Nietzsche's Will to Power and the Pursuit of Happiness

Ditzler 1 Emily Ditzler Liberal Studies 422 8 December 2014 The Will to Power and the Pursuit of Happiness In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche, through the mouth of the fictional prophet Zarathustra, proclaims one of the central theses of his entire body of philosophy: “Wherever I found a living thing, there found I the Will to Power …Only where there is life, is there also will: not, however, Will to Life, but—so I teach thee—Will to Power!” Nietzsche, Friedrich. Trans. Thomas Common. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Project Gutenberg, 2008) With this, Nietzsche suggests that the fundamental characteristic of life is the presence of a will to power. Nietzsche’s realization of the will to power marks a critical shift in his philosophy from viewing humanity as dualistic to monistic—positing that human action and valuation ultimately are dependent upon the exercise or restraint of the will to power as the universal psychological drive. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1974). Pg. 178: “The basic difference between Nietzsche’s earlier and later theories is that his final philosophy is based in the assumption of a single basic principle [the will to power], while the philosophy of his youth was marked by a cleft which all but broke it in two.” After reducing humanity to a single knowable principle—the will to power—Nietzsche formulated the notion of self-overcoming. Self-overcoming involves the intelligent and discerning negotiation of the will to power between self-satisfaction and self-denial in order to achieve a sort of natural, life-affirming balance. Thus, in Nietzsche’s philosophy the will to power is inextricably linked to self-overcoming, which is ultimately the individual pursuit of happiness. Prior to the invention of the will to power, Nietzsche speculated that power and fear comprised the two principal psychological drives of humanity. Indeed one of Nietzsche’s earliest Ditzler 2 uses of the phrase “the will to power” reads: “Fear (negative) and will to power (positive) explain our strong consideration for the opinions of men.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Notes from the early 1870’s” Qtd. by Walter Kaufmann. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Pg. 179 In this assertion, Nietzsche develops a dualistic conception of humanity’ action as either negated/ inhibited by fear, or affirmed/satisfied by power. Despite this initial positive valuation of power, Nietzsche was also cognizant of the dangers of power. For Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, his former companion, provided an exemplary case for the investigation of power. In his work Nietzsche contra Wagner, Nietzsche writes: “The same instinct unites them [Wagner and his admirers] with one another, in him [Wagner] they recognize their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardor they feel themselves transformed into power, even into greater power.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. Nietzsche contra Wagner. (T.N Foulis: London, 1911). Here, Nietzsche consciously breaks with his former praise of Wagner, and his critique is rooted in Wagner as symptomatic of the nihilistic times. Nietzsche noted that Wagnerian power was essentially dangerous because it was rooted in decadence and perpetuation of pessimism, rather than life-affirmation, which in Nietzsche’s eyes was the central function of the will to power. While Nietzsche ultimately condemns Wagnerian power, he does simultaneously praise him for his ability to transform power into creative potentiality and to imbue others with power. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche contra Wagner. “In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner’s influence has really been beneficent.” The dualism of humanity, as driven by both power and fear, posited in Nietzsche’s early notes, is a theme that is continued in the Birth of Tragedy. In this work, Nietzsche constructs two archetypes of human behavior represented by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo signified the rational side of humanity that allowed for the restriction of impulse, order, and Ditzler 3 balance. Contrarily, the Dionysian model embodied the instinctual side of humanity responsible for deep emotion, erratic behavior, and even madness. Allison, David. Reading the New Nietzsche. (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2001) pg. 18-19: “Implicit in Apollonian art was the concept of restraint, of balance or limitation, qualities that required the intervention of human reflection and rationality…Dionysus, by contrast, represented the instinctual elements in human expression: the sometimes violent drives of intense emotion, sensuality, intoxication of frenzy and madness.” Although, Nietzsche had a strong preference for Dionysian passion, he was aware that the Apollonian side of humanity was indispensable and an equally valid part of human nature. Furthermore, as Nietzsche’s philosophy progressed, he began to grow uncomfortable with an irreconcilable dualism of instinct and reason. Nietzsche’s fragment titled Homer’s Contest exemplifies his dissatisfaction with dualism: When one speaks of '' humanity " the notion lies at the bottom, that humanity is that which separates and distinguishes man from Nature. But such a distinction does not in reality exist: the " natural " qualities and the properly called " human " ones have grown up inseparably together? Man in his highest and noblest capacities is Nature and bears in himself her awful twofold character. His abilities generally considered dreadful and inhuman are perhaps indeed the fertile soil, out of which alone can grow forth all humanity in emotions, actions and works. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Trans. Maximilian A. Mugge. Homer’s Contest. (Macmillan: New York, 1911). The resolution to the apparent contradiction between naturalism and humanity that plagued both Nietzsche’s mind and early philosophy was his creation of the will to power. Nietzsche realized that the dualism of fear and power could be eliminated by evaluating fear in terms of power, that is as impotence. Similarly, the dualism in human nature between impulse and reason could be resolved by reading impulse as the gratification of the will to power and reason as the restriction of the will to power. These resolutions allowed for Nietzsche’s decisive conclusion that “wherever found a living thing, there I found the Will to Power”, which asserted the will to power as the fundamental human drive. Ditzler 4 After establishing a non-dualistic conception of humanity via the advent of the will to power, Nietzsche was ready to evaluate how it operated on the plane of human history. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche demonstrates the will to power in terms of two groups—the masters and the slaves. The argument is premised on the idea that differing degrees of power inherently exist in society from the master (who yields a large amount of power) to the slave (who is plagued by impotence). Although an innate inequality in the distribution of power exists, the will to power remains universal and applicable to both the master and the slave and thus, the slave must find a creative way to exert this will. Nietzsche’s argument commences with a dual prehistory of the terms “good and bad” and “good and evil”. The original use of the word “good” was fashioned by the master race as means of distinguishing themselves from the common. Hence, in word and titles “which denote ‘good’ we can often detect the main nuance which made the noble feel they were men of higher rank…they might give themselves names which simply show superiority of power or the most visible sign of this superiority.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 5, pg. 14. Therefore, the master race engages in the creation of the notion of “good” as a characteristic applicable to themselves, in order to assert the supremacy of their power in relation to the other. Consequently, “bad” is simply a designation for those who have not achieved the same extent of power, prestige, or nobility. Nietzsche’s critical observation in the master’s distinction of “good and bad” is that “the judgment ‘good’ does not emanate from those to whom goodness is shown! Instead it has been ‘the good’ themselves, meaning the noble…who saw and judged their actions as good…in contrast to everything lowly.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 2, pg. 11. Therefore, the initial distinction of good and bad was merely a way of power maintenance through the creation of “pathos of distance” between the master and the slave. Ditzler 5 The slave response to the noble valuation of “good and bad” was what Nietzsche terms a “slaves revolt in morality” which sought to redefine and reverse master morality in an attempt to exert power. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 7 pg. 18 : “…namely that the slaves’ revolt in morality begins with the Jews: a revolt which has two thousand years of history behind it and has only been lost sight of because—it was victorious…” The revolt begins with a fragmentation of the aristocratic class into a subdivision of a clerical class who develops notions of “pure and impure” which operate on a more complex behavioral basis than the previous valuations of “good and bad”, which merely signified social standing. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 6. Pg. 15-16. In the clerical break from the aristocracy, the slaves found an alternative source of power through which they could stage a revolt. Nietzsche utilizes the Jews as the prototype of this “slave revolt”. He writes, “It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held in its teeth the most unfathomable of hatred”. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 7. Pg. 17. In this reinterpretation by the Jews, weakness and powerlessness are perceived as “good” while its reverse is seen as not bad but “evil” and worthy of condemnation. The division in the conception between the master’s ideas of “good and bad” and the slave response of “good and evil” is understandable in the context of Nietzsche’s naturalism. The noble “good” was a construction built out of the natural circumstances and distribution of power. As Nietzsche notes “the well-born felt they were ‘the happy’ [the good], they did not need to first of all to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 10, pg. 21. In contrast, the slave reevaluation is a purely reactive and unnatural creation—a hate-filled response to an inherent impotence. A secondary difference between the noble and the slave valuation operates in terms of activity versus passivity. The noble were freely able to exercise their power through action Ditzler 6 and thus, “as men bursting with strength and therefore necessarily active, they knew they must not separate happiness from action.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 10. Pg. 21 Oppositely, because slaves were plagued by an inability to act and an essential powerlessness, they had to invent a morality that elevated passivity. Consequently, “’happiness’ at the level of the powerless, the oppressed and those rankled with poisonous and hostile feelings, for whom it manifests itself as essentially a narcotic…a relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs, in short as something passive.