i Will to Power as Psychological Explanation of Moral Phenomena
In Nietzsche's writings, and even more in other people's interpretations of them, the will to power presents itself in various guises: it appears sometimes to offer a global metaphysics, sometimes to be an explanatory term specific to Nietzsche's psychology of drives, and at other times to give a criterion for his own evaluations—the latter most blatantly in the late passage 'What is good?—All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man' (A 2). I want to start by showing how the concept of will to power unifies the psychological explanations we have seen Nietzsche offer in the first two treatises of the Genealogy concerning the origins of our concepts 'good' and 'evil' and the genesis and moralization of guilt and bad conscience.
It is in the Third Treatise that Nietzsche makes the generalization that 'every animal [...] instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can vent its power (Kraft) completely and attain its maximum feeling of power (Machtgefuhl)' (GM III. 7). In the Third Treatise will to power emerges as the 'strongest, most life-affirming drive', and acquires a variety of further explicit roles, appearing as the paradoxical self-overcoming and self-domination of the ascetic, as the tyranny of the sick over the healthy, as the self-preserving drive that leads the weak to form communities in which to shelter, and as the explanation of the happiness in feeling superior that arises from doing good to others.1 But it would be wrong to think that will to power is invoked in an explanatory role only
1 See GM III. 11, 14, 15, 18. The ascetic ideal is the priest's 'tool of power' in III. 1; and 'feeling of power' and 'consciousness of power' (Machtgefühl, Machtbewusstsein) feature in III. 7, 9, 10, 14, 19.
in the Third Treatise.2 'Will to power' does not occur by name in the First Treatise, and makes appearances only in three sections of the Second (three times as Wille zur Macht, once as 'power-will' (Macht-Wille), and once as the 'will of life which is out after power' (Lebenswille, die auf Macht aus ist); GM II. 11, 12, 18)—though in one of these sections it receives prominence among the most thorough methodological reflections in the whole book (of which more below). Nevertheless, it is quite easy to show how the explanations given in the first two treatises count as instances of explanation through will to power.3
The first and second treatises, as I have argued, instantiate a point made about opposites in Beyond Good and Evil 2. In both treatises, Nietzsche reveals that 'good and honorable' things have an incriminating link to 'the very things that look like their evil opposites', and that they are one with them in essence. As part of the project of'translating man back into nature', Nietzsche criticizes the metaphysicians' prejudice that the good must have a separate ('higher') origin from what we suppose is its opposite, but the point is not solely that the good has a natural rather than supernatural explanation—it is that the very same human drives may explain superficially opposite evaluations. Without doubt Nietzsche presents the nobles in the First Treatise as human animals instinctively striving for conditions in which to express their strength and gain a maximum feeling of power, and therefore as manifesting will to power. And similarly in the Second Treatise cruelty represents a basic human tendency to release one's power to the detriment of another and temporarily at least 'become master' over them. But there is a shock in each essay: the slaves' invention of the good—evil opposition and labelling of themselves as good is driven by the need to overpower the powerful in a more subtle and underhand way, and the imposition of guilty bad conscience on ourselves is an inward deflection of cruelty, the instinct to release power at the expense of something else. The interiority, complexity, conceptual sophistication, and subsequent rationalization ofthese moral phenomena disguises the sameness
2 As in Leiter's statement (2002: 173): 'It is, in short, naturally occurring psychological mecha-nisms—ressentiment (GM I), internalized cruelty (GM II), the will to power (GM III), that suffice to explain morality's origin in Nietzsche's view.' It is more accurate to say that throughout the three treatises morality is explained by psychological mechanisms which are diverse manifestations of will to power: ressentiment, internalized cruelty, and the conscious adoption of self-denial as an ideal.
3 The same point is made by Reginster (2006: 139).
of their origins with brutality and cruelty, and Nietzsche's unmasking of these disguises is a project that unifies the Genealogy. In the Third Treatise, Nietzsche describes asceticism as a self-contradiction: here a ressentiment without equal rules, that of an unsatiated instinct and power-will that would like to become lord not over something living but rather over life itself [...] an attempt is made here to use energy to stop up the source of energy.
