Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Affirmation

Will to Power

Cluster Affirmation Writing period 1881–1888 First encounter 6 readings

The phrase does three different jobs across the corpus, and they are not equally well supported. Two of them are worked out at length in books Nietzsche published. The third — the one that says the world is will to power — belongs mostly to notebooks he did not publish, and this page keeps that difference visible throughout.

The order matters more than it might seem. A reader who starts from the posthumous compilation called The Will to Power meets a cosmology arranged by editors and numbered by editors, and then reads the published books as though they were applications of it. A reader who starts from Daybreak and Zarathustra meets something else: an account of what drives people, extended into a way of asking historical questions, and only then pushed — tentatively, in the form of a supposition — towards a claim about everything. The second order is the one the published texts support, and it is the order this page uses.

Two cautions before the reading begins. Power here is not reducible to political domination: the artist composing, the ascetic priest governing by weakness, the scholar mastering a problem, and the person who simply wants to be felt by someone are all doing what Nietzsche means by it. Domination of other people is one case, and Nietzsche does discuss it, but it is a case rather than the definition. And the compilation called The Will to Power is not a book Nietzsche wrote. It is an arrangement of notebook entries made after his collapse, numbered editorially. Its entries can show what he was working out in private; they cannot settle what the published books leave open.

Three registers sets out the distinction the rest of the page runs on. The cosmological question takes up the contested one on its own, after the published spine, and notebook material is a short, explicitly secondary appendix.

Essential first encounter

Six sections, read in order: 1881, 1883, 1886, 1886, 1887, 1888. The sequence is deliberately published-only. Ask at each step what kind of claim is being made — about a person, about living things, about how to read history, or about what is good — and whether the text supplies the evidence that kind of claim would need.

  1. Core · 1881

    Daybreak §262

    A desire that comfort does not quiet

    Kennedy's free edition heads the section "The Demon of Power." The free translation is J. M. Kennedy; preferred translation R. J. Hollingdale.

    Question: The section claims that security and satisfaction do not remove the desire it describes. What would a counterexample look like?

    Why it belongs: Start five years before the phrase is famous. Daybreak works with a feeling of power — Machtgefühl — as an explanatory category in moral psychology, and this section puts the claim in its strongest early form: neither necessity nor desire for material goods accounts for what people pursue, because the wanting continues after both are satisfied. The closing turn to Luther places the same desire inside religious language, where it would seem least at home. Read it as what it is, a sweeping psychological hypothesis offered for testing against cases rather than a completed doctrine, and notice how much of the later idea is already here without the later vocabulary.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §189; Psychology of morality.

    Online edition: §262 (trans. J. M. Kennedy) · Preferred edition.

  2. Core · 1883

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra II, "On Self-Overcoming"

    Commanding, obeying, and the cost of both

    Common: "Self-Surpassing"; the free edition is Thus Spake Zarathustra. The chapter's best-known sentences about finding will to power wherever there is life are rendered differently by Kaufmann and Common — compare the two rather than quoting one as the other.

    Question: Zarathustra says the one who commands also obeys, and risks more in commanding. What does that add to a claim that living things seek power?

    Why it belongs: A sustained account of what the phrase means, and the reason the psychological register is not simply a theory of dominance. What Zarathustra describes is a structure inside the living thing: something in it commands, something obeys, and the commanding is itself an exposure, since a command that fails destroys the one who gave it. He then finds the same structure between living things — the weaker serving the stronger, and the stronger in turn serving something still weaker that it wants. The picture is of organization under strain rather than of one party subduing another, and it is the picture Beyond Good and Evil will restate in prose. Read the whole speech; the aphoristic lines that circulate from it lose the argument.

    Read alongside: Beyond Good and Evil §13; Self-overcoming.

    Online edition: Part II, "Self-Surpassing" (trans. Thomas Common) · Preferred edition.

