perhaps the world's greatest psychologist (Nietzsche) pointed it out.
A further difficulty is that these all important "first order drives" are neither named or explained. What, exactly, is to count as a "first order drive" and why? Modern biology (in so far as I understand it) is very reticent about positing the existence of discrete, unitary "first order drives", and theories such as Maslow's seem to assume a bedrock and hierarchy of needs and wants that science simply doesn't endorse.
This seems to me to represent a significant problem for the "first order, second order" drive theory being proposed.
Alternatively, one could understand "first order drives" as being largely divorced from biology and being the domain of consciousness.
e.g. I feel hungry and wish to eat, but i'm on a diet and I decide to go without. Which phenomenon here is to count as a "first order drive": the desiring of food or the refusal to eat? Does "first order drive" denote a chronological priority, or does it denote the strength and vehemence of the "drive" itself?
Nietzsche views the problem quite differently, indeed quite the reverse of what's being proposed. According to him it is the feeling of power that is always being sought, regardless of the means, objects and circumstances required to bring this about. The fact that this feeling can be attained by the most divergent and antithetical means is what gives the psychological WP its great explanatory power, for it appears to "explain" not only the "striving for distinction"(D.113) in its most easily visible, everyday forms, but also in nominally senseless behaviours, such as suicide, asceticism, martyrdom, altruism, meekness, passivity and self-castigation.
The "first order, second order" theory does away with all this rich insight, and replaces Nietzsche's WP with, as far as I can see, a mundane definition of "second order drives", and a silence in naming and explaining the "first order drives" at all.
When Nietzsche claims, as he sometimes does, that all affective and psychological phenomena is simply a development, an offshoot, a sublimation, an extension of WP, and nothing but WP, then I think he is simply mistaken. I can't find anywhere in his works a credible and detailed grounding for this view.
But, I do think that the feeling of power ,in itself is extraordinarily important to [all] human beings, and that it manifests itself in the most subtle and oblique ways, as well as the most obvious. I think this feeling is more important to humanity than is commonly appreciated, and while I don't see it as the only primordial element and driving force in our emotional and psychological life, I am inclined to believe that Nietzsche has grasped something very important here, and that the "first order, second order" thoery effectively renders Nietzsche's actual contributuion superflous.
In addition, there are serious problems of how feelings of any kind, be they will to power or otherwise, are to be concieved as the telos towards which all human thought and action move. Of course, many philosophers have advanced the idea that "happiness" or "pleasure" is our summun bonum; and while Nietzsche typically sees these states as simply symptoms and expressions of the more fundamental WP being experienced, it still leaves the difficulty of explaining how "psychological" phenomena of any kind, are to be concieved as more significant and more powerful that the physiological body out of which they spring?
How did feelings of any kind come to occupy such a pr-eminent position within the totality of our body? Nietzsche almost always insists that this way of looking at ourselves is wrongheaded, and that in reality our value judgements, moods, and rationality are mere surface phenomena, and that our real struggles, decisions, and judgements take place unconsciously, in the physiological realm.
This perspective, which Nietzsche consistently holds to, is very difficult to square with the view that our feelings and the contents of our consciousness have an autonomous and privileged status within the totality of our bodily organism. This view leaves too much unexplained and seems fanciful, arbitrary, and anti-scientific.
This leaves Nietzsche with a problem, the problem of how to harmonise his insistence on the primacy of physiology with his insistence that the feeling of WP is our summum bonum. His awareness of this problem is perhaps nowhere clearer than in WP.676. (in my view a very important and profound passage).
WP.676. would seem to fatally puncture any possible harmonisation of these two propositions. And yet, as we know, Nietzsche didn't abandon his grandiose claims for the "psychological" WP.
How was he able to accomplish this alleged harmonisation? There seems only one answer: he was able to continue to insist on the tremendous importance of the "psychological" WP in all our thoughts, feelings and actions, because he continued to see the physiological realm itself (i.e. all organic functions) as an arena where the WP played itself out. He doesn't want to conceive the "psychological" WP as an emergent phenomenon, he wants to believe that the "psychological" WP is simply an outgrowth and a reflection of the WP operating at the level of protoplasm upwards throughout all biology.
I don't know of any modern biologist who takes this idea seriously; and Nietzsche's arguments in support of this strong interpretation of WP are, in my view, simply too weak and nebulous to accept.
When a great thinker is wrong, he's wrong. That's it. Period. He may, perhaps, be interestingly wrong, but he's still wrong nevertheless. So it is with Nietzsche on this subject. I have no intention of aping the Marxists and Aristotelians, to take but two examples, who have a fondness for what Galileo called "logic chopping" in an attempt to salvage the dogmas of their intellectual masters.
As a matter of biographical curiosity I remain unsure of Nietzsche's relation to some of the physiology of his day. Did he advance the (strong) WP all the more keenly because he saw in the work of certain anti-Darwinian biologists a scientific respectability for his ideas? Or, did the "psychological" WP that he explored (especially in the pre-TSZ works) already predispose him (conceptually and viscerally) to posit a WP operating at all times, and at every biological level, regardless of the empirical science of his day? I'm tempted to say that the latter seems the most likely . . .
Sometimes the simplest questions receive no satisfactory answers, or simply no answers at all. This is (or should be) troubling for someone trying to think clearly, and especially for those who claim to have struck philosophical gold.
Although I think that Nietzsche is an outstanding psychologist and that the "psychological" investigation of the WP he offers sheds great light on many of our thoughts, feelings and actions (I mean the WP free of any metaphysical, ontological, or protoplasmic foundations), there is a very simple question that, as far as I can see, remains unanswered.
Put simply: is the paradox of masochism, for example, a solution to a riddle, or is it merely as restatement of an unanswered problem? Is Nietzsche's answer to these questions any more substantial than the logic of Kant that he mocks in BGE?
"How does opium induce sleep? "By virtue of a faculty," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,
Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura sensus assoupire. (BGE.11).
If the individual wants nothing more than the feeling of power, and if the feeling of power can be attained by the most divergent means (e.g. wealth/poverty, gregariousness/ solitude, hedonism/asceticism, cruelty/compassion, suicide/ self-preservation, popularity/hatred), why isn't the feeling of power experienced more frequently by all of us?
Is the feeling of WP completely determined by certain objectively valid configurations of events? Or is the feeling of power not constrained by objective reality in this fashion at all, but is essentially a contingent and creative interpretation of events in the service of this feeling?
If the latter, it is difficult to understand why the will cannot simply interpret any and every event as it pleases, and in a way beneficial to itself. In that case the puzzle would not be: "How can anyone possibly be happy on the rack"?, but rather: "Why isn't everyone happy on the rack"? ("happy", in this Nietzschean context means experiencing an affirmative feeling of power).
Is there a discoverable (in principle) formula which determines whether the feeling of power will be experienced or not? I can't find anywhere in Nietzsche the suggestion that there is. Again and again the attainment of the feeling of power is attributed to the desire for such a feeling. Here (objective interpersonal) facts don't seem to matter very much, here everything seems to be shaped by the interpretative will.
As far as I can determine, Nietzsche offers little or no reason to explain why the positive feeling of power is not far more frequently experienced by everyone, including the most nominally impotent.
It is, of course, true that Nietzsche suggests that obstacles and resistance are required, and that this necessitates that feelings of deprivation and impotence exist in us as a stimulus, an opportunity, to further movement and action in the pursuit of the feeling of power. In this way, as Nietzsche suggests, the warrior can love peace as a means to new wars, etc, etc etc.
This is all well and good, but only if "peace" is short-lived and shallow, and "war" is frequent and bloody, because otherwise it leaves us completely in the dark when we look at the relative strength, duration and frequency of these two states (power and impotency, or,in this example, war and peace), and try to discover their relationship with one another. It should be obvious to everyone that humanity, as a whole, does not experience existence, all things considered, as fertile ground for frequently acquiring significant and affirmative feelings of power.
Nietzsche appears to have no satisfactory answer to this question. When he states that:
"Every animal . . . instinctively strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can expend all its power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in the same instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that "is loftier than all reason" dislikes any kind of trouble maker or barrier which lies or which could lie in his way to these optimal conditions (I`m not speaking about his path to "happiness" but about his way to power, to action, to his most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about his path to unhappiness)". (GM.3.7).
this clearly implies that these "beneficial" and "optimal" conditions refer to material conditions of various sorts. e.g. The philosopher, ascetic and Buddha don't want marriage or children, because these are not perceived to be conducive to their attaining their maximum feelings of power. But this simply begs the question: given that this instinct for the optimal conditions is characteristic of every animal, why do so many animals [i.e. humans] fail so miserably in locating it?
Nietzsche sometimes tries to get around this problem by characterising some people as simply "decadent" or as simply unable to discover where exactly their advantage lies. But if, as Nietzsche argues, the idea of "life against life is, physiologically considered, a simple absurdity"(GM.3.13), then most of his depictions against "decadence" are equally and necessarily absurd.
I don't see how the question of physiology can be used as a means to explain this widespread lack in experiencing the feeling of power, when physiology itself is assumed to conform in its entirety to the principles of WP.
But this criticism also applies equally to the inability of an individual to find their advantage; not, granted, in isolated and unfamiliar cases, were the "instincts" prove, perhaps reasonably enough, to be inadequate guides and judges, but in normalised environments with which one is all too familiar. Failure in this instance is difficult to explain, if the prime concern of my organism is to experience the feeling of power and yet, surrounded by a plethora of apparently self-beneficial interpretive options, I am unable to attain this feeling meaningfully to any great degree for any length of time. Nietzsche doesn't appear to have a clear answer to this very basic question.
This suggests to me that much more work needs to be done in establishing the precise status the WP enjoys in our psychic life.
A further difficulty concerns our understanding of the term "power" itself. Nietzsche variously speaks of "overcoming" or "self-expansion" or "appropriation" or "assimilation" or "overwhelming" or "accumulation" or "growth" or "increase" or "incorporation", etc, as if these terms were synonyms and clearly defined. These terms are vague and by no means identical.
This lack of conceptual clarity concerning "power" is reminiscent of Nietzsche's treatment of the concept of "drives" in Daybreak where he says: "To express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification - or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness - these are all metaphors . . ." (D.119).
The difference here is that Nietzsche's admission that the terminology being applied here is "metaphorical" is admirable, and Daybreak alone contains many examples of Nietzsche explicitly struggling with how to conceive the notion of "drives", given our tremendous ignorance in this field.
But all too often no such modesty and tentativeness is offered when he speaks about "power". All too often he simply speaks as if the concept was self-evident. It should be obvious that this is simply not true.
