Exploring the final work of the West’s most controversial philosopher
Dostoevsky once said, “If Christ is not the truth, I prefer to remain outside the truth with Christ.” Though anybody can understand the words, to truly understand the sentiment is a difficult thing. Everyone finds ways to deceive themselves; it is another matter entirely to knowingly choose against the truth.
However, Simone Weil referred to Dostoevsky’s confession as a “frightful blasphemy.” For Weil, Christ sanctified himself by his relationship to the truth and a Christian should always be willing to abandon the faith if it was shown to be outside the truth. That said, Nietzsche’s The Will to Power is the most potent, not to mention extensive, attack on my own faith that I have ever encountered. It represents a perfectly realized atheism in a way that I have never seen rivaled anywhere else. But to call it merely an attack on Christianity would be to drastically undersell just how profound this book is.
To start, it is MASSIVE, just shy of six hundred pages long. At this point, I’ve read a good chunk of Nietzsche’s work (Zarathustra, All too Human, Genealogy, Ecco Homo, Birth of Tragedy, not to mention various readers throughout my undergraduate work), but, for my money, this is THE definitive book outlining Nietzsche’s philosophy, and for good reason: it was meant to be his magnum opus, before it was abandoned in frustration and later arranged and published after N.’s death by his sister, Elizabeth, and his friend, Heinrich Koselitz.
The Will to Power is divided into four books which chart a path from nihilism to the “revaluation of values” and the embracing of the will to power.
In the first, N. explains that Europe’s descent into nihilism is the result of fundamental misconception: the belief that the world and life can be judged morally or found wanting. This is, according to his estimation, the origin of nihilism: a loss of faith in the moral justifications for existence. N. diagnoses European society with “decadence” — something like cultural exhaustion, a failure of confidence. While others had said similar things, they had attributed this failure to a loss of faith in various cultural institutions such as the Church and Christianity. Nietzsche goes much further, defining religion — and even morality itself — as forms of decadence. In the second book, he embarks on a radical critique of not just of religion, but of morality and even philosophy.
The philosophy of The Will to Power is about as cynical a philosophy as can be imagined, not that this makes it wrong. Nietzsche imagines two broad groups of humanity: the exceptional and “the herd.” This immediately invokes racial connotations, but N. doesn’t mean it racially. Even when he does speak of “races,” he seems to be using it to mean something closer to “ethnicities.” Regardless, in every race, the exceptional (the strong) are the extreme minority. Morality is envisioned as an attempt by the majority to embrace its own will to power, which takes the form of norms and rules meant to hamper the creative and dominant powers of the strong.
The philosophers likewise are accused of pursuing their own “will to power” through the use of their cleverness and their ability to make others seem foolish, or to try to rescue their God by means of logical arguments. But at the ground floor of his axioms, every philosopher has only invented a system which in some way upholds himself as the exemplar, the priest, the wise or brilliant man. (One could, of course, turn this criticism around on Nietzsche — except that he is so clearly NOT the ubermensch that he preached about and makes no effort to pretend to be, *AND* because his philosophy does not award moral value to anything; he could not ever claim any superiority for believing or acting in certain ways.)
In his third part, he describes the various ways in which the “will to power” is manifested in nature, society, and art. It’s all very fascinating and there’s no way that I could do justice to it here, so I won’t even try.
A Connoisseur of Bullets
In philosophy departments, one frequently hears the expression “biting the bullet” in regards to when one has to assert some proposition or logical consequence that is at odds with either “common sense” or a popular opinion on some given subject. Generally, it is something that philosophers (at least, today) try to avoid…and a fair amount of time and ink is spent in the effort to reduce the pain of bullet-biting (see the recent the scholarship of Moral Anti-Realists still trying to reconcile their commitments with their ability to live in the world).
I once saw an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not which featured a man who ate bullets (as well as various other glass and metal objects) as a hobby, and this roughly captures something of Nietzsche’s approach to bullet-biting, namely that there is not a single one that he will not. I suppose when you believe you’re so far ahead of the curve that it’s not even worth the effort of trying to make yourself palatable, you become savagely honest. The consequences of Nietzsche’s beliefs are so terrible that he even states:
“We are in need of lies in order to triumph over this reality, this ‘truth’, that is in order to live…The lie which is needed in order to live is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence…”
Elsewhere, he also claims that, for him, the measure of a man’s strength is how much of the horrible truth is able to endure before he most retreat to comforting lies.
It’s amusing to me the lengths that people have gone to in order to try to rehabilitate Nietzsche to modern audiences. Nietzsche would have spit on such attempts to reconcile him to the mediocre moralists of our age. On the back cover of my edition, a blurb reads as follows:
“These writings…offer some of his most powerful and troubling thoughts: on how the values of a new, aggressive elite will SAVE–
[this one made me laugh out loud because the ‘salvation’ that is being referred to here is…slavery. You might want to check the Carfax on that one]
–a nihilistic, mediocre Europe, and, most famously, on the ‘will to power’ — ideas that were seized upon and twisted by later readers.”
