Image by Michael Lones

Katrina Mitcheson

Nietzsche’s concept of life plays a key role in his philosophy: it is the standpoint from which he conducts his revaluation of all values. In questioning the value of our values Nietzsche asks: “Are they a sign of the distress, poverty and the degeneration of life? Or, on the contrary, do they reveal the fullness, strength and will to life”.[1] Despite his perspectivism, which relates all values to various perspectives of life, Nietzsche does not allow that all values have equal merit. He is against values that he deems to be life denying. It is on the basis that life is inherently affirmative that Nietzsche differentiates between the healthy and the sick, and repudiates as sick values that negate life itself, while retaining a perspectivism that allows for multiple values within life. Though Nietzsche cannot deny that the values of Christianity are the evaluation of a perspective of life, he has to maintain that these values represent a sickness that goes against the nature of life itself, in order to dismiss them as degenerate, and advocate instead values which enhance life. This paper explores whether Nietzsche’s concept of life as will to power allows him to do this.

In Nietzsche’s characterisation of life two themes continually remerge. Firstly Nietzsche claims: “life as such is will to power”.[2] What then is will to power? Nietzsche writes that will “wants to be master of itself and around itself and feel itself master”.[3] Will is to power in that it strives to feel power in overcoming itself and what it encounters. Nietzsche’s formulation of the will to power is shaped by physiology: “protoplasm stretches out pseudopodia to seek something that resists it – not out of hunger but out of a will to power. Then it tries to overcome what it has found, to appropriate it, incorporate it”.[4] Nietzsche insists that “life is no inner adaptation of inner to outer conditions, but the will to power, which from inner always subordinates and incorporates more ‘outer’”.[5] In describing life as will to power Nietzsche considers it to be a constant process of growth and incorporation.

The second key description of life is that it is inherently evaluative. Nietzsche asks “Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?” and claims that “without evaluating the kernel of existence would be hollow”.[6] This allows us to further elucidate the claim that life is will to power. For life to exist in a particular form is in itself evaluation, and as will to power this form imposes its evaluation; incorporating other forms of life in its service.

Nietzsche talks about not one will to power but wills to power and rejects monistic philosophy in general, noting “Unity (monism)” to be “a need of inertia”.[7] Nietzsche contends: “Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word”.[8] Each will to power affirms its evaluation, its interpretation, against others in its very living; overcoming other wills to power by incorporating them in the service of its own evaluation. Plurality allows for such affirmation. As Gilles Deleuze observes, the monistic will in Schopenhauer leads necessarily to nihilism because of its monism. “Because the will according to Schopenhauer, is essentially unitary, the executioner comes to understand that he is one with his victim”.[9] Thus, on a monistic interpretation, the very possibility of the will asserting itself involves negating itself. In a plurality, in contrast, a will to power can affirm itself, against, and at the cost of, another will to power, without negating itself. In the affirmation of a particular will to power against another, which we have seen is the nature of will to power, and, as life is will to power, is an activity inherent to life, the particular will to power affirms both itself and its own evaluation. In doing so it affirms also the nature of life as will to power: affirming expansion, incorporation and becoming in the activity of its expansion, incorporation and becoming. It would seem, therefore, that if we understand life as will to power it is indeed inherently affirmative.

Degeneration and decay, the symptoms in the organic world of encroaching death, are for Nietzsche signs of a stifled or weak will to power: “where the will to power is lacking there is decline.”[10] This cannot imply there is no will to power, as according to Nietzsche everything is will to power, but there is a lack of a healthy, strong will to power. It is such degenerate states of life that account for the apparent paradox of the existence of life negating values as part of life. Sick life requires a life negating evaluation, which suppresses the character of life as a multiplicity of self affirming wills to power, in order to cling on to life. Christianity offers such an evaluation. Serving itself up as the only truth, it operates to suppress the multiple character of life, and it explicitly devalues this world and this life; condemning them as inferior in comparison to an unobtainable other world and afterlife.

Nietzsche is, then, entitled to claim that life is inherently affirmative, and thus that devaluing life can be seen as a symptom of sickness, if he is entitled to the claim that life is will to power. This claim is itself an interpretation, which we are “required to think through to its limits”.[11] We are, according to Nietzsche, “commanded” to make such an “experiment” by our “conscience of method”.[12] Whether we are convinced by the characterisation of life as will to power hangs on the particular explanations of phenomena that Nietzsche offers us and the possibility of extending this project. Nietzsche is entitled to his concept of life as inherently affirmative in so far as the explanatory power of life as will to power is demonstrated in the application of genealogy, and this remains open to investigation.

Katrina Mitcheson is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Warwick.

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