Will to Power

AQ

232 Idea of a will to power or an unconscious mind. Idea of a psychological drive. The picture that comes into mind when we think this is not compelled by the logic of the concept.
Pictures of the will to power as a drive. Like the driving myth of the superman. Idea of all things as restrained in power, as being as they are because they do not have unlimited power and wealth.
Imagine a tension, the compressed spring. It is like we imagine a desire which may not be explicitly there. Like we add an extra energy, an explicit desire and judge in terms of this. In this context one comes into a lot of conflict.

281 Will to power a viewpoint that sees every viewpoint in terms of the suppression of other viewpoints. Aim being to repel demoralising ideas. The crucial point. A viewpoint that justifies itself by revealing undeniable facts which others conceal.
Succeeds in repelling the idea with will to power. He has a perspective which is not only incompatible with the demoralising ideas he wants to repel but superior to other perspectives in being more compatible with demonstrable features of reality, which opposing perspectives ignore or deny.

43 Obviously some will to power must suppressed, but one looks for an intelligible basis on which to insist on that.
An egalitarian zeitgeist. Every product of this zeitgeist, uninterpreted as will to power, is contemptible. See how a whole era can come to seem hateful.
The pubescent girl does not understand how oppressive and hateful her values can be. To her these values of conformism are just the safety and happiness she remembers from home. What could be wrong with that?

AJ

1 Conscious will to power. Being in favour of the will to power. The strong. Life affirmation v life negation. ‘The strong man’ lives in a way that is compatible with recognition of will to power. He lives in consciousness of his will and the need for it to be satisfied. Anyone may use morality to attack a form of strength to which they are opposed. Nothing wrong with that..
Strength and weakness are qualities that occur through reality. Confusion of truth and symbol is always a possibility. In speaking of the strong Nietzsche means individual strength, essentially an attitude towards one’s own experience.
In relation to my own will, my own experience, I have to see myself as strong.
I oppose the morality of the weak insofar as it is directed against myself. Throw it back at the reader ad hominem. I may oppose someone else’s strength, but do I oppose my own strength, my own ability to further my aims and objectives?
A thoroughgoing morality of the weak refuses to envisage itself as being in a condition of strength. It cannot look at that position in this manner.
To be opposed to strength, however it manifests itself, is the essence of Christianity as Nietzsche sees it. So it cannot see pure will as in itself good

The morality of the weak. Seeing itself as in opposition to the will to power as such. In opposing the will of the strong, it explicitly opposes its own will, which is a piece of dishonesty. To oppose will to power as manifested in oneself is ex hypothesis impossible. Consciously, however, one may oppose it.

On the philosophical level we have Schopenhauer, with a doctrine of explicit hostility to the will.
To be in favour of the will to power, life affirmation.
If you understand the primacy of the will to power, you cannot see yourself in opposition to it. Is this to say that life affirmation is inevitable, life negation impossible? Perhaps one of the problems with Nietzsche is that people too easily take his categories to refer to distinct classes of people.

45 Will to power. To persuade by argument. The new agon. What is power? I spoke of the power of the philosopher. The power to persuade by means of argument. The ultimate ideal of life, a form of battle. The ideal of Pindar. Athletic contests. The Valhalla ideal.
Forms of power. What about the power of the priest? To what extent is the priest an unarticulated form of philosopher?
Battle, power. Power as realised in battle Genghis Khan’s idea of greatest happiness, slaughtering your enemies and embracing their wives and daughters.
In one’s will to power how far does one want to go? First one wants to set up the arena.
Conscious will to power, the form it takes. Pindar versus Socrates. That the persuasion of others is a more satisfying exercise than the experience of a warlord.
The enjoyment and the practice of power.

115 Marx has a lot to say about illusion and reality. What people think their values are and what they really are. So the sort of unconscious reality represented by the will to power is not altogether alien to him.
To suggest that true values are no more than toys for a child or chasing young women for young men, implicitly this denies the will to power.
Much as he rejects the present order Marx is as despotic as an authoritarian conservative. He envisages a happiness in which the will to power is suppressed.
i.e. it is considered not to be necessary, all happiness is to be obtained with the framework of a given set of values.

174 In expressing a truth, whoever first expresses a truth requires that other people accept it. Crowley’s example. It is on the self as active will, that part of Nietzschean doctrine. In a way profoundly satisfying. The will to power perhaps in its most conscious form.
Crowley advances beyond Nietzsche in his living of an active will to power. He incarnates this as a form of knowledge.
Will to power, desire for your ideas to flourish in the world. Nearly always there is a species of dishonesty. The chiefs and Indians bit.
Take Freud as one example. You have a doctrine and you want to have followers. The true joy of life that you have discovered is that of being a king in the realm of thought. You present yourself to your followers in a somewhat dishonest guise as humble servant of truth. You do not teach them your real secret.

197 The denial of the will to power involves an ideal of contentment that is an invitation to slavery.
The denial of the will to power. Incompatible ideals of happiness. In the society, prevalent ideal of life. Awakened ambition. Accepting the concept of the will to power one forms one’s own ambitions. This ambition is opposed by prevalent values within society. Happiness is offered conditional on the acceptance of unacceptable assumptions.
Firstly that there is no will to power.
Try to clarify.
Accepting the concept of will to power one is conscious of desires beyond those easily satisfied. Say that each recognises in himself a desire to become a god. It is not that he is likely to achieve godhead or become a king.

209 When we articulate objectives, what are they likely to be? This is much up to the individual of course. Some people may be solely concerned with athletics. The will to power will only take this form given certain interests.

294½ Marx is conscious of the will to power, say a conscious will to power, but he deplores it, writing about the man from Holstein.
What Nietzsche argues is that conscious will to power becomes inevitable given certain beliefs about human nature. The very communist equality thesis is a manifestation of it i.e. springing from deprivation. This is how the equality thesis can alone become plausible.
Thesis of a will to power.

Turning the will to power into rational persuasion.
Exercise of will to power hemmed in by social constraint not abstract moral ideas, but the will to power of others.
Claim that will to power is universal, that it is natural. Difference this makes.
That it makes a difference. It does so insofar as different beliefs result in different desires.
According to different beliefs different options appear to be open for desire.
Marx’s call for universal equality. Fairness.
Submission to alien standards. The call that one submits to alien standards, understand this.
Refusal to admit desire for power as a legitimate motive.
Consider these opposing viewpoints. Desire for power, desire for power moralised, desire for power opposed.
Claim for universality of will to power. This compared to an opposing viewpoint.
Intensity of Marx’s own will to power, his desire to crush opposing views. His identification with a will to power of the excluded.

