james i. porter

A Companion to Nietzsche Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson Copyright © 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

30 Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will to Power JAMES I. PORTER

The so-called theory of the will to power is one of the most contested aspects of Nietzsche’s writings, and rightly so. The theory presses the idea of a naturalistic moral psychology to startling extremes. It flatly disposes of traditional metaphysical categories and beliefs passed down, with variations, from Plato to Kant to Schopenhauer, such as (free) will, substance, unity, appearance and reality, body and soul, causality, and so on (see HH 1–5; GS 110). It calls for a radical revision of our concepts of self and reality, in ways that will become clear below. Concepts like the sublimation of the instincts, the affirmation of life, and holism float across its surface like so many bright images of a life better conceived. And yet, for all its brilliance, the will to power presents difficulties of interpretation that often appear insuperable. Modeled on a line of argument that nowhere seems to get off the ground or ever to reach a conclusion, the theory of the will to power is nowhere spelled out as such, being oracular when it is expounded and otherwise seemingly presupposed rather than felt to merit explanation. Worse, even if the presence of the will to power in the finished writings is undeniable, the primary evidence for the theory is found in the controversial and fragmentary Nachlass material, representing a work that was never brought to completion and possibly was abandoned (KSA 14, pp. 29–35; Montinari 1982; Magnus 1988). Finally, the will to power quickly becomes entangled in the very problems of representability it would denounce, in part by conjuring up problems of representation at three levels, and allowing these to collide with one another: 1 2

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The will to power, as a theory, is a representation – a depiction – of a reality, even if only as a matter of “hypothesis.” The theory claims to get at a reality that exceeds the human capacity for representation (depiction, conceptualization, imagination), even as Nietzsche mocks this pretension of the theory and of anyone that would accept it. Nonetheless, will to power as a reality crucially and constitutively involves representational calculations – perspectival viewings and reckonings by the “willing centers” that make up its field.

The claims of (2) clash with that of (1). But the calculations found in (3) are troublingly close to the kinds of faculties critiqued in (2) (more on all of this below). But these are

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power perhaps only worries if we presuppose that the will to power constitutes an argument at all. It is not clear that it does. A further difficulty has to do not with where the will to power appears in Nietzsche’s corpus, but when it appears. When, exactly, does the will to power appear for the first time? Accounts vary, although the consensus view today is that this startling novum is announced (Kaufmann would say “discovered”) during Nietzsche’s last productive decade, while refinements to the concept are made, possibly culminating in 1888. Of course, how one characterizes the will to power will determine how one dates the conception, irrespective of its explicit mentions by Nietzsche (Förster-Nietzsche 1895– 1904: vol. 2/2, p. 682; Kaufmann 1974: 178–207; Magnus 1988: 224–6; its first occurrence is in a notebook dating already from the end of 1876 to mid-1877: KSA 8, 23[63], p. 425). And this makes the problem not only of defining but also simply of locating the will to power even harder than it appears to be. An argument could be made, for instance, that there is nothing fundamentally novel about the will to power wherever it does occur in the later writings. Indeed, I believe that the problems associated with the will to power were encountered in all their essentials in writings from around 1870/1, where Nietzsche’s critical and parasitical demolition of Schopenhauer, his critique of foundational concepts in the metaphysical tradition, his deployment of atomism in that critique, and his writerly practice throughout (his penchant for depicting conceptual “primary scenes,” but also the rhetorical posturing of his arguments) were seen to flow together in unexpected and elaborate ways (Porter 2000a: 57–73, 126–31, 2000b: 103–6). All these features of the notebooks from the time, which in fact look back to Nietzsche’s university days (for instance, to his 1868 essay, “On Schopenhauer,” to the sketch from a month later, “Teleology Since Kant,”1 or to the notes on the pre-Socratics), can be shown to repeat themselves in the notebooks and the published writings from the 1880s, the materials that will form the basis of this discussion. Further comparisons between these two disparate sets of material will be reserved for below. If I am right, evidence of Nietzsche’s view on the will to power tends to be sought out in the wrong places. Look for it in the presumed reality the theory describes, whether you take that reality to be ontological or psychological, and you will miss the point. In fact, these two options tend to amount to the same thing. In reducing the world to the primitive, instinctual “pre-form of life” and to the reality of our drives (Triebleben) as in BGE 36, or to the peculiar landscape of “willing centers” as in the Nachlass (see below), the psychological reading effectively ontologizes psychology. But the reverse is also true: ontological readings invariably lapse into psychologism. Nietzsche’s exposition of the will to power crucially relies on this very dilemma. In short, the tendency in the past has been to focus on the positive contents of Nietzsche’s account. Attending to Nietzsche’s presentational strategies, I believe, can help us see how we might reassess not only the contents but also the nature and especially the purpose of his account. A few representative views of the will to power will illustrate this point briefly in what follows, starting with Nietzsche’s own.