  3. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil §13 · Part I

    Self-preservation demoted to a consequence

    Part I, "Prejudices of Philosophers" (§§1–23). The free edition is divided by part, so the link opens Part I; use Find for the section number. Free translation Helen Zimmern; preferred translation Walter Kaufmann.

    Question: Nietzsche calls self-preservation one of the indirect and most frequent results of what a living thing does. What would count as evidence for that ordering rather than the reverse?

    Why it belongs: Four sentences that set the terms for everything after. A living thing, Nietzsche writes, seeks above all to discharge its strength; life itself is will to power, and self-preservation follows as a consequence rather than standing as the aim. The target is named: he calls the self-preservation principle a superfluous teleological principle, and takes it to be a piece of inherited philosophy rather than an observation. Note what the section does and does not do. It states a position with unusual compression and it identifies what it rejects. It does not argue for the position, and Nietzsche gives it as a thesis about method — economy of principles — as much as a thesis about organisms.

    Read alongside: §36; Twilight, "Skirmishes" §14.

    Online edition: Part I: locate §13 (trans. Helen Zimmern) · Preferred edition.

  4. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil §36 · Part II

    The experiment, stated as a supposition

    Part II, "The Free Spirit" (§§24–44) — a different part from §13, and a separate link below. Zimmern's free edition opens the section "Supposing that nothing else is 'given' as real but our world of desires and passions"; Kaufmann's English differs, and the two should not be run together.

    Question: The section is built entirely out of conditionals. What has been shown by the end of it, and what has only been proposed?

    Why it belongs: The most careful passage on this page, and the one most often quoted as though it were a conclusion. The whole section is a supposition: supposing nothing were given as real but our drives, supposing thinking were only a relation among them, then it would be a matter of method — the conscience of method, Nietzsche says — to try whether one kind of causality might explain the rest, rather than helping oneself to several. Only after that chain does the formula arrive, and it arrives as what the world would be called if the experiment succeeded. Nietzsche does not claim the experiment has succeeded. Read the grammar as carefully as the content; it is the difference between a hypothesis and a physics, and most of the dispute recorded on this page turns on it.

    Read alongside: §22; the cosmological question.

    Online edition: Part II: locate §36 (trans. Helen Zimmern) · Preferred edition.

  5. Core · 1887

    On the Genealogy of Morals Essay II §12

    Why a practice outlives the purpose it was made for

    Free translation Horace B. Samuel; the link opens the second essay, so use Find for the section number. Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.

    Question: If a later power can take over an existing practice and give it a new purpose, what happens to explanations that read a practice's present function back into its origin?

    Why it belongs: The register that does the most work in the late books, and the one that can actually be tested. Nietzsche separates two questions that moral history habitually runs together: how a thing arose, and what it is now for. Whatever exists, he argues, is repeatedly reinterpreted by whatever gains power over it, so that the chain of purposes a practice has served is a succession of appropriations rather than a development of one intention. Punishment is the worked example, and it is chosen because its present meaning looks so obviously like its origin. Two things to hold apart while reading. The distinction between origin and function is a genuine methodological gain, usable by a reader who accepts nothing else here. The stronger interpretation of life as essentially appropriation and overpowering, and the ranking of sacrifices to exceptional types as progress, are separate claims that need independent assessment — and the second is where the register touches the politics.

    Read alongside: Essay III §27; Genealogy as method.

    Online edition: Second Essay: locate §12 (trans. Horace B. Samuel) · Preferred edition.

  6. Core · 1888

    The Antichrist §2

    The idea turned into a standard of value

    Free translation H. L. Mencken; the link opens the work, so use Find for the section number. The section's famous answers to "what is good?" are worded quite differently by Kaufmann and by Mencken, whose English speaks of what augments the feeling of power; this page paraphrases rather than presenting one translator's sentence under the other's link. Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann.

    Question: A standard has to be able to rule things out. What does this one rule out, and who decides?

