July 21, 2020 (substack.com)

Today, I want to talk about an idea people misunderstand: Nietzsche’s will to power.

In his writing, Nietzsche showed doubts about Darwin’s theory of evolution. The philosopher Herbert Spencer famously built his own concepts around Darwin’s ideas, even coining the term “survival of the fittest,” but Nietzsche felt it was missing something crucial by focusing entirely on reactivity to the environment. He seemed to prefer a version of the Lamarckism that lived before Darwinism.

In Beyond Good and Evil, he had this to say:

“Psychologists should bethink themselves 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.”

It took me a while to understand this concept. I only really started getting it in the last year, and I don’t think most people who read Nietzsche fully capture its meaning.

The will to power was perhaps his most central concept. A common misinterpretation maps to Spencer’s thought. Life is about the survival of the fittest, and those who acquire the most resources or status or time win. They claim to stare the harsh truth of reality in the face, and they accept it, and they play the game.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the game if that’s what you do. That said, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, this mentality is actually one of weakness, not strength. It is base, not noble. The will to power has nothing to do with acquiring power as an end, as a sort of representation in the culturally defined realm. Although it can be, it’s not really about ruling anyone or anything. It’s about power as a way of being, an activity that the body does – a release.

At any moment, a body has a certain amount of energy that it has to do something with. This energy is felt in us as sensations that then turn into emotions. Now, the body can use that energy in two ways: reactively or actively.

If Spencer’s philosophy is taken at face value, life is to be lived with a fear of death. That is how most of us live. It’s deeply programmed into our nervous system. Even when we make plans for great ambitions of domination, we are living in fear. It may be hiding deeper in the well, but it’s still reacting to something, and that changes how it interacts with the world. It’s a form of weakness masquerading as strenght.

A fear of death creates a rigid sense of self. A rigid sense of self is built around habits that protect you from this fear. It might still be able to take over the world, but its emotional range is limited. It feels the same things over and over again.

This brings us to another Nietzschean concept: the Übermensch. We can translate that as the overman or superman, but the idea is about self-overcoming. When the will to power is channeled as active energy, there is a possibility to overcome the self, whether temporarily as a matter of feeling, or more generally as a way of being. It’s not asceticism in the sense that the self is made to disappear by negating the world, like in some contemplative traditions. Nietzsche doesn’t have much patience for that. Rather, it’s the ability of the body to feel a new emotion at every moment of life.

A reactive body feels the same thing, over and over again, in the name of acquiring some sort of representation in the world, whether that be a concrete object like property or an abstract concept like safety. Sometimes, it doesn’t even know what that representation is, but for most people, it’s status of some kind. An active body, however, feels its own power in the granularity of the sensations that flow in and out, and using those sensations and the emotions they bring out, it channels that power forward in everything that it does. This could be in the name of some grand ambition, but ambition isn’t the point. It’s the feeling of a new emotion that is.

The novelty of new representations fade, but the ability to feel every group of sensations in the body as distinct from the last ones is a novelty that never gets old. It gets us out of the cycle of suffering, where nothing seems to be enough.

This is something that makes a little more sense in the context of the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on emotions. The old scientific paradigm of emotions basically thinks of them as hard-wired into our bodies. The body feels threatened or scared, and it runs through an anger or a fear pathway that evokes the same response every time. Based on what I personally know, this seems obviously wrong, but I can see how people buy it. Barrett’s work seems to agree with my intuition.

Each combination of sensations in the body has a different flavor and a different intensity, and it also changes based not just on movement but also on interpretation. Even just having more linguistic concepts for the different emotions we have changes how we experience them. Barrett calls this emotional granularity. Anger becomes many shades of anger. Anxiety becomes more than fear.

Nietzsche takes this a step further. When a body reacts to something or someone, it releases that energy, that strength, inward, to fuel an inner cycle of the patterns of emotion stored in the body’s memory. This hardens the self into a rigid form. When the body acts, however, by simply being in motion or responding actively to something or someone, it releases that energy, that strength, outward, and in doing so, it transforms the sensations that were felt when a stimulus hit the body into something entirely new – a new way of feeling, of being. Self-overcoming.

One thing I have always felt quite grateful for is the fact that I don’t really get anxious or depressed. Given my particular life history, I would personally have bet a lot of money on being susceptible. Either way, I know people who struggle deeply with these experiences, and I know that they have to muster up a kind of strength that I probably can’t imagine. That said, I wonder how much of these cycles of anxiety and depression have to do with reacting versus acting.

Whenever I do feel hints of these sensations, I make a point to keep moving, keep pushing, and more often than not, they change form just as fast as they came and then they go away. They have the opportunity to become something else in an active release rather than some internal pattern in a reactive cycle of self-formation. I’m sure it’s not as simple as that for many people, but maybe there is something there.

There is a certain safety in defaulting to what you have always felt, to feel being a consistent self across time, to feel what is familiar even if it hurts. To overcome the self is to fundamentally overcome the fear of death. Enlightenment, as commonly understood, does this, but many people who affirm emptiness or spirituality too strongly negate the body as a result, which is a form of nihilism. Nietzsche pointed towards another way: Don’t negate power. Love it. Cherish it. Feel it.

One reason for the centrality of the will to power in Nietzsche’s work is that it’s also an epistemological principle, as the postmodernists realized. One way to interpret that is to think that knowledge is never distinct from power, which will lead you into all sorts of fun directions. Another way, a humbler way perhaps, is just to think of your own body as your temple of truth. Its expression as a truth. More than the warrior or the philosopher, this is why Nietzsche was especially drawn to the archetype of the artist – who creates what they are; who becomes what they are; who feels as many emotions as they possibly can to reach towards the truly novel.

That’s it. I hope that gave you something to ponder. As always, thoughts and criticisms are more than welcome, too.

Talk soon,

Zat Rana