302 Marx v Nietzsche. Marx regards a will to power as a bad thing, unless expressed in a collective spirit. With Nietzsche the only motive to change things, and not accept prevailing standards, is an aggressive, competitive spirit, a conscious will to power. Without that, prevailing standards and judgements are simply accepted. We are not to say that they are simply wrong, and that this is an insight that can be got. For that is virtually meaningless.
The elusive.
Arguing for the existence of the will to power, for the will to power as an innate drive. Activated by it oneself. An argument why opposing views must be rejected. They present standards and values to which you may or may not submit in repressive guise .
A will to understand is a measure of will to power. Why try to understand, why not be content with ignorance as are the extremely unaggressive? One seeks the limits, i.e. natural constraint, that is truth.
To deny the will to power is to set up barriers, values.
Is the will to power in some and not in all? If it were not in those who are claimed not to have it there would be no resistance if I tried to take power from then.
This is a perspective. Perhaps one has to argue, to convince ad hominem.
Will to Power theory is a whole view or perspective, and the claim is that it is an illuminating perspective, i.e. illuminating for you, with your will to power and all, such as it is. The views it is rejecting are claimed to be distortions.
Will to power is perhaps not a theory to appeal to a soulless computer. For any number of theories may be applied as classificatory grids. A computer could hardly choose between the, perhaps it would go for simplicity.

AP

1 Nietzsche’s project and conception of life. Repelling a type of depressing idea. When I say that someone’s opinions express a will to power, that must avoid triviality.
Repelling depressing ideas is to involve the discomfiture of others, of those who hold those ideas. It is to show how those ideas are rooted in error and falsehood. That every successful opinion involves the suppression of others.
How much this is fact and how much emotional tone.

61& Transvaluation. A new way of looking at everything that is. See how a partial victory could obscure everything. Reconciling oneself with society, making one feel one shares in its judgement. Like giving up the resistance. Become what you are.
Say one desires power, even absolute power. This meets resistance. Pressure to yield to the resistance.
True liberation. War against Ialdabaoth.
Will to power. All the possibilities of thinking differently. Release from a constant pressure. How could the pressure be removed? Imagine some easy way of removing it, like becoming a hero. Not right. Answer. For one thing, it is untruthful. It involves an abandonment of friends and equals.
What will to power elucidates is a full range of different possible positions in conflict with each other.

147& Will to power as a principle of enlightenment. See this as love, for human relationships. The guru principle. The most primitive form of intellectual power relationship.
One might be able to see all enlightenment in terms of human relationships.

Post modernism not an acceptable development of Nietzsche’s ideas. One wants to say that will to power means that that is wrong.
The power of the guru, something that conflicts immediately with one’s own will to power.

Nietzsche’s will to power is in its deepest sense concerned to resist the domination of unjustified power.
He identifies power relationships where others see something different.
One can say that his whole hope springs from his inadequacy. His whole hope lies in finding an argument against arbitrary authority.

AT

218 Seeing mysticism, even, as will to power. The turning away from all power, seemingly the complete passivity and renunciation. Surely someone with no will to power?
Eckhart. The God prejudices and baggage we all carry. The whole of mediaeval Christendom as not what it seems. Its baggage of philosophy.
When morality of the weak, anti-Nietzschean ideology, does not seem painful and repressive (as for Labour party enthusiasts) when it actually seems to offer an increase in power, respect and authority. For some classes that may seem immediate, for others it means a degree of dishonesty, a lack of self knowledge.

274 Women and their reproaches, their emotional reality with which they claim to present you. The morality they present. Their passionate will to power, the existence of which they indignantly deny Spengler's identification of western Christianity with a will to power impulse.
Everything is will to power.
Some forms of will to power are closer to our own.

305 Importance of Lange’s saying how the significance and status of atoms etc comes down to the theory of knowledge. And that this is the significance of Nietzsche’s more metaphysical sounding speculations. We are not to take any metaphysical conception as preceding knowledge.

But questions of knowledge determine all our most basic categories.
The will to power having such an important basis in human psychology, it underlies all our most basic assertions of knowledge, even of the constituents of the universe, basic constituents of reality. Nietzsche’s alternative to Kantianism.
Mach, progenitor of logical positivism. Lange’s attack on Buchner,

341 All religions and doctrines are tools of will to power, each expresses someone or other’s will, set against the surrounding chaos of the world.
That is what we have, the reality of life… this idea is itself the expression of will to power. One that can catch out others in demonstrable falsehood.

AK

13 will to power is an epitomisation of Nietzsche’s whole philosophy, raising it to a new level of persuasiveness. Are we to take all human motivation at its own face value? In understanding the significance of human behaviour, to take everything at its own face value is in the first place to surrender to hopeless chaos.
Alternatively one is to take up particular point of view and took from there, in which case some people’s descriptions of their own motives will be discounted in favour of our own interpretations

23& Will to power does not define a goal for human life, nor would it put anyone in the wrong. Scientific logicality. As a theory, greater coherence and greater correspondence to the data.
Each particular viewpoint, in its assertion, expresses a will to flourish, which means towards power.
Will to power does not see the true end of life as revealed in any other way than as it is.
Unconscious agenda. Suspending the concept of rightness, it relates the 1001 goals to each other in terms of power. It does not say that any one such goal is anything other than it purports to be.

A perspective, suspending the concept of rightness and wrongness and looking at all explicit goals in relation to each other. This produces a view of human motivation in terms of explicit aims, plus a hidden agenda which is describable in terms of power.
The claim is correspondence and coherence. That nothing more is necessary to get an adequate view of human psychology.

45 What The Wasteland expresses, musical as it is, is a seething frustration with the condition of civilisation. To that extent it is expressing a will to power, involving a fantasy of an alternative political order. Instead of Jacobitism Eliot joined the Richard III society. Richard III as the last English king.

87 Marxism and power. Resistance to domination. I would say that domination is precisely what Marxism is really about. That to point out the universality of will to power is a way of resisting that domination. One way of resisting anyone’s claim to power is to establish an absolute tyranny of doctrine. To get satisfaction, that is to identify it with your own will to power.
Complacency, obscurity. The claim to be satisfied.
What does it matter if you are not satisfied? What is the point in constructing an artificial myth of contentment?

101& Hegel. How much should Satan learn if he is to overcome his rebellion? In saying a will to power is innate one is not simply rationalising one’s own will to dominate. One is actually saying one does not want to learn, does not see why one has to learn or change.
There is some order of things which offers its own ladders, its own staircase, its own paths to all desirable satisfactions. Suppose they do not satisfy me but they satisfy you. I perceive a basic lie here. It denies a motive that I have. Always the insistence that I should learn. If you do not have a will to power why do you not allow yourself to be dominated by me? You cling to your own favoured power structure.

236* Phenomenological reality. The Christian ideal is precisely what it is. Interpreted on the will to power theory what difference is made?
Possibility. Equivocation with the concept. On the will to power theory, that anybody thinks and feels whatever they actually think and feel is not at all denied. This may seem obvious but it is easy to forget. There is a sense in which it is a possibility. It is a possible state of the human mind. As to the extent to which it is possible to you, who recognise this, that is an entirely different question.
If you were to think something other than the will to power, abandon your belief, new forms of experience might be open to you.
I do not see why this should not be possible, why it should not be permitted.
The concept of the will to power serves a specific purpose to do with particular kind of enlightenment and the desire for it. To satisfy the desire for experience a different formula is called for.