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 10 pg. 21. However, in light of these differences between master and slave morality, both concepts are grounded in the will to power. The unnatural and passive characteristics of slave morality incite reproach by Nietzsche—a criticism he roots in the will to power. First and foremost, Nietzsche contests slave morality because it promotes the taming of man and the repression of the will to power. He theorizes if we assume the “truth” of slave morality, then we can subsequently assume that “it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man’”. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 11. Pg. 24 Under the master’s morality, the will to power was encouraged to manifest externally in acts of strength, yet under this new culture, slaves band together in a herd mentality of weakness (under the guise of morality and righteousness) to advocate for societal restraint of the individual will to power. The basic result of the acceptance of slave morality is the inversion of the will to power. With the inability to externalize the will, “all instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards—this is what I call the internalization of man.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 16. Pg. 57. From Nietzsche’s perspective, the internalization of man and his will to power is essentially a break with naturalism. The essential Ditzler 7 outcome of this internalization is a grave sickness of modern man and a rejection of an indispensable element of human nature –instinct. Nietzsche distinguishes modernity’s sickness as “man’s sickness of man, of himself” which has come about from “a forcible breach with his animal past” and from “a declaration of war against his old instincts on which, up till then, his strength, pleasure, and formidableness had been based”. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Aphorism 16. Pg. 57. By subverting the will to power through morality, humanity has also subverted its ability to experience pleasure. Furthermore, the only solution provided by morality for this absence of external pleasure is self-violation or the exercise of the will to power upon oneself and gaining pleasure from self-cruelty, selflessness, self-denial, and self- sacrifice. Nietzsche is, however, deeply disappointed by this solution and offers an alternative in his notion of self-overcoming. The underlying rationale behind self-overcoming is that only the powerless (like the slaves) assert power by overcoming the other; the truly powerful exert power by overcoming themselves which involves a intelligent negotiation of the will to power. The process by which one can achieve self-overcoming is sublimation. Sublimation refers to the rechanneling of an impulse into a creative activity, rather than be satisfied directly. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Pg. 220: “Nietzsche believed that a sexual impulse, for example, could be channeled into a creative spiritual activity, instead of being fulfilled directly. In a section of Nietzsche’s work Dawn of Day titled “Self-Control and Moderation, and their Final Motive”, Nietzsche espouses six different methods for achieving restraint of the impulse to externalize power. The fifth of these six methods comes the closest denotatively to sublimation: “We may bring about a dislocation of our powers by imposing upon ourselves a particularly difficult and Ditzler 8 fatiguing task, or by deliberately submitting to some new charm and pleasure in order thus to turn our thoughts and physical powers into other channels.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. Trans. J.M. Kennedy. The Dawn of Day (George Allen: London, 1924). Pg. 107 It is important to emphasize a distinction between Nietzsche’s parallel conceptions of self-overcoming and sublimation and the Christian idea of self-abnegation. The Christian idea of self-abnegation is founded in the validation of the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche sarcastically defines the ascetic ideal in On the Genealogy of Morality stating, “we know what the great three catchwords of the ascetic ideal are: poverty, humility, and chastity”. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Pg. 78. In this narrow definition, the commonality of the three defining features is restriction—poverty as the restriction of wealth, humility as the restriction of pride, and chastity as the restriction of sexuality. The ascetic morality, therefore, argues for the suppression of instinct completely. Furthermore, in the paradigm of Christian morality, self-abnegation is imbued with great power because it means the limitation of sin, the favor of God, and the limitation of suffering. Nietzsche’s notion of sublimation runs contrary to Christian self-abnegation because rather than absolute suppression of the will to power, sublimation offers an alternative satisfaction of the will to power. In rechanneling an external impulse into a creative activity, the essence of the will to power is maintained, although the physical result is altered. Ultimately, sublimation provides for the satisfaction of the will to power in a controlled manner. Sublimation’s relation to the will to power is perhaps best envisioned in terms of Aristotle’s twofold evaluation of matter into substance and accident. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Pg. 221. For example, it is inevitable that men will feel an impulse toward sexuality as the result of the inherent will to power (the substantial element), yet the gratification of this impulse in a sexual act is accidental. Therefore, if the Ditzler 9 sexual impulse is sublimated and gratified in an alternative manner, the substantial element (the will to power) still remains intact, despite the fact that the accidental consequence has changed. Because sublimation provides for the expression of the will to power, while self-abnegation completely denies it, Nietzsche champions it as the method to achieving self-overcoming. However, sublimation does not imply that Nietzsche favors hedonism or the unrestrained satisfaction of instinct. In fact, sublimation involves the cooperation and arbitration of both the Apollonian and Dionysian facets of human nature. Rationality itself is a manifestation of the will to power and is the tool we must use when judging whether or not we should act on an impulse or sublimate it. Nietzsche comments on the importance of rationality in The Gay Science; he writes: What is good-heartedness, refinement, and genius to me, when the human being who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments, and when the demand for certainty is not to him the inmost craving and deepest need—that which distinguishes the higher from the lower man. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Qtd. in Walter Kaufmann. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Pg. 230-231. With this, Nietzsche praises rationality as the human capacity with the capability of distinguishing the higher man from the lowly man. However, he also explicitly critiques the overuse of rationality and the consequential abandonment of the instincts. For Nietzsche, rationality then becomes an important tool at humanity’s disposal that must be exercised in the negotiation of the will to power and sublimation, but it should not constitute the basis for all human action. The individual’s mediation between reason and instinct via cognizance of the will to power is ultimate goal of self-overcoming. Nietzsche articulates this goal in The Gay Science Ditzler 10 promoting the idea that “one thing is needful—to give style to one’s character.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science. (Vintage Books: New York, 1974). Aphorism 290. The principal idea underlying the stylization of one’s character is power. Only the powerless accept the moral valuations of the herd, but the powerful are essentially creative and determine their own standards of living. The process of stylizing one’s character is described by Nietzsche as “practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science Aphorism 290. Thus, the prerequisite for stylization is the wholehearted embrace of nature as containing within it strength and weakness, light and dark, Apollo and Dionysus, and pleasure and pain. As a corollary to the embrace of nature, man must reject the singlehanded pursuit of pleasure. In terms of Nietzsche’s philosophy, pleasure can be defined as the exertion of the will to power. Yet, Nietzsche rejects a life that seeks to achieve pleasure and minimize pain in either a barbarous (exerting the will to power on others) or ascetic manner (exerting the will to power on oneself). Sigmund Freud substantiated Nietzsche rebuke of pleasure in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he was critical of those who “presuppose the existence and supremacy of the pleasure principle and bear no witness to operation of principles beyond the pleasure principle.” Freud, Sigmund. Trans. C.J.M. Hubback. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (International Psycho-Analytical Press: London) Section II. Both Nietzsche and Freud are conscious that the pursuit of pleasure and the minimization of pain are not to be conflated with the pursuit of happiness. For Nietzsche, happiness is to live in a naturalistic way, and this pursuit of happiness is dependent upon the acceptance that both pleasure and suffering are part of the consequences of living and that self-overcoming implies Ditzler 11 both self-satisfaction and self-denial in a dialectical relationship. Integral to this argument of naturalism is Nietzsche’s insistence that pleasure cannot exist without suffering. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche is careful to unpack the idea that pleasure and pain our opposite feelings. He contests “it seems that a little inhibition is overcome and then immediately succeeded by another inhibition that is again overcome—this play of resistance [of pain] and victory---is the strongest stimulus of that total feeling of …overflowing power which constitutes the essence of joy.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Qtd. in Walter Kaufmann Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Pg. 273 Hence, Nietzsche suggests that the greatest amount of happiness is derived from the dialectical relationship between pleasure and pain, creation and destruction in which the will to power is fully exercised and constantly employed. Happiness, then, is not the absence of pain but an individual creation that involves the dynamism of dialectic relationships. Overall, the endpoint of Nietzsche’s relationship between the will to power and the pursuit of happiness is the concept of amor fati or the love of fate. Loving fate is a consequence of embracing nature and consists of affirming our passions and our lives by recognizing that exerting power entails suffering and happiness. We must learn to love our passions and our will to power to the extent that we choose to control them through sublimation rather than to suppress them or blindly exert them. In Nietzsche’s words, amor fati means to be a “Yes-sayer”, and to affirm and accept the ebb and flow of life as something that is inherently beautiful—this is the key to happiness. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science . Aphorism 276: “someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer” Ditzler 12 Works Cited Allison, David. Reading the New Nietzsche. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Print. Freud, Sigmund. Trans. C.J.M. Hubback. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 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