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“Claims to Power” In its most impressive form, the will to power is nothing less than the (somewhat diffusely argued) amorphous nature of the world and the totality of its activities, presented under a terrifying aspect. It is “the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power,” a power so “vividly” conceived that it makes the very notion of tyranny pale into effeteness, leaving it “unsuitable” as a term, no more than “a weakening and attenuating metaphor – being too human” (BGE 22; cf. 259). This vision rests on the (monistic) supposition that “all organic functions,” indeed the world entire, “could be traced back to this [one] will to power” (BGE 23 and 36). What Nietzsche’s picture of the will reveals, or rather holds forth like a promise, is a vision of uninhibited exertion and excitement. There is something intuitive and irresistible, not to say seductive, about that picture, with its talk of epidemic, contagion, physiological excitation, eruption of desire, “inability to prevent reaction,” the overwhelming incapacitation before “the stimulus of life” – a feeling of potency, fullness, approaching, even, completion, if not perfection (WP 811; cf. TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” 9 and 10). At its literal extreme, Nietzsche’s “idea” (WP 636) promises to take in much more than unconscious forces roiling beneath the surface of consciousness, and haunting it as well. “In the actual world” we find an exhilaration of a perhaps more intellectually satisfying kind. Things are “the sum of [their] effects” or relations, and “everything is bound to and conditioned by everything else” in a mutually implicating whole, in which “to condemn and think away anything means to condemn and think away everything” (WP 551 and 584). In the words of one recent and influential commentator, “the will to power is then an activity that affects and in fact constitutes the character of everything in the world and that is itself the result of such effects” (Nehamas 1985: 80). And that activity occurs even without the presence of a subject, although it at least appears to have larger implications for defining what a subject is and how it should regard itself (although just what these are is a matter for interpretation). At a final level of abstraction, everything that exists reduces down to mere “quantities” of force or will characterized by a single trait: their endless striving towards a higher condition, or rather, towards an ever greater disposal of ever greater power. The lure of these various conceptions, I believe, partly lies in their imprecision. The problem is that in each of them Nietzsche places two incompatible demands on us: the world must be intrinsically featureless, conceivable without a subject, yet it has to exhibit the features, and indeed the effects, of a subjective presence. A featureless world would be inert, suspended, and without relations (even without any meaningful relation to itself ); but what is wanted is, precisely, the force that actively constitutes relations, effects, and so on. Interpretation and subjectivity are essential; they furnish the world with relations, and therefore endow it with features – or so Nietzsche seems willing to concede at least some of the time (e.g., WP 560 and 564). But where do these activities occur? The answer is in the will to power, the activity that selects and arranges things from a perspective, and whose effects condition the whole. Will and power are supposed to bring the extra element of “interpretation and subjectivity” to the problem, only there seems to be no subject on hand to supervise such activity: features, relations, and effects just are what interpretation and subjectivity are, or so it

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power seems, and as a consequence the true place of the subject is never acknowledged as such (Nehamas 1985: 81). Either there just is will to power, diffused throughout Nietzsche’s holistic conception, or we have its concentrated instances, “centers” or “units” (or else mere “quanta”) of force exerting themselves upon their perspectival worlds. The one seems to provide reality with a pulse and a rhythm (although at times terrifyingly); the other is too fantastical even to imagine. Plainly, Nietzsche’s view of reality can be as romantically compelling as it is radically estranging, even if it is designed to offer a glimpse into a condition that can only be called, in Nietzsche’s own term, “inhuman” (GS 382; EH, “Z,” 2) But the inhuman is itself a romantically compelling notion, and any worries as to how these vagaries of the imagination might be resolved tend to be swept aside in heady assertions of “Nietzschean affirmation,” of the sort found in Derrida, Deleuze, and others. Here, for example, is how Derrida describes “Nietzschean affirmation”: it is “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without faults, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (Derrida 1978: 293; emphasis added). But to whom is the world offered? Deleuze provides one answer: “a subjectivity of the universe which is no longer anthropomorphic but cosmic” (Deleuze 1983: 44). Evidently, the passage “beyond man and humanism” doesn’t get us very far: we land back in subjectivity, but of what sort? Why a cosmic subjectivity should somehow be free of the defects of subjectivity as we know it (the undisputed aim of Nietzsche’s will to power) is nowhere clarified. And how this is to be squared with a claim like the following is not easy to see: “There is no will: there are treaty drafts of will [Willens-Punktationen] that are constantly increasing or losing their power” (WP 715). The model is strange, to say the least, and not easily captured by accounting for the will to power as a joyous affirmation of life. How does one joyously affirm a dot? The very idea bleaches even the most robust concepts of the self as “style.” Translate the metaphor back into the organic realm of neural synapses (“stimuli,” A 14) and it fares no better. Having reduced opposition to an oscillation, and the subject of sensation to sensation without a subject (“Who feels pleasure? Who wants power? – Absurd question,” WP 693), Nietzsche puts us in an uncomfortable position. Less hyperbolic readings, content somehow to envisage the will to power as a basic world-shaping activity, face the same consequence, namely that the will to power is structured like a subject in every way but one: it is not a subject, but the antithesis of one, indeed its critique. Not only is it hard to conceive a subject that is not a subject, it is hard to see how a critique at times so literally invested in what it would displace, namely the manifestly subjective – indeed, anthropomorphic – features of the will to power, can function as a critique of anything at all. Finally, a view that serenely contemplates the world conceived as the sum of its interconnections and seemingly without origins is insufficiently troubled by the violence that underlies Nietzsche’s conception – part of which is indicated by its self-refuting character, for instance the claim (which is in fact incoherent) that a thing is the sum of its effects (on which see below). And in general “affirmationist” readings of the will to power, which tend to resolve every conceivable tension through an all-embracing sublimation (“self-overcoming”), fail to reckon with the consequences of “the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power.” And that is to fail to describe the will to power at all.

