by Sarcasm » Wed Jul 05, 2006 4:07 am
Will to Power, from Wikipedia
"Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results."
- Walter Kaufmann
Furthermore, the will to power is something like the desire to exert one's will in self-overcoming, although this "willing" may be unconscious, for all things "desire to grow". Indeed, it is unconscious in all non-human beings; it was the frustration of this will that initially caused man to become conscious. The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto says that "aggression" is at least sometimes an approximate synonym.[citation needed] However, Nietzsche's ideas of aggression are almost always meant as aggression toward oneself, as the energy a person motivates toward self-mastery. In any case, since the will to power is fundamental, any other drives are to be reduced to it; the "will to survive" (i.e. the survival instinct) that biologists (at least in Nietzsche's day) thought to be fundamental, for example, was in this light a manifestation of the will to power
"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (—its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on." -Walter Kaufmann
Thus, rather than a conscious intention to 'dominate over others,' the "will to power" is better understood as the tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces' relations to each other. While a rock, for instance, does not have a conscious (or unconsious) "will," it nevertheless acts as a site of resistance within the "will to power" dynamic. Moreover, rather than 'dominating over others' (a misinterpretation by Deleuze et al.), "will to power" is more accurately postioned in relation to the subject (a mere synecdoche, both fictitous and necessary, for there is "no doer behind the deed," [see On the Genealogy of Morals] and is an idea behind the statement words are "seductions") within the process of self-mastery and self-overcoming. The "will to power" is thus a "cosmic" inner force acting in and through both animate and inanimate objects, but it may also take on many forms that could perhaps involve such mastery but in a "life-denying" modality. Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. In fact, Nietzsche considered consciousness itself to be a form of instinct. This includes both such apparently harmful acts as physical violence, lying, and domination, on one hand, and such apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love, and praise on the other – though its manifestations can be altered significantly, such as through art and aesthetic experience. In Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective, absolute truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their will to power; this will can be life-affirming or a manifestation of nihilism, but it is the will to power all the same
"[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life" - Walter Kaufman
As indicated above, the will to power is meant to explain more than just the behavior of an individual person or animal. It is not psychological, nor intentional or subjective. The will to power lends itself more to the view, though it be homogeneous in expression, its transformations are heterogeneous, based on the altering organizations of "quanta of power".
Of note, however, involving the biological interpretation of the will to power, is that it is but one of many possible interpretations, as it would so appear – indeed, Nietzsche scholarship is overflowing with contrasting interpretations, largely due to either Nietzsche's elusive style or the interpreters' ineptitude. Others might suggest that the will to power is not really as central a concept in Nietzsche's thought. For example, it appears that Nietzsche himself might have agreed, when he suggests, in Ecce Homo, that his notion of eternal recurrence of the same is his most central thought, and the central theme of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, Heidegger, and Deleuze as well, would argue that both concepts, the will to power and the "thought of the eternal recurrence", are to be conceived together. Additionally, one particular interpretion, which lends significant credence to the view of the will to power as the most central concept of Nietzsche's thought, has, as it were: if attention were given to the will to power "as pathos", according to Nietzsche's own definition, as the fundament of his ontological ideation of becoming, then such concinnity vis-à-vis his work suggests a more thoroughgoing interrelation to the ideas prevalent throughout his work in its entire and how other ideas might be shown to be based upon it. Such a view is then taken further to view Nietzsche's ontology as a part of a much larger conception of a process philosophy. The degree to which these current interpretations stand is still tentative and debated among scholars
1,000,000,672+1D4 Bludgeoning to the face, bitch!