There seem to be two distinct arenas where the concept of "power" is applicable. Firstly, in the material world, where force and power relations can be (in principle) objectively measured and verified. e.g. my government is more powerful than I, the USA is more powerful than Tahiti, the Athenians were more powerful than the Melians, the Sultan of Brunei is more powerful than his wife, etc.
Secondly, in the psychological realm. The American President, for example, for all his nominal power, may be actually neurotic, a quivering wreck, bedevilled by feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, while a simple peasant in some nondescript part of the world exudes a sense of powerfulness routinely as a result of his "temperament" and his social relations.
It is clear that the "feeling of power" is quite different from any external, social conceptions of "power". Nietzsche is well aware of this and the largest part of his unmasking of morality concerns the ways in which "slave morality" and "asceticism" frequently triumph over more visible, external acquisitions of power, in attaining the desired "feeling of power".
"Indeed, happiness, concieved of as the liveliest feeling of power, has perhaps been nowhere greater on earth than in the souls of superstitious ascetics" (D.113).
And yet, even if we confine WP to the psychological realm alone we are still left with the task of delineating more precisely what this feeling actually is, what it isn't, and what forms of appearance it presents to consciousness.
In general, I think that Nietzsche has got hold of something very important here that we shouldn't easily let go of, but, that intuition shouldn't blind us to the fact that much more thinking and observation needs to be done.
I wish to briefly make two further points regarding WP, and in doing so reference the work of Henry Staten who is, in my opinion, one of the very few contemporary scholars who takes Nietzsche seriously.
1. Attaining significant feelings of power is not primarily determined by our physiological constitution, nor does it rely on the drive-discharge model that Nietzsche often embraces (e.g. GS.360). Above all it is a sociologically determined phenomenon. It results primarily from our ability to master the "techniques" necessary in order to prevail in specific situations.
(see Staten's Towards a Will to Power Sociology in Nietzsche and Ethics, 2004).
2. There is, for Nietzsche, an aesthetic problem with the logic of WP. Nietzsche repeatedly asserts that at the deepest, most fundamental level, our relations with others, whether they be characterised as cruel or benevolent, are determined by our desire for the feeling of power (e.g. GS.13). Our kindness or cruelty is, he thinks, ultimately a means towards the end of enjoying the sensation of increased power.
This is why he can view such things as sympathy, pity, altruism, meekness, self-castigation, passivity, philanthropy, asceticism, devotion to others, compassion, and love as disguised forms of WP. This represents an evaluative/ideological problem for Nietzsche, because he realises that when the strong seem to be simply incorporating, dominating and appropriating the weak, the weak can use this strategy (i.e. the appearance of surrender) in order to circuitously and subtly incorporate, dominate and appropriate the strong. This must be so, according to Nietzsche, because what the weak want fundamentally is what the strong want - the feeling of power.
This is an aesthetic/evaluative problem for Nietzsche because it undermines the very concepts of weak and strong that he so frequently insists upon and champions. The methods employed by the weak may be more indirect and heavily disguised, more cautious, but the underlying motivation and goal remains the same - the acquisition of the feeling of power.
This has important historical consequences. This is partly why "salve morality" triumphs, because the "strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate" The strong are often "irritated and disquieted" by a collective coming-together, and feel "much resistance from the individual conscience". (GM.3.18)
This is part of the reason why Nietzsche praises solitude so much. It is also partly why he privilages strong individuals over even stronger groups. He sees that every incorporation leaves open the possibility that the appropriator is itself being appropriated by the weaker, and that therefore some concession, some readjustment, some diminution of individual autonomy is always at risk. All this makes an unambiguous order of rank among individuals more problematic, and without an order of rank there is, for Nietzsche, an indigestible problem.
The psychologist in Nietzsche, in the three works preceding TSZ, makes an increasingly strong case that the feeling of power is extremely important to us, and is exercised in the subtlest domains of thought, feeling and action. The evidence he provides in support of this thesis is tremendously impressive.
But by the time of TSZ a tremendous change has taken place. Now a will to power is dogmatically announced and is said to apply to every form of life. Virtually no supporting evidence is supplied in support of this gigantic claim, but the claim persists nevertheless.
This is exceedingly odd. Since when did the grandest claims require no rigorous supporting evidence and no serious engagement with probable objections? What kind of reader is Nietzsche addressing here? It's difficult to see any qualitative methodological difference here between a reader persuaded by such insubstantial talk and a religious or party political ideologue. Why did Nietzsche commit himself to such a ludicrously ambitious claim, while simultaneously offering no seriously discussable supporting evidence in its favour?
I've asked myself this question many times and can find no satisfactory answer. How can a thinker who only recently wrote Daybreak. 542., for example, a passage which effectively destroys the pretensions of TSZ's "will to power", offer such paltry material and expect to be taken seriously? Daybreak 542, incidentally, is the best corrective I know to all Nietzsche's hyperbole and dishonesty in the realm of knowledge.
Soon afterwards, another exceedingly odd thing occurs. In TSZ the WP is commonly presented as manifesting in self-squandering, self-overcoming, perishing, and squandering. But by the time of the later works Nietzsche commonly presents the WP in much more aggressive terms, typically as forms such as "appropriation", "domination", "overwhelming", "accumulation", "growth" and "increase" (i'm grateful to Henry Staten's excellent Nietzsche's Voice for making this changing conception explicit).
Now, one could argue indefinitely the extent to which these terminological changes mirror a significant conceptual shift in Nietzsche's thinking, but at the very least, they do, to me, mark a noticeable change of emphasis. So much so that when I read the Will To Power and focus on the notes relating to WP I can almost always correctly predict whether the note dates from the TSZ period or later.
The problem is, I can find no compelling objective, theoretical, evidenciary support in Nietzsche's text for this change of emphasis on Nietzsche's part. Thus it looks to me, in keeping with the profound analysis of Daybreak 542, as if Nietzsche is projecting onto nature his own prejudices and desires.
All of this must be borne in mind when investigating the WP. None of this, of course, refutes Nietzsche's numerous and well argued cases of the importance and prevalence of the WP in the psychological realm. Nietzsche really has, I believe, struck gold here, but the gold is neither as pure or omnipresent as he sometimes believed.
It's worth briefly noting some of the background motivations that sometimes helped lead Nietzsche beyond a strictly psychological conception of WP towards a conception of WP that applied to all organic and inorganic phenomena.
The inorganic - in the absence of a God Nietzsche was suspicious of the legitimacy of there being "laws in nature". In the absence of an artificer and commander the concept of "laws" hanging over the universe seemed too static, too orderly and suspiciously transcendent. Instead Nietzsche was inclined to advance the thesis that "[laws] are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment". (BGE.22).
In this mood Nietzsche suggests that the "necessity" and "calculability" so apparently visible in the universe are the result of power relationships between things and not the result of any obedience to "law".
The organic- Nietzsche believed that Darwinism (he appears never to have actually read Darwin) placed far to much emphasis on the notion of adaptation, and sought to explain much development, organisation, functionality and complexity in the organic realm in light of this principle of adaptation. This, Nietzsche thought, was too passive, too reactive and too much in keeping with what he saw as the dominant moral ideals of his day.
In the later, increasingly shrill works, Nietzsche frequently labels these tendencies as "decadent". In the work of physiologists like Wilhelm Roux and Michael Foster he found more active conceptions of biological life. He was attracted to a picture of organic life, applicable and operative at every biological level, that stressed activeness, assimilation, domination, incorporation and accumulation. Struggle was primarily a consequence of these predispositions, he believed, and these intrinsic predispositions are what primarily account for all the biological complexity, organisation and functionality apparent in the world.
All of these are, at bottom, the result of power struggles and power relations between different forms of organic life.
Along this vector of Nietzsche's thought, it can be seen how unremarkable and plausible it would seem to suggest that all psychological life be understood as higher level manifestations and sublimations of a WP working below at every level of existence.
The problem is - i'm aware of no contemporary physicist or biologist who is prepared to endorse Nietzsche's most grandiose claims for WP. At the level of physics I don't think it amounts to much more than a semantic quibble. At the level of biology I think that Nietzsche was simply wrong, and, either he simply didn't sufficiently understand biology or, more worryingly, he was wilfully seeking to impose his own moral prejudices onto nature (and hence the reader). Either way, i'm aware of no good reason to take the WP seriously outside of the psychological realm.
In this realm, and this realm alone, I think that Nietzsche's WP has made real progress in understanding some of our thoughts, feelings and actions. But I don't take seriously the idea that all psychological and behavioural events are soley the manifestation of WP. Things other than WP are involved, and where exactly WP fits into all this, why it's there and what its identity actually is; these are questions that still await an answer.
Nietzsche repeatedly affirms becoming over being, but it's unclear what form of becoming he has in mind. Becoming, in its most literal and radical form would present a major conceptual problem for the WP, for in the absence of any persisting thing the concept of growth, or the feeling of growth, would be an impossibility. Increased power, or an increase in the feeling of power, requires that something, the entity in question, hasn't significantly changed in the transition towards increased power.
As Nietzsche acknowledges in WP.643 "mere variations of power could not feel themselves to be such: there must be present something that wants to grow . . "
Without some continuity of identity nothing can be said to have grown, to have increased its power or its feeling of power. Without some continuity of identity it would make no sense to claim that X has increased its power or its feeling of power, because any X, in a world of radical becoming, could not survive any transitional state between events. The WP needs an X, but radical becoming excludes the very possibility of an X.
Of course, Nietzsche does not need to affirm becoming in its most literal and radical formulation. He could advance a more relativist, more modest, and less extreme version of becoming. But this revised version of becoming, whatever it is to be, Nietzsche never adequately demarcates.
There are thinkers who love the chase more than the capture. Philosophy can be very accommodating to such people because the methods of philosophy rarely allow for anything of substance to be conclusively settled. Philosophical doctrines go in and out of fashion but they are seldom silenced forever, because the a priori methods favoured by philosophy rarely allow a proposition to be falsified.
This is a strange state of affairs, and explains why so much modern philosophy has been concerned with language. Science, on the other hand, is inherently self-correcting and falsifiable, and so real scientific progress actually does occur. Philosophy is very different, it thrives in hiding-places and dark corners, in obscurity and undecidability, in terminological confusion.
So much academic chatter has been devoted to the Will To Power not because of its inherent plausibility and coherence as a doctrine. On the contrary, neither Nietzsche or his interpreters are able to offer a consistent account of the theory which is generally perceived as both new and true. In the final analysis, it's the failings of the theory, its instability, plasticity, ambiguity, contradictions, terminological imprecision, in short, its slipperiness and vagueness, which allow it to continue into the present.