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james i. porter What is missing from Nietzsche’s picture of things, conceived in these ways, is precisely the frame that enables the picture to appear to us at all: ourselves. Shying away from the category of the subject, in the wake of Nietzsche’s relentless critique of it as a mere deposit of interpretive activity, we go wrong if we head in the opposite direction, and in fact, as we have begun to see, that way lies no real escape at all. But surely this is Nietzsche’s point: there is no escaping the category of the subject. One of his earliest insights, and a point he had made good against Schopenhauer, it is also one he never repealed: “A representing agency cannot ‘not represent’ itself, cannot represent itself away” (KSA 7, 26[11] ); and “not-Being is unthinkable” (KSA 7, 3[91] ), which implies the ineffaceable continuity of thought and being. Together, these provide the complement to a later fragment (WP 584): “To condemn and think away anything means to condemn and think away everything” – apart, that is, from the subject of the thinking (cf. WP 569). Nietzsche’s point about a representing agency needs to be reapplied to his account of the will to power as represented by us in our own minds (its relevance to Schopenhauer will be made evident below). Identifying with the truth of the will to power, we fail to identify ourselves as its co-authors. Simply to conceive the will to power, a subject must take up a “view from nowhere” and thus eliminate herself as a constituent of the world – an incoherent prospect. Thus, the radical destitution of the subject does not occur at all within Nietzsche’s picture, even when he requires that it should; it occurs in ourselves, whenever we try to picture what he is describing. And as for the real source of the violence of Nietzsche’s image, it is not at all in the scenarios he describes. It is in the way we imagine them, and in imagining them, delete ourselves as the subjects of the representation we behold. We become the missing subjects of Nietzsche’s conception and its leftovers: we are its premise, which must be obliterated and forgotten for that conception to exist. This also happens to be where Nietzsche’s apparent doctrine that a thing is the sum of its effects (WP 551) goes awry: it is not a complete sum, because it leaves out a remainder; it subtracts from the sum the condition of its possibility. Attractive on the surface, eliminating substance and swapping effects for things is delusive. “Effects” assume the logical status that “things” once had. But more to the point, it is not quite the case that “if we eliminate the effects, hoping to isolate the thing as it ‘really’ is, we will have nothing left” (Danto 1965: 219; Nehamas 1985: 80). This position echoes WP 567 (“as if a world would still remain over after one deducted the perspective”). But in one respect it crucially does not, for it leaves unanswered the question of agency in the “deduction” that is made. In what way can effects be eliminated if they are not thing-like? What makes it certain they even can be eliminated? Of course, to presume to talk about things as “effects,” even if only of “will” (BGE 36), is to forget that effects are themselves the result (the effect) of their having been posited (GM I. 13). And so, too, it is not the case that nothing will remain if we eliminate all presumed effects. Second, who does the elimination? The answer given in the preceding paragraph tells us that there is indeed something left and what that leftover is: here, it is “we” – the actual source of the positing, the source of the putative totality and its parts. (Cf. also HH 9: “Metaphysical world. – [ . . . ] We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power very well calculated to bother people overmuch.”) In depicting the peculiar agency of the will to power, Nietzsche is attacking much more than our integrity and selfconception as subjects. He is showing us, in the most painful demonstration conceivable, how such an attack can only be carried out by someone who is irretrievably a subject, and on herself. (The connection between this kind of violence and the less abstract violence that Nietzsche so often seems to ennoble, but which is sublimated out of existence in the affirming accounts of his philosophy, cannot be gone into here.) There is a limit to self-transcendence, and subjectivity is this limit.

The Rhetoric of the Will to Power Considerations of this kind reveal something about the rhetorical construction of the will to power, the connotations of Nietzsche’s language, and the effects these have upon his readers – effects he could and did count on. This, in turn, raises the question whether Nietzsche’s will to power is a theory at all, coherent in itself and offering a coherent image of the world it depicts, or whether it is not in fact a strategy aimed at disguising and at times revealing the obvious fact of its construction, but, even more importantly, aimed at implicating its readers in that construction. The will to power, I will be proposing, does not describe the nature of the world, or rather of the reality that underlies everyday appearances. Rather, it describes a process of misrecognition, the poetic manufacture of the world; and it does this by rendering itself circular and incoherent, and its objects inconceivable. It is this circular strategy which in fact invites us, as readers, to participate in a form of misrecognition just by asking us to imagine and construe the will to power. The same is true of Nietzsche’s proposition, “a ‘thing’ is the sum of its effects,” as a glance at its context shows: “Interpretation by causality a deception – A ‘thing’ is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by a concept, an image” (WP 551). A “thing” comes about not wherever there is a sum of effects, but whenever a sum like this has been postulated (the sum is itself “a concept, an image,” a synthetic unity). This helps account for the meaning of the following: “We take the sum of [a thing’s] properties – ‘x’ – as cause of the property ‘x’ – which is utterly stupid and mad!” (WP 561). To “take” things in this way is “utterly” stupid and mad because the logic is twice invalid: the second fallacy lies in getting the causal property wrong; but the first fallacy lies in the initial positing of x itself – not of the object, but of the alleged sum of the object’s properties. “Causa is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added [more literally, “imputed,” hinzuerfunden] to the events” – namely, by a subject (WP 551). Note that Nietzsche does not explicitly denounce the fallacy. Instead, he commits it himself, by designating the sum of a thing’s properties at all (“x”), thus involving himself, and his readers, in circular reasoning. But the circularity comes about only because the interpretive nature of the proposition has been concealed by the proposition itself. Thus, Nietzsche’s proposition repeats the very error it is designed to eliminate: the thing is actually being viewed as a causa sui (already a heresy for Nietzsche), when in fact nothing exists, or has effects, except in the mind of a subject. (Differently, Nehamas [1985: 87–93, esp. p. 87], assuming the existence of a “totality,” and Müller-Lauter 1971, passim, affirming and denying such a synthetic instance [or finality, Letztes].)

