Name: Will to Power
ISBN: 9781478384144

Will to Power

Nietzsche's notebooks, kept by him during his most productive years, offer a fascinating glimpse into the workshop and mind of a great thinker, and compare favorably with the notebooks of . The Will to Power, compiled from the notebooks, is one of the most famous books of the past hundred years, but few have studied it. Here, at last, is the first critical edition in any language. Down through the Nazi period The Will to Powerwas often mistakenly considered to be Nietzsche's crowning systematic labor; since World War II it has frequently been denigrated, just as fallaciously, as being not worth reading. In fact, it represents a stunning selection from Nietzsche's notebooks, in a topical arrangement that enables the reader to find what Nietzsche wrote on nihilism, art, morality, religion, the theory of knowledge, and whatever else interested him. But no previous edition--even in the original German--shows which notes Nietzsche utilized subsequently in his works, and which sections are not paralleled in the finished books. Nor has any previous edition furnished a commentary or index. Walter Kauffman, in collaboration with R.J. Hollingdale, brings to this volume his unsurpassed skills as a Nietzsche translator and scholar. Professor Kauffman has included the approximate date of each note.

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resource_wasteMay 2025

Power according to Hobbes is the ability to get what you want.

One of the forms of power is success power, another is riches (more here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2...)

By showing you can afford lavish things, you are demonstrating success power and riches. This makes people do whatever you want, or at least tilt the scale closer into your favor.

I think Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, then reading Will To Power would very much get you up to speed. Other authors, Hobbes, Machiavelli, maybe Stirner, maybe skip to Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Even ChatGPT can probably get you started on Nietzsche.

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oscilloscopeOct 2010

"Will to Power" by Friedrich Nietzsche, who you'll probably love if you like Rand.

"A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze & Guattari. A psychedelic philosophy of complexity. Not exactly an airtight philosophical system, but it will blow your mind several times per page.

"Being & Time" by Martin Heidegger. An intense, logical investigation of individual existence. A deeply nuanced philosophical take on death, being, and temporality. This is the book to grapple with your inevitable annihilation.

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edna_piranhaJul 2010

If you're interested in phenomenology and/or existentialism and works that are somewhat readable (this is subjective of course), I'd suggest:

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty - The Phenomenology of Perception

2. Simone de Beauvoir - Ethics of Ambiguity

3. Friedrich Nietzsche - Will to Power

I'd highly recommend NOT reading Being and Time by Heidegger - you'll want to stab your eyes out ten times.

Outside of pure philosophical texts and more emphasis on fictional works related to philosophy, I'd suggest indirect material that encourage ideas of subjective perception and point-of-view. Examples are works by Franz Kafka, Ryu Murakami and William S. Burroughs.

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origin_pathAug 2022

Thanks. I wasn't reading all your other posts in this thread. I have now read your proposal for a non-religious opposition to rape.

I'd like to clarify what I'm arguing here. I'm not arguing that only religion can provide a moral code. I don't think I've stated that anywhere. To try and clarify, what I'm claiming is:

- Science is not in and of itself a moral code. NB: science is not the same thing as rationality!

- Creating a moral code as comprehensive and useful as those that religions provide, based on nothing more than logic applied to a handful of axioms (first principles), is really hard. Maybe not impossible! But it's definitely harder than it looks, and this can easily lead to bizarre and destructive conclusions, or arguments that sound logical on the surface but which actually contain fallacies.

You are arguing (I think) that the codes provided by religions are totally irrational and should be discarded. I'm not actually religious but find myself in the Nietzschian camp, thinking that is risky and has to be refined a bit. If you accept the axioms (e.g. that the word of God/Jesus is axiomatically moral, that the Bible records the word of God/Jesus), then the reasoning from that point on is pretty straightforward. And in particular it's fairly complete because the Bible covers how to treat a lot of common situations. We know this moral code sorta mostly works, because it's been around a long time and we have a lot of experience with it. We also know what happened to communist societies that deliberately erased religion and replaced it with Marxist morality - hundreds of millions of deaths, which is why a common American insult to the Soviets in the 20th century was to call them "godless". This is what Nietzsche predicted in "The Will To Power".

"It should be obvious that killing in general will harm your own chances of survival in general ... This is simple evolution. If we don't optimize for life in our society then we have a clear disadvantage compared to other societies that do so."

OK, now we're getting somewhere. This is a Darwinian argument: that which leads to successful reproduction is moral.

The problem is that this justification fails in the case where one side is overwhelmingly strong. If my side knows about guns and has them, and all you have is spears, then realistically I can kill as many of you as I want without any real risk. Moreover I can then move in and take all your land and women, so at that point it's an evolutionary fit strategy to do so. Yet this shouldn't be considered morally OK merely because the risk of dying in return is very low. Indeed, it's critical to have a moral code that doesn't involve relative risks here to stop exactly that genocidal situation from occurring.

"Put random animals from different species into a room and most of them will also not kill each other. That does not mean some of them will not kill the other"

Correct but I've never claimed 100% consistent or even majority behaviour; it'd be irrelevant to my argument to do so. My point is that if you build a Darwinian moral code then there's nothing really wrong with me fighting and killing you. After all, animals do it sometimes. Sure not all the time, and I wouldn't go around killing people all the time anyway for the risk related reasons you previously highlighted. But so what? If evolution is all there is to it then how could anyone tell me not to kill you for moral reasons? The fact that most of the time, animals don't do it? Not convincing.

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Barrin92Sep 2021

the article is purely didactic and pedagogical. Nihilism is bad for society, therefore it's not okay, without nihilism there's no morality, therefore it's not okay, and so on. It's a sort of finger-wagging attitude of a parent.

This purely instrumental stance of viewing the world is basically just cope. A more mature and real approach is what you could call having an honest stance towards the world. If you come to the conclusion that nihilism, of whatever form, is what describes the world best, is the correct stance to take, and so on, you ought to do it. Not because it's 'good' or 'bad', but because it's intellectually and personally honest.

In the Will to Power one of the first things Nietzsche says is that we'll have to pay for 2000 years of Christianity. That is to say, the loss of absolute values and meaning is painful. Nonetheless it is necessary, because it has the benefit of being true. The widespread nihilism that the author thinks is a form of malaise is just a disorientation, having shed old values after recognizing that they're not fundamentally real.

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daseiner1Jun 2021

“You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.” - Nietzsche

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