Very many academics are drawn to the theory precisely because it can be interpreted in so many diverse and unfalsifiable ways. Its attractiveness is it's conceptual obscurity (virtually its meaninglessness), its ability to generate a large quantity of academic discourse without running the risk of being conclusively refuted.
But it's impossible to refute a proposition which you can't first identify and understand correctly. Before we can affirm or deny any proposition we must first be clear about what that proposition is, and what it isn't. It's very noticeable to me, for example, that almost all the academic commentary which involves the will to power in the inorganic, biological or psychological realm almost never references current scientific knowledge in the fields of physics, biology or psychology. There are, it appears, a large numbers of philosophers who are drawn to Nietzsche for all the wrong reasons.
An elementary conceptual problem in the Will To Power.
Nietzsche repeatedly attacks philosophers for lacking a historical sense, for failing to affirm becoming over being, and thus failing to appreciate that the origin of a thing and the status it later acquires are two different things. Neither the eye nor the hand, for example, came into being in order to see and grasp. They acquired these functions fortuitously, derivatively, from utterly non-functional, initially random processes.
On the other hand, Nietzsche does not want the will to power itself to have become in the organic realm, since this would imply that the will to power was not sufficiently primordial, omnipresent and all-encompassing. He wants the will to power to have been there at the very begining, alone, by itself, as a process and tendency that preceded any actual instance of biological life.
When Nietzsche conceives of the most primitive living cell, for example, he thinks that the will to power is the real "force" behind this phenomenon, and that the cell is itself, in the most literal sense, a manifestation of the will to power, wholly and completely, unsullied by any other force or internal constitution or structure. The simplest cell has to be the will to power in every respect, wholly and completely, it cannot contain anything within it that is not wholly and completely the will to power.
Seen in this original perspective, any other attribute of the cell, such as a "desire" to survive, to reproduce or to find nourishment, for example, only comes about because the cell wants to experience the sensation of power and it can only do this, or be prevented from doing this, by the existence of other, equally simple and primordial cells. The cell only "wants" to survive so that it can experience the sensation of power; and it only seeks nourishment, not in order to simply continue living, but in order to assimilate and overwhelm other cells; and it only reproduces because through reproduction it experiences the sensation of power (see e.g., WP.641-656, 702, 680).
It is difficult to see, on this model, how any form of multi-cellular life ever got started.
"The strong, on the contrary, drives others away; it does not want to perish in this manner; it grows and in growing it splits itself into two or more parts. The greater the impulse towards unity, the more firmly may one conclude that weakness is present; the greater impulse towards variety, differentiation, inner decay, the more force is present. The drive to approach - and the drive to thrust something back are the bond, in both the inorganic and the organic world. The entire distinction is a prejudice. The will to power in every combination of forces, defending itself against the stronger, lunging at the weaker, is the more correct. N.B.: Processes as 'entities'". (WP.655).
This echoes his claim in Beyond Good and Evil that "[laws in nature] are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment". (BGE.22).
If we return to our original biological scenario of nothing but single cell organisms inhabiting the planet how do multi-cellular organisms come about? Imagine two single cells A and B, each being wholly and completely incarnations of the will to power without exception. What would "pursuade" one to submit to the dominance of the other rather than perish if it found itself unable to prevail over it?
Well, perhaps "weakness". But what is the source of this "weakness"? The "weakness" cannot be due to any original, intrinsic deficiency of the single cell, since all single-celled organisms are presumed to be constituted, in their entirety, by the will to power and nothing else. There cannot be any "decadence" in single celled organisms because that would mean that something other than the will to power was present at this elementary level.
Neither can the dominance of one single-celled organism over another be due to any asymmetrical complexity between the two, since structural complexity is itself a later development, the result of previous interactions between simpler organisms.
Supposing cell A assimilates cell B. From what source did A acquire this superiority, and why does cell B settle for becoming merely a function of cell A, rather than choosing death?
The only remaining possibility would seem to be that while both cells were structurally and constitutionally identical, containing nothing but will to power, one cell had a greater quantity of will to power at its disposal, and that it was soley this quantitative difference between the two cells which allowed once cell to prevail.
But this merely pushes back the puzzle without resolving it: what circumstance brought about an inequality in the quantities of power between the two cells? Is quantity derived from sources outside the will to power?
It seems clear that Nietzsche can't allow this possibility, which can only mean that the will to power itself, in some pre-biological form, brought about original inequalities in the quantities of power represented by each individual cell.
Nietzsche cannot appeal to laws of biological form, or the notion of natural constraints in the form of laws of nature, in order to account for evolution, complexity and form, because that would be to posit something other than the will to power within which the will to power operates, and that would dethrone the will to power from the lofty place which Nietzsche is inclined to place it. But without other sources of form Nietzsche is effectively forced to account for the development of the will to power by means of the will to power itself. This is clearly unsatisfactory and smells of dogmatic obscurantism and metaphysics.
In sum, I don't think Nietzsche has accounted for multi-cellular organisms coming into existence. He can't account for the compliance of the original assimilated cell because he can't ascribe any "decadence" to it. He can't account for the superiority of the original stronger, assimilating cell, because he can't appeal to pre-existing laws of nature or biological form, nor can he appeal to inherent complexity or quantitative superiority on its part in order to explain its victory.
A world of primitive biological will to power and nothing else, wholly and complete, would never get off the ground. Form, complexity and development presuppose forces other than the will to power, forces that Nietzsche is loathe to admit.
Lest there be any terminological problem here with my amateurish use of the terms "single-celled" and "multi-cellular" organisms. I'm using these terms to illustrate a conceptual problem and not (obviously) as an expert in microbiology and the origins of life.
The actual characteristics of the Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes and Multi-celled organisms, as well as the complex evolutionary process which unites them are all, for my present purposes, not strictly necessary.
The simplest single-celled organisms, the Prokaryotes, already contain a significant amount of internal structure and complexity (i.e. a 'division of labour') and are therefore not at all as simple and uniform as I have suggested. These are differentiated structures.
However, I used the language of "single-celled" and "multi-cellular" organisms symbolically, simply in order to denote the transition from the simplest possible form of biological life to the next level of complexity, in the same way that physics continue to use the word "atom" while affirming the existence of sub-atomic particles.
Nietzsche on several occasions in the Nachlass uses the example of the protoplasm in trying to account for the will to power in its most elementary, primitive, original biological form. But the protoplasm is itself entangled in a pre-existing structure and complexity.
From my limited understanding of current scientific and philosophical discourse, there is no agreed definition on just what "life" is exactly. This would have horrified Plato, with his insistence on essentialism, but Nietzsche would have been perfectly content with this ambiguity and anti-essentialism, since it seems to reinforce the fundamental notion of becoming over being.
But, the specific complexities of biology aside, the more abstract, conceptual point still stands. If Nietzsche wants to see all organic life as rooted in a primordial conception of will to power, then the simplest forms of organic life (whatever they may be) must represent the will to power in its most pure and unsullied manifestation.
Ignoring the question of how it came to be in the first place, the question i'm concerned with here is how the transition is made from this utterly primitive and pure biological instance of the will to power, to any subsequent appropriation, assimilation, and overpowering of another elemental instance of the will to power, and the resulting complexity, specialisation, division of labour etc.
I see nothing in Nietzsche's text which explains how such a development and evolution could take place, since Nietzsche cannot appeal to concepts of natural constraints, biological laws of form, or laws of nature which transcend or exist independently of the omnipresent will to power.
The Will To Power as an inorganic principle and the so-called "Laws of Nature".
In The Gay Science Nietzsche says: "Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only in beside a world of purposes that the word 'accident' has meaning". (GS.108).
As it stands, this seems to me to be perfectly reasonable. It reminds us that the concept of "law" typically presupposes an agent of some kind, a "lawgiver" (usually God), who gives expression to his largely autonomous will. This is just one of the many shadows of God that need to be confronted in our reevaluation of ourselves and the universe. So far so good.
What then determines the "necessities" that Nietzsche is happy to acknowledge? In Beyond Good and Evil he castigates physicists for affirming "nature's conformity to law", and interprets their interpretation as a subtle form of atheism which is, nevertheless, inherently sympathetic to the increasingly democratic zeitgeist.
Here Nietzsche agrees that the universe has a "necessary" and "calculable" character but "not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment" (BGE.22).
The two key points to note here are:
(1) There are no "laws" in nature, but there are indeed "necessities".
(2) These "necessities" are the result of power relations between various constellations (quanta) of force.
As many remarks in the Nachlass show, Nietzsche was attracted to this idea right up until 1888, the idea 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" (WP.636).
"Mechanics shows us only the results, and then only in images (motion is a figure of speech). Gravity itself has no mechanistic cause, since it itself is the ground for mechanistic results. The will to accumulate force is special to the phenomena of life, to nourishment, procreation, inheritence - to society, state, custom, authority. Should we not be permitted to assume this will as a motive cause in chemistry, too? - and in the cosmic order?" (WP.689).
I've previously highlighted the fact that becoming in any truly radical formulation prohibits the very axioms of will to power taking hold, since some form of boundary of identity is needed in order for the concepts of "appropriation", "accumulation" and the feeling of power to make any sense.
Here I want to highlight a conceptual problem effectively identical to that which i've just outlined in the organic sphere.
If there are no "laws" but there are nevertheless manifest "necessities" to be observed in nature, and these "necessities" are the result of "every power drawing its ultimate consequence at every moment" - what is it that determines that one centre of power is able to exert a necessary, reliable, consistent, and calculable force over another centre of power?
Is Nietzsche not here simply placing a fat word in a gap in our (his) knowledge? If the notion of will to power is inherently active and encroaching, if every centre of force is continually striving to increase its effect upon other centres of forces and to thrust back everything it cannot dominate and master, then surely the relations between different power centres should be continually changing and no long term "necessities" and "regularities" should be visible at all in nature?
"Necessity" and "regularity" can only be understood as forms of equilibrium between conflicting centres of force. But if equilibrium persists for very lengthy periods (as it undoubtedly does), so much so that it can be regularly and repeatedly measured and quantified by observers in the form of "laws", then this enduring and resulting stasis seems to have brought any intrinsic will to power to a halt.
The will to power, paradoxically, seems to have resulted in a rigid passivity and conservatism in nature, and Nietzsche gives us no reason to account for this strikingly predictable and regular state of affairs.
According to the will to power, the apparent necessities and regularities that physicists observe in nature, if they exist at all, should only be temporary, should only be apparent for a brief length of time and should soon be replaced by very different "necessities" and "regularities", as a new configuration of power relations reach equilibrium and takes hold over events. It seems embarrassingly obvious to point out that this doesn't seem to happen in nature.