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james i. porter “In short: the will to power. Consequence: if this conception [Vorstellung; sc. the will to power] is hostile towards us, why do we give into it? On with the beautiful simulacra! Let us be the imposters and embellishers of humanity! –” (KSA 11, 43[1] ). A hypertrophy of the will that “has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of non-sense, if I may say so),” the will to power is thus not only self-subverting, as Nietzsche occasionally allows (BGE 36) – even here one has to recognize “untruth as a condition of life” (BGE 4) – but it requires its readers to be self-subverting too. One of the subtler flaws in attempts to rescue Nietzsche from the fantastical nature of his own hypothesis (or myth) lies in assuming that the “bad ‘philology’ ” with which he equates his proposed interpretation of the world as will to power refers to his own, and not our, “bad ‘philology’” (BGE 22; see Clark 1990: 239–44; more satisfactorily, Clark 1983: 465, and MacIntyre 1990: 48–9). Of course, Nietzsche nowhere labels the will to power a “myth.” In fact, the latter term derives not from Nietzsche’s discussion of the will to power, but from his discussion of Schopenhauer’s theory of the will in GS 127. Which brings us to another shared assumption in current scholarship on Nietzsche – only here the agreement is explicit, in addition to being all but universally shared: Nietzsche’s will to power, whether the theory or the reality that constitutes the theory’s explanandum, must be dissociated at all costs from Schopenhauer’s account of the world as will and representation. The effort required to make this dissociation is considerable: after all, Nietzsche’s own theory is likewise an account of the world as will and representation. And although there are marked differences in their respective views of the world, at least on the surface (for instance, Schopenhauerian pessimism and Nietzschean optimism, to cite the most familiar contrast), taking note of these still leaves intact the premise of the will’s primacy as the key to the intelligibility of the world (cf. BGE 36; Schopenhauer 1969: vol. 2, ch. 18). Indeed, the two views of the world might be regarded as tantamount to two distinct attitudes towards the will, the one abhorring the will’s activities (which make up the world), the other joyously affirming them (cf. WP 1005). Does Nietzsche’s difference from Schopenhauer come down to a difference in his evaluation of the Schopenhauerian will, which is to say of the Schopenhauerian project – its correction even? The ghost of Schopenhauer is not so easily thrown off. Nietzsche’s counter-claim, held against his metaphysical opponent, that “life simply is will to power” (BGE 259), could be paraphrased without loss of meaning as “all that has being is only a willing” which is the very mythology he would oppose (GS 127). One immediate reason for suspicion is, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche (who in turn borrows the phrase from Schopenhauer, e.g. 1969: vol. 1, ch. 22), the persistence of the “one word, ‘will’ ” in Nietzsche’s own discourse. It has been suggested that the word “will,” presumably taken over from Schopenhauer, was not well chosen, because it carries suggestions which were unintended (cf. Hollingdale 1965: 82, 219–20). We are right to feel uneasy with the term but wrong to rule out that Nietzsche’s aim was, precisely, to create this sense of unease (the concept of the will is termed a “paroxysm of nonsense” at GM II. 22 and impugned again as a “projection” and “only a word” at TI, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” 5). Why does Nietzsche invite confusion with his “reinscription” of will? “Perhaps Nietzsche used the word ‘will’ so as to permit an analogy between it and our ready-made psychological concept” (Danto 1965: 219). Or perhaps there is

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power more than analogy at stake. The question why something like analogy appears in Nietzsche’s account of the will is best turned around in the form of another question: why do we need the analogy (and not just the disanalogy) to make sense of Nietzsche’s “will”? And the same could be said about the categories (or are they merely analogies, too?) of causality and explanation, which plainly are not erased by Nietzsche’s alternatives (as at BGE 36). As we shall see below, the apparently discarded features of the metaphysical subject are anything but inert in Nietzsche’s account of the will to power. My larger point, however, is that the word “will” can never appear in Nietzsche’s writings without invoking this problem of its indebtedness to what the will to power purportedly refuses, in the very same way that the category of the subject is not effaced but merely translated into another dimension by the will to power. To put the point differently, Nietzsche’s “will” is legible only through the registers of meaning that the word “will” commonly and philosophically has. And that confusion of meanings, the impossibility of “will” to signify outside its inherited significations, is, I want to argue, crucially bound up with the meaning of Nietzsche’s own writing of the will to power. Not the least of these inherited significations is the connotation of Schopenhauerianism, which Nietzsche not only cannot avoid but actively courts. Kaufmann’s worry (1974: 178) that Nietzsche’s conception is “primarily a perverse development of Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ ” is thus real. The perversity lies not in the mere idea that Nietzsche’s theory should be distorting Schopenhauer, as if from a safe distance. What is truly perverse is the relation of mimicry established by Nietzsche between the two worldviews, which raises the question whether Nietzsche is able, or even wants, to extricate himself from Schopenhauer in the way that he is generally thought to have done (even including the essays in Janaway 1998, which represent a welcome break from the entrenched orthodoxy of the past). Nietzsche’s statements on the will to power, I am suggesting, are in fact strategies that create dilemmas of interpretation like the one just mentioned. Several important consequences flow from this way of looking at Nietzsche. First, the will to power is no longer to be viewed as a celebration of the interrelatedness of everything imaginable in the world, of perspectivism, of an affirmative stance towards life, of prodigious Dionysian energy, or of an achieved greatness of self and soul. Although undeniably vital to Nietzsche’s generalized critique of modernity, his proprietary conception of will (which is opposed to the received notion of will – the view that human action arises in the first instance out of a center of agency that is conscious, volitional, rational, and straightforwardly simple) is no less vulnerable to that same critique. From this, it follows that the will to power is best viewed not as a positive antidote to the failed pretensions of the modern world, but as their repetition. Thus, Nietzsche’s account of the will to power actually functions something like an allegory of the modern subject. As I have argued elsewhere (Porter 1998), the will to power is a faintly disguised genealogy of the modern subject and its fascination with the one trait it absolutely lacks: power. This is not to deny that the will to power offers a radical critique of the subject. It does. But then it also critiques itself. Here we may at last begin to see why some of the difficulties with reading Nietzsche’s will to power can never be smoothed off. Inconsistencies do abound. But these are a reflection of the conditions of modernity, of which the will to power is to be seen as a symptom, with its delusions of uninhibited power and of agency untrammeled by the constraints and illusions of subjectivity, its

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james i. porter self-affirmation, “the cheerful asceticism of an animal become fledged and divine, floating above life rather than in repose” (GM III. 8), concealing its own fragility and impotence from itself (“the richest and most complex forms [ . . . ] perish more easily,” WP 684; cf. Müller-Lauter 1971: 123), and so on. With these considerations in mind, we may now examine in greater detail Nietzsche’s strategic analysis of power as will.