263 Non-conflict models of human psychology. Relation between the desire for power and achievement for knowledge. Will to power insists on the importance of a fact which other theories prefer to ignore.
Why is it insisted that this is not to be ignored? A will to power, or a perverse will, insists that recognition of this is essential to knowledge. The insistence on the fact. A desire for scientific knowledge, a desire for power. Why should not a desire for power take an opposite form, i.e. against recognition of the will to power?
Important questions. Of models for knowledge, there are others. The oppressiveness of one comes from its disharmony with feeling. The so called cooperative, or non-conflict model. The invitation to cooperate itself involves abnegation.

It is not that will to power theory is an expression of the desire of the ego to dominate, as if any other theory would do. It is the expression of a cooperative venture, namely the scientific one.
It is not a refusal to accept principles one has not invented oneself.
But the ‘fact; that is denied is the recognition of one’s own energies. The intolerable thing about the denial of the fact. How knowledge springs out of struggle.

335 Orthodoxy, morality, orthodox morality.
David Hume and his views on ethics. One liked his apparent demolition of the cognitive value of morality. But in giving it an emotional value he gave equal cognitive value to any moral values whatever. So none are any better than any others, more rational or whatever.
A standard for criticism of orthodoxy. Hume was against this. His praise of Laud.
Independently derived truth, scientific psychology.
Morality of the strong, morality of the weak. Morality of the weak is experienced as a poisonous assault.
That one can produce a standard. That one may refute nihilism logically.
Gregarious spirit that can produce a will, an explicit desire, to accept orthodoxy. The perverse spirit that rejects this. Perhaps we are getting down to something important.
There are two hostile wills here. Each claims precedence, dominance over the other.
Herd morality. Differing wills to dominate. War to the death.
The gregarious will supports itself by nihilism. The solitary will by an appeal to truth.
His is a logical kind of truth, one that makes his own will legitimate.
Jesus v Pilate.
The will to power, coefficient of forces. Not a tyrannical individual will. It is a demand for the logical space in which to operate.
The gregarious spirit is intensely coercive. Its effect is to deny possibility, which is both logically and psychologically erroneous. What the concept of the will to power does is to legitimise a perverse or wayward will. If there were no will to power there would be no standard of truth.

369 The desire to be different is a clear expression of conscious will to power. Humanism a denial of that will, a desire to contain within a given set of values.
Question of the conscious will to power. A will to power may obviously be served within a set of values. But it is not conscious until there is conflict.

AL

91 Nietzscheanism v feminism. In the Foucault book one contributor suggests feminists might make use of Foucault’s analysis of power and domination. Patriarchy.
Acceptance of the will to power should result in a type of culture that is not feminist. Women themselves should see this.
See why the feminist could not be happy with Nietzsche. Because even when she exposes a lot of supposedly repressive power structures called patriarchy, she cannot accept that her feminism is itself a repressive power structure which no one need obey who does not feel like it.
See how will to power works. I feel I need accept no idea or principle that I myself feel to be repressive.

255 The war, i.e. the war against Ialdabaoth, has been going on for a long time. It precedes intellectualisation. For a long time it worked in the form of myth. Mythically one could call this the war against the heathen. What I would want is to pursue my cause in argument.
Will to power. Simply that Nietzsche intended this as the title of his last and greatest book suggests he saw the concept as the keystone of his philosophy.
What is significant is that in human life as well as animal, innumerable possibilities are suppressed. This is not a metaphysical but a factual proposition of a most ordinary kind.
Whatever criticism Nietzsche makes of truth he insists on factual reality and possibility of lying and falsification.
I would call the assertion of this proposition the doctrine of the will to power, in this lies any truth claim it possesses.
Maudemarie Clark would put his claim to that of ‘the possibility of the will to power’ which seems unnecessarily complicated.

267 The will to power is an essential anchorage point. As a principle it is superior to the enlightenment principle which is constructed out of thin air. Will to power claims a basis in the constitution of things. From this point a great body of ideas take reference and stake their claim to authority.

322 The will to power as a drive, a force.
Utopianist schemes. Openness of possibilities. Every mental state simply is what it is. We do not have to think of an unconscious force. But there is empirical content.

345& Will to power establishing truths of nature. A truth of human nature. distorted by various factors. Perspectives. Is there a divide between my earlier and my later way of looking at will to power?
First as an undistorted presentation of the facts of human nature. Second as an expression of the implicit conflict between all different viewpoints and values.
Trouble is that the earlier position is not proof against sophisticated attack.
Think of the great task I have with Nietzsche.
First will to power, different concepts of it, and the place it plays
Idea that it is a scholastic concept that Schopenhauer’s concept of affirmation v negation is more fundamental.
Then the need to avoid a relativistic position, self refuting paradox.
Such a need is also faced by other philosophers.
I say Nietzsche’s solution is the best because he appeals to a language of fact. Setting himself against Hegel.

AM

17 However elegantly and clearly we could state the will to power doctrine, there is always the Marxist objection that appeals to Sartre, rather like how Dr Einstein came along and confounded Newton.
But even the Newtonian phase of totally concise expression has not yet been achieved.
But let it be established that it is a bourgeois truth. How establish that? What does it say? The common human nature that it argues may be thought of in terms of response to a particular understanding.
Link up my two interpretations of will to power.
1 that there is a lot of oppression.
2 a simple interpretation of the diversity of values.
So how comes the sense of a drive?
I must describe the link How one perspective grows out of the other.
How certain psychological theories distort reality.
Behaviourism, associationism. Presenting human aims and purposes and purposes within a single scale of values. They oppress, as soon as we begin to think about them. It becomes clear that human happiness is not containable within such schemata.
The error of such theories is not entirely one of empirical fact. It is partly conceptual
In one way the will to power is a psychological hypothesis in opposition to behaviourism and associationism. It takes the form it does explicitly by contrast with them.
Insofar as these must be interpreted as theories about ‘the good’ they contain this within rigid frameworks. What human beings will desire, what it is right for them to desire.
That it will not remain contented with these supposedly rational patterns so within that context it appears as a psychological hypothesis.

