The Will-to-Power as Delirium

In Zarathustra, Chapter 3, Nietzsche (through the mouth of Zarathustra) addresses the "backworldsmen" (Hinterweltlern).  This is his term for people who believe in a world beyond the world of appearances - an otherworldly realm free from the exigencies of our benighted realm.  It's clear that he is not only speaking of religious mystics and members of ancient schools such as the Pythagoreans and Platonists, but also of the ideas of many of his philosophical contemporaries.  Indeed, he starts by saying that he too was once a "backworldsman," himself - he once "cast his fancy beyond man."  He goes on to say that he remains, in a certain sense, tender and understanding towards backworldsmen, though he enjoins them to grow out of their backworldliness.

Despite his remarkably perspicacious psychological insights, mostly drawn from introspection, Nietzsche himself was not totally free from self-deception.  Frankly, Nietzsche had not fully developed as far as he thought he had.  Critical as he was of "backworldsmen," he had not yet truly transcended their fundamental worldview.  For to say that the will-to-power is what lies beyond the world of appearances is just another way of being a "backworldsman".

Indeed, it is suspiciously close to what Schopenhauer says - that beyond the world as representation is the world as will.  Here, Nietzsche is exposing his roots, and demonstrating his failure to rigorously and critically think through his inherited presuppositions.  Nietzsche's philosophy is only Schopenhauer's philosophy, inverted.  Where the pessimist Schopenhauer mopes that the ultimate reality is will, Nietzsche boldly proclaims that the ultimate reality is power, as a joyous affirmation.  But whether they put a positive or negative spin on it, it amounts to the same thing.

Certainly, of course, humans desire power of various forms at various times, but by hypostasizing this desire into a metaphysical abstraction - indeed, the metaphysical basis of all existence, or at any rate all human existence, Nietzsche was indulging in the same kind of absolutizing fogwork to which theological apologists and philosophical obscurantists inevitably appeal.  (And his motivations were much the same, as well.)

Just look at the way he writes about it, "that will itself, the will-to-power, the unexhausted, procreating life-will!" (Thus Spake Zarathustra, Sec. 34)  It is clear that the will-to-power is something that Nietzsche worships, something that he has faith in.  Notice the title of this section, as well: "Self-surpassing."  He still, in his own way, "casts his fancy beyond man." 

Marx (or at least his Marxist epigones) reduced the world to struggles among the economic classes.  Freud (or at least his psychoanalytic epigones) reduced the world to sex.  And Nietzsche reduced the world to power.  Reductionists cannot face the inexhaustible complexity of the world, and so turn the valve of their experience down from an overwhelming unrushing gush to a manageable drip.  They see what they want to see and disregard the rest.  But there is always an excessive remainder that refuses to fit into their neat and tidy worldview.

Are all human motivations really reducible to the will to power?  

I once joked that Nietzsche never wrote about the will to sit in my underwear, wrap up in a blanket, and watch "Laverne and Shirley" reruns.  A joke, but not completely a joke.  Right now, I have an urge to eat a sandwich.  Is this an expression of the will to power?  I'm sure you can come up with an interpretation in which it is, but doesn't it feel like a stretch?  And when you try to come up with your apologetics, who are you covering for?  Whom are you protecting?

Nietzsche once said, about the world, that "It has no meaning, but countless meanings."  But doesn't he try, in "1001 Goals" and "Self-Surpassing," to imply that there is really only one meaning, namely the will-to-power?

There are many people who, upon more careful inspection, do not desire power, actually, but rather status - which is not the same thing at all.  I would almost call them opposites, though perhaps it is more accurate to describe them as orthogonal to each other.

What would Nietzsche make of these people - status-seekers, who are content to be powerless over their own lives, so long as they are generally seen as respectable?  I cannot help speculating that Nietzsche would despise these people, with their designer shirts and golf.  Should such people be content with mere status?  Shouldn't they will real power?  But there's that rascally word, "should," which seems to have wormed its way into our discourse once again.  After all, why shouldn't such people be content?  In the end, Nietzsche turns out to be a moralist after all.  His is a morality grounded in aesthetics.  (Aren't they all?)

To command: it has its place, but it's not the most important thing, let alone the only thing desirable.  But it's understandable that it would seem that way to someone who was utterly deprived of it, and lived in a state of subjection and oppression.  One can see easily see how a person's perspective would be warped by such experience into inflating this relatively unimportant part of human experience into some kind of multidimensonal, mystical summum bonum.

Nietzsche goes so far, in the section on "backworldsmen," to suggest that backworldsmen are sick, and motivated by this sickness and by the desire for release from this sickness.  But doesn't the rest of his philosophy suggest that Nietzsche was - still sick?