“The world viewed from inside”: Nietzsche’s Later Atomism Consider the mind, the body, and their objects in the barest of “physiological” terms, even below the level of neural excitations, and the world immediately takes on an entirely transformed aspect. Suddenly, we have to entertain the fiction of quantities, units of differential force (Machtverschiedenheiten) or quasi-corporeal entities spread out over a pseudo-continuum, whose attributes, defined by difference and relative position, constitute their only “qualitative” differences or “values,” and whose engenderment reproduces on a primordial micro-level all the agonal effects familiar from the world’s largest dissensions, summarized by Nietzsche as the struggle between active and reactive forces. It is the business of these quantitative units of force, which exist at a level that can only be called “atomistic,” to generate in turn, or rather to vanish into, effects on a perceptible level of macro-phenomena: appearances, sensations (like pain and pleasure), moral sentiment, and artistic rapture. Such are the primary ingredients and features of Nietzsche’s celebrated account of “the will to power,” which offers a gripping spectacle of the conditions that show knowledge to be an illusion. Heidegger’s response is the obvious one: “This is a chemical description, but scarcely a philosophical interpretation” (Heidegger 1961: vol. 1, p. 136). Nor is this response the only one of its kind (Kaufmann 1974: 262; Nehamas 1985: 153–4). If we were to accept its premise, by the same token a good deal of Nietzsche would be rendered impertinent – all his accounts, familiar from the published writings, of organic reactions, of “energy,” “stimulus,” “accumulation,” “discharge,” and “intoxication,” and generally speaking all of what falls under the rubric of “physiology.” (A further irony: if we accept the dictum “everything is bound to and conditioned by everything else” [WP 584], how can one consistently “think away” Nietzsche’s view of physiology? As it happens, the paragraph that opens with this dictum concludes with another: “Physiology teaches us better!”) But it would be wrong to assume that the quantitative view of power is a feature peculiar to the notebooks. That the vision of the world as a struggle of forces exerting themselves like molecules under a microscope is actually presupposed by the finished works is put beyond doubt by Nietzsche’s peculiar “physiological” accounts of, for example, declining and ascending forms of power (as in TI, “Expeditions,” 37: “Declining life, the diminution of all organizing power, that is to say the power of separating, of opening up chasms, of ranking above and below,” etc.; cf. TI, “Expeditions,” 38), or by a passage like the following: “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect” that is subordinated to a single means, “namely as a means of creating greater units of power” (GM I. 13, II. 11). The instinctual and energetic basis of life is its will to power as well (cf. BGE 36; TI, “Expeditions,” 41, 44; TI, “What I Owe the Ancients,” 3). In short, “Long live physics!” (GS 335). But his “physics” is of a peculiar variety.

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power At the core of Nietzsche’s conceit is its basic postulate, that of minuscule and myriad “centers of force,” each endowed, at first sight, with all the characteristics of a Schopenhauerian will exercising its blind urgency to powerful self-satisfaction. In purely formal terms, these force-centers recall the Leibnizian monad, though with a vengeance, for each center is a perceptual focus tyrannically commanding the confines of a given perspective, and therefore anything but blind, but rather intelligent, calculating, and dangerously cunning. Either way, their sole purpose is the gradual construction of empires of power out of increasingly complex “arrangements” of force (WP 636: “they conspire together”). The “reduction” of “the ‘apparent world’” to “a specific mode of action on the world” (WP 567) is simultaneously a disavowal of subjective consciousness (“the absurd overestimation of consciousness [ . . . ] [viewed as] something that feels, thinks, wills,” WP 529). The aim is to depict the way the world looks when our point of view has been subtracted from it: “the world, apart from our condition of living in it, the world that we have not reduced to our being, our logic and psychological prejudices” (WP 568). This picture of things is undoubtedly alienating. Whether Nietzsche actually achieves his aim of repulsing the subject is another question. But now he adds a further twist, by (as it were) alienating alienation. Least welcome as visitors, on Nietzsche’s account, are those who might relish more than anyone else the prospect of a world finally rid of that obtruding presence, man – namely, the “physicists,” and above all the atomists, whose physical world is premised on the primary existence of lifeless material elements or forces, such as atoms, which in turn are related by mere mechanical action and nothing more. Nietzsche critiques the atom in all its stripes for being just what it is: an importation of Parmenidean metaphysics (being, unity, impassibility, etc.) – or more crudely, of idealism – into the physical world (cf. WP 507 and 442). The atom is the despicable equivalent of a Ding an sich. These arguments are by no means new. They in fact continue Nietzsche’s critique of Greek atomism, which runs without break from the late 1860s (Porter 2000b: introduction and ch. 1). Further extensions of the same argument are Nietzsche’s aversion to “mechanistic senselessness” in GM II. 12 and in GS 373. The same holds for the culminating move in that critique. For in the end Nietzsche’s harshest critique of the atom is as consequential as it is highly paradoxical: the atom is if anything too “conceivable”: it conceals the hallmarks of subjectivity in its very construction. The concept of the atom smuggles phenomenal traits, properties derived from subjective experience (such as size, weight, shape, density, and motion, the anthropomorphisms of attraction and repulsion), back into conditions which purportedly lie waiting to be “discovered” in some objective sphere (cf. WP 552b). And so if anything the atom is all too conceivable and imaginable, too much a “semiotic” of the subject who authored these fictions. The anthropomorphisms of atoms exist “to make it possible for us to form an image of the world, no more!” (WP 621), and so atomism is an insult not to objectivity (which it wants but cannot attain) but to subjectivity. It is a reproach that brings to mind all too vividly the intrinsic limits of the human imagination, in two distinct ways: in the alternative picture of the world that it draws, an image so abhorrent that no imagination would wish to fathom it (for “what does Greek particle theory have to do with the meaning of life?”, KSA 8, 3[63] ), and in the logically flawed and incomplete attempt to depict the undepictable (cf. WP 552b). Nietzsche, in revenge, effectively sets out to “complete” the project of atomism

