much is reckoned higher than life itself by the living one. But out of the very reckoning speaketh the will to power. Thus did life once teach me. And thereby your wisest ones. Do I solve you the riddle of your hearts. Welcome to the first part of our series on the famous will to power. We will tackle this elusive nichian concept in three parts. The first part will serve as an introduction of sorts. We'll go over Nietzsche's intellectual background, most importantly the influence of both Schopenhauer and Darwinism. We will also look at the question of interpretation. Is the will to power a metaphysical principle, or is it simply a human drive or emotion? In the second part, we will look at the concept of the will to power as it appears in Nietzsche's work itself. The will to power is notoriously vague as a concept, and throughout Nietzsche's writings, we see how the concept comes to mean different things at different times in his intellectual development. In the second part, we trace these developments through a literature study.

of sorts. In the third part, we will look at a contemporary interpretation of the concept in modern philosophy. It will also serve as the grand conclusion of this series. We'll see how the will to power gives Nietzsche a means of overcoming Schopenhauer's pessimism. At the end, we will hope to have given you a comprehensive overview of one of the most difficult and misunderstood ideas in philosophy. If you want to be notified when parts 2 and 3 are released, please subscribe to the channel and click the bell button. With that said, let's get started. Schopenhauer and Darwinism. Any comprehensive discussion on Nietzsche must begin with Schopenhauer. The logical place to start is Schopenhauer's idea of the will to life. As we will see, in many ways, Nietzsche's will to power was formulated as a direct competitor to Schopenhauer's will to life. We will therefore briefly go over what this concept entails. For this section, we recommend you watch our series on Schopenhauer, particularly part 1, where we go in

greater detail. For Schopenhauer, the will to life is the metaphysical basis for all of reality. Behind the facade of the phenomenal world, that is to say the material world of time and space, the world of our senses and perception, is the world as will. This ever-striving, blind, irrational will is the true nature of reality. Our material world is simply an objectification of this will. Put another way, we are the end result of the workings of this will. We are the effects, and the will is the cause. What can we say about the will? Schopenhauer, at this point in his philosophy, takes a break from metaphysical speculation and takes a look at nature. He makes two observations. First, life is suffering. Second, everything that exists seems to fight for its own continued existence, and often these two observations go hand in hand. This universal conflict becomes most distinctly visible in the animal kingdom. For animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, and even within the animal kingdom, every beast is the prey and the food of another, for each animal can only maintain its

existence by the constant destruction of some other. Thus, the will to live everywhere preys upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment. So we arrive at three main ideas in Schopenhauer's conception of the will to life. 1. There is a metaphysical principle underpinning all of reality: the will. 2. This will is characterized by a struggle for life, or more broadly, a struggle for existence as its primary purpose. The will becomes the will to life. And 3. This struggle causes suffering, pessimism. These three points will be important later on. Notice the phrase struggle for life in the second point. Besides Schopenhauer, the other major development we need to discuss before moving on to Nietzsche proper is Darwinism. We always have to remember that Schopenhauer wrote down his entire philosophy some 40 years before Darwin's monumental On the Origin of Species was published. It will take another few decades before Darwin's biological theory of evolution would make its influence known in other areas of human knowledge.

such as philosophy. In particular, writes during the heyday of the philosophical movement that sought to explain everything in the natural world, even human behavior, in terms of material causes and effects. This means, however, that there is no room for metaphysical principles such as the Schopenhauerian will. After all, metaphysics, literally meaning beyond physics, cannot exist in the materialist framework advanced by Darwin and his acolytes. The struggle for life for Schopenhauer is the result of a metaphysical will being divided against itself through an infinite number of objectifications of itself. The struggle for life for Darwin is the result of limited resources and natural selection. In discussing Nietzsche's will to power, one of the main points of contention is the following question: Is the will to power a metaphysical principle, or is it a materialist explanation of behavior? Important follow-up questions include: Does the will to power apply to all of reality, or is it only limited to humans, animals, or plants? As we shall see, to answer these questions is not

