How in your view does Nietzsche intend that
we take the
concepts of the will to power and the Eternal Recurrence?
What role do they
play in his thought?
Greg Detre
Monday, February 05, 2001
Dr Rosen, post-Kantian IV
Three difficult concepts permeate Nietzsche�s later writings: the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence and the will to power. Although it is possible to view each in isolation, it seems truer to Nietzsche�s intentions to try and bind the three together coherently. Our aim should be to get a sense of the future and world he envisaged, and also perhaps, to answer or discard the question of whether they are intended as a metaphysics or as psychological prompts.
The will to power derives from Schopenhauer�s will, though in Nietzsche�s hands, it becomes very different. Nietzsche came to see this original will to life as being too broad, too Schopenhauerian. His world is �a monster of energy, without beginning, without end�, with life as �struggle and becoming�, always swirling in and around itself. The �will to be master�, to have power over others, over nature, over oneself, expresses itself in many subordinate drives: the will to truth, ascetism, war.
The will to power makes its first appearance in Daybreak, as one human drive among others. By the end of his life, it had become of crucial importance: �This world is the will to power � and nothing besides!� (WP 1067). Perhaps the most simple explanation is a purely psychological one. We could accuse Nietzsche of hypocrism, of indulging in the philosopher�s typical practice of �[creating in thought] a world before which [they] can kneel� for �every great philosophy so far has been � the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir� (BGE 6). In Nietzsche�s case, the good and fundamental gradually takes on the character of the will to power. But this seems to be a simplification and an injustice � it seems unlikely that after railing against this practice for much of the first part of BGE, that he would so unwittingly indulge in it himself. Nietzsche�s later writings are almost entirely concerned with disbanding such metaphysical systems, while at the same time describing the will to power in highly metaphysical terms.
Is the will to power some sort of monist idealism, then? He
writes, �The victorious concept "force," by means of which our
physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an
inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as "will to power �
In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to
power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source� (WP 619).
It sounds here as though it consists of a sort of anthopomorphic, fundamentally
life-orientated force, drive and energy, that coheres in living, especially
intellectual, beings. But elsewhere, he identifies this �basic conception� not
as a cosmology, but as �the highest
formula for affirmation that is at all attainable� (EH III 1). This deliberate
obtuseness indicates that Nietzsche is unwilling to be pinned down as to the
exact ontological status of his will to power � we have to simply accept it as
a principle and interpretation, and revalue our values accordingly.
The Eternal Recurrence came to Nietzsche in a revelatory flash, almost as he describes it in the Gay Science. A demon whispering in your ear, �This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence�. �The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!� (GS 341). Almost like being entombed alive, we are deprived of oblivion, and forced to endure this life over and over again. Eternity is then a loop, rather than an endless string with one fixed beginning.
How then, are the two concepts related? It may be necessary to bring in the concept of the Overman here. Misunderstood and mistranslated, the Overman is a problematic notion in modern interpretations of Nietzsche, often because he resists being happily harmonised with the picture of a daring, solitary genius dreaming of a modern age of heroes. The Overman is pure, focused will to power - he creates his own interpretation of the world and legislates his own values, creating and living the optimum existence. This consists of sublimating one�s impulses, integrating one�s passions and stylising one�s character, so that the beautiful and ugly features are artfully harmonised together: this is not so far from the artistic metaphysics of the Birth of Tragedy, life as an aesthetic phenomenon.
But this is fairly vague. The best way to understand the Overman is by way of the Eternal Recurrence. The Overman is one who, when faced with the greatest weight of the Eternal Recurrence � rejoices. Nietzsche questions whether there has ever been a moment so tremendous that we wish it would abide, that we could live it for ever. �� how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (GS 341).
