The will to power (German: der Wille zur Macht) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. He never systematically defined it, leaving its interpretation open to debate. His use of the term can be summarized as self-determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto oneself or one's surroundings, and it coincides heavily with egoism.
Kraft vs. Macht Some of the misconceptions of the will to power, including Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, arise from overlooking Nietzsche's distinction between Kraft ('force' or 'strength') and Macht ('power' or 'might'). Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything possessing it, while Macht is, within Nietzsche's philosophy, closely tied to sublimation and "self-overcoming", the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes.
Early influences Nietzsche's early thinking was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whom he first discovered in 1865. Schopenhauer puts a central emphasis on will and in particular has a concept of the "will to live". Writing a generation before Nietzsche, he explained that the universe and everything in it is driven by a primordial will to live, which results in a desire in all living creatures to avoid death and to procreate. For Schopenhauer, this will is the most fundamental aspect of reality – more fundamental even than being. Another important influence was Roger Joseph Boscovich, whom Nietzsche discovered and learned about through his reading, in 1866, of Friedrich Albert Lange's 1865 Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism). As early as 1872, Nietzsche went on to study Boscovich's book Theoria Philosophia Naturalis for himself. Nietzsche makes his only reference in his published works to Boscovich in Beyond Good and Evil, where he declares war on "soul-atomism". Boscovich had rejected the idea of "materialistic atomism", which Nietzsche calls "one of the best refuted theories there is". The idea of centers of force would become central to Nietzsche's later theories of "will to power".
Appearance of the concept in Nietzsche's work As the 1880s began, Nietzsche began to speak of the "Desire for Power" (Machtgelüst); this appeared in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880) and Daybreak (1881). Machtgelüst, in these works, is the pleasure of the feeling of power and the hunger to overpower. Wilhelm Roux published his The Struggle of Parts in the Organism (Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus) in 1881, and Nietzsche first read it that year. The book was a response to Darwinian theory, proposing an alternative mode of evolution. Roux was a disciple of and influenced by Ernst Haeckel, who believed the struggle to survive occurred at the cellular level. The various cells and tissues struggle for finite resources, so that only the strongest survive. Through this mechanism, the body grows stronger and better adapted. Rejecting natural selection, Roux's model assumed a neo-Lamarckian or pangenetic model of inheritance. Nietzsche began to expand on the concept of Machtgelüst in The Gay Science (1882), where in a section titled "On the doctrine of the feeling of power", he connects the desire for cruelty with the pleasure in the feeling of power. Elsewhere in The Gay Science he notes that it is only "in intellectual beings that pleasure, displeasure, and will are to be found", excluding the vast majority of organisms from the desire for power. Léon Dumont (1837–77), whose 1875 book Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité, le plaisir et la peine Nietzsche read in 1883, seems to have exerted some influence on this concept. Dumont believed that pleasure is related to increases in force. In The Wanderer and Daybreak, Nietzsche had speculated that pleasures such as cruelty are pleasurable because of exercise of power. But Dumont provided a physiological basis for Nietzsche's speculation. Dumont's theory also would have seemed to confirm Nietzsche's claim that pleasure and pain are reserved for intellectual beings, since, according to Dumont, pain and pleasure require a coming to consciousness and not just a sensing. In 1883 Nietzsche coined the phrase Wille zur Macht in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The concept, at this point, was no longer limited to only those intellectual beings that can actually experience the feeling of power; it now applied to all life. The phrase Wille zur Macht first appears in part 1, "1001 Goals" (1883), then in part 2, in two sections, "Self-Overcoming" and "Redemption" (later in 1883). "Self-Overcoming" describes it in most detail, saying it is an "unexhausted procreative will of life". There is will to power where there is life and even the strongest living things will risk their lives for more power. This suggests that the will to power is stronger than the will to survive. Schopenhauer's will to live (Wille zum Leben) thus became a subsidiary to the will to power, which is the stronger will. Nietzsche thinks his notion of the will to power is far more useful than Schopenhauer's will to live for explaining various events, especially human behavior—for example, Nietzsche uses the will to power to explain both ascetic life-denying impulses and strong life-affirming impulses as well as both master and slave morality. He also finds the will to power to offer much richer explanations than utilitarianism's notion that all people really want to be happy, or the Platonist notion that people want to be unified with the Good. Nietzsche read William Rolph’s Biologische Probleme around mid-1884, and it clearly interested him, for his copy is heavily annotated. He made many notes concerning Rolph. Rolph was another evolutionary anti-Darwinist like Roux, who wished to argue for evolution by a different mechanism than natural selection. Rolph argued that all life seeks primarily to expand itself. Organisms fulfill this need through assimilation, trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of themselves, for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment. Life forms are naturally insatiable in this way. Nietzsche's next published work was Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where the influence of Rolph seems apparent. Nietzsche writes,
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