139 Seduction, the argument from pleasure, the Nietzschean does not find in any way congenial. Inevitable need to criticise a will to happiness. For a will to happiness, will to power not the discovery of a new energy but a reinterpretation of the energy we all recognise.
It is only because I do not identify with each particular aim or value that I interpret it in terms of the power which it embodies
Behaviourism and associationism are wrong, for largely logical reasons.
Mixing of the logical and the empirical
Whether there is an inner drive or there is not.
Whether power needs to be brought in as an explanation.
Whether it does or does not depends on a certain basic premise.
Power, interpreting what has been achieved as power.
What will be achieved is also power. Power is therefore the motive.
To contemplation, for us that is, it has a certain emotional colour which is not the same as that it has for the person we are discussing.
Empirical evidence will all relate to the empirical fact of the existence of an implicit conflict, conflict between innumerable different ideas and values all with an equal claim as to possibility.
These possibilities can still be perceived under different perspectives but they may be brought under different concepts, like evil or sickness.

168 Will to power as explanation versus the will to health. Will to power should not be turned into a health standard as if the truest standards, those we should all observe, are those of the powerful man. This is an important point and has particular application to sexuality.
People have different needs for different circumstances. Different sexual needs. To classify some of these as inadequate or second best may be beside the point. The appearance of being an unsatisfactory shift, of something that might actually be quite a good adaptation.

185 Will to power, a slogan expressing a very definite insight. Try to get to the source of the confusion in which it is wrapped. The double nature of this concept. It has a certain emotional colour, which is not essential to the insight expressed. The parallel with Darwin can be quite close.
One who thinks in terms of a universal struggle for existence will see his own life in that way,
Seeing your life in terms of the power you have achieved.
The essential and the inessential.
On the unanalysed mythic level there is the sense of great insight. And there is insight. Put it this way. In its origins the idea of will to power is to express a certain insight, to point to a fact. Essentially what is expressed in Genealogy of Morals. To point to a fact, and perhaps a certain commitment may make it easier to perceive this fact i.e. on this level a certain confusion dos not matter between a consciously pursued will to power and a perception of its universality. The insight it is attempting to bring out and a way of living. So will to power can also mean conscious desire for and pursuit of power.
Will to power as ‘the one force’ reminds of Henry More. Crude criticisms of the foundations of science.
See why Nietzsche has been considered not to be a philosopher at all,
The concept comes to bear a greater burden as the underlying premises that sustains his whole position.
Then comes the question what sustains the underlying premises?

244 Russell’s collection of essays In Praise of Idleness are clear evidence of charlatanism. Russell as educator makes the most sweeping generalisations. A will to power is strongly evident. One could call it glib.
It recalls Shaw, Wells and other such pundits. It is a very bad style, though deceptive and easy to imitate. Here again it fails to be knowledge. It is not that it is only opinion. It is a single thought, a string of hypotheses exalted into dogma. Not just that he fails to grasp the phenomena he discusses but that his prime concern is with agitation. Rhetoric and direction of thought.

255 Nietzsche may believe in triumph, but not the triumph of just anyone. Some peoples’ triumph is incompatible with what he perceives as knowledge.

Be that as it may, there are certain beliefs that are incompatible with will to power and that should be made plain. That is the purpose of it. Will to power as a teleological principle, does place a limit on egoistic assertion. This is a limit that, because of temperamental factors, the Nietzschean does not find in any way uncongenial.

265&& What democratic domination does is to create a particular sort of oppression. Carey himself is the real bully. He denies there is any cause for complaint. Denies the element of power in his own satisfaction with his own values. Denies the natural impulse for challenge and question, which is an expression of the desire for power.
He has power, other people want it. It is deeply depressing that strength should be demoralised by weakness.
My real problem with will to power, what I have not yet achieved. Communication on a simple level
See what I have yet to get across. Human beings are animated by a will to power. How does this illuminate? It is a denial of any alternative teleological principle.
We see how this can become frustrated. The usefulness of this principle in criticising objectionable ideas.
People’s definitions of what happiness consists in.
Power, question of what will satisfy.
If someone rooted in his own set of beliefs says that human happiness can be secured by living in accordance with those beliefs then he is distorting human nature by neglecting a fundamental motive.
The crude idea that we would all really like to be oriental despots. Imaginative image.
Why yield to the power of alien standards? If there is no will to power then the possession of power will not be challenged, except by the sick or the perverse.
Struggling against Ialdabaoth in the form of John Carey,
That one set of values should prevail we observe to be a manifestation of power.
The impulse to challenge the authority of one set of values is therefore a will to power. The authority is therefore to a degree a repressive authority. That is if will to power is accepted as legitimate, as natural.
Will to power is an alternative explanation of human behaviour to various other theories.
Oriental despot’s idea not altogether misleading
Every state of affairs expresses power because there is so much that it excludes.
We delude ourselves if we think that if restraints were removed we would continue to act as we do now.
The will to power concept is designed to be used as a weapon against certain theories of life.
Carey criticises concepts of superior and inferior. Fair enough, but the real point is that a morality of the weak leads us to choose what we know to be inferior.

270 Will to power should be applied as a comprehensive critical procedure.
Idea that one should no have such and such a desire. Basically will to power theory says that desire is innate in everyone.
See the difference here. What arouses the desire to consciousness is the conviction that it is reasonable. What one believes to be unreasonable is something one is prepared to change.
In describing the power hierarchy within which someone lives, beliefs help to make up that hierarchy.
A woman may appear not to have a will to power. There is a temptation to attribute this to her beliefs or assumptions. Such a desire is not present in her, not frustrated because it is closed off by reason of her beliefs.
To frustrate a conscious will to power. This is not frustrated where it is not conscious.
Will to power and the birth of knowledge.

AO

1 see if there could be something more plausible in the idea of will to power as the motive behind evolution. What he suggests, is the idea that always strength is repressed. This is in man, but perhaps only in social animals.
But he does not really believe in will as a cause for anything.
In a physiological substrate he believes. He objects to the Darwinist and eugenicist idea that the strong are the strong.

11& Will to power. Always I must try to state in as convincing a way as possible.
The values and ideas by which people live, or are expected to live.
Standing on the top of a mountain. Try to turn the ideas at which I have arrived into the framework of my thought
Values, relation of power to each other.
Difficulties in being understood.

I see the will to power as the logical and factual foundation of the Nietzschean future.

What the will to power doctrine opposes, what it is criticism of.
A doctrine like utilitarianism or socialism which lays down a pattern of belief within which all people are supposed to fit.
Will to power says that will to power is a motive which is left unsatisfied resists in frustration. That the stability of any system of human values depends upon the satisfaction of this motive.
It must be clear how strongly opposed I am to alternative formulations, other ides of psychology.
Take the socialist scheme. On the will to power the thesis, that everyone should adopt required values, is unsatisfying. It is oppressive because it denies the existence of a motive, denies the expression of an innate impulse.
This thought.
Say I have a will to power. That is easy enough to conceive. I will find any order of things oppressive which denies me expression of that motive.
On my interpretation, whatever people believe or say they are in fact they do express will to power.
So if other propel do not feel as I do about the order of things they have a different interpretation of the relation of values to each other. They are as if under an illusion. I say they express their will to power through ideas with consciously reject or deny it.
See if I can express the whole thought more simply. That one has a will to power to do with the fact that one sees possible values as interrelated in a particular way.
This is only one possible way of relating them, there are others.
But say everyone implicitly accepts this one, that is human nature .
That the idea could be expressed even more simply.