How seriously does Nietzsche intend us to take this notion of an endlessly looping universe? He describes it as �the most scientific of all hypotheses�, and goes a little way towards reasoning for it. In a finite, atomistic world, it seems inescapable that eventually the huge number of configurations must recycle itself eventually. If we were to try and reply in a scientific fashion, we could respond that entropy imposes finitude on the universe. Moreover, matter in the world as contemporary physics understands it is far too strange to admit the simple building blocks analogy that Nietzsche is making. Reasoning on his level, Simmel provided an elegant mathematical refutation using just three wheels, lined up together, and rolling at different speeds which never return to their original exact positions.
But even if we grant that the world does reconfigure itself an infinite number of times for the rest of eternity, then reliving my life as if for the first time will hold no terrors for me. To bring in a debate about personal identity here would be unhelpful, but it seems difficult to relate to a future self who can have no memory of me whatsoever, since I have no memory of any past selves. And Nietzsche cannot and does not claim that future selves will remember, since they are by definition identical to me now. But if analysed closely, this notion of the Eternal Recurrence is puzzling. If every single reconfiguration of atoms will eventually occur again, then surely all the choices I didn�t make will occur and recur too, like parallel universes? If that is the case, then for every Overman happily reliving his life innumerable times more, there will be paler shadows of himself reliving unhappy, unfulfilled existences alongside. Whether we choose to heed Nietzsche�s advice and live well or badly will not free us from the Eternal Recurrence.
Putting this aside, could we make more sense of the will to
power and the Eternal Recurrence together if we treat them as psychological
doctrines, designed to jolt us out of our usual habits of thought and judge how
we should be living. Just as Mill sought a criterion by which we could
judge the morality of an action, the Eternal Recurrence �gives [Nietzsche] a
formula for what it is to value the process of life as an
end and not merely as a means�[1].
It counters the Christian notion of a second, after-world, by forcing us to
live wholly in this one, again and again. It also attacks the� notion of historical progress; what comes
after is not necessarily better, and indeed past and future lose all sense in
such a looped time-system.
If we are to take the Eternal Recurrence as being a sort of dictum, �Live every moment as though you will have to repeat and relive it endlessly�, does it not take on some of the character of the Categorical Imperative? This would be ironic, given Nietzsche�s long-standing attacks on a very Kantian conception of morality. Kaufman[2] argues against this view, pointing out that Kant�s Categorical Imperative was not intended to appeal to dispositions, but rather as a method to highlight conflicts between maxims. The Eternal Recurrence is not intended as a �noble lie�, and is not concerned with moral consequences, but with the �overall state of man�; if one can even momentarily wish an experience to be endless, then that is a step towards the continual joyous harmony of the Overman.
We are now ready to see the Overman as the link between the will to power and the Eternal Recurrence. By living according to the will to power, the most �life-affirming� will, he is able to accept and relish the prospect of Eternal Recurrence, while the ascetics and Christians and other herd men suffer and twist their will to power at each other or against themselves, and dread the prospect of the Eternal Recurrence, are crushed by it. In this way, the the �revaluation of all values� becomes the business of seeing value in terms of the Eternal Recurrence.
Heller[3]
takes an interesting slant on Nietzsche�s polemic against philosophers� who
codify their personal temperaments as metaphysics, by arguing that Nietzsche
does the opposite. He points to an autobiographical note written in 1868-9
about a hallucination: �What I am afraid of is not the terrifying figure behind
the chair, but its voice. No, not the words, but the horrifyingly inarticulate
sound of that creature. If only it spoke in the manner of human beings�. He
considers that a fear of inarticulacy underlies much of Nietzsche�s approach:
inarticulacy results from conclusions and certainty, but can be staved off with
paradox. In this way, Eternal Recurrence grants the �weight of eternity� to the
otherwise �unbearable� and inarticulate �lightness of being� �
articulation requires duration. In fact, in Nietzsche�s pre-Zarathustra notes,
he writes, �I do not wish to live again�. The Overman is one for whom
Nietzsche�s greatest fears are the greatest cause for celebration and gladness.