The recent discovery of the Higgs particle and the Higgs field by the LHC, for example, a discovery that many physicists had long anticipated in conformity with the Standard Model; are we really to imagine that this anticipation and discovery is due, in the final analysis, to the "bad philology" of the scientific community?
Physicists were able to predict and discover this precisely because they don't pay any attention to Nietzsche.
If there are no stable "things", if there is only becoming and force, whereby each, inherently unstable and fluctuating, sphere (quanta) of power interacts with another inherently unstable and fluctuating centre of power, then surely long-term, repeatedly observable, "necessities" and "regularities" should be the last thing we should expect to find in nature?
If there are repeatedly observable and consistent "necessities" and "regularities" in nature, this equilibrium can only persist because the determining forces are unchanging. But an unchanging power relation between two or more centers of power, can only mean that the will to power is no longer operative, because it would mean the that various centres of power have neither increased nor decreased their force in relation to each other. Where has the inherent dynamism of the entire process gone?
One way out of this conundrum is to allocate the will to power to a much more moderate, conditional and subservient role and to admit that constraints of various kinds exist within which the will to power functions. Some of these constraints would be "laws of nature", principles and features of the universe which, once established, nothing can override or ignore or bypass. But Nietzsche doesn't want to endorse this picture, he wants the apparent "laws of nature" to be themselves the results of the more fundamental will to power.
This brings us to another conceptual problem identical to the one I raised earlier in relation to biology. Galen Strawson, for example, has recently endorsed Nietzsche's claim that there are no "laws of nature" but only power relations between various forces (Strawson's Nietzsche's Metaphysics, can be found here: http://www.academia.edu/3051045/Nietzsches_Metaphysics ).
Strawson: "Matter isn’t a passively sitting stuff that is then (‘then’) regimented by laws. Laws of nature can’t be supposed to be in any way ontologically independent of, rather than essentially constitutive of, part of, the (categorical, intrinsic) nature of matter/energy. Matter or reality is force or energy, and
[Nietzsche] 'the unalterable sequence of certain phenomena does not prove a "law" but a power relation between two or several forces. To say: "But precisely this relation remains the same!" means nothing more than: ‘One and the same force cannot be a different force as well’. (WLN: 88; NL 1885-6, KSA 12, 2[139]; Strawson's emphasis)
"This takes a little thinking about at first, but it is exactly right. Here Nietzsche imagines someone thinking that the claim ‘But precisely this relation remains the same!’ requires (or involves) appeal to a law as an explanation of its truth. But that is to misunderstand what a force is—what reality is. When you understand that, you see that ‘But precisely this relation remains the same!’ is really nothing more than a tautology or necessary truth, a particular instance of the necessary truth that ‘every thing is what it is, and not another thing’ (Butler 1729: 28)".
Strawson's essay frequently references modern physics and its apparent endorsement of reality as consisting of processes or fields, and the view that, in some fundamental sense, everything is energy. These are undoubtedly interesting and complex subjects but they are not my main concern here, and in addition, I prefer to get my understanding of physics from physicists themselves and not from metaphysical philosophers.
My primary concern here is that neither Nietzsche nor Strawson is able to why "this relation [of force, power] remains the same" and why it manifest itself in "an unalterable sequence of certain phenomena". Semantics aside, no reason is given as to why various forces have the characteristics and potency they do. If a particular force has a particular identity then that identity needs to be accounted for, its identity and potency cannot be said to consist simply of some undifferentiated kind of "stuff" or "force" or "power". Its potency, force, or power must reside in some type of arrangement, configuration, or structure both within and between various forces.
To say that "every thing is what it is, and not another thing" and that "One and the same force cannot be a different force as well", means that the "thing" in question has some determinate identity and quality which sets it apart from other "things" and that the (power) relation between these various "things" is constant.
From whence does this constancy arise? Answer: From potency and power relations. But what determines the potency between things? Answer: Their intrinsic potency determines their potency and their relations to each other. This strikes me as another instance of the Moliere fallacy that Nietzsche ridiculed in BGE.9.
In conclusion, I have emphasised two arguments against the will to power operating in the inorganic realm: (1) the inherently dynamic, active, temporal and encroaching character of will to power can't account for the unalterable regularity and calculability of events because this necessary stasis and passivity between forces, which we observe in the form of regularities and necessities in nature, presupposes a stasis and passivity within the forces themselves; and (2) no explanation is offered that accounts for the potency at the disposal of each and every power source; the potency of each power centre is simply said to exist in a particular (but unspecified) quantity, but no explanation is offered as to the source and ground of this potency.
I thought it seemed appropriate to give the WP it's own thread, given that Narziss and I have been discussing the theory in the 'Suggested Topics' thread, thus i'll import the relevant content of that thread to here.
ReplyDeleteNarziss said: Although I believe it makes its appearance several times in the secondary literature, it is interesting to discuss the differences between the will to power (in Nietzsche’s philosophy) as either a metaphysical theory or a psychological one.
The metaphysical theory would be something of this sort: the universe is constituted of fluid quanta of power which are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting each other.
The psychological theory would be that power is only ever a second order aim. You can never want power-in-itself; it is always power-for-the-sake-of-which. First, each drive has a primary aim, and secondly, each drive has the aim of wanting the power to attain its primary aim.
I agree with the psychological theory which states that all of our drives, in seeking their corresponding aim, also seek the conditions for which to fully acquire or discharge themselves according to this aim. Thus, each drive inadvertently seeks the 'power' to manipulate conditions for the sake of attaining it's relevant aim.
Narziss,
ReplyDeleteI don't myself accept the metaphysical reading of WP, for a whole variety of reasons, the principle one being i've never seen the theory qua theory sufficiently well articulated (by N or anyone else), never mind any empirical and methodological concerns. Do you think it plausible?
As for the psychological WP, are you saying that WP is to be understood in essentially instrumental terms, solely in relation to "first order" drives?
Nietzsche commonly suggests the opposite; are you saying he mistakes WP for a first order aim when it is, in fact, a second? He commonly views WP as the primordial form of affect, and all other affects and drives are sublimations, side-effects, consequences of this foundational tendency (of course, this veers back in the direction of a metaphysical reading of WP).
e.g. ". . . what one calls 'nourishment' is merely a derivative phenomenon, an application of the original will to become stronger" (WP.702).
(There is also a significant ambiguity or confusion in Nietzsche's understanding of the relation between power and happiness, which i'll simply note here in passing).
I'm not sure I understand you here, please elaborate. Does your understanding here have any affinity with John Richardson's work on drives and WP? Are you saying that because he doesn't have a right to the metaphysical reading of WP, he is thus not justified in positing it as a sort of ontological psychological/affective given?
2 August 2010 16:40
NARZISS SAID
ReplyDeleteAs a metaphysical theory, I agree that it seems implausible, but then again, for me that brings into question what the term "metaphysical" even means. Is it an ontological term that describes the material of the world or an epistemological term that describes what we can know with certainty or know with universality?
If in the ontological case, all Nietzsche is saying is that the world is made up of some abstract material that is continuously redefining itself and has no fixed and eternal properties, that seems somewhat plausible. If in the epistemological case, Nietzsche is saying that all truth is influenced by perspectives and pragmatic/prudential/self-interested struggle, then that seems mildly plausible. While it is true that we are forced to take “perspectives,” that does not mean that there are not privileged interpretations. His metaphysical theory seems to be somewhat a combination of these ontological and epistemological aspects, with some empirial grounding in mechanistic "truths" like the laws of conservation.
This metaphysical theory, as articulated in his notebooks, seems like an interesting, speculative side-project Nietzsche had going on, but I don’t credit it with particularly profound insights, and it really doesn’t capture my curiosity as much as his psychological theory.
I haven’t yet read John Richardson’s book (Nietzsche’s System); I’m having a little trouble understanding what you are saying due to a lack of familiarity in how you use the words you’ve chosen. But for the most part, I think you have captured what I was trying to say in seeing the will to power as a second order drive.
For example, let’s say you want food, you must obtain money in order to purchase food. Let’s say you want to marry and have children, you must obtain a job to obtain money to support having a family. Money becomes a means to obtain the things that you want. Money is worthless without there being things that you really want and can obtain with this money. You want money only by virtue of the fact that you want something to purchase with this money.
Following this analogy, power is necessary in order to satisfy drives, but you only want power by virtue of the fact that your drives have first order desires that want to be satisfied. In addition, power is worthless if you lack first order desires.
Here is Reginster’s summary of the view as it appears in the work of Clark:
“The third view, developed by Maudemarie Clark, proposes to answer this question by inviting us to conceive the will to power ‘as a second order desire for the ability to satisfy one’s other, or first-order desires.’ If it is a second-order desire, the will to power requires the existence of other, first-order, desires for the sake of which power can be sought. This interpretation nicely explains the privileged position of will to power in comparison with other drives. Different human beings could have different drives, but they will all have the will to power, simply by virtue of having drives, because the occurrence of a certain desire will naturally spawn a desire for the ‘power’ to satisfy it” (The Affirmation of Life: 128).
But such a psychological theory seems comprehesive enough to possibly be considered a metaphysical-psychological theory since it satisfies the condition of universality.
5 August 2010 14:23
It's been a while since I read Clark, but from what you and her seem to be saying, it looks to me as if you've erased the WP in all but name!
ReplyDeleteThat seems to be, implicitly, Reginster's view also in the passage you quote (I haven't read Reginster), hence his quotation marks around "power" in the last line.
You say that "power is necessary in order to satisfy drives". Couldn't you just replace the word "power" here with the word "something" and the integrity of the sentence would remain intact? What is achieved by the use of the word "power" in this schema?
At the psychological/affective level, the sensation of power could easily be absent while the instrumentally desired goal is pursued and achieved. "Power" here seems to be being understood functionally, literally, as being objectively necessary.
i.e. I profoundly desire A, but it can't be accessed directly. In order to acquire A I objectively need to acquire B, C, and D. Thus I pursue B, C, and D not for their intrinsic worth but as the circuitous route to A, my genuinely desired goal.
Surely the same logic can also be applied to the attainment of B, C, and D, indefinitely? i.e. In order to get B, I must get B2, B3, and B4 etc. One could proceed in this manner, breaking every goal down into smaller and smaller, more localised tasks. As far as I can see, none of this need produce the affect of WP, since, according to this schema, it is not the affect of WP that is at issue, but the acquisition of specific external, concrete situations/objects in pursuit of my ultimate goal A.
This seems to me to take the "will" out of WP. I don't see what this positing of WP actually explains, or why it is necessary?