Consider any false psychological views that go against human nature. How could any be proved wrong? Theoretically we could imagine anyone accepting any formula. Whatever people’s desires and values it is possible to conceive them all saying the one thing. Even a powerful drive like sex could be concealed by not being spoken of
This does not prove there is no human nature. This an important point to bear in mind,. Try and keep in mind the motive, what will to power is denying.
All verbal expressions and description of desire relate, either effectively or ineffectively, to underlying reality.

The view will to power is devised to combat. Take utilitarianism.
Try to express my meaning in as simple as way as possible. What it is not saying, what it is.
Any description of human nature is possible. This words.
There are things that happen no matter how we describe them some descriptions of motive are more effective than others.
The description under which any motive might appear

121 Presumed revolutionary implications of will to power. It does not have revolutionary implications.
Transvaluation.
One is not pitting some idea of power against all the power that exists. One only aims to effect what one can effect. This is on the level of interpretation. To have a fantasy, like a political fantasy of being a dictator, is not a serious political opinion.
To say Nietzsche was not a politician should clinch the mater.
Politics is already, through and through the expression of will to power. There is no way one could make it more so (or less so).
It is wrong to say generous motives do not express it and ungenerous ones do.
Whatever I want I want. Referring all to my will is not gong to make me want what I do not want. If some value is undesirable it is because I do not desire it.

129 Foucault and the French intellectual. The pattern of French absolutism. The despicable revolutionary Maoism of the seventies. Misconceptions about the will to power. Foucault did appear to redeem himself a bit. It is the irresponsibility of his middle years that I find slightly odious.
He seems to bear out the criticism of the intellectual made by [http://www.example.com describe linkhttp://www.mith.demon.co.uk/NORD.html]Nordau, Carey and the like. A dangerous, lethal, criminal kind of thought.
I do not see Nietzsche, Swinburne, De Sade, Rimbaud, Baudelaire like this. Someone who was dangerous was Georges Sorel.
De Nerval, Artaud, Van Gogh. They operate on a certain plane, stand for a certain liberty of he imagination.
But the interpretation of such liberty as the liberty of the despot is a different matter.
Interpretations of Nietzsche. I would say that perhaps the French intellectual finds it hard to get an angle on the will to power because he is himself not subject to the kind of opposition that besets his equivalent in Anglo Saxon countries.
Not hat his despotic freedom amounts to anything like the power he says it does.
Discipline and Punish. Damiens. The saturnalia Foucault finds in the mob’s enjoyment of the torture and execution.
But think if English mobs at Tyburn the mob similarly affirm, a different kind of liberty. Not the liberty under despotism, the horrible excessive Catholic kind of liberty.
Hell Fire Club versus the Deer Park
The despotic kind of freedom is also that of the French intellectual.
Identifying will to power with the peculiar position in which he finds, himself this abnormal accumulation of power of a sort, this access to the media.
To identify this with will to power as such is ridiculous. To say that this is what Nietzsche means, what he is talking about.
This power is my no means unlimited in all directions. It has limits, like any other kind of power. But those limits are perhaps not altogether interesting. What is there to prove? So you rail against the government. Etc etc.

135 Interpretation of the will to power. I see how poorly I have succeed in expressing my point when old Alex thinks I am saying Nietzsche is suggesting it is possible and rational to persuade people to give up their democratic rights on the grounds that some people feel frustrated. That is so far from the point I mean to make. What seems so clear and simple to me, a point that is a prolegomena to any further understanding.
How far people are from communicating. Foucault. His perception of will to power. I would say Miller (The Passion of Michel Foucault) does not have a good grasp of Nietzsche.
Perceiving one’s own will to power as a destructive surrender to the Dionysian as conceived in BT.
The will to power is universal. It dos not take the same form in everybody. To see it only in terms of an awakening desire for brutality and destruction is a to make a different point, a very different point, more like Freud’s.

147 Must clarify, clarify, will to power.
False psychology, false descriptions of human nature. It can seem so crystal clear yet it can be so hard to put it into good words.
The will to power is not something you discover and fill yourself with the urges of a Hitler.
Equal rights, this psychology that goes with it, this way of looking at human desire.
Behaviourist and associationist perspectives. It is easy to see the views of human desire that is involved and how it is different from will to power, but to explain it is another matter.
If all human desires are like hunger, it is easy to see how food might be shared out. Why should it not be plausible to say they are? Drives can be identified by experiment, empirical experiment.
If I say they desire power, that is not something that can be shared. But not everyone explicitly desires power.
Like an eighteenth century despot's or a Chinese emperor's philosophy. .
Not a beautiful dream ruined by a bad human nature, an original sin, but a bad dream from the start. Intrinsic tyranny.
Suppose I say things could be different, different ideas could prevail.
That one order should prevail, the utilitarian proposal is an expression of power. Other possibilities are suppressed.
Try and wrap the mind around all this.
The mandarin philosophy. The motive to struggle against imperfection. Aggression. Will to power of the strong. But will to power is universal. Defence of values against demoralising threat.
Only because we look in this particular way.
Utilitarianism, the success of such values would involve the suppression of others. What those would be would be any attempt to alter common assumptions.
Common assumptions are claimed to be right and true. How is this to be justified.
Try and see it all together. If I see that some values flourish at the expense of others, that are suppressed.
Struggle against just and fair power is what we are accused of, the strong are those who are unfairly trying to get more than they deserve.
But it is not like that.
The weak are the weak because they are not the strong. The convolutions one gets into when unable to grasp the simple point.
Suppression of strength. Not suppression of everybody’s drive for power. That of the weak could be satisfied.
The utilitarian order what it is as a particular manifestation of the power, with suppression of various alternatives.
It satisfies and it frustrates,. Different people. This is because all the drives and desires with which it deals do include this one. Power.
An attack on the whole utilitarian picture. All the drives and desires it claims to take account of and to satisfy. Etc etc etc.

317 Perspectives. Empirical psychology. Psychological truths. One cannot say will to power directly gives these particular truths. What it does is to provide a perspective in which they do become revealed as certain obscuring forces are dissipated. On could say that it is like a corrective pair of glasses.
So psychological observations are not direct deductions from will to power, they are just what becomes apparent when falsifying doctrines are removed.

AD

95 the tendency of the concept of the will to power can be to arrange a hierarchy of desires and values. Or that is how I saw it. ‘Power’ was the symbolic objective driving us on. The magnetic force outside ourselves as it were. Some values and activities seem to realise this more than others.
Other concepts of mine. The grossness of the will, and being asked to acquiesce in the frustration of one’s own desire.
The concept of the will to power is one that transcends desire, and may even aspire to sort desires into a form of hierarchy.
But is that necessary or useful? Des it explain what is really frustrating in certain types of idea or doctrine?