    Why it belongs: The last step because it is the least careful, and seeing that is the point of putting it here. Nietzsche answers three questions in a few lines: what is good is what raises the feeling of power and the will to power in a human being; what is bad is what comes from weakness; happiness is the feeling that power is growing and resistance is being overcome. Everything the earlier steps built — a hypothesis about drives, a supposition about method, a way of separating origin from function — is here compressed into a criterion and used to open a polemic. Read it against Beyond Good and Evil §36 and ask what has happened to the conditionals. The slogan is memorable and it is doing far less argumentative work than the sections behind it; treat it as the late evaluative use of the idea rather than as its summary.

    Read alongside: §6; Revaluation of values.

    Online edition: The Antichrist: locate §2 (trans. H. L. Mencken) · Preferred edition.

Three registers

Three different claims travel under one phrase. They are related, and Nietzsche moves between them without always marking the move, but they are not equally established and they would not be refuted by the same evidence. The first two are worked out in books he published. The third is mostly notebook material, and the published texts that approach it do so as a supposition.

1. Psychological — what moves a person
The claim that what people pursue is best explained by an expansion of capacity and a sense of their own effectiveness, rather than by pleasure, comfort or survival. It begins in Daybreak as a feeling of power, is dramatized in Zarathustra as commanding and obeying inside a single creature, and is applied in the late books to cases that seem to refute it — pity, benevolence, asceticism, self-denial. It is a hypothesis about motivation, and it can be argued with by producing motives it does not fit. This register is well represented in the published works.
2. Methodological — how to read a practice, a morality, a text
The claim that institutions and valuations should be read as successive interpretations imposed by whatever gained power over them, so that a thing's present purpose is no evidence of its origin. Genealogy II §12 states it; the Genealogy as a whole is it being used. This is the most defensible register on the page, and the one a reader can adopt as a working method without committing to any thesis about the universe. It is also where the idea turns on itself: Genealogy III §27 applies it to the will to truth, including Nietzsche's own.
3. Cosmological — what the world is
The claim that everything that is, is will to power, and that what looks like matter, causation or law is a relation among quanta of force. In the published works this appears twice and both times in the conditional: Beyond Good and Evil §22 offers it as a rival interpretation while conceding that it is one, and §36 reaches it only at the end of a chain of suppositions. The unhedged formulations are in notebooks Nietzsche did not publish. How much weight the register can bear is a live disagreement among readers, and this page does not settle it — see the cosmological question.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it shapes how the rest of the page is arranged. A reader who finds the third register unpersuasive has not thereby disposed of the first two, and a reader persuaded by the first two has not thereby acquired the third. They stand or fall separately, and Nietzsche's published prose is considerably more careful about that than the compilation's title suggests.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Four investigations to take after the first encounter. Each assignment opens its full explanation and reading links in the work survey below.

1. The psychological register, tested on hard cases

The hypothesis is only interesting if it can be applied where it looks least likely to hold.

  1. Daybreak — §113
    The early extended portrait of the drive to be felt by others.
  2. The Gay Science — §13
    Pity and benevolence read as ways of acting on another person.
  3. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — II, "On Self-Overcoming"
    Commanding and obeying inside one creature.
  4. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §15
    Weakness that governs, which is the case the hypothesis most needs.

2. The methodological register

The most careful material here, and the part a reader can use without accepting anything about the universe.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §36
    The experiment, and the economy of principles that motivates it.
  2. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay II §12
    Origin separated from function, with punishment as the example.
  3. Beyond Good and Evil — §186
    Moralities treated as evidence about their holders rather than as answers.
  4. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §27
    The method turned on the will to truth, Nietzsche's included.

3. Life, organization, and the political edge

Where the account of living activity becomes a claim about how people may treat each other. Do not read past the difficulty.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §13
    Discharge of strength as primary, self-preservation as a result.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil — §259
    Life described through appropriation and injury, and used politically.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — "Skirmishes" §14
    Against a picture of life organized by scarcity and survival.
  4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — II, "On the Tarantulas"
    A demand for equality read as the thing it claims to oppose.