Surely N was drawn to WP as a psychological theory because it sought to account for what were otherwise apparently baffling and irrational behaviours and beliefs?
Let's take a rather crass example: a man with a pronounced sex-drive, dominated by erotic thoughts almost beyond his control. This predisposition, given his historical and social location, constantly leads him into unstable and unpredictable situations, some of which themselves greatly frustrate his sexual urges and prevent them finding suitable objects for his desires. The psychological and societal anarchy that his predicament necessitates leads him to experience all kinds of debilitating deprivations. He suffers tremendously. Thus, one day he becomes the most resolute ascetic. He may even reach a point were all manner of erotic temptations may be placed in front of him, yet he is calmly unperturbed, and enjoys a tremendous sensation of WP. (e.g. D.109, which you cited, comes to mind).
How would such a scenario be explained with the model you and Clark are proposing? In what way would it help?
My own view of the status of WP is inconclusive in many respects, and whatever interpretation I may adopt I am left with some important unanswered questions. Nevertheless, the most persuasive reading of WP that i'm aware of is Henry Staten's "Towards a Will To Power Sociology" from 'Nietzsche and Ethics' 2007. I know Leiter has a low opinion of Staten generally, and I offer no judgement as to whether Staten's critique of Leiter is universally valid, but, regardless, I think if WP has lasting value it is somewhere along the lines outlined by Staten.
If you're interested and can't get hold of Staten's essay, let me know and i'll try to summarise the basics.
5 August 2010 17:52
NARZISS SAID
ReplyDeleteLet's say we take power to mean something like "the ability to manipulate things". So very simply, if you want e.g. food, then you must also want the ability to manipulate conditions in order to attain food.
This ability can come in different forms: strength, intelligence, etc. And such abilities grant you an edge on being able to attain some goal/end.
I think the term "will" in "the will to power" stands for the notion that at a top-level, we can see that the organism as a whole fundamentally strives for power (regardless of what the power is for).
Just like "weak willed" and "strong willed," the use of the term "will" in "will to power" is meant as a top-level description that simplifies what is going on.
In a "weak willed" individual, they are easily distracted and tempted by different aims because there is disorganization among their drives.
In a "strong willed" individual, they pursue their goal with resolve because a master drive has sublimated all the weaker drives to its own end.
With the "will to power," power is being sought in order to satisfy the first order demands of the drives.
13 August 2010 13:06
Narziss,
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear, you say:
"I think the term "will" in "the will to power" stands for the notion that at a top-level, we can see that the organism as a whole fundamentally strives for power (regardless of what the power is for)".
If I understand you correctly, that sentence could be rewritten thus (without compromising its integrity):
"I think the term "will" in "the will to power" stands for the notion that at a top-level, we can see that the organism as a whole fundamentally strives for those things necessary, whatever their determinate content, for the successful attainment of first-order drives, and those "things" (regardless of what they are) we shall call "power".
As previously indicated I have a problem with calling this a "psychological theory" at all, since the AFFECT is, for Nietzsche, the alpha and omega of things. The WP for Nietzsche is first and foremost an affect, a pathos, a striving for the feeling of difference, an overcoming of obstacles etc. Subsequently, Nietzsche extends this into all biological functions in nature and even into the realm of the inorganic.
If one rejects the extension and primacy of WP into all nature (as I do), and also as the sole determining factor at work in the psychological and affective realm (as I do),then I can understand the motivation behind "correcting" the theory in order for it to remain plausible. Otherwise, one is bound to ask, how and why did the WP come into being at all? Nietzsche seeks to avoid this problem by denying that WP has "become" at all. According to his most speculative thoughts, WP simply IS. It's the most elemental ontological "thing" there is.
Very few interpreters (yourself, Clark and I included)can accept this, with good reason.
The question we have to answer, if we are to grant any significance and novelty to Nietzsche's theory of WP (in whatever form) is this: what hitherto puzzling phenomena does the theory contribute to understanding? What do we "know" now that we didn't know previously?
I think we have, if we grant the purely psychological relevance of parts of the theory, a better (though still very incompletely understood) appreciation of certain otherwise apparently non-utilitarian, illogical, ascetic and self-destructive behaviours and ideas.
I gave the example of the former sex-addict, turned ascetic, or, more prominently, we can see the motivation behind the adoption of slave morality by the largely resentful, inhibited, inferior, and vengefully powerless masses. I still don't see how you or Clark advance us towards understanding this behavioural and psychological transformation.
Might I also ask which drives are to count as "first-order" and why? You mention food, what about the ascetic who all but starves himself?And how is the apparently teleological nature of these first-order drives to be understood?
will to Power! Read the last pages of will to power to answer the essential question posed by Nietzshe. "and do you know what "the world" is to me? shall I show it to you in my mirror?". read what he writes, read it as you would a poem, read it over and over and you will have an understanding of his World.
ReplyDelete"Anonymous",
ReplyDeletedeclaring something isn't the same as demonstrating it, and there's plenty of evidence to support the idea that Nietzsche had severe doubts about the most outrages claims he occasionally made for WP. Join the discussion by all means, but to simply quote a piece of hyperbolic unpublished text doesn't get us very far. . .
The "first order", "second order" schema, as a means of demarcating the WP, seems to me have certain obvious problems.
ReplyDeleteThe first is the sheer obviousness of saying that the goal of attaining A (a "first order drive") can rarely be instantaneously and directly accomplished, and will usually require the acquisition of things necessary as a means in order to attain one's primary goal of attaining A. This is true but trivial, and has surely been known to preliterate humanity since day one. The universe doesn't instantly satisfy our whims and desires and if we wish to actualise and attain our desires we must do more than simply and passively wish-it-so, we must involve ourselves with those things instrumentally necessary in order to attain our desired end.
This is so self-evidently true that I don't see why it was necessary to wait until perhaps the world's greatest psychologist (Nietzsche) pointed it out.
A further difficulty is that these all important "first order drives" are neither named or explained. What, exactly, is to count as a "first order drive" and why? Modern biology (in so far as I understand it) is very reticent about positing the existence of discrete, unitary "first order drives", and theories such as Maslow's seem to assume a bedrock and hierarchy of needs and wants that science simply doesn't endorse.
This seems to me to represent a significant problem for the "first order, second order" drive theory being proposed.
Alternatively, one could understand "first order drives" as being largely divorced from biology and being the domain of consciousness.
ReplyDeletee.g. I feel hungry and wish to eat, but i'm on a diet and I decide to go without. Which phenomenon here is to count as a "first order drive": the desiring of food or the refusal to eat? Does "first order drive" denote a chronological priority, or does it denote the strength and vehemence of the "drive" itself?
Nietzsche views the problem quite differently, indeed quite the reverse of what's being proposed. According to him it is the feeling of power that is always being sought, regardless of the means, objects and circumstances required to bring this about. The fact that this feeling can be attained by the most divergent and antithetical means is what gives the psychological WP its great explanatory power, for it appears to "explain" not only the "striving for distinction"(D.113) in its most easily visible, everyday forms, but also in nominally senseless behaviours, such as suicide, asceticism, martyrdom, altruism, meekness, passivity and self-castigation.
The "first order, second order" theory does away with all this rich insight, and replaces Nietzsche's WP with, as far as I can see, a mundane definition of "second order drives", and a silence in naming and explaining the "first order drives" at all.
When Nietzsche claims, as he sometimes does, that all affective and psychological phenomena is simply a development, an offshoot, a sublimation, an extension of WP, and nothing but WP, then I think he is simply mistaken. I can't find anywhere in his works a credible and detailed grounding for this view.
But, I do think that the feeling of power ,in itself is extraordinarily important to [all] human beings, and that it manifests itself in the most subtle and oblique ways, as well as the most obvious. I think this feeling is more important to humanity than is commonly appreciated, and while I don't see it as the only primordial element and driving force in our emotional and psychological life, I am inclined to believe that Nietzsche has grasped something very important here, and that the "first order, second order" thoery effectively renders Nietzsche's actual contributuion superflous.
Will to Power contd.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, there are serious problems of how feelings of any kind, be they will to power or otherwise, are to be concieved as the telos towards which all human thought and action move. Of course, many philosophers have advanced the idea that "happiness" or "pleasure" is our summun bonum; and while Nietzsche typically sees these states as simply symptoms and expressions of the more fundamental WP being experienced, it still leaves the difficulty of explaining how "psychological" phenomena of any kind, are to be concieved as more significant and more powerful that the physiological body out of which they spring?
How did feelings of any kind come to occupy such a pr-eminent position within the totality of our body? Nietzsche almost always insists that this way of looking at ourselves is wrongheaded, and that in reality our value judgements, moods, and rationality are mere surface phenomena, and that our real struggles, decisions, and judgements take place unconsciously, in the physiological realm.
This perspective, which Nietzsche consistently holds to, is very difficult to square with the view that our feelings and the contents of our consciousness have an autonomous and privileged status within the totality of our bodily organism. This view leaves too much unexplained and seems fanciful, arbitrary, and anti-scientific.
This leaves Nietzsche with a problem, the problem of how to harmonise his insistence on the primacy of physiology with his insistence that the feeling of WP is our summum bonum. His awareness of this problem is perhaps nowhere clearer than in WP.676. (in my view a very important and profound passage).
WP.676. would seem to fatally puncture any possible harmonisation of these two propositions. And yet, as we know, Nietzsche didn't abandon his grandiose claims for the "psychological" WP.
How was he able to accomplish this alleged harmonisation? There seems only one answer: he was able to continue to insist on the tremendous importance of the "psychological" WP in all our thoughts, feelings and actions, because he continued to see the physiological realm itself (i.e. all organic functions) as an arena where the WP played itself out. He doesn't want to conceive the "psychological" WP as an emergent phenomenon, he wants to believe that the "psychological" WP is simply an outgrowth and a reflection of the WP operating at the level of protoplasm upwards throughout all biology.
I don't know of any modern biologist who takes this idea seriously; and Nietzsche's arguments in support of this strong interpretation of WP are, in my view, simply too weak and nebulous to accept.
When a great thinker is wrong, he's wrong. That's it. Period. He may, perhaps, be interestingly wrong, but he's still wrong nevertheless. So it is with Nietzsche on this subject. I have no intention of aping the Marxists and Aristotelians, to take but two examples, who have a fondness for what Galileo called "logic chopping" in an attempt to salvage the dogmas of their intellectual masters.
As a matter of biographical curiosity I remain unsure of Nietzsche's relation to some of the physiology of his day. Did he advance the (strong) WP all the more keenly because he saw in the work of certain anti-Darwinian biologists a scientific respectability for his ideas? Or, did the "psychological" WP that he explored (especially in the pre-TSZ works) already predispose him (conceptually and viscerally) to posit a WP operating at all times, and at every biological level, regardless of the empirical science of his day? I'm tempted to say that the latter seems the most likely . . .