104 the cliché that makes cheerful. Becoming an oppressive force, an attempt to chain the flow of life, as Blake puts it.
Antithesis of the will to power as an explicit doctrine.
Nietzsche’s ideas can be presented as the precise antithesis of what they are
As philosophy of rebellion their appeal is plain. They speak beyond orthodox conventional doctrine. But if you can get away with setting up your own opinions as authority the case is different.
The concept of power repudiates all attempts to hypostatise values, to set up some one law table as the whole end of life.
But a limit is reached, there is a limiting case. This is the capacity to accept the doctrine itself. Master values may be taken as allowing for this, slave values as excluding it.
To deny the will to power is an attempt to stem the flow, to set up an ought, against which people come to grief. Like an old ape or an old Plato.
To suggest that Nietzsche is for any doctrine that promotes the feeling of power is ridiculous.

288 Will to power is a slogan encapsulating the main thrust of his thought. Encapsulating, summarising.
His work is engaged in presenting a perspective. From this perspective come quite naturally his range of critical judgements.
The thrust of his argument is this.
To say that man is motivated primarily by a will to power is to say that psychological understanding would have a certain character. This would be the character expressed in his own aphorisms.
Different conflicting interpretations are to be regarded as error, different points of view whose essence consist in what we can call power relations.
It is clear that there are very different interpretations of human nature, say Nietzsche’s and say Tolstoy’s or Graham Greene’s. There are various ways of explaining the relation between these different points of view. Nietzsche, of course, would make a claim to be the true theory. Compare with astronomy. Say that Nietzsche’s ideas are comparable to a heliocentric theory. Since Einstein, of course, the idea of the necessary superiority of heliocentricity has lost a lot of its validity.
What Nietzsche calls falsification might be called something else, and a different picture generated,
Nietzsche’s human nature is of a certain character and is largely dominated by what we can call power relations.

Those in a position of being without power, relatively speaking, have an interest in upholding an alternative view of human nature, what we may call falsifying it. To do this one has to show it in its full complexity, the arrangement of concepts of which it consists, that is one of the many possible views of human nature, it is one which should have priority. Its explanatory power.
In our post Einsteinian days of course we are not to claim for it absolute truth., but that is quite another mater from misinterpreting and underestimating it.
What we must appreciate is that from its own perspective this view is entirely sound, whatever perspective is taken the relations exist.
From a different perspective the facts will look different. But there is a difference between a clear sighted perspective and a blind one, the shallow psychology put our by people like Anthony Storr.

310 William James found the idea of physiological determinism distressing, but perhaps there was no real need to. Physiological determinism might explain too little rather than too much.
All his talk of brain activity, associationism etc. Seemingly no place here for a will to power, or even a pleasure principle as rigidly interpreted.
The will to power interpreted as a development of the concept of the pleasure principle. I.e. as taking into account the contexts of value systems.

AN

2 The Notes for The Will To Power, the richest source of Nietzsche’s insights, i.e. the unfinished, the unpolished.
The deconstructive reading of Nietzsche cuts him free form his anchorage, i.e. what to him is the most important point that he wants to make. It allows the self confidence he gives to his own central position to be shifted into any one of a variety of other positions to which we may happen to be attracted. So Nietzsche is thereby enable to unite with Hegel.

28 Decadence of the modern world. Like destruction of myth. Domination of some form of shallow rationalism which is the zeitgeist. This egalitarianism, this equal rights doctrine which has to be resisted, and which gives even the artefacts of the age a tendency to a bad meaning. All the inertia of the age, the energy of the age, put into this equality principle, like the way ‘God’ was the premise of all mediaeval culture.
Thus with my presuppositions in the Middle Ages I would have had to have been a philosopher or a heretic.
Other meanings may, of course, be put upon the present day. There is still the role for the artist, for some form of romantic rebellion. But the inertia of the age is to promise all satisfaction through the equal rights doctrine. So the products of this assume a malevolent formlessness until such time as they acquire historic curiosity. Then we see them just as manifestations of a will to power that is not a threat to our own perspective.
Most of the creative energy of the time serves this horrible doctrine which is especially destructive of beauty or exceptional achievement. Decline in the arts automatically follows.
So now we have mass entertainment on colour television. The ultimate crude utilitarian philosophy. Religion quite dead. Religion has value. It is the mythic basis for creative thinking. An over rationalistic philosophy is lifeless.

49& Idea of universal will to power is that everyone to some extent behaves as if they believed it.
Idea relate to Darwin. As Darwin sees it each life form as engaged in a struggle to survive.
First, see how it acquires content. This from a desire which can be opposed and from which come demoralising ideas.
Then see how this can be embedded in reality.
Denial. That you are not subject to power. That certain ideas are to be accepted, judgments are to be acquiesced in, even though seem to you to be straightforwardly oppressive. The demand to accept certain judgments.
The transition from a weak to a strong hypothesis. Take the weak thesis. What turns the weak thesis into a stronger thesis? Believing it. Ideas which do not serve my power and which I can identify as demoralising.
What on the thesis is perceived as subjection to power. Provisionally, the real attack is not yet.
See it as a poetic response, based on a true perception of relatedness.
On will to power thesis one looks at a value in relation to other possible values. Simple unsophisticated looking.
The simple thesis is not contentious. People object to it who wish us to accept certain ideas. So alternative theses are put forward, such as that some other will is more fundamental than the will to power.
Accusation of sleight of hand. The uncontentious and the primitive. Separate, make all clear.
Altruism e.g. Expressive of a will to power vis a vis egoism.
What it does seem to render impossible is the hostile demoralising idea, the morality of the weak experienced as an attack, the more unhelpful varieties of guilt
So there is an accusation that the simple thesis is not so simple and uncontentious, and that it rules out a range of possible ideas. The sick
I cannot accept an idea which I perceive as opposed to my own power.
Such ideas exist and the injunction that I should accept them I understand as a morality of the weak.

309 Idea that people want us to accept. Utopian political programmes. Ideas that we are expected to accept, led by some allegedly rational motive like fairness or equality. What is wrong with such proposals, why some people find them satisfying and others do not is the extent to which they satisfy a drive which we call the will to power. To expect someone to accept such an idea when to do so would thwart one of his most natural biological drives is not rational at all, but a repressive dogma. This is the first stage, set in the form of a hypothesis. The argument is pursued through several further stages.

There are different perspectives on the ‘rational’ doctrine. If I believe I have a will to power and that it conflicts with it then I experience it as repressive. If I do not believe that then I may not experience it in the same way.
So what does the belief amount to? It is question of interpretations.
How is one to make the will to power manifest in the form of rational desire? Obviously some have the desire & some don’t.
Opposing argument that one has no permanent desires that conflict with the doctrine. Underlying natural desire.
In opposing what we are opposing we are opposing a vast body within our civilisation of what claims to be rational and enlightened
The answer as to what these people should do is that they should repent. If they use some Hegelian style movement to get themselves round to our point of view so well and good. But we need to be aware of the magnitude of the forces ranged against us.
There are premises that make it appear there is a will to power and premises that make it appear that there is not.

