The Will to Power (German : Der Wille zur Macht) is a book of notes drawn from the literary remains (or Nachlass ) of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz). The title derived from a work that Nietzsche himself had considered writing. The work was first translated into English by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910, and it has since seen several other translations and publications.
After Nietzsche's breakdown in 1889, and the passing of control over his literary estate to his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche's friend Heinrich Köselitz, also known as Peter Gast, conceived the notion of publishing selections from his notebooks, using one of Nietzsche's simpler outlines as a guide to their arrangement. As he explained to Elisabeth on November 8, 1893:
Between 1894 and 1926, Elisabeth arranged the publication of the twenty volume Großoktavausgabe edition of Nietzsche's writings by C. G. Naumann. In it, following Köselitz's suggestion she included a selection from Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which was gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. She claimed that this text was substantially the magnum opus , which Nietzsche had hoped to write and name "The Will to Power, An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". The first German edition, containing 483 sections, published in 1901, was edited by Köselitz, Ernst Horneffer, and August Horneffer, under Elisabeth's direction. This version was superseded in 1906 by an expanded second edition containing 1067 sections. This later compilation is what has come to be commonly known as The Will to Power.
While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, the philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari decided to go to the Archives in Leipzig to work with the original documents. From their work emerged the first complete and chronological edition of Nietzsche's writings, including the posthumous fragments from which Förster-Nietzsche had assembled The Will To Power. The complete works comprise 5,000 pages, compared to the 3,500 pages of the Großoktavausgabe. In 1964, during the International Colloquium on Nietzsche in Paris, Colli and Montinari met Karl Löwith, who would put them in contact with Heinz Wenzel, editor for Walter de Gruyter's publishing house. Heinz Wenzel would buy the rights of the complete works of Colli and Montinari (33 volumes in German) after the French Gallimard edition and the Italian Adelphi editions.
Before Colli and Montinari's philological work, the previous editions led readers to believe that Nietzsche had organized all his work toward a final structured opus called The Will to Power. In fact, if Nietzsche did consider producing such a book, he had abandoned such plans in the months before his collapse. The title of The Will to Power, which appears for the first time at the end of the summer of 1885, was replaced by another plan at the end of August 1888. This new plan was titled "Attempt at a revaluation of all values" [Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe], [2] and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli have called The Will to Power a "historic forgery" artificially assembled by Nietzsche's sister and Köselitz/Gast. [3] Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals) a new work with the title, The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, the project under this title was set aside and some of its draft materials used to compose The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888, see Magnum in parvo: A philosophy in compendium ); the latter was for a time represented as the first part of a new four-part magnum opus, which inherited the subtitle Revaluation of All Values from the earlier project as its new title. [4] Although Elisabeth Förster called The Will to Power Nietzsche's unedited magnum opus , in light of Nietzsche's collapse, his intentions for the material he had not by that time put to use in The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist are simply unknowable. So The Will to Power was not a text completed by Nietzsche, but rather an anthology of selections from his notebooks misrepresented as if it were something more. Nevertheless, the concept remains, and has, since the reading of Karl Löwith, been identified as a key component of Nietzsche's philosophy although many believe so erroneously, so much so that Heidegger, under Löwith's influence, considered it to form, with the thought of the eternal recurrence , the basis of his thought.
In fact, according to Montinari, not only did the Will To Power impose its own order on the fragments, but many individual fragments were themselves cut up or stitched together in ways not made clear to the reader. Gilles Deleuze himself saluted Montinari's work declaring:
Drawing on this research for support, Montinari also called into question the very conception of a Nietzschean magnum opus, given his style of writing and thinking. [6]
In 2006, Thomas H. Brobjer stated in the abstract to his study, Nietzsche's magnum opus:
Nietzsche did not write a completed magnum opus, a "Hauptwerk", but he planned to do so during at least the last 5 years of his active life. I will show that during and after the writing of Also sprach Zarathustra this was his main aim and ambition. The projected work passed through a number of related phases, of which the much discussed and controversial Will to Power was merely one. This intention to write a magnum opus has been denied or almost completely ignored by almost all commentators (and even the many writers of Nietzsche biographies). I will bring attention to this intention, discuss why it has been ignored and show that an awareness of it is important for our understanding of the late Nietzsche's thinking and for determining the value and originality of his late notes. It has been a failure of historians of philosophy, intellectual historians and Nietzsche scholars not to have taken this into consideration and account. [7]
Since Nietzsche asked his landlord to burn some of his notes in 1888 when he left Sils Maria, and these notes were ultimately incorporated into the compilation The Will to Power, some scholars argue that Nietzsche rejected his project on the will to power at the end of his lucid life. However, a recent study (Huang 2019) shows that the "burning" story indicates little about Nietzsche's project on the will to power, not only because only 11 “aphorisms” saved from the flames were published in The Will to Power, but also because these abandoned notes mainly focus on topics such as the critique of morality while touching upon the “feeling of power” only once. [8]
The book was featured in the 1933 film Baby Face . It is also referenced in the 1991 Oliver Stone film The Doors .