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james i. porter (WP 619), by laying bare its contradictory impulses and then by making a remarkable move, by absorbing atomism into the very form of the will to power. First he negates atomism, by rejecting its primary postulate: “There are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads” (WP 715). Then he predicts its logical culmination, in a system that surprisingly curves back on atomism itself: “The evolution of the mechanistic-atomistic way of thinking is today not yet conscious of its necessary goal. [ . . . ] They will end up by creating a system of signs: they will renounce explanations, and abandon the concept of cause and effect” (KSA 12, 2[61] ). This is a vaticinium ex eventu.2 The completed evolution he has in mind is in fact his own conception of the will to power. The atomists took man out of the picture. Nietzsche claims that they unwittingly imported the “subject” back in. So, on the one hand, he merely draws out the consequence that the atomists shrank back from, by willfully reinstalling the subject in the atomistic scenario, enlivening the picture with the traits of its own construction, populating it with anthropomorphisms (perspectival centers of will and force): The victorious concept “force,” by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power,” i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power. (KSA 11, 36[31], emphasis added; cf. WP 619)

But surely the will to power is more than a logical extension of atomism – or is it? A closer look at the details of Nietzsche’s counter-concept is needed. A “force-center” (Kraftzentrum) or “force-point” (Kraft-Punkt), in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, is synonymous with a “quantum” of power or of will to power, the amount or degree of force exerted by each center. Quantitatively reduced, a center of force can also be called – surprisingly, and with no loss of semantic substance – a Kraft-Atom, or “atom” of force (WP 634 and 637; cf. KSA 12, 2[69]: Kraft-Punkt (“force-point”), and KSA 11, 40[36] on the “force-point world” of conventional physics that he opposes): A quantum of power is designated by the effect it produces and by the effect it resists. [ . . . ] Not self-preservation: every atom works [literally, “has an effect”] upon the whole of being: it [sc. the atom] is thought away if one thinks away this radiation of power-will [Machtwillen]. That is why I call [the atom] a quantum of “will to power.” (WP 634)

Quanta of force are defined by way of the resistance that they occasion or meet, as they inevitably will, because centers of willing just are the elements of a multiply constituted field of forces (or relations), and because they are projections of points of view that by definition can never completely overlap or “agree.” We have to imagine “points” of minimum (or no) extension arrayed “atomistically” across some spectrum, each constituted by (or as) a different window onto the world; the world’s “being is essentially different from every point [Punkt]; it presses upon every point, every point resists it – and these summations [Summirungen] are in every case quite incongruent” (WP 568; emphasis added). The “summations” are the collective impressions that each point makes or takes concerning its field of view; totaled, they are equivalent to the “world” – its world. But such a world is a discrepant total, never equal to itself, because it is never identically viewed from the different viewing centers that can in principle compose it. A sum total of the individual summations (a summa summarum)

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power is impossible, in part just because the individual sums are incommensurable with each other. But even assuming such a calculation could be made, who would make it? The assumption requires introducing a further viewpoint, which remains partial at best, and at worst generates an absurd regress. Now we can see why Nietzsche’s claim that a thing is the sum of its effects is in fact self-refuting: the presupposition of a sum total is incoherent. There is no way to capture the totality of “everything in the actual world” without betraying either the world or oneself. It is not even clear that the world exists in a total state at all. How could it, if the will to power is an account of the conflictual and unarbitrated struggle to define just what the world is?3 Nietzsche says that the summings-up are “incongruent” not only as a whole, but “in every case.” Thus there is a deeper reason for doubting the quantifiability of every center. To begin with, each center lacks self-identity: this is a direct consequence of its relational identity.4 But there is more. A viewing center is dynamically constituted in its eccentric relation to a world (the world it sees), which in turn is and is not identical with the individual viewing center that beholds it. It would seem that both the viewing center and its world are constituted together – in the same perceptual act, but as other and different from each other. For just as “there is no such thing as ‘willing,’ but only a willing something,” so too “to be an object is to be a perception” (WP 668; KSA 7, 7[168]: “the one world-will is simultaneously self-perception: and it sees itself as world, as appearance”; cf. GM III. 12: “seeing becomes seeing something”); and yet, the something that is willed by a force-center is the world it sees and resists. How, then, can what is viewed also constitute a “pressure” of the world, a “resistance,” when it looks to be internal to the act of viewing? One way it can is in the feeling of an increment in power that accompanies the “growth” of a center of force.