A Further Problem.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the simplest questions receive no satisfactory answers, or simply no answers at all. This is (or should be) troubling for someone trying to think clearly, and especially for those who claim to have struck philosophical gold.
Although I think that Nietzsche is an outstanding psychologist and that the "psychological" investigation of the WP he offers sheds great light on many of our thoughts, feelings and actions (I mean the WP free of any metaphysical, ontological, or protoplasmic foundations), there is a very simple question that, as far as I can see, remains unanswered.
Put simply: is the paradox of masochism, for example, a solution to a riddle, or is it merely as restatement of an unanswered problem? Is Nietzsche's answer to these questions any more substantial than the logic of Kant that he mocks in BGE?
"How does opium induce sleep? "By virtue of a faculty," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,
Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire. (BGE.11).
If the individual wants nothing more than the feeling of power, and if the feeling of power can be attained by the most divergent means (e.g. wealth/poverty, gregariousness/
solitude, hedonism/asceticism, cruelty/compassion, suicide/
self-preservation, popularity/hatred), why isn't the feeling of power experienced more frequently by all of us?
Is the feeling of WP completely determined by certain objectively valid configurations of events? Or is the feeling of power not constrained by objective reality in this fashion at all, but is essentially a contingent and creative interpretation of events in the service of this feeling?
If the latter, it is difficult to understand why the will cannot simply interpret any and every event as it pleases, and in a way beneficial to itself. In that case the puzzle would not be: "How can anyone possibly be happy on the rack"?, but rather: "Why isn't everyone happy on the rack"? ("happy", in this Nietzschean context means experiencing an affirmative feeling of power).
Is there a discoverable (in principle) formula which determines whether the feeling of power will be experienced or not? I can't find anywhere in Nietzsche the suggestion that there is. Again and again the attainment of the feeling of power is attributed to the desire for such a feeling. Here (objective interpersonal) facts don't seem to matter very much, here everything seems to be shaped by the interpretative will.
As far as I can determine, Nietzsche offers little or no reason to explain why the positive feeling of power is not far more frequently experienced by everyone, including the most nominally impotent.
It is, of course, true that Nietzsche suggests that obstacles and resistance are required, and that this necessitates that feelings of deprivation and impotence exist in us as a stimulus, an opportunity, to further movement and action in the pursuit of the feeling of power. In this way, as Nietzsche suggests, the warrior can love peace as a means to new wars, etc, etc etc.
This is all well and good, but only if "peace" is short-lived and shallow, and "war" is frequent and bloody, because otherwise it leaves us completely in the dark when we look at the relative strength, duration and frequency of these two states (power and impotency, or,in this example, war and peace), and try to discover their relationship with one another. It should be obvious to everyone that humanity, as a whole, does not experience existence, all things considered, as fertile ground for frequently acquiring significant and affirmative feelings of power.
Nietzsche appears to have no satisfactory answer to this question. When he states that:
ReplyDelete"Every animal . . . instinctively strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can expend all its power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in the same instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that "is loftier than all reason" dislikes any kind of trouble maker or barrier which lies or which could lie in his way to these optimal conditions (I`m not speaking about his path to "happiness" but about his way to power, to action, to his most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about his path to unhappiness)". (GM.3.7).
this clearly implies that these "beneficial" and "optimal" conditions refer to material conditions of various sorts. e.g. The philosopher, ascetic and Buddha don't want marriage or children, because these are not perceived to be conducive to their attaining their maximum feelings of power. But this simply begs the question: given that this instinct for the optimal conditions is characteristic of every animal, why do so many animals [i.e. humans] fail so miserably in locating it?
Nietzsche sometimes tries to get around this problem by characterising some people as simply "decadent" or as simply unable to discover where exactly their advantage lies. But if, as Nietzsche argues, the idea of "life against life is, physiologically considered, a simple absurdity"(GM.3.13), then most of his depictions against "decadence" are equally and necessarily absurd.
I don't see how the question of physiology can be used as a means to explain this widespread lack in experiencing the feeling of power, when physiology itself is assumed to conform in its entirety to the principles of WP.
But this criticism also applies equally to the inability of an individual to find their advantage; not, granted, in isolated and unfamiliar cases, were the "instincts" prove, perhaps reasonably enough, to be inadequate guides and judges, but in normalised environments with which one is all too familiar. Failure in this instance is difficult to explain, if the prime concern of my organism is to experience the feeling of power and yet, surrounded by a plethora of apparently self-beneficial interpretive options, I am unable to attain this feeling meaningfully to any great degree for any length of time. Nietzsche doesn't appear to have a clear answer to this very basic question.
This suggests to me that much more work needs to be done in establishing the precise status the WP enjoys in our psychic life.
Another problem.
ReplyDeleteA further difficulty concerns our understanding of the term "power" itself. Nietzsche variously speaks of "overcoming" or "self-expansion" or "appropriation" or "assimilation" or "overwhelming" or "accumulation" or "growth" or "increase" or "incorporation", etc, as if these terms were synonyms and clearly defined. These terms are vague and by no means identical.
This lack of conceptual clarity concerning "power" is reminiscent of Nietzsche's treatment of the concept of "drives" in Daybreak where he says: "To express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification - or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness - these are all metaphors . . ." (D.119).
The difference here is that Nietzsche's admission that the terminology being applied here is "metaphorical" is admirable, and Daybreak alone contains many examples of Nietzsche explicitly struggling with how to conceive the notion of "drives", given our tremendous ignorance in this field.
But all too often no such modesty and tentativeness is offered when he speaks about "power". All too often he simply speaks as if the concept was self-evident. It should be obvious that this is simply not true.
There seem to be two distinct arenas where the concept of "power" is applicable. Firstly, in the material world, where force and power relations can be (in principle) objectively measured and verified. e.g. my government is more powerful than I, the USA is more powerful than Tahiti, the Athenians were more powerful than the Melians, the Sultan of Brunei is more powerful than his wife, etc.
Secondly, in the psychological realm. The American President, for example, for all his nominal power, may be actually neurotic, a quivering wreck, bedevilled by feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, while a simple peasant in some nondescript part of the world exudes a sense of powerfulness routinely as a result of his "temperament" and his social relations.
It is clear that the "feeling of power" is quite different from any external, social conceptions of "power". Nietzsche is well aware of this and the largest part of his unmasking of morality concerns the ways in which "slave morality" and "asceticism" frequently triumph over more visible, external acquisitions of power, in attaining the desired "feeling of power".
"Indeed, happiness, concieved of as the liveliest feeling of power, has perhaps been nowhere greater on earth than in the souls of superstitious ascetics" (D.113).
And yet, even if we confine WP to the psychological realm alone we are still left with the task of delineating more precisely what this feeling actually is, what it isn't, and what forms of appearance it presents to consciousness.
In general, I think that Nietzsche has got hold of something very important here that we shouldn't easily let go of, but, that intuition shouldn't blind us to the fact that much more thinking and observation needs to be done.
Two further points.
ReplyDeleteI wish to briefly make two further points regarding WP, and in doing so reference the work of Henry Staten who is, in my opinion, one of the very few contemporary scholars who takes Nietzsche seriously.
1. Attaining significant feelings of power is not primarily determined by our physiological constitution, nor does it rely on the drive-discharge model that Nietzsche often embraces (e.g. GS.360). Above all it is a sociologically determined phenomenon. It results primarily from our ability to master the "techniques" necessary in order to prevail in specific situations.
(see Staten's Towards a Will to Power Sociology in Nietzsche and Ethics, 2004).
2. There is, for Nietzsche, an aesthetic problem with the logic of WP. Nietzsche repeatedly asserts that at the deepest, most fundamental level, our relations with others, whether they be characterised as cruel or benevolent, are determined by our desire for the feeling of power (e.g. GS.13). Our kindness or cruelty is, he thinks, ultimately a means towards the end of enjoying the sensation of increased power.
This is why he can view such things as sympathy, pity, altruism, meekness, self-castigation, passivity, philanthropy, asceticism, devotion to others, compassion, and love as disguised forms of WP. This represents an evaluative/ideological problem for Nietzsche, because he realises that when the strong seem to be simply incorporating, dominating and appropriating the weak, the weak can use this strategy (i.e. the appearance of surrender) in order to circuitously and subtly incorporate, dominate and appropriate the strong. This must be so, according to Nietzsche, because what the weak want fundamentally is what the strong want - the feeling of power.
This is an aesthetic/evaluative problem for Nietzsche because it undermines the very concepts of weak and strong that he so frequently insists upon and champions. The methods employed by the weak may be more indirect and heavily disguised, more cautious, but the underlying motivation and goal remains the same - the acquisition of the feeling of power.
This has important historical consequences. This is partly why "salve morality" triumphs, because the "strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate" The strong are often "irritated and disquieted" by a collective coming-together, and feel "much resistance from the individual conscience". (GM.3.18)
This is part of the reason why Nietzsche praises solitude so much. It is also partly why he privilages strong individuals over even stronger groups. He sees that every incorporation leaves open the possibility that the appropriator is itself being appropriated by the weaker, and that therefore some concession, some readjustment, some diminution of individual autonomy is always at risk. All this makes an unambiguous order of rank among individuals more problematic, and without an order of rank there is, for Nietzsche, an indigestible problem.
A further observation.
ReplyDeleteThe psychologist in Nietzsche, in the three works preceding TSZ, makes an increasingly strong case that the feeling of power is extremely important to us, and is exercised in the subtlest domains of thought, feeling and action. The evidence he provides in support of this thesis is tremendously impressive.
But by the time of TSZ a tremendous change has taken place. Now a will to power is dogmatically announced and is said to apply to every form of life. Virtually no supporting evidence is supplied in support of this gigantic claim, but the claim persists nevertheless.
This is exceedingly odd. Since when did the grandest claims require no rigorous supporting evidence and no serious engagement with probable objections? What kind of reader is Nietzsche addressing here? It's difficult to see any qualitative methodological difference here between a reader persuaded by such insubstantial talk and a religious or party political ideologue. Why did Nietzsche commit himself to such a ludicrously ambitious claim, while simultaneously offering no seriously discussable supporting evidence in its favour?
I've asked myself this question many times and can find no satisfactory answer. How can a thinker who only recently wrote Daybreak. 542., for example, a passage which effectively destroys the pretensions of TSZ's "will to power", offer such paltry material and expect to be taken seriously? Daybreak 542, incidentally, is the best corrective I know to all Nietzsche's hyperbole and dishonesty in the realm of knowledge.
