Friedrich Nietzsche And The Will To Power

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century, along with other notable figures such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Many call these thinkers “philosophers of doubt” because of their desire to reveal the falsehood that lies beneath enlightened values, rationality, and truth. In particular, Nietzsche spoke of the will to power, which we discuss in this article.

According to Nietzsche, Western culture is ruined because it has strived for rationality in all aspects of life. Ever since Western culture was born in Greece, rationality, he said, has represented decay. Anything that is contrary to the instinctive and biological values ​​of human life is corrupt.

In order to understand Nietzsche’s philosophy, one must keep in mind his strong criticism of the world of Plato’s ideas. Nietzsche’s philosophy rejects these metaphysical traps: the rational world, the moral world, and the religious world. The ultimate principle of his theory is the concept of life. To understand how this philosopher understood “life,” one must keep in mind how he completely denied the rational world of Plato.

Nietzsche and the concept of life

According to this German philosopher, life is based on two basic principles: preservation and expansion.

He showed that there is life only insofar as it preserves itself. This ability to preserve is, of course, due to constant movement and a desire to expand. If the things we keep do not expand, they will die. Life is able to expand thanks to all the things that keep us alive. All this living space and its principles are the thing we are made up of. This, in turn, is perceived as a will to power.

Nietzche and the will to power

The will to power refers to the evolution of life. One could say that life itself is a will to power, for life conquers everything we need, strives to get what we want and to control what we own.

The will to power is life-oriented towards the horizon where we find and get what we want, that is, it wants things and wants more of what it already has. But it is important to mention that the will to power must love itself before it can desire anything else; only in this way does it want more of what it owns in order to preserve what it already has.

Imagine you want to buy a car, but you don’t have enough money for it right now. The survival of that desire is only possible if you seek to increase your savings to get that car purchased. If you do nothing to achieve that goal, desire, will and motivation will disappear.

The will to power wants itself

When the will to power wants to preserve itself, it also understands that it cannot sustain anything it conquers just by preserving it. In order for it to truly survive, it must expand, conquer new territories.

The will to power is appropriate and it is oriented towards the world of life, which is the only place where a person can get what he wants. This will is characterized by movement; it does not want to stop, it wants to continue to expand. According to Nietzsche, we will die if we are content with what we have at any given moment and do not try to expand it (we die symbolically, that is, our will to power solidifies).

Where, then, is the truth? According to this German philosopher, it is clear that the truth lies in the will of power of every individual. According to him, the relationship between truth and power is very close.

The real truth

Imagine that some media source publishes the news in the morning. All the other media follow suit, and each of them tells that news from the perspective of their own ideology. It is more than likely that each individual will consider the “truth” to be the fact that best fits their own perceptions.

Now imagine that there is controversy over different versions of these media, and at night, people from different media come together to discuss how the news actually went. It is clear that the truths are on a collision course precisely because the facts have only been interpreted. At that moment, the critical mind understands that Truth is the daughter of power.

It is obvious that power always supports hegemonic truth, given that it is a powerful expression of a will that wants to expand in order to preserve itself. To understand this, think of totalitarian regimes whose truth was Truth.

According to Nietzsche, any will to power that does not intend to expand in order to survive is just a worthless life: what is now understood as nihilism (the word nihilism comes from the Latin word nihil, which means nothing ).