“The Logic of Feeling” The mere reflection of its own (and arguably doubtful) existence ought to suffice to give the first spurt of this feeling, to “mark” a force-center with the signature of its own quantity. As we saw, “a quantum of power is designated [bezeichnet] by the effect it produces and by the effect it resists” (WP 634); and these two effects are in fact temporally and formally one, all rolled up into the act of seeing or willing – or rather, feeling – something, “a feeling of difference [Differenz-Gefühl], presupposing a comparison,” WP 699). (It is worth noting that the very first occurrence of the expression “the will to power” in Nietzsche’s writings [KSA 8, p. 425; see the introductory discussion to this essay] is coupled with another: “the feeling of [ . . . ] power.”) In other words, a quantum of power doesn’t exist as such until it has been semiotically marked; indeed, it is no more than the “degree” of resistance it meets or feels, because to be a quantity at all is to be already signed, or measured, by a degree of difference in force and resistance. A quantity can never meet with no resistance, unless it should cease to produce (and to “feel” or sense) any effects at all. “The will to power can express itself only through resistances” (WP 656); and since the will exists only insofar as it is expressed, the will is at the very least crucially dependent on the resistances it meets, and possibly is nothing more than the resistances it posits, or presupposes, in order to discover them.

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james i. porter “The feeling of power, of struggle, of resistance persuades that there is something that is here being resisted” (WP 533). Resistance is not given, but presupposed, or in more familiar and acceptable language, “interpreted.” To illustrate this, we need to rethink the “continuum” of the world posited on Nietzsche’s scenario. For the world of forces is not only scarcely fixed but is instead constantly in flux, or rather moving in a flux of ever-changing relations (which is to say, interpretations). The flux consists in the fact that quantities are ever being recast in new form, as new qualities, by the constituent atoms of will, which are themselves the very quantities and qualities in question. The conversion of quantity into quality is in fact the activity most proper to the will to power, its most basic perceptual judgment. “The desire for an increase in quantum grows from a quale,” by which is meant the perception that answers to the question, What is the quality in front of me, and what is my own? (WP 564). In this way, identities are “fixed,” if only en route to ever larger, more powerful identities, against the background of a postulated “whole”; differences in quantity and quality are established, displayed, and altered in the very process of their establishment. But, again, these features (and changes) are mere perceptions, and perceptions, being partial by definition, never agree with each other or even with themselves within a stable framework of identity-relations. Thus, a quantity of force will be internally incongruent just by possessing the quality of a quantity, which is to say, just by representing to itself a qualitative difference from all quantities, including its own. “Quantitative differences [ . . . ] are qualities which can no longer be reduced to one another” (WP 565). To be a quantity is to be a difference, a “difference of quantity”; it is to display the “quality” of a differential force (WP 563–5). How, and why, do qualities come into existence? Nietzsche’s answer is complex: “[M]ere quantitative differences,” which result from a comparative judgment, “are something fundamentally distinct from quantity” in some absolute sense; that is, they are qualities (WP 565). This “law,” which is that of an irresistible constraint, is in fact the law of a subjective impression: “we cannot help feeling” that this is so, which is why “qualities are insurmountable barriers for us” (WP 565; emphasis added). The same point was available in 1872/3, again in the context of a theory of will, conceived as varying quantities of “centers of sensation”: “We can free ourselves from qualities only with difficulty” (KSA 7 19[159] ). Qualities (evaluative distinctions) are a way – apparently the only way – of viewing quantities. A quantity is merely the register of a perceived relative difference, not an objective “amount.” Indeed, the idea of a totality or whole amount is itself a qualitative grasp of a quantitative difference. But quantities are not totalizable, or “fixed,” until they are grasped as qualities (that is, in their relations); and until that moment, they cannot even be grasped as quantities (that is, totalized as such). Quantities exist, one might say, simply in order to be a sign of qualities (KSA 12, 2[157] ). And signs exist only for a subject. Plainly, there are no objective amounts and no objective qualities (for “the same quantum of energy means different things at different stages of evolution,” WP 639). The difference between quantity and quality is a weak one; it is internal to the system of conveniences that enables the distinction to emerge at all. The difference between them is the sign of a perspectivally induced illusion. Now the question naturally arises, for whom is the illusion effective? Here, Nietzsche’s account of force-centers wavers meaningfully. Qualitative differences, which is to say

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nietzsche’s theory of the will to power differences in force, enliven the scenario of a world that otherwise, were it composed of quantities and no qualities, would be “dead, stiff, motionless” (WP 564), just as a world without features would be inert, lacking in all relationality, and suspended. (The mechanistic view of nature is one such attempt to achieve, as near as possible, a world of pure quantities.) So on the one hand, this enlivening is brought about by the force-centers themselves, as they calculate their relative worth, in the conversion of quantities into qualitative, evaluative differences (starting with the very premise of a quantity itself ); and that conversion is crucially retroactive in nature. What a force-center sees is differences in “rank,” order, or value – it has, in other words, a perception of qualities – before it can reflect these back onto a perception (or feeling) of quantities of force. On the other hand, the reduction of a world to pure quantities, Nietzsche insists, is conceptually and psychologically impossible – for us. Clearly, if the will to power has any meaning at all, it is only in relation to the intrinsic limitations of its intended spectator, Nietzsche’s all-too-human reading subjects, whose limitations just happen to coincide with those of the objects of the spectacle they take in, the force-centers themselves, their distant relations (analogs). Plainly, the will to power is not an account of the world as it is, nor is it an account of Nietzsche’s personal view of the world. It is a view that has been projected, in parable form, as a mirror of mankind. “Qualities are our own human idiosyncrasy” (WP 565; cf. WP 584). And centers of force both mirror and mimic this psychology in their own behavior (a behavior we can be sure has been enlivened thanks to the projections of our more familiar perspectives). Force (power) is what quality represents, and nothing more; it is a retrospective perceptual glimpse of the world, validated as a feeling. By now it should be clear that force is constructed as a phantasm of the subject – the subject that any center of force in fact represents. And so, too, the consistency of the world taken in by a center of force (its view of the “whole,” epitomized in the dictum that “everything conditions everything else”) attests to nothing but the consistency of a phantasm. A premise of this picture is the supposition “that the world ha[s] a certain quantum of force at its disposal” (WP 638), in other words, a sum of forces. But that premise, we have seen, is false. The will’s power is the retroactive product of a perceptual act. Can it not be said of the will to power too, as it can be said of the world of subjects, objects, and doers that is the misbegotten product of our misdescription of the world, “let us not forget that this is mere semiotics and nothing real [ . . . ] already a translation into the sense language of man” (WP 634) – in other words, that the will to power is a mere, or if you like false, perception, made in the first instance by each willing-center, and in the last instance by ourselves? If this is right, then the “errors” of the anthropomorphic perspective – that is, “the logic of the perspectivism of consciousness” that was “left out” of the contents of the physicists’ picture of the world (although that logic was everywhere present in its frame) – are not so much exposed by Nietzsche’s fantastic scenario of willing-centers as they are written into it as its operative, if somewhat concealed, premise (WP 636). How strange – or is it? – that the repressed “perspectivism of consciousness” should return, as Nietzsche’s version of perspectivism, as “precisely this necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every center of force – and not only man – construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, i.e., measures, feels, forms,