4. The late evaluative use

What happens to a hypothesis when it becomes a standard, and what the standard is then used to do.

  1. The Antichrist — §2
    The criterion, compressed to three answers.
  2. The Antichrist — §6
    Pity assessed by that criterion, in its harshest application.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — "Morality as Anti-Nature" §6
    The same standard stated negatively, against morality that opposes life.
  4. Ecce Homo — "Why I Am a Destiny" §1
    The criterion restated as a personal vocation.

Keep these distinctions in view

Power and domination over other people
Domination is one form the idea covers, not its meaning. If it were the meaning, most of the late analysis would collapse: the ascetic priest, who governs by weakness, and the self-denying believer, whose renunciation Nietzsche reads as a way of exercising power on oneself, would be counterexamples rather than the hypothesis's best cases. Read "power" as effectiveness, capacity, and the extension of what a thing can do — and then notice separately, without softening it, that Nietzsche does sometimes draw political conclusions from it.
A hypothesis and a demonstration
Beyond Good and Evil §36 is built out of suppositions and calls its own procedure a matter of method. Quoting its last clause as a thesis removes the argument that produced it. Nothing in the published works claims the experiment has been carried through.
Life is will to power / the world is will to power
The first is a claim about organisms and appears without hedging at Beyond Good and Evil §13. The second is a claim about everything, and in the published works it is offered conditionally or as an avowed interpretation. The step from the first to the second is exactly the step the notebooks take and the books do not.
Feeling of power and will to power
Daybreak's Machtgefühl is something a person can have, notice and pursue. The later phrase names what is supposed to produce it. Nietzsche does not always keep them apart, and The Antichrist §2 in particular runs them together in a single sentence; a reader who keeps them apart will see more of the argument.
Published register and notebook register
Where the two diverge, the published text governs. The notebooks can sharpen a published claim, preview one, complicate one, or overstate one. They cannot settle a question the books leave open, and the strongest cosmological formulations are precisely where the divergence is widest.
Explanation and endorsement
Reading an institution as an expression of power is an analysis. Judging that it is therefore good is a further step that needs its own argument. The late books take that step, and the reader should be able to see exactly where — usually at the point where the vocabulary shifts from "is" to "raises" or "diminishes".
Nietzsche's compilation and Nietzsche's book
He planned a major work under a title of this kind and abandoned the plan; the published books of 1888 are what he did with the material instead. The Will to Power as it circulates was assembled after his collapse from notebooks, and its numbering was given by editors. See notebook material.

The cosmological question

The strong reading holds that will to power is Nietzsche's account of what there is: not a psychology extended by analogy, but a claim that the world consists of quanta of force in relations of command and resistance, with matter, substance and causal law as interpretations laid over that. Something like this is certainly present in the corpus. The question is what supports it.

In the published works it surfaces twice, and both times with the argument's provisional character on the surface. Beyond Good and Evil §22 attacks the physicists' "conformity of nature to law" as bad philology — a reading of the world produced by democratic instincts rather than by the evidence — and then proposes the counter-reading, while conceding in the same breath that someone will object that this too is only interpretation, and answering: so much the better. §36 arrives at the formula at the end of a chain of suppositions. Neither passage asserts the cosmology flatly, and a reading that treats them as doing so has to explain away their grammar.

The unhedged statements are in notebooks Nietzsche did not publish, and the best known of them is the entry usually cited as KSA 11, 38[12] / WTP §1067 — where §1067 is an editorial number in the expanded posthumous compilation rather than an original notebook number, and KSA 11, 38[12] is the securely known manuscript reference. It describes the world as a monster of energy, without beginning or end, eternally creating and destroying itself, named at the close as will to power. It is a remarkable piece of writing. It is also an unpublished note, and its position at the very end of the compilation, which makes it read like a conclusion, is an editorial decision rather than Nietzsche's.