He thereby completes a single arc of explanation that began on the battlefields and hunting grounds of the early simple-minded 'nobles'. Morality's various phenomena are explained as ways in which human beings, like all animals, strive to discharge their power and maximize their feelings of power under the exigencies of their own characters and externally imposed constraints.
There are a number of dimensions of variation in the way will to power operates in Nietzsche's psychological explanations. First, will to power may be outward-directed or inward-directed, showing up on the one hand as the more obvious interpersonal domination, competition, or superiority, on the other hand as a state in which one sub-personal part or drive dominates, harnesses, or lives at the expense of another. Making oneself suffer feelings of guilt is one example of the latter; having a policy of despising and suppressing one's natural instincts is another. Outward-directed will to power may be either active or reactive, as witness the obvious central contrast between the spontaneous, self-defining behaviour and values of the noble mode of evaluation and the invention of the good-evil morality out of a need to redefine and blame one's masters.
Another variation is that will to power may result in the achievement of actual power, or only in the gratifyingfeeling of power.4 Thus, Christians who envisage the humiliation of the strong in the afterlife (and whose emotional investment in this 'overpowering' attitude is so graphically invoked in GM I. 14 and 15) attain a feeling of power with respect to others, but without necessarily altering the real power-relations that obtain between themselves and those others. Again (as in GM I. 13), by forming the belief that a transgressor acts out of a neutral, characterless freedom, the victim
can portray the other as choosing to inflict harm with full responsibility, and thereby feel the superiority of blaming the other as 'evil'. Although no actual power is so far gained over the other, because one has simply painted a false picture of him, the feeling of power is strong enough to provide compensation for the inability to retaliate. In due course, however, this mode of evaluation genuinely becomes victorious. The weak, through the reinterpretations offered by the ascetic priest, whose overcoming of his natural self is a genuine exercise of inward-directed power, in fact become masters over the strong by teaching them to be restrained by guilt and to think of their natural ability to be strong as blameworthy and wrong.
Will to power may manifest itself in healthy or unhealthy ways, creating either unity or conflict in the psyche. The ascetic is sick, because he is split against himselfby his need to locate ultimate value in despising and denying himself.Opposed to this are those 'rare cases of powerfulness in soul and body, the strokes of luck among humans' (GM III. 14), whom Nietzsche portrays as well-formed and healthy expressions of will to power. Yet Nietzsche's thought tracks the intricacies of psychology with a subtlety that strains the boundaries of such classifications. Of the ascetic he says, for instance:
we stand here before a conflict that wants itself to be conflicted, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even becomes more self-assured and triumphant to the extent that its own presupposition, physiological viability, decreases.
Nietzsche calls the ascetic a paradox and a self-contradiction, meaning not that the ascetic is an impossibility, but that he genuinely grows in power (over himself) as he dissociates from and destroys his natural strength. The ascetic ideal gives its proponent a unity of purpose and strength of will, so that there is a real 'triumph' and 'victory', not a mere illusion of one. Yet this is a personality type—to which most of us belong in the modern world, according to Nietzsche—whose strength and unity consist in self-opposition and denial of one's own most natural functions. The complexity ofthe phenomena here is mirrored in Nietzsche's attitudes too: he admires the magnitude of the ascetic's achievement while lamenting its unhealthy devaluing of the natural self.
Such ambivalence characterizes also his attitude to the slave revolt in morality and the internalization of instincts. The slave revolt, though it demeaned the simple, healthy, outward-directed expression of power, was itself a successful exercise of will to power, daring, fear-inspiring, ideal-creating, value-reshaping, and victorious over other forces that, left to themselves, would have rendered human history 'too stupid'.5 A similar ambivalence permeates the description of the will to power that is at work in the internalization of the instincts that leads to bad conscience:
this artists' cruelty, this pleasure in giving oneself—as heavy resisting suffering matter—a form, in burning into oneself a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a 'no'; this uncanny and horrifying—pleasurable work of a soul compliant—conflicted with itself [...] this entire active 'bad conscience', as the true womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally brought to light [...] a wealth of new disconcerting beauty and affirmation and perhaps for the first time beauty itself...
The will to power, directed inward, violently reorganizes the self, giving it positive form and purpose that was lacking before, but again at the expense of losing for ever a more primitive unity and health.6
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