I believe Nietzsche's use of the striking catch phrase "Will to Power" was one of his biggest blunders.
Granted, he couldn't have foreseen his sister's later mischief - creating, "forging" (Montinari's phrase) a book called "The Will to Power", proclaiming it to contain her brother's final thoughts and then selling it and an ignorant, warped, edited view of him to anti-Semitic Nazi "sub-men" (in Camus' phrase).
Granted, Power is a much better "ultimate description" of the world than God or Love or Survival or the Quark.
And then, he couldn't have foreseen that the meaning of the word "will" would slowly change from "passion and drive" to "conscious effort". Conscious Effort to Power? This combination of concepts is perhaps the best indication that one lacks power, that your instincts, your drive to power has abandoned you. The use of the less striking phrase "drive to power" or "desire for power" would have avoided this problem.
But there are further problems.
Nietzsche paid sufficient attention to the complexities of willing in Beyond Good and Evil Section 19 and elsewhere, but he didn't have time to explore the complexities of power. So I will make the following points:
1. The flip-side, the yin-yang partner of power is ... laughter - life wasting time and energy in the delight at the ultimate uselessness of all existence, of all power. In animals, play is not just practicing for power but also "mocking" it. I can't help feeling my cat is laughing as it bounces across the floor chasing a rolling ball. Power is life's serious straight-man. The taller, the more powerful the man that slips on the banana the greater the laughter. A complete thesis would also say, 'the world is ... 'will to laughter' and nothing else'
2. Power that is unlaughable (such as the holocaust or state capital punishment) is not power at all but a pathetic attempt to hide one's weakness.
3. The greatest power in the universe, truly infinite, is the 'butterfly effect'. Whether you wave your hand towards the right or the left will totally change, through the capriciousness of the winner of conception, the faces of every person on earth 500 years from now and into eternity. Here infinite power meets infinite laughter - for this power is infinitely useless.
4. The types and colors of power are as varied as life itself.
5. Different types of power fight and destroy each other. A few examples:
a. Sprinters can't run long distances well. Body builders and dinosaurs lack flexibility.
b. Man's reliance on machines and his supreme domination of every bit
of earth into a safe super-controlled artificial environment (e.g.
suburbia) are making him organically weaker and weaker.
c. In empire-building
cultures (German, American, British), the regimentation needed for
powerful armies and economies leads to meek, powerless, undeveloped
personalities.
6. There are two main categories of individual power:
A. Organic power: the power of your instincts, your organs, your spirit, your body - developed by life's drive to power over 3 billion years.7. Domination and commanding, which Nietzsche considered important aspects of the will to power, is hardly ever a happy situation for the dominator, the 'topdog'. As Fritz Perls pointed out, 'the bottomdog, the saboteur, always wins'
8. Compared with death, the simplest abilities (walking, lifting, talking, eating, looking etc.) have infinite power and can be enjoyed as such.
My own theory is that with this phrase Nietzsche, consciously or subconsciously, played a practical joke on humanity. In practical terms, real power, that is organic power, develops very slowly. The path from man to overman takes millenia rather than decades, and certainly not from "New Year's Resolutions"
In Ecce Homo (Part 2 Section 9) he describes the development of his own capacities -To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. ...
The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface —must be kept clear of all great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great pose! ... Meanwhile the organizing "idea" that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down —it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as means toward a whole—one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, "goal," "aim," or "meaning."
I never even suspected what was growing in me - and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth in their ultimate perfection. I cannot remember that I ever tried hard - no trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my life; I am the opposite of a heroic nature. "Willing" something, "striving" for something, envisaging a "purpose," a "wish" - I know none of this from experience.
© Copyright 2006
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