313 Will to power. Its appearance as a drive or force. A magnetic force or a gravitational field. What could be a very interesting part of the theory. How the will to power can appear to be drive or a force. More significant than explicit desire as an explanation of behaviour.
In something reminiscent of Einstein’s theories, I want to show how something seemingly solid and substantial can be the product of a mere point of view. Rather like how energy and matter are interchangeable.
That it can seem to be something more than desire, that it can seem to be something that desire serves. To show how this seeming can come to be, and is not precisely erroneous. Holding onto all parts of the argument.

347 Will to power, practical applications. The American Civil War as example. Yankee imperialism rather than a struggle for goodness and justice.
Looking in terms of all proclivities we only make sense in seeing a desire that one value should prevail against others.
The illumination this bestows.

AR

8 Power, justification, confusion. The use I make of will to power attacking demoralising ideas. Arguable subjectivity in this.
In attacking Wagner I do so from an Anglo Saxon perspective. Churchill as will to power, . Rationalism as will to power.
So why not apply this to other rationalistic ideas like modern equal rights feminism? How can I argue it is wrong?
Wagnerian’s idea of the heroic. Creative achievement of sexuality. Cerebrality. Idea of a superiority’ like surmounting of the animal instinct. Something that seems biologically unnecessary.
Feminism as rationalism
That there is a will to power is a truth that other positions may deny. They may claim a more direct access to truth. Or a permission based on some dogma of relativism.

AI

172 Healthy attitudes towards women. Virility of the soldier. Straightforward virility versus the complications brought about by decadence.
Is life straightforward? Then what of the extra ambition of the perverse? Always I have been for the perverse. I repudiate the negative judgment that may be induced by a commitment to the straightforward, the perverse is an expression of a commitment to the will to power. The will to power is a value that overrides healthy mindedness. What is the point of my life and what are my objectives? The serpent was the subtlest beast of the field.

180& Nietzsche v Freud.
Belief in the will to power different from a belief in mental health as a standard.
From a personal viewpoint it releases from the painful pressure of a possible negative judgement.
Thus one may see it as in itself an ideal, in criticism of something already established.
What of the fear that it may itself generate a negative judgement? In what manner is this possible? A different manner, clearly. As one brings up children one does not fail to impose a standard of health. But all values and standards are relative. That is a standard whereby one judges other standards, and so is this. Thus two perspectives. The painfulness of one may be one reason for rejecting it. Will to power relativises all values and standards. ‘In the light of another standard’ it is said, Take Sanine.
What do ascetic ideals mean?
Will to power is certainly a recommendation. It purports to offer total freedom . You may choose your values as you wish.

286 Talk of the will to power. That there is an unconscious will which is not simply self love as Joseph Butler understands it but a strength of passion beyond what is explicit. There are hidden motives to be analysed in terms of beliefs held. The deistic model of the universe is static i.e. there is a psychology which presupposes a given set of beliefs and values.

AH

243 which values we then ask are we to consider as most basic? Which are to rule, which are to prevail?
Here I come in with the scientific viewpoint of the will to power.
Will to power, urge not to normality but to superiority. Abnormality may thus have a higher value than normality
Potential bad consequences of thesis, like the cult of homosexuality.

AS

268 Will to power in Beyond Good and Evil as hypothesis without truth claim. Metaphysical metaphor.

AZ

5 Primary tendency to see will to power in aggressive terms. There may be other ways of looking that should be considered.
My interpretation, see in terms of an extensive commentary on Will to Power §455

47 The war of all against all, not economic competition. Like the war of ideas, for mental dominance. For aesthetic vision.
The cause of ugliness, the refusal of submission to mental superiority
Dispute about taste.
Will to power, monarchy. It is not an idea, not a ‘truth’ that rules, it all comes down to power. Monarchy reveals this clearly. It gives more mental freedom than anarchy of interpretation. The republic brings a straitjacket of conformity. It may be negotiated if you grew up with it. Otherwise it is stunning naiveté.

65 Will to power rightly understood. A test formula. like philosophical error. For all you are doing is something for yourself, fighting for an interpretation. You may be right to speak of light and darkness even, but at best that is relative to a scientific discovery. Your enemies just interpret differently. What to you are forces of life to them are forces of death, and vice versa.

119 Simone Weil. Conscious renunciation of will to power. Mysticism from suppression of sexuality. Different way of being left wing, a sort of radicalism without Marxism. Social conscience.

The fundamental self assertion. Like the root of a powerful and fundamental heresy. Weil herself accused of heresy in rejecting the God of the Old Testament.
Orthodoxy as embodying something fundamentally Jewish, the idea of a God the father who tells you things you don’t understand but which you had better believe for your own good
The basic irrationality that is said to represent the true depth of things, the morality.
Power considerations determine morality as they determined the main creeds of the Christian church not to mention the 39 articles.
At thirty, Alleged self anointed authority. Always the insinuation that there is something you don’t understand, that if you did not accept tit there is something wrong with you,.
This is not just a point of view. It is s lie. It conceals the reality that establishes the so called authority, the raw power .etc.

AV

187 Different views on surrealism. Nietzsche, desire. Can one have complete libidinal fulfilment? Wrongness of Freud as interpreted.
The revolutionary carnival, the restraint placed upon libidinal excess. Dali as motivated by will to power.
What constraints do we have? The constraints of the criminal law and whatever other opposing desires spring up. The wrongness of Freudianism. Nietzsche.
The counter reformation. Mel Gibson’s Jesus film. Outlets for sadistic feelings, libidinal irresponsibility.

Morality, concern for others, power. The sheer mistake of interpreting will to power in detachment form other conditions. To see it as opposed to all morality, all restraint.
The mistaken combination of Freud and Nietzsche.
One may pursue the unfettered imagination but one comes up against the law and self imposed morality. In a sense that is not unacceptable restraint

252 Richardson, Parkes.
The idea that the discovery of will to power does not in itself solve Nietzsche’s problem, but that that has to wait until the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence. Or the great health.
Why some do not see master morality as something to be imitated. This question of terminology but actually more than that.
One of these views is wrong, one is clearly a misreading. Either mine or the others. What can we say against the others?
Either the psychological problem continues and is to find its solution in psychological way, in the pursuit of one the various programmes that Nietzsche proposes. Or he has solved it with will to power and master morality and the derivation of ideals is just what he chooses to do with his strength, his playfulness.
Richardson seeing will to power as confirmed by empirical facts, as I do.