straightforwardly simple. In fact, the answer to the questions seems to change throughout Nietzsche's own intellectual development. We will trace the development of the idea throughout Nietzsche's writings. In the next part, we will see how Nietzsche's own understanding of the concept evolves from how it appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, all the way to The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. Welcome to the second part in our series on Nietzsche's will to power. In the first part, we went over the necessary philosophical backgrounds. We quickly reiterated the main points of Schopenhauer's concept of the will to life, and the philosophical movement inspired by Darwinism that sought to explain all natural phenomena, including human behavior, from a materialist lens. Despite apparent agreements between Darwin and Schopenhauer, there is a huge point of contention between the two systems of thought. Schopenhauer advanced a metaphysical theory, while Darwin championed a materialist theory which has no need for metaphysics. As we shall see, Nietzsche struggled with his dilemma.

when trying to formulate his own concept of the will to power, the question that looms over the will to power even today is the following: should we understand the will to power as a metaphysical concept or not? The purpose of this video is to go through Nietzsche's works in chronological order and trace the evolution of the concept of the will to power in Nietzsche's own intellectual development. The fact of the matter is that there is simply no single will to power in Nietzsche's work. A lot depends on which conception you choose to single out for discussion, because as we will see, the concept has evolved throughout Nietzsche's thinking. 

The Joyful Science: A Theory of Power
In The Joyful Science, we see the first systematic treatment of power in Nietzsche's works. It's only one paragraph long, and Nietzsche doesn't use the term will to power yet. Rather, the paragraph is about the feeling of power, which is also the title of the paragraph in question. In it, Nietzsche describes how desires for cruelty and feelings of power are linked.

pity and cruelty are emotions linked to the practice of power. The first, pity, signifies a lack of power, while cruelty is associated with an increase in power. But we can see how the will to power is taking root here. The first sentence is illustrative. We exercise our power over others by doing them good or by doing them ill. That is all we care for. Notice how Nietzsche is restricting himself. The feeling of power seems to be a human affair. Can animals feel power? What about plants or rocks? The feeling of power seems to be restricted to organisms with a certain degree of intelligence, presumably only humans. If we go back to the question we asked ourselves earlier, is the will to power a metaphysical concept or not, we can see how at this stage of Nietzsche's development, the answer is no. The feeling of power, which Nietzsche describes here, is only applicable to humans. Therefore, we are closer to Darwin than we are to Schopenhauer. We are not in metaphysical territory. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the spoke.

zaratustra. We see the first mention of the term will to power in Nietzsche's works in chapter 34. We even get a definition of sorts: the will to power is the exhausted procreating life. Will. Later, Zarathustra says, wherever I found a living thing, there found I will to power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master. But the content of the concept seems to have changed in between The Joyful Science and Zarathustra. An earlier section, chapter 15, describes Zarathustra's travels through many countries where he encounters many different peoples. What they all have in common is that each adheres to a different system of morality of good and evil. Zaratustra remarks that the labels good and evil are simply value judgments created by man himself. Different definitions are used by different communities, yet all of them seem to flourish all the same. Zaratustra exclaims, a table of excellencies hangeth over every people: lo, it is the table of their triumphs; lo, it is the voice of

their will to power human systems of good and evil. Which is to say, all systems of good and evil are simply an expression of a stronger underlying will to power. Making a value judgment, assigning values is a creative act, and therefore an expression of the will to power. And it seems that humans cannot escape this impulse. Values that man only assign to things in order to maintain himself, therefore calleth he himself man, that is the evaluator. In Zarathustra, the will to power seems to be a decidedly human phenomenon. It is primarily concerned with value judgments and ethical systems. Man exercises his will to power by creating values and systems of good and evil. Beyond Good and Evil, published three years after Zarathustra, explores the concept further beyond human affairs. Of all Nietzsche's works, Beyond Good and Evil has the most references to the will to power, with the term appearing in 11 aphorisms. In aphorism 36, Nietzsche seems to suggest that the will to power might actually be a metaphysical principle independent.