Readers disagree about what follows, and the disagreement is worth preserving rather than resolving. One tradition, associated above all with Heidegger, treats the cosmological claim as the centre of Nietzsche's thought and the published books as its partial expression. Another, represented by readers such as Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, holds that the notebooks record experiments Nietzsche declined to publish, and that a naturalistic psychology is what the books actually deliver. The texts underdetermine the choice. What can be said without taking a side is narrower and more useful: the psychological and methodological registers are established in works Nietzsche saw into print, the cosmological register is not, and any reading that leans on the third should say that it is leaning on notebooks. Compare interpretive approaches.

Explore by work

Twenty-nine assignments across eight published works, including the six starting readings. Core identifies the first encounter; development adds a setting or a second formulation; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology. Notebook entries are not listed here; they have their own separate and secondary section.

Daybreak3 reading assignments

1881, and the book most often skipped by readers who associate the idea only with the late polemics. Here it is moral psychology, the vocabulary is feeling of power rather than will to power, and the claims are offered as hypotheses about cases. Free edition trans. J. M. Kennedy; preferred translation R. J. Hollingdale.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

The Gay Science3 reading assignments

Books I–IV are from 1882; Book V was added in 1887. The middle-period statements are the sharpest test of the psychological register, because they are applied to affects that look like its refutation. Free edition: Thomas Common's The Joyful Wisdom; preferred translation Walter Kaufmann. Book V's §360, on distinguishing the cause of an action from the force that drives it, is the methodological companion to these and is worth finding by number.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Thus Spoke Zarathustra4 reading assignments

1883–85, and where the phrase is named. The dramatic form is not decoration: what the speeches supply is a picture of the idea working inside a single creature and between creatures, which the later prose then states more flatly. Free edition trans. Thomas Common, titled Thus Spake Zarathustra, whose chapter titles differ; preferred translation Walter Kaufmann.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Beyond Good and Evil7 reading assignments

1886, and the book where the idea is stated most carefully. Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296 across nine parts; the free edition is divided by part, so each assignment below names its part and you will need Find for the number. Two assignments that earlier versions of this page ran together are separated here because they sit in different parts and do different work: §13 is in Part I and §36 in Part II; §44 is in Part II and §259 in Part IX. §51, on why strong natures have stood in awe of the saint, is a further application of the hypothesis to its least likely case and is worth locating in Part III. Free translation Helen Zimmern; preferred translation Walter Kaufmann.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

On the Genealogy of Morals4 reading assignments

1887, and the book in which the methodological register is not stated but used. Free translation Horace B. Samuel; the links open whole essays, so use Find for section numbers. Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Twilight of the Idols3 reading assignments

1888, and compressed. Section numbers restart in each chapter; Ludovici's free edition uses different chapter titles, given with each assignment. The links open chapters, so use Find for section numbers. Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

The Antichrist2 reading assignments

1888, and the book where the idea is least an enquiry and most a weapon. Free translation H. L. Mencken, whose English differs markedly from Kaufmann's; the link opens the work, so use Find for section numbers. Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Ecce Homo3 reading assignments

Written in 1888, published in 1908. Nietzsche's retrospect on his own books, which makes it the nearest thing to an authorial gloss on the theme and also the least disinterested source for it. Ludovici's free edition titles the chapters "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Write Such Excellent Books" and "Why I Am a Fatality". Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Notebook material

Four entries, offered as an appendix rather than as a second route through the theme. They are here because readers meet them attributed to Nietzsche as doctrine, and because a page about this idea that omitted them would be avoiding the problem rather than addressing it. There is no short starting sequence for them: the published texts above are the route, and these are supplementary. Where a notebook entry and a published text pull in different directions, the published text governs.

For the notebooks as written and dated rather than as arranged and renumbered, consult Nietzsche Source's critical edition.

Related extensions: what might follow?

Choose these after the central questions, according to the direction your reading takes. They return to assignments already explained above.

Connections

← All themesEternal recurrence →