Role of facts.
The solution, as I see it, is intellectual and for all time. The discovery itself has overcome nihilism. The alternative view, popular among scholars, is that this itself has done nothing. Turning Nietzsche himself into a sick thinker.
Richardson sees will to power as confirmed by facts, but he does not se this itself as the solution of Nietzsche’s problem.
This itself is a precarious psychological procedure of trying to achieve affirmation.
That is his fundamental problem, variously expressible as overcoming nihilism, demoralisation, repelling slave morality.

AU

91 Kohler1 and the idea that Nietzsche’s philosophy is incomprehensible. Where as really it is everything. The irrational resistance of those who wish to believe something different and wish to be immune from criticism. First criticism of the book is when he says Freud has shown something or other as if his thought was scientific. He claims that everyone now rejects the will to power.

126 Burke On the Sublime and the Beautiful. His 18th century Lockean confidence in being able to classify the faculties of man. The interest of his 18th century presuppositions. How different from today. His idea of ‘delight’ is very suggestive of schadenfreude. He departs from Locke to become more 18th century.
He is a deep writer but the peculiarity of his depth relates to a certain shallowness of the framework
his view of pleasure excludes any suggestion of will to power.
No will to power, so pleasure is conceived not only without relation to pain but without desire, the pleasures of sex and society as resting on a neutral basis as if people are not most of the time in a state of frustration and if the behaviour of frustrated animals in the rutting season has no human analogue.
There is like a sublimation of sadism. The schadenfreude is a simple enjoyment, the relief offered by the experience of beauty, the torment that is normal life is ignored and passed over. Locke had more psychological penetration,

138 Nietzsche's chapter On the Sublime Men. An attack on the idea of sublimity.

A way to read Zarathustra as one reads the Bible. Dipping into it for inspiration
In calling it the mot profound book humanity possesses he is obviously taking on the Bible. Burke’s ideas on the sublime were influential via Lessing
Nietzsche may be used as the Bible is used, to yield different coherent sets of ideas of beliefs.
As Burke says God is sublime.

The Gnostic myth. Illuminating the human condition. Always there is something to avoid.
Here is a myth that expresses much of what Nietzsche means by will to power. It illuminates aspects of the human condition. Liberation and the forces that oppose it.
One oppression one may be keen to avoid is that of one’s younger self by one’s elder.
Idea of a more positive way of looking at the Bible. The Bible as will. My mother’s friend Mrs Hall, who knew it back to front. Fact that stupid people like the Bible.

155 Heidegger’s attack on Nietzsche. Though it may be easy to refute it with an ad hominem argumentum, (e.g. he blames Nietzsche for a Nazism that is far closer to his own position than Nietzsche ever was, but perhaps needs to be tackled more directly. Idea that will to power as an idea results in mere technique, soulless technology.
What value in the criticism? Is Nietzsche harmful to Germans who need to hold their desires in check?
Idea that Nietzsche lacks compassion, that if we stick with him we will too. That something else is needed beside Nietzsche, some kind of radical change of heart.

AF

17 Nietzsche v Mill. Sociocultural and personal implications to fundamental psychological beliefs. There will be a difference in where and how one looks for one’s happiness.
The pleasures of a witopist (believer in will to power) will be consciously expressible in terms of power. He will claim to be able to explain the pleasures of the associationist in similar terms, except he will say that the will to power is in that case unconscious.
There will be states of mind from which he is incapable of deriving satisfaction. To say that truth had come to consciousness would be suspiciously Hegelian. Hegel’s illusion of explanation. What is explained by putting things into triads? Only an appeal to a habit, an authority of habit. What is explained by Catholicism for example?

138& Will to power, desire, try to express this issue plainly. Sources of frustration.
Certain ideas, concepts for classification of experience frustrate. If I were to accept certain moral ideas that are thrust at me my energies could find no proper outlet, I would be frustrated.
I am expected to live as crippled, partly unhappy.
But it is said that my desires only conflict with morality because of the ideas, the concepts which I hold, which I keep in my mind. These central ideas, central concepts, this is the fundamental issue.

207 Mick’s creativity involves pleasing people. If people do not like his work he could hardly continue to assert its worth.
With my effort on the other hand, I need to tell people that have to see things my way, that my conclusions necessarily follow. This, one can say, is my will to power, my personal ambition, my envy and resentment. But this takes an ethical form i.e. it is the search for an ideal order, but not a narrowly selfish ambition.
What one wants, something on which theoretically there can be universal agreement.
Creative eras of history, nineteenth century Russia, seventeenth century England, ancient Greece.
The will to power behind the development of any new cultural force. Conception of an ideal order, or a more ideal order.
Creative discontent
Milton, Soviet Russia. The discontent one feels at that which is not perfect. But the discontent is because it directly obstructs the will.
One objects to arbitrary power insofar as one does not exercise it.. but one does not respond by desiring such arbitrary power oneself. One can go better, One needs to be justified.

AE

237 the precise significance of Nietzsche in the history of ideas. His philosophy belongs to a universal type of religion, the affirmationist type symbolised by the phallus.
The will to power itself may be considered as a scholastic concept its ‘truth' on a scientific basis like the proofs of the existence of God.
Naïve optimism is trapped in beliefs that cannot be justified. Schopenhauer criticises philosophies (of which the archetype is Proclus) that begin from the concept.
The great merit of Locke, as he sees it, rooting philosophy n experience, i.e. in perception. While disputing many of the empiricists’ assumptions I agree that philosophy has to begin from what is known.
Our chain of argument must begin from what is immediately thought. The will to power is a concept, possibility is a concept. But power and possibility can be the subjects of the most immediate experience.
The ‘will to power’ is a statement about human nature. To say that the rest of Nietzsche’s philosophy springs from this concept could be to put the cart before the horse. Etc etc

242 I would put possibilitism and will to power together. Both spring from a programme of enlightenment, one as the philosophy the other as the psychology. This programme in its full objective is to produce a self sufficient science, i.e. one does not have to keep referring back to affirmationism. The philosophy and the psychology are intended to stand by themselves. So there is no need to refer back.

303 Language, and its capacity to get grip on the world. The war of ideas, what is fundamentally at issue.
We have to do away with the concept of the thing in itself.
So when we talk of a will to power what do we mean? How is this any more true than a feminist view of life?
What I was really meaning to say. Strength and will. It is very clear that what is being attacked is the will of the male.

344 We conceive the will to power as basic life energy. Some ideas dam this up, prevent it from finding a natural outlet. So we say. The problem is presented by the fact that to those who believe in such ideas the perspective is different. They would interpret in a different way, so what ground are we to have to give primacy to our own perspective? A most fundamental philosophical question that underlies all psychological theory.

AX

137 Idea of will to power as exposing the oppression that normal views of life regularly gloss over.
Bad memory that blights, we say. Standards of judgement, recalling or suggesting something about the they world. And false memory is forgetting of what ought to be remembered, of the purpose of the action taken.
The need, the activity. Even error is a striving not to be error.

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