of human affairs, or rather, the reader is invited to make the thought experiment. If nothing in the world is given as real except for our desires and passions, is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether this, which is given, does not suffice for an understanding even of the so-called mechanical or material world? Nietzsche takes the thought experiment very far. It's part of his larger exercise in beyond good and evil to question the hidden assumptions philosophers before him have had without realizing it. We have a video dedicated to the will to power as it appears in beyond good and evil. We highly recommend you watch it. There is a link in the description. By the time we get to twilight of the idols, the time for thought experiments has passed. The traditional confounding of that which is the least real, the illusory world of our desires, passions, and senses, with what is most real, the Kantian deng anzech, is subject of a particularly scathing passage. Nietzsche speaks of the mistake of

philosophers to confuse the last for the first the highest concepts that is to say the most general the emptiest concepts at the beginning as the beginning in essence nietzsche invites us to think bottom up instead of top down where philosophers have traditionally posited god the last thinnest emptiest concept as the ansi realism the most real thing. We should regard our basest desires and passions in short our will to power as the most real thing instead. In fact so-called higher concepts such as god become unnecessary to explain the world if we accept that the will to power is the anserialism wherein beyond good and evil nietzsche was still talking in terms of a thought experiment. In twilight of the idols he seems to regard the will to power as a very real metaphysical principle underpinning all of reality. The antichrist is the last complete book nietzsche himself wrote. The concept of the will to power has not changed much from twilight of the idols to the antichrist but some famous quotes are found here.

and they might make things a bit clearer. What is good? Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power. Whenever the will to power fails, there is disaster. The Antichrist is more about what happens when will to power is lacking, whether it be in religion, individuals, people, or society. A lack of will to power is decadence, degeneration, weakness. We will explore the concept of decadence more in another video. Finally, we have the posthumous work with the title Will to Power. We will not discuss that work here. The simple reason is that this book was not published in Nietzsche's own lifetime. It consists of loose notes compiled by his sister after his death. For that reason, the work is not generally considered to be canonical. However, if there is enough interest, we might do a separate video in the future.

if you'd like to see it, please comment below. However, it's obvious that towards the end of his life, Nietzsche saw the will to power as more of a metaphysical principle than he had at the beginning of his intellectual career. Conclusion: we see how the will to power was first introduced as simply an observation on human behavior in The Joyful Science. In Zarathustra, the will to power takes on the form of the creative, valuating part of the human spirit, common to all humans, and maybe even to all organic life. In Beyond Good and Evil, we are invited to a thought experiment: what if the will to power was simply a grand theory of everything? Is the will to power enough to explain reality, human behavior included? Is the will to power a metaphysical undercurrent influencing a simple rock as much as it does mankind? Finally, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche rails against the philosophers who have complicated metaphysical systems with God at the top, in what he calls a grave error of taking the last

for the first, we simply do not need God or a metaphysical complex system to explain reality. All we need is the will to power. As if the thought experiment of Beyond Good and Evil had become reality. Let's go back to our first dilemma. Is the will to power a metaphysical concept like Schopenhauer's will to life? Or is it simply a physical theory of behavior like Darwin's natural selection and struggle for life? It seems Nietzsche himself moved from Darwinism back to Schopenhauer-style metaphysics towards the end of his intellectual career. The will to power has undergone a transformation from a human instinct or drive to a mysterious force underpinning all of reality. However, it would also be a mistake to call this metaphysics. Nietzsche's opinion in Twilight of the Idols is actually very straightforward. He rails against metaphysical systems. He is quite obviously opposed to a metaphysical dualism in the sense of Schopenhauer. Yet some sort of dualism is still needed in order to understand.

