Nietzsche’s Will to power: A Naturalistic Account of Metaethics Based on Evolutionary Principles and Thermodynamic Laws (original) (raw)
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The Relevance of History for Moral Philosophy: A Study of Nietzsche's Genealogy
Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morality': A Critical Guide, Simon May (ed.), Cambridge University Press (2011), 170-192., 2011
The Genealogy takes a historical form. But does the history play an essential role in Nietzsche's critique of modern morality? In this essay, I argue that the answer is yes. The Genealogy employs history in order to show that acceptance of modern morality was causally responsible for producing a dramatic change in our affects, drives, and perceptions. This change led agents to perceive actual increases in power as reductions in power, and actual decreases in power as increases in power. Moreover, it led agents to experience negative emotions when engaging in activities that constitute greater manifestations of power, and positive emotions when engaging in activities that reduce power. For these reasons, modern morality strongly disposes agents to reduce their own power. Given Nietzsche’s argument that power has a privileged normative status, these facts entail that we have a reason to reject modern morality.
This essay seeks to show how a psychological interpretation of the 'will to power' would have been implausible if not impossible for Nietzsche given his other philosophical commitments and aims. These aims include 'tracing man back into nature' and revaluing values. The philosophical commitments include his Heraclichean metaphysics of fatalism, 'becoming' and a necessary 'flow' in nature and his dismissal of freewill. This study shows how these themes are ever-present in his middle to late periods and thus constrain the will to power to its broadest interpretation, that being an ontological principle in nature. This I regard as a far more charitable and compatible reading with his dismissal of 'freewill', 'causation' and 'atomism', a reading that also concurs with aspects of the science and philosophy of his day, as well as more recent findings from the sciences, than does a psychological or biological interpretation.
Will to Power as Interpretation: Unearthing the Authority of Nietzsche’s Re-Evaluation of Values
It goes without saying that I do not deny -unless I am a fool -that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged -but I think that one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently -in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.
Morality and Feeling Powerful: Nietzsche's Power-based Sentimental Pragmatism
Inquiry, 2023
In recent work, Bernard Reginster argues for an interpretation of the relationship between morality and the affects in Nietzsche which he calls 'sentimental pragmatism'. According to this view, the values, value judgments, and moral practices agents develop and adopt function to serve specific affective needs. Reginster deploys this interpretation to argue for a functional interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, according to which all three essays of the Genealogy comprise psychological studies designed to uncover Christian morality's function to serve the affect of ressentiment. In this paper, I first develop Reginster's sentimental pragmatism by specifying a need to feel powerful as the one affective need which all moral developments aim to serve on Nietzsche's view. Then, I argue that while Reginster's functional interpretation of the Genealogy makes sense of key moral phenomena discussed in the first and third essays, it works less well to explain key developments in the second essay. I then suggest that my power-based sentimental pragmatism does better in this regard, allowing us to identify one basic function of morality that Nietzsche intends to uncover in all three essays of the Genealogy, one basic affective need it aims to serve: the need to feel powerful.
Domination, Individuality, and Moral Chaos: Nietzsche�s Will to Power
Undergraduate Review, 2010
ne of the most well known, but deeply debated, ideas presented by the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, is the will to power. Scholars have provided a variety of interpretations for what Nietzsche means by this concept. In this paper, I argue that, under each interpretation, Nietzsche may still face what I call, the problem of moral chaos, or the problem of endorsing the claim that immoral acts, such as murder and torture, are justifiable as they exemplify the human will towards power over others. I ultimately argue that Nietzsche's philosophy avoids this problem: though Nietzsche proposes it is possible to harm others as a way to power, we should not direct our will to power in this manner. To illustrate this point, I investigate common interpretations of the will to power, arguing that the psychological interpretation is the most compelling. From here, I demonstrate through Nietzsche's passages that he clearly inspires humanity to direct the will to power towards individual inner growth, and not as a form of domination. Therefore, Nietzsche does not fall into the problem of moral chaos. Part I. The Will to Power: Metaphysical, Metaphorical or Psychological? In order to understand the moral connotations of the will to power, we need to first determine what Nietzsche really means by the will to power. There are generally three different interpretations: the metaphysical, metaphorical, and psychological interpretations. In this part, I examine each of these interpretations, arguing that the psychological interpretation is the most compelling.
Filosofia Unisinos, 2019
This article focuses on the first treatise of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, regarding the historical origins of the noble and slave morality, and proposes the intrinsic possession or lack of power as a key notion to understand these origins. Given the significance that Nietzsche ascribed to the Ancient world, the notion of power will be elucidated through a comparison with some selected texts by Heraclitus and Plato. The first part deals with intrinsic power as the primary source of the noble morality, its consequences with regards to the notion of good and the image human beings have of themselves and their place in the world. The second part presents powerlessness as the root of all moral resentment, i.e. of the slave morality, focusing on Plato’s conception of the ἰδέαι, as well as his definition of being as the power (δύναμις) to perform an action or to be acted upon. The third part synthesizes the previous sections and shows the relation between the noble and slave morality regarding both power and cruelty, i.e. their own account of what good and evil are.
In this paper I focus on a key site of experimentalism in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche cites a number of bold experimental thoughts within his work, such as the causal hypothesis of the world envisioned as will to power, and the question of how much truth one can incorporate. It is especially pronounced, however, in his revaluation of morality. Nietzsche orients himself against a negative brand of morality, hegemonised under what he calls the ‘Moral World Order’, and the lynchpin of this ‘order’ is its conception of free moral agency. Nietzsche attacks this from numerous angles, but fundamentally condemns it as a particularly acute instance of nihilism: the unconditional moral will stands apart from the sensuous body, tyrannising over it and recommending the extirpation of its passions and instincts. This is the basis of Nietzsche’s claim that Judaeo-Christian morality has ‘translated the human out of nature’. But it is also the departure point for his pursuit of a superior morality which inverts the relationship between body and will, and affirms ‘freedom of the will’ as an emergent affect that accompanies processes of mutual interpretation among bodily drives. This superior kind of morality turns on two principles. First, an effort to embrace the totality of one’s drives, such that the freest kind of will expresses the fullest economy of one’s self. Second, an experimental approach to organising this economy, requiring that one remain open to varying the internal hierarchy of one’s drives in order to experience the diverse affectivities of ‘free willing’ that novel arrangements generate. On this basis, I elaborate Nietzsche’s revaluated brand of morality by importing ideas from complexity theory, proposing that the experiment of becoming a superior moral agent involves making of oneself a non-linear system. To conclude, I use this cross-fertilisation to illuminate some key areas of Nietzsche’s naturalism.