Soon afterwards, another exceedingly odd thing occurs. In TSZ the WP is commonly presented as manifesting in self-squandering, self-overcoming, perishing, and squandering. But by the time of the later works Nietzsche commonly presents the WP in much more aggressive terms, typically as forms such as "appropriation", "domination", "overwhelming", "accumulation", "growth" and "increase" (i'm grateful to Henry Staten's excellent Nietzsche's Voice for making this changing conception explicit).
Now, one could argue indefinitely the extent to which these terminological changes mirror a significant conceptual shift in Nietzsche's thinking, but at the very least, they do, to me, mark a noticeable change of emphasis. So much so that when I read the Will To Power and focus on the notes relating to WP I can almost always correctly predict whether the note dates from the TSZ period or later.
The problem is, I can find no compelling objective, theoretical, evidenciary support in Nietzsche's text for this change of emphasis on Nietzsche's part. Thus it looks to me, in keeping with the profound analysis of Daybreak 542, as if Nietzsche is projecting onto nature his own prejudices and desires.
All of this must be borne in mind when investigating the WP. None of this, of course, refutes Nietzsche's numerous and well argued cases of the importance and prevalence of the WP in the psychological realm. Nietzsche really has, I believe, struck gold here, but the gold is neither as pure or omnipresent as he sometimes believed.
Motivations behind the WP.
ReplyDeleteIt's worth briefly noting some of the background motivations that sometimes helped lead Nietzsche beyond a strictly psychological conception of WP towards a conception of WP that applied to all organic and inorganic phenomena.
The inorganic - in the absence of a God Nietzsche was suspicious of the legitimacy of there being "laws in nature". In the absence of an artificer and commander the concept of "laws" hanging over the universe seemed too static, too orderly and suspiciously transcendent. Instead Nietzsche was inclined to advance the thesis that "[laws] are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment". (BGE.22).
In this mood Nietzsche suggests that the "necessity" and "calculability" so apparently visible in the universe are the result of power relationships between things and not the result of any obedience to "law".
The organic- Nietzsche believed that Darwinism (he appears never to have actually read Darwin) placed far to much emphasis on the notion of adaptation, and sought to explain much development, organisation, functionality and complexity in the organic realm in light of this principle of adaptation. This, Nietzsche thought, was too passive, too reactive and too much in keeping with what he saw as the dominant moral ideals of his day.
In the later, increasingly shrill works, Nietzsche frequently labels these tendencies as "decadent". In the work of physiologists like Wilhelm Roux and Michael Foster he found more active conceptions of biological life. He was attracted to a picture of organic life, applicable and operative at every biological level, that stressed activeness, assimilation, domination, incorporation and accumulation. Struggle was primarily a consequence of these predispositions, he believed, and these intrinsic predispositions are what primarily account for all the biological complexity, organisation and functionality apparent in the world.
All of these are, at bottom, the result of power struggles and power relations between different forms of organic life.
Along this vector of Nietzsche's thought, it can be seen how unremarkable and plausible it would seem to suggest that all psychological life be understood as higher level manifestations and sublimations of a WP working below at every level of existence.
The problem is - i'm aware of no contemporary physicist or biologist who is prepared to endorse Nietzsche's most grandiose claims for WP. At the level of physics I don't think it amounts to much more than a semantic quibble. At the level of biology I think that Nietzsche was simply wrong, and, either he simply didn't sufficiently understand biology or, more worryingly, he was wilfully seeking to impose his own moral prejudices onto nature (and hence the reader). Either way, i'm aware of no good reason to take the WP seriously outside of the psychological realm.
In this realm, and this realm alone, I think that Nietzsche's WP has made real progress in understanding some of our thoughts, feelings and actions. But I don't take seriously the idea that all psychological and behavioural events are soley the manifestation of WP. Things other than WP are involved, and where exactly WP fits into all this, why it's there and what its identity actually is; these are questions that still await an answer.
Becoming and the WP.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche repeatedly affirms becoming over being, but it's unclear what form of becoming he has in mind. Becoming, in its most literal and radical form would present a major conceptual problem for the WP, for in the absence of any persisting thing the concept of growth, or the feeling of growth, would be an impossibility. Increased power, or an increase in the feeling of power, requires that something, the entity in question, hasn't significantly changed in the transition towards increased power.
As Nietzsche acknowledges in WP.643 "mere variations of power could not feel themselves to be such: there must be present something that wants to grow . . "
Without some continuity of identity nothing can be said to have grown, to have increased its power or its feeling of power. Without some continuity of identity it would make no sense to claim that X has increased its power or its feeling of power, because any X, in a world of radical becoming, could not survive any transitional state between events. The WP needs an X, but radical becoming excludes the very possibility of an X.
Of course, Nietzsche does not need to affirm becoming in its most literal and radical formulation. He could advance a more relativist, more modest, and less extreme version of becoming. But this revised version of becoming, whatever it is to be, Nietzsche never adequately demarcates.
Academia and the Will To Power.
ReplyDeleteThere are thinkers who love the chase more than the capture. Philosophy can be very accommodating to such people because the methods of philosophy rarely allow for anything of substance to be conclusively settled. Philosophical doctrines go in and out of fashion but they are seldom silenced forever, because the a priori methods favoured by philosophy rarely allow a proposition to be falsified.
This is a strange state of affairs, and explains why so much modern philosophy has been concerned with language. Science, on the other hand, is inherently self-correcting and falsifiable, and so real scientific progress actually does occur. Philosophy is very different, it thrives in hiding-places and dark corners, in obscurity and undecidability, in terminological confusion.
So much academic chatter has been devoted to the Will To Power not because of its inherent plausibility and coherence as a doctrine. On the contrary, neither Nietzsche or his interpreters are able to offer a consistent account of the theory which is generally perceived as both new and true. In the final analysis, it's the failings of the theory, its instability, plasticity, ambiguity, contradictions, terminological imprecision, in short, its slipperiness and vagueness, which allow it to continue into the present.
Very many academics are drawn to the theory precisely because it can be interpreted in so many diverse and unfalsifiable ways. Its attractiveness is it's conceptual obscurity (virtually its meaninglessness), its ability to generate a large quantity of academic discourse without running the risk of being conclusively refuted.
But it's impossible to refute a proposition which you can't first identify and understand correctly. Before we can affirm or deny any proposition we must first be clear about what that proposition is, and what it isn't. It's very noticeable to me, for example, that almost all the academic commentary which involves the will to power in the inorganic, biological or psychological realm almost never references current scientific knowledge in the fields of physics, biology or psychology. There are, it appears, a large numbers of philosophers who are drawn to Nietzsche for all the wrong reasons.
An elementary conceptual problem in the Will To Power.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche repeatedly attacks philosophers for lacking a historical sense, for failing to affirm becoming over being, and thus failing to appreciate that the origin of a thing and the status it later acquires are two different things. Neither the eye nor the hand, for example, came into being in order to see and grasp. They acquired these functions fortuitously, derivatively, from utterly non-functional, initially random processes.
On the other hand, Nietzsche does not want the will to power itself to have become in the organic realm, since this would imply that the will to power was not sufficiently primordial, omnipresent and all-encompassing. He wants the will to power to have been there at the very begining, alone, by itself, as a process and tendency that preceded any actual instance of biological life.
When Nietzsche conceives of the most primitive living cell, for example, he thinks that the will to power is the real "force" behind this phenomenon, and that the cell is itself, in the most literal sense, a manifestation of the will to power, wholly and completely, unsullied by any other force or internal constitution or structure. The simplest cell has to be the will to power in every respect, wholly and completely, it cannot contain anything within it that is not wholly and completely the will to power.
Seen in this original perspective, any other attribute of the cell, such as a "desire" to survive, to reproduce or to find nourishment, for example, only comes about because the cell wants to experience the sensation of power and it can only do this, or be prevented from doing this, by the existence of other, equally simple and primordial cells. The cell only "wants" to survive so that it can experience the sensation of power; and it only seeks nourishment, not in order to simply continue living, but in order to assimilate and overwhelm other cells; and it only reproduces because through reproduction it experiences the sensation of power (see e.g., WP.641-656, 702, 680).
It is difficult to see, on this model, how any form of multi-cellular life ever got started.
"The strong, on the contrary, drives others away; it does not want to perish in this manner; it grows and in growing it splits itself into two or more parts. The greater the impulse towards unity, the more firmly may one conclude that weakness is present; the greater impulse towards variety, differentiation, inner decay, the more force is present. The drive to approach - and the drive to thrust something back are the bond, in both the inorganic and the organic world. The entire distinction is a prejudice. The will to power in every combination of forces, defending itself against the stronger, lunging at the weaker, is the more correct. N.B.: Processes as 'entities'". (WP.655).
This echoes his claim in Beyond Good and Evil that "[laws in nature] are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment". (BGE.22).
If we return to our original biological scenario of nothing but single cell organisms inhabiting the planet how do multi-cellular organisms come about? Imagine two single cells A and B, each being wholly and completely incarnations of the will to power without exception. What would "pursuade" one to submit to the dominance of the other rather than perish if it found itself unable to prevail over it?
ReplyDeleteWell, perhaps "weakness". But what is the source of this "weakness"? The "weakness" cannot be due to any original, intrinsic deficiency of the single cell, since all single-celled organisms are presumed to be constituted, in their entirety, by the will to power and nothing else. There cannot be any "decadence" in single celled organisms because that would mean that something other than the will to power was present at this elementary level.
Neither can the dominance of one single-celled organism over another be due to any asymmetrical complexity between the two, since structural complexity is itself a later development, the result of previous interactions between simpler organisms.
Supposing cell A assimilates cell B. From what source did A acquire this superiority, and why does cell B settle for becoming merely a function of cell A, rather than choosing death?
The only remaining possibility would seem to be that while both cells were structurally and constitutionally identical, containing nothing but will to power, one cell had a greater quantity of will to power at its disposal, and that it was soley this quantitative difference between the two cells which allowed once cell to prevail.
But this merely pushes back the puzzle without resolving it: what circumstance brought about an inequality in the quantities of power between the two cells? Is quantity derived from sources outside the will to power?
It seems clear that Nietzsche can't allow this possibility, which can only mean that the will to power itself, in some pre-biological form, brought about original inequalities in the quantities of power represented by each individual cell.
Nietzsche cannot appeal to laws of biological form, or the notion of natural constraints in the form of laws of nature, in order to account for evolution, complexity and form, because that would be to posit something other than the will to power within which the will to power operates, and that would dethrone the will to power from the lofty place which Nietzsche is inclined to place it. But without other sources of form Nietzsche is effectively forced to account for the development of the will to power by means of the will to power itself. This is clearly unsatisfactory and smells of dogmatic obscurantism and metaphysics.