the conception of the will to power of the late Nietzsche, a materialist doctrine, simply does not allow for a vocabulary to formulate something like the will to power as Nietzsche envisioned it in his late period. Yet, he is also opposed to metaphysics in this traditional sense. Nietzsche himself struggled greatly with his dilemma. He was working it out but could not finish his own work due to his mental illness, which left him incapacitated for the last 11 years of his life. Perhaps it is up to us to finish the task that I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends. Ah, whoever guesses what is my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed. Whatever I create and however much I love it, soon I must oppose it, and my love, thus my will, wills it. This is the third part in a series on Nietzsche's will to power. In the first part, we went over the philosophical background necessary to understand the concept, and in the second part, we took a look at

nietzsche's published works, and we saw how the will to power as a concept evolved throughout nietzsche's intellectual career. The central question we're asking ourselves is, is the will to power a metaphysical principle, or is it a materialist, or even psychological drive? We saw how nietzsche himself wasn't quite able to answer this question. He was working on solving the problem, but sadly became ill before he could finish it. In this part, we will look at a modern interpretation of the will to power that, in our opinion, at least offers a neat solution to the aforementioned question. The problem is the following: in niches later works, we keep reading how the will to power is formulated as a kind of metaphysical principle, but on the other hand, also in the late nietzsche, we read a constant attack on the metaphysical systems of previous philosophers, and he even attacks the notion of metaphysics itself. How can we square this whole? Is metaphysics possible or not? How can the will to power be a

metaphysical concept, while also not being metaphysical at the same time. Before we go on, keep in mind this is just one interpretation of many. Your interpretation may vary. With that said, let's take a look at a modern attempt to solve this problem. For this video, we will take a look at Bernard Reginster's book on Nietzsche entitled The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism from 2006. The section that interests us deals with the question: What is power? What is Nietzsche talking about when he speaks of the will to power? Throughout the series, we have hinted at possible answers, going from simple physical strength to political power, to creating values, to defining good and evil, to acquiring knowledge, and so on. But we need to have some definiteness. If Nietzsche wants to use the will to power to explain reality, we must have a clear picture of what exactly that means. Unfortunately, Nietzsche doesn't give us the straight answer himself. We must find our own answer. This is the answer of Bernard Reginster.

in my view, then, the will to power is the will to the overcoming of resistance. This definition dictates a particular conception of the relation between it and other drives. So defined, the concept of power is in and of itself devoid of any determinate content. It gets a determinate content only from its relation to some determinate desire or drive. Something constitutes a resistance only in relation to a determinant, and one desires to realize. In register's analysis, the will to power is a second-rate desire. When one desires this or that, one automatically desires the power to satisfy that desire. Furthermore, in defining the will to power as the will to the overcoming of resistance, one must paradoxically conclude that one actively wills resistance in order to realize some other determinate end. Thus, in looking for power, one also looks for resistance. This idea of always more shines through when Nietzsche speaks of life, which is again simply will to power, in terms of growth and self-overcoming. The will to power is not self-defeating but rather insatiable.

similarly, Nietzsche has often criticized the so-called will to truth of philosophers. Yet, in this analysis, the search for knowledge is only another form of will to power. Acquiring knowledge, seeking to solve new problems, and answer new questions is just another manifestation, another way of resistance to be overcome. Knowledge, like life, is a process of growth. It could be said that the will to power ultimately wills itself as a kind of virtuous cycle of continuous self-overcoming and growth. Here we find again parallels with Schopenhauer's characteristics of the will. Recall that Schopenhauer assigned three primary characteristics to the will: the will to life is irrational, eternal, and blind. Similarly, Nietzsche's will to power and desiring ultimately only itself, with no overarching guiding principle and no possible permanent satisfaction, shares these three characteristics. Also, note how we're taking a middle road here. We are not in full-blown metaphysical territory, but we're also not simply saying the will to power is just another drive among many. In his formulation, Reginster has found a

solution to the question we have been asking ourselves in this series. But the most important achievement of register's interpretation is how it ties together nietzsche's entire project. Overcoming pessimism and nihilism. Despite the similarities with schopenhauer nietzsche's characterization of the will as ultimately driven by power gives him a way out of schopenhauer's ardent pessimism. Defining the will as driven by power and not by mere life existence or self-preservation is nietzsche's primary weapon against schopenhauer's pessimism. For schopenhauer it is precisely because of the never-ending will to life eternally insatiable that permanent happiness is impossible. Humans are destined to swing like a pendulum between two miserable states. Either a state of unfulfilled desire or a state of boredom when the desire has been fulfilled and a new desire is on the horizon. The only way out is a complete renunciation of the will which in practice translates to a lifetime of asceticism. In essence this is a radical saying no.