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. The Übermensch represents a shift from otherworldly Christian values and manifests the grounded human ideal. The Übermensch is someone who has "crossed over" the bridge, from the comfortable "house on the lake" to the mountains of unrest and solitude.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra, is a work of philosophical fiction written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; it was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. The protagonist is nominally the historical Zarathustra, more commonly called Zoroaster in the West.
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that covers ideas in his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra but with a more polemical approach. It was first published in 1886 under the publishing house C. G. Naumann of Leipzig at the author's own expense and first translated into English by Helen Zimmern, who was two years younger than Nietzsche and knew the author.
The Antichrist is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895.
The will to power 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. However, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche's work, leaving its interpretation open to debate. Usage of the term by Nietzsche can be summarized as self-determination, the concept of actualizing one's will onto one's self or one's surroundings, and coincides heavily with egoism.
Mazzino Montinari was an Italian scholar of Germanistics. A native of Lucca, he became regarded as one of the most distinguished researchers on Friedrich Nietzsche, and harshly criticized the edition of The Will to Power, which he regarded as a forgery, in his book The will to power does not exist.
Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher was a German classical scholar. He specialized in studies of Greek and Roman mythology.
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894.
Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher, philologist and historian. A native of Turin, he taught ancient philosophy at Pisa's university for thirty years; he edited and translated Aristotle's Organon and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for Einaudi, a major publishing house in Italy. Subsequently, he produced the first complete edition of Nietzsche's work together with his friend Mazzino Montinari. His work culminated in La Sapienza greca, an edition and translation of the "Presocratics". Interrupted by his death in January 1979, it was supposed to be in eleven volumes.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) developed his philosophy during the late 19th century. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and said that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher, published in 1874 as one of his Untimely Meditations.
The revaluation of all values or transvaluation of all values is a concept from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche owned an extensive private library, which has been preserved after his death. Today this library consists of some 1,100 volumes, of which about 170 contain annotations by him, many of them substantial. However, fewer than half of the books he read are found in his library.
The Nietzsche Archive is the first organization that dedicated itself to archive and document the life and work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, all sourced from Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher's sister.
Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf Würzbach was a Nietzsche scholar, Nazi sympathiser and convinced propagandist. He was born in Berlin in the summer of 1886 to a Polish-Jewish mother and German-Protestant father, and died in 1961 in Munich.
Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépály is a German cultural manager and Director of the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Wolfgang Müller-Lauter was a German philosopher and scholar. He is particularly known for his groundbreaking work on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, considered to be one of the most important contributions to the study of Nietzsche in the twentieth century. He was Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Kirchliche Hochschule Berlin and from 1993 Emeritus Professor in the Theological Faculty of the Humboldt University Berlin.
Dionysian Dithyrambs, also called Dionysus-Dithyrambs, is a collection of nine poems written in second half of 1888 by Friedrich Nietzsche under the pen name of Dionysos.
Carl Ludwig Nietzsche was a German Lutheran pastor and the father of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Magnum in parvo: A philosophy in compendium (1888), in German Magnum in parvo: Eine Philosophie im Auszug, is a project of work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) conceived in Sils Maria, Switzerland, at the end of August 1888, the last summer of his lucid life. This is a book that the Röcken philosopher planned as a rigorous and precise synthesis of his ill-fated capital project The Will to Power and in which the key themes of his thought are addressed. However, a sudden change of opinion in a context of growing mental excitement prior to Nietzsche's near psychophysical collapse determined that this unique work was finally published not in the planned unitary form, but dissolved and mixed with other materials in two different books: Twilight of the Idols (1889) and The Antichrist (1894).
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