In sum, I don't think Nietzsche has accounted for multi-cellular organisms coming into existence. He can't account for the compliance of the original assimilated cell because he can't ascribe any "decadence" to it. He can't account for the superiority of the original stronger, assimilating cell, because he can't appeal to pre-existing laws of nature or biological form, nor can he appeal to inherent complexity or quantitative superiority on its part in order to explain its victory.
A world of primitive biological will to power and nothing else, wholly and complete, would never get off the ground. Form, complexity and development presuppose forces other than the will to power, forces that Nietzsche is loathe to admit.
N.B.
ReplyDeleteLest there be any terminological problem here with my amateurish use of the terms "single-celled" and "multi-cellular" organisms. I'm using these terms to illustrate a conceptual problem and not (obviously) as an expert in microbiology and the origins of life.
The actual characteristics of the Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes and Multi-celled organisms, as well as the complex evolutionary process which unites them are all, for my present purposes, not strictly necessary.
The simplest single-celled organisms, the Prokaryotes, already contain a significant amount of internal structure and complexity (i.e. a 'division of labour') and are therefore not at all as simple and uniform as I have suggested. These are differentiated structures.
However, I used the language of "single-celled" and "multi-cellular" organisms symbolically, simply in order to denote the transition from the simplest possible form of biological life to the next level of complexity, in the same way that physics continue to use the word "atom" while affirming the existence of sub-atomic particles.
Nietzsche on several occasions in the Nachlass uses the example of the protoplasm in trying to account for the will to power in its most elementary, primitive, original biological form. But the protoplasm is itself entangled in a pre-existing structure and complexity.
From my limited understanding of current scientific and philosophical discourse, there is no agreed definition on just what "life" is exactly. This would have horrified Plato, with his insistence on essentialism, but Nietzsche would have been perfectly content with this ambiguity and anti-essentialism, since it seems to reinforce the fundamental notion of becoming over being.
But, the specific complexities of biology aside, the more abstract, conceptual point still stands. If Nietzsche wants to see all organic life as rooted in a primordial conception of will to power, then the simplest forms of organic life (whatever they may be) must represent the will to power in its most pure and unsullied manifestation.
Ignoring the question of how it came to be in the first place, the question i'm concerned with here is how the transition is made from this utterly primitive and pure biological instance of the will to power, to any subsequent appropriation, assimilation, and overpowering of another elemental instance of the will to power, and the resulting complexity, specialisation, division of labour etc.
I see nothing in Nietzsche's text which explains how such a development and evolution could take place, since Nietzsche cannot appeal to concepts of natural constraints, biological laws of form, or laws of nature which transcend or exist independently of the omnipresent will to power.
The Will To Power as an inorganic principle and the so-called "Laws of Nature".
ReplyDeleteIn The Gay Science Nietzsche says: "Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only in beside a world of purposes that the word 'accident' has meaning". (GS.108).
As it stands, this seems to me to be perfectly reasonable. It reminds us that the concept of "law" typically presupposes an agent of some kind, a "lawgiver" (usually God), who gives expression to his largely autonomous will. This is just one of the many shadows of God that need to be confronted in our reevaluation of ourselves and the universe. So far so good.
What then determines the "necessities" that Nietzsche is happy to acknowledge? In Beyond Good and Evil he castigates physicists for affirming "nature's conformity to law", and interprets their interpretation as a subtle form of atheism which is, nevertheless, inherently sympathetic to the increasingly democratic zeitgeist.
Here Nietzsche agrees that the universe has a "necessary" and "calculable" character but "not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment" (BGE.22).
The two key points to note here are:
(1) There are no "laws" in nature, but there are indeed "necessities".
(2) These "necessities" are the result of power relations between various constellations (quanta) of force.
As many remarks in the Nachlass show, Nietzsche was attracted to this idea right up until 1888, the idea 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" (WP.636).
"Mechanics shows us only the results, and then only in images (motion is a figure of speech). Gravity itself has no mechanistic cause, since it itself is the ground for mechanistic results. The will to accumulate force is special to the phenomena of life, to nourishment, procreation, inheritence - to society, state, custom, authority. Should we not be permitted to assume this will as a motive cause in chemistry, too? - and in the cosmic order?" (WP.689).
I've previously highlighted the fact that becoming in any truly radical formulation prohibits the very axioms of will to power taking hold, since some form of boundary of identity is needed in order for the concepts of "appropriation", "accumulation" and the feeling of power to make any sense.
ReplyDeleteHere I want to highlight a conceptual problem effectively identical to that which i've just outlined in the organic sphere.
If there are no "laws" but there are nevertheless manifest "necessities" to be observed in nature, and these "necessities" are the result of "every power drawing its ultimate consequence at every moment" - what is it that determines that one centre of power is able to exert a necessary, reliable, consistent, and calculable force over another centre of power?
Is Nietzsche not here simply placing a fat word in a gap in our (his) knowledge? If the notion of will to power is inherently active and encroaching, if every centre of force is continually striving to increase its effect upon other centres of forces and to thrust back everything it cannot dominate and master, then surely the relations between different power centres should be continually changing and no long term "necessities" and "regularities" should be visible at all in nature?
"Necessity" and "regularity" can only be understood as forms of equilibrium between conflicting centres of force. But if equilibrium persists for very lengthy periods (as it undoubtedly does), so much so that it can be regularly and repeatedly measured and quantified by observers in the form of "laws", then this enduring and resulting stasis seems to have brought any intrinsic will to power to a halt.
The will to power, paradoxically, seems to have resulted in a rigid passivity and conservatism in nature, and Nietzsche gives us no reason to account for this strikingly predictable and regular state of affairs.
According to the will to power, the apparent necessities and regularities that physicists observe in nature, if they exist at all, should only be temporary, should only be apparent for a brief length of time and should soon be replaced by very different "necessities" and "regularities", as a new configuration of power relations reach equilibrium and takes hold over events. It seems embarrassingly obvious to point out that this doesn't seem to happen in nature.
The recent discovery of the Higgs particle and the Higgs field by the LHC, for example, a discovery that many physicists had long anticipated in conformity with the Standard Model; are we really to imagine that this anticipation and discovery is due, in the final analysis, to the "bad philology" of the scientific community?
Physicists were able to predict and discover this precisely because they don't pay any attention to Nietzsche.
If there are no stable "things", if there is only becoming and force, whereby each, inherently unstable and fluctuating, sphere (quanta) of power interacts with another inherently unstable and fluctuating centre of power, then surely long-term, repeatedly observable, "necessities" and "regularities" should be the last thing we should expect to find in nature?
ReplyDeleteIf there are repeatedly observable and consistent "necessities" and "regularities" in nature, this equilibrium can only persist because the determining forces are unchanging. But an unchanging power relation between two or more centers of power, can only mean that the will to power is no longer operative, because it would mean the that various centres of power have neither increased nor decreased their force in relation to each other. Where has the inherent dynamism of the entire process gone?
One way out of this conundrum is to allocate the will to power to a much more moderate, conditional and subservient role and to admit that constraints of various kinds exist within which the will to power functions. Some of these constraints would be "laws of nature", principles and features of the universe which, once established, nothing can override or ignore or bypass. But Nietzsche doesn't want to endorse this picture, he wants the apparent "laws of nature" to be themselves the results of the more fundamental will to power.
This brings us to another conceptual problem identical to the one I raised earlier in relation to biology. Galen Strawson, for example, has recently endorsed Nietzsche's claim that there are no "laws of nature" but only power relations between various forces (Strawson's Nietzsche's Metaphysics, can be found here:
http://www.academia.edu/3051045/Nietzsches_Metaphysics ).
Strawson: "Matter isn’t a passively sitting stuff that is then (‘then’) regimented by laws. Laws of nature can’t be supposed to be in any way ontologically independent of, rather than essentially constitutive of, part of, the (categorical, intrinsic) nature of matter/energy. Matter or reality is force or energy, and
ReplyDelete[Nietzsche] 'the unalterable sequence of certain phenomena does not prove a "law" but a power relation between two or several forces. To say: "But precisely this relation remains the same!" means nothing more than: ‘One and the same force cannot be a different force as well’. (WLN: 88; NL 1885-6, KSA 12, 2[139]; Strawson's emphasis)
"This takes a little thinking about at first, but it is exactly right. Here Nietzsche imagines someone thinking that the claim ‘But precisely this relation remains the same!’ requires (or involves) appeal to a law as an explanation of its truth. But that is to misunderstand what a force is—what reality is. When you understand that, you see that ‘But precisely this relation remains the same!’ is really nothing more than a tautology or necessary truth, a particular instance of the necessary truth that ‘every thing is what it is, and not another thing’ (Butler 1729: 28)".
Strawson's essay frequently references modern physics and its apparent endorsement of reality as consisting of processes or fields, and the view that, in some fundamental sense, everything is energy. These are undoubtedly interesting and complex subjects but they are not my main concern here, and in addition, I prefer to get my understanding of physics from physicists themselves and not from metaphysical philosophers.
My primary concern here is that neither Nietzsche nor Strawson is able to why "this relation [of force, power] remains the same" and why it manifest itself in "an unalterable sequence of certain phenomena". Semantics aside, no reason is given as to why various forces have the characteristics and potency they do. If a particular force has a particular identity then that identity needs to be accounted for, its identity and potency cannot be said to consist simply of some undifferentiated kind of "stuff" or "force" or "power". Its potency, force, or power must reside in some type of arrangement, configuration, or structure both within and between various forces.
To say that "every thing is what it is, and not another thing" and that "One and the same force cannot be a different force as well", means that the "thing" in question has some determinate identity and quality which sets it apart from other "things" and that the (power) relation between these various "things" is constant.
From whence does this constancy arise? Answer: From potency and power relations. But what determines the potency between things? Answer: Their intrinsic potency determines their potency and their relations to each other. This strikes me as another instance of the Moliere fallacy that Nietzsche ridiculed in BGE.9.
In conclusion, I have emphasised two arguments against the will to power operating in the inorganic realm: (1) the inherently dynamic, active, temporal and encroaching character of will to power can't account for the unalterable regularity and calculability of events because this necessary stasis and passivity between forces, which we observe in the form of regularities and necessities in nature, presupposes a stasis and passivity within the forces themselves; and (2) no explanation is offered that accounts for the potency at the disposal of each and every power source; the potency of each power centre is simply said to exist in a particular (but unspecified) quantity, but no explanation is offered as to the source and ground of this potency.