to life's pleasures, chiefly those pleasures concerning food, drink, and sex. Since we have defined the will to power as the will to the overcoming of resistance, suffering, which is another way of saying encountered resistance, has become re-evaluated to no longer carry negative connotations. For the will to power to flourish, suffering is not only necessary, suffering must be actively desired. In a way, Nietzsche is turning a curse into a blessing. That is not to say that rejecting Chopin harrium asceticism leads to ordinary hedonism. Within the framework of the will to power, asceticism has its place, for an ascetic life is a self-contradiction. Here rules rezantimo without equal, that of an insatiable instinct and power will that wants to become master, not over something in life, but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful, and basic conditions. Here an attempt is made to employ force to block up the wells of force. Here physiological well-being itself is viewed as sconce.

and especially the outward expression of this well-being beauty and joy while pleasure is felt and sought. In ill-constitutedness decay pain mischance ugliness voluntary deprivation self-mortification self-regulation and self-sacrifice. The ascetic wages war against himself and against life in general. He deliberately seeks out resistance in order to overcome it not in the external world but in the internal one. In fact successful aestheticism increases the feeling of power. It is viewed as a type of growth. The suffering is not the goal as the ascetic would have you believe but the overcoming of the suffering. Thus asceticism is not a denial of the will to life but a manifestation of the will to power. In conclusion one might say that for Schopenhauer suffering in the world is a necessary evil while for Nietzsche well he has made a virtue out of necessity. In response this is the heart of the matter Nietzsche's will to power re-evaluate the position of suffering in the human experience.

while for schopenhauer the over-abundance of suffering in the world precluded man from ever achieving a state of contentment or happiness, for nietzsche the suffering in the world is an opportunity for the will to power to vent itself, to show its strength. Suffering becomes a necessary part of the human condition, and those who overcome it will feel the pleasure of increasing power, the closest thing we get to ordinary happiness in nichian terms. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome. We are tempted to think that nietzsche, especially in his later works, made a radical departure from his chopin haurian influences, but when we look at nietzsche's work from this angle, there are more similarities in the worldview than we might at first suspect. Ultimately, both nietzsche and schopenhauer maintain that the world and the human experience are characterized by suffering. The big difference is that for schopenhauer, this meant we should withdraw from the world; for nietzsche, this means the world is challenging us, even taunting us.

Schopenhauer invites us to say no to the world, while Nietzsche wants us to say yes, and not just say yes, but very radically say yes, not just to life's pleasures, but to life's pains as well. Pain, after all, is just an opportunity for us to exercise our power. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. With Reginster's analysis, we have a fitting conclusion to our series on the will to power. Nietzsche envisioned for his philosophy to be a prelude to a future re-evaluation of all values. He wanted his will to power to be the center point of this reevaluation. He needed an alternative metaphysical foundation for reality in order to bring about a new moral order. The Antichrist was the first book and a planned series dedicated to this revolution of values, but sadly Nietzsche's mental health did not allow him to finish the project. Reginster has made a valuable contribution by examining the enigmatic foundation of it all, the elusive will to power, and making it

more clear and definitive the will to power is. The desire to overcome resistance. It has no determinant end goal in itself. It can take many forms, but the striving for growth, for venting strength, for overcoming, for creating, for destroying. This perpetual struggle against life is what Nietzsche wanted us to embrace. Ultimately, Nietzsche's project remains unfinished, but maybe that's just fitting. The will to power is never done. The will to power is the necessity and embrace of struggle itself, the condition for growth. By leaving some questions unanswered, Nietzsche gave us our own opportunities to practice will to power by picking up where he left off. I hear with pleasure that our sun is swiftly moving towards the constellation of Hercules, and I hope that man on this earth will, in this respect, follow the sun's example. Thank you for watching, and we'll see you in the next one.

NIETZSCHE: Will to Power Explained (all parts)

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