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james i. porter according to its own force” (WP 636; emphasis added). Nietzsche’s having concealed things like this has nothing to do with secretiveness. Quite the contrary, he is demonstrating, in Edgar Allen Poe’s term, a “hyperobtrusive” fact, one so obvious it escapes notice. What is more, the strategy has a point. For hiding in the light in this way itself constitutes one more analog of the phenomenalist error that Nietzsche detects in all mortal judgments, which conceal their anthropomorphisms in a variety of ways, but most of all by acting as if they did not exist. The will to power is itself deeply anthropomorphic, and a projection of the constitutive limits of the subject. See also 4 “Nietzsche on Individuation and Purposiveness in Nature”; 5 “The Individual and Individuality in Nietzsche”; 12 “Nietzsche on Time and Becoming”; 20 “Agent and Deed in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals”

Notes This essay is excerpted and adapted from a book in progress entitled Nietzsche and the Seductions of Metaphysics: Nietzsche’s Final Philosophy. My thanks to Keith Ansell Pearson for incisive editorial comments. 1 Both of these early pieces can be found in translation in Crawford 1988. 2 A prediction made after the event. 3 See also WP 708, where it is shown how the very idea of a “total value” as applied to the world is a meaningless concept, and esp. WP 711: “in the ‘process of the totality’ the labor of man is of no account, because a total process (considered as a system –) does not exist at all; [ . . . ] there is no ‘totality’ [Ganzes]; [ . . . ] the world is [ . . . ] chaos” (emphasis added). The idea of a total state is a human projection (as is that of chaos – which is another story). 4 The logic of relational identity has been misstated in the past. A “‘thing’” may be “the sum of its effects” or relations (WP 551), but this does not mean that their sum can be totaled up, or that some unintegratable remainder won’t always be left over at the end of the process. It is not just that the relations of a thing keep slipping away from us in the form of a leftover whenever we try to establish the thing’s identity: a thing’s identity just is this leftover itself – whether the thing in question is a “thing,” an event, a relation, “everything in the world,” or, if you like, the will to power itself, construed as any of these possibilities. There is no whole, no consistent sum, to which the will to power as a feature (or the only relevant feature) of the world might correspond: the presupposition of a sum total is incoherent.

Editions of Nietzsche Used Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).

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References Clark, Maudemarie (1983). “Nietzsche’s Doctrines of the Will to Power,” Nietzsche-Studien, 12, pp. 458–68. —— (1990). Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Crawford, Claudia (1988). The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Danto, Arthur C. (1965). Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan). Deleuze, Gilles (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press). Derrida, Jacques (1978). “Structure, Sign, and Play,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth (1895–1904). Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, 2 vols. in 3 (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann). Heidegger, Martin (1961). Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Günther Neske). Hollingdale, R. J. (1965). Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Janaway, Christopher (ed.) (1998). Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Kaufmann, Walter (1974). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn. (1st pub. 1950; Princeton: Princeton University Press). MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (1990). Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Magnus, Bernd (1988). “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power,” in R. C. Solomon and K. M. Higgins (eds.), Reading Nietzsche (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 218–35. Montinari, Mazzino (1982). Nietzsche Lesen (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang (1971). Nietzsche. Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). English translation (1999): Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of his Philosophy (Urbana: University of Illinois). Nehamas, Alexander (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Porter, James. I. (1998). “Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche,” Nietzsche-Studien, 27, pp. 153– 95. —— (2000a). The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (Stanford: Stanford University Press). —— (2000b). Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969). The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover).

Further Reading By far the most perceptive works on the will to power are: Gerhardt, V. (1996). Vom Willen zur Macht. Anthropologie und Metaphysik der Macht am exemplarischen Fall Friedrich Nietzsches (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Haller, F. W. (1976). Zum Problem des Wertschätzens. Eine ontologische Auslegung der Wertschätzungslehre Nietzsches (Bonn University); a little-cited dissertation. See also Müller-Lauter (1971) above.

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james i. porter Also of interest: Gaède, E. (1962). Nietzsche et Valéry: Essai sur le comédie de l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard). Grau, G. G. (1984). Ideologie und Wille zur Macht. Zeitgemässe Betrachtungen über Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Hamacher, W. (1997). “ ‘Disgregation of the Will’: Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality,” in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. P. Fenves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 143–80. Porter, J. I. (1999). “Nietzsche et les charmes de la métaphysique: ‘La logique du sentiment,’ ” Revue germanique internationale, 11 (“Nietzsche moraliste”), pp. 157–72. Williams, B. (1995), “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology,” in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers, 1982–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 65– 76.

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