Now, I have to admit that I, too, once fell into the camp of people who believe this — back when I’d only listened to second-hand commentary on Nietzsche’s philosophy without reading it myself. And I’ll be upfront and say that there are still a couple of his later works that I haven’t gotten to yet (Edit: I was here speaking of Twilight of the Idols and Anti-Christ, which I have now read and my opinion remains unchanged), and perhaps there’s something in there that will cause me to reconsider; but, based on all of his work that I’ve read so far and ESPECIALLY this volume, the idea that N.’s philosophy was “twisted” is comically absurd.
This is a man who said that the French Revolution was justified because it produced Napoleon, that millions would be sacrificed (and should be sacrificed) for the creation of a single superior individual:
“To attain that tremendously energetic quality possessed by great men, the quality most needed in moulding the men of the future, requires not only the cultivation of these men but also the annihilation of millions the ill-constituted. The difficulty is to do such a a thing and not be devastated at the thought of the suffering produced, suffering the like of which has never before been seen!”
And while N. may have famously despised his sister’s antisemitic fiancé, it was probably not for the reasons that we might expect or feel vindicated by.
And yet, for all this moral horror, Nietzsche is correct. Well, he’s correct if his starting assumption that we live in a godless universe is correct. Granted that axiom, all of the rest follows very naturally.
Final Thoughts
It’s difficult to describe the feeling one gets while reading Nietzsche. He is SO far ahead of his time.
I used to think that he was ahead of ours; but, after this reading, I think we may actually be right on schedule. Both C.S. Lewis (in The Abolition of Man) and Theodore Adorno and Horkheimer (in Dialectic of Enlightenment) opined on a shared fear of the future in which mankind has mechanized himself or turned himself into a means to an end. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this as the possible outcome of the instrumentalized Baconian reasoning of the Enlightenment, while Lewis imagined it as the outcome of the line-of-thought of those who reject what he calls the Tao and feel free to reinvent mankind in whatever form they choose. Ultimately, both feared the enslavement of humanity, but Nietzsche does not; he considers it necessary to the appearance of whatever is to supersede humanity.
And still, in spite of all this, it is difficult to call him a monster. There is great value in his words — in his incredible faith in the power of the human spirit. The thing that makes N. most distasteful to us (not that it matters; he wouldn’t care in the slightest) is that he imagines that the difference between the inferior and superior human is innate…a matter of breeding, almost. But if we reimagine this to say that it is a matter of choice, there is immense utility that can be taken from that.
Throughout his writings, Nietzsche characterizes the strong person as one who seeks out suffering so that he may transcend it; he looks for new burdens, he looks for opportunities to demonstrate his strength.
In a world brimming over with people living down to the lowest expectations, filling their lives with the boring hedonism of stock-standard consumerism, Nietzsche is still a necessary wake-up call — a reminder that the ground is always moving beneath our feet, that there is no such thing as “resting in safety,” and that the will to freedom is always the will to fight, the will to power.
We continually promote the interests of our egos at the ‘expense of other’; life always lives at the expense of others. He who has not grasped this fact has not yet made the first step towards being honest with himself.
Each individual represents the whole course of evolution (and not only, as morality [conceives] it, something which begins at birth). If he represents mankind’s ascending course his value is, in fact, extraordinary; and extreme care should be taken in preserving and fostering his growth…If he represents its descending course, towards decay and chronic illness, then he is of little value; simple fairness requires that the well-constituted be deprived of room, vigour and sunshine as little as possible. In this case, society has a duty to suppress egoism…whether it be that of individuals or of whole strata of the population which are decaying and atrophied. A doctrine and religion of ‘love’, of the suppression of the self-affirmation, of patience, forbearance and helpfulness, of reciprocity in word and deed, may be of supreme value within such strata, even in the eyes of the rulers, for it suppresses feelings of rivalry, ressentiment and envy, feelings which are all too natural in the unfortunate — it apotheosizes the condition of being enslaved, subjugated, impoverished, infirm and down-trodden for them, under the ideal of humility and of obedience. This is why, in every age, the ruling classes of all races, as well as the ruling individuals, have upheld the worship of selflessness, the gospel of the ‘meek’ and ‘the God on the cross.’
That is the convenience which ‘the good man’ affords — he inspires no fear, he puts us at ease, we find everything about him eminently acceptable…The same sort of man who wishes for nothing but ‘fair weather’ also wishes for nothing but ‘good men’…But if we view things from a higher vantage-point, we desire exactly the opposite, the ever-greater reign of evil, man’s increasing emancipation from the narrow and timid strictures of morality, the growth of the power to take the greatest forces of nature, [the] passions, into service…
The Barking Years 
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