Nietzsche in 1200 Words

[The question being answered here: Explain in as much detail as is appropriate and with appropriate quotes or textual reference what Nietzsche means by the “will to power” and how that concept is closely related to such terms as “genealogy,” “valuation,” “transvaluation,” “ressentiment,” “higher man”, and “overman.” To what degree are these terms closely interconnected throughout Nietzsche’s writings, and what significance might you assign to each of them in other than pure Nietzschean language? A legend explaining title abbreviations is provided at the end of this post.]

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Nietzsche’s aggressive polemic against the traditions of Christian morality and Western metaphysics may be understood, in part, as a sustained effort to “remain faithful to the earth” (TSZ 188). Nietzsche sees the prevailing philosophy and religion of his time as repudiating the earth through “a moral-optical illusion” (TI 484). They construct an idealized ‘true world’ in direct contradiction to the ‘actual world,’ decrying the latter as a world of mere appearances. He unfavorably portrays such thinkers as “tarantulas” (TSZ 211) and “spiders” (TSZ 237) that spin elaborate webs of truth, meaning, and purpose in their efforts to define the ‘true world.’ But as long as one casts the world as a negation of another, Nietzsche contends, the motivation is not a love of the truth; it is “a profound vexation at reality” (AC 582).

Nietzsche’s distinctive term the will to power denotes the ceaseless, dynamic interplay of commanding and obedient forces operating within the world. Through his declaration that, “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!” (WP 550), Nietzsche characterizes each of the individual forms which constitute the world as a manifestation or an instance of the will to power. Because everything that exists is an instance of the will to power, all the events of the world are a becoming master in which interacting forces subdue or are subdued by one another. Nietzsche states, “Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it” (GM 513).

Thus the history of any thing—be it an idea, custom, etc.—may be understood as “a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations” (Ibid.). Each transformation of a thing constitutes a new link in this chain, and its meaning, purpose, and (to use a more Nietzschean word) value thus cannot be regarded as fixed or intrinsic. On these grounds, Nietzsche pronounces that facts do not exist; “only interpretations” (WP 267). Of human beings, Nietzsche states, “life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values” (TI 490). We cannot help but be involved in the world’s ongoing process of valuation. For this reason, the essence of existence—of our existence—should never be understood in terms of static states of being but rather as “a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness” (WP 550). Valuation cannot reach a point of stasis or final achievement because there is no preordained endpoint or telos toward which becoming progresses (GM 513). In this light, I imagine the will to power as the generative wave of energy that continually invigorates us to demonstrate our creative abilities (our skills of valuation) in new ways.

Through the practice of genealogy, Nietzsche investigates the process of valuation that has generated and transformed a particular sign. Genealogy is the labor to identify those forces that gave rise to it, as well as those forces which subsequently mastered it for their own ends. As genealogist, Nietzsche places great importance on the role origins play in valuation (BGE 234). I conceive of genealogy as the concept of an autopsy stood on its head: The genealogist skillfully lays back the most immediate layers of the subject’s form in order to study the components that constitute its deeper structure. The intent, however, is not to identify a cause of death but the cause of birth. In works such as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols, we witness Nietzsche the genealogist analyzing the sign-chains of supposedly objective or eternal truths. Time and time again, Nietzsche concludes that the origins of traditional values, as well as the forces that have mastered them, are not divine or transcendent in character, but rather human, all-too-human.

Genealogy’s labor also facilitates transvaluation. The corollary of the statement “remain faithful to the earth” is Zarathustra’s admonition to “let the value of all things be posited newly by you” (TSZ 189). The insights of genealogy, in a sense, demystify existing values and thereby better equip one to reinterpret, obscure, or obliterate their previous meanings in appropriating them. It is truly a trans-valuation between existing and created values. When Nietzsche describes those “form-giving forces” which are “the essence of life,” he speaks of them as “aggressive,” “expansive,” and “spontaneous” (GM 515). Therefore, when transvaluation occurs as an active and self-assertive practice, free of any sense of personal obligation to what one ought to do, it is an affirmation of the essence of life and of the world as the will to power.

Antithetical to any such affirmation is ressentiment. Nietzsche identifies ressentiment as valuation that is thoroughly reactive (GM 472). He finds this mode of valuation to be evident in persons who bemoan their station in life (GM 473) or who are angry over their inability to change the past (TSZ 251), and then choose to avenge themselves against a world perceived to be hostile or unfair by fashioning their own values in direct negation of that world. Ressentiment is a form of spiritual revenge because this valuation does not result in actual deeds but remains a sort of ideological attack (my words) in which the valuator accepts the present state of the world. I see it as the attitude of sour grapes elevated to a worldview. Nietzsche declares that ressentiment has so permeated the values of the West that we longer see it (GM 470). Nietzsche need only observe the web-spinning spiders to confirm the prevalence of reactivity and negation in the European, intellectual culture of his day. In Nietzsche’s understanding, the society founded on ressentiment will only deepen in its “aversion to life” (GM 599). The person this society has produced is (among other things) sickly, mediocre, eager to please, and a herd animal (BGE 266).

Thus Zarathustra announces, “I teach you the overman. Man is something that must be overcome” (TSZ 124). In Zarathustra’s prophetic teachings, there is a vision of one who wills without ressentiment; in whom the will to power is spontaneously and creatively manifest. To will as the overman is to transform the bemoaning ‘it was’ of ressentiment into ‘thus I willed it’ (TSZ 251). In this transvaluation, the great affirmer “says Yes to everything questionable, even the terrible” (TI 484). The reappropriation of “evil” values, such as self-love and esteem of the body, is “necessary for the overman’s best” (TSZ 400). It is in this regard that the overman is not to be confused with the higher man. The higher men—Christians, Buddhists, Kantians—also seek to move beyond their present state but their ascendance still takes place within “an illusory higher order of things” while the real world remains unchanged (BGE 264). The higher man is a would-be perfecter of convention, not the boldly inventive creator the overman is. True overcoming does not begin with a climbing up, but with a going under (TSZ 122), acknowledging the reality of the world as layer upon layer of valuation, all the way down. However, in throwing off the weight of constructed morality and philosophy, the process of going under finally makes one light, an active expression of the will to power.

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AC = The Antichrist

BGE = Beyond Good and Evil

EH = Ecce Homo

GM = On the Genealogy of Morals

TSZ = Thus Spoke Zarathustra

TI = Twighlight of the Idols

WP = The Will to Power