Will to power
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Will to Power (German: "Der Wille zur Macht") is a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Will to Power is also the title of a work that Nietzsche planned to write, as well as the title given to a book of selections from his notebooks (or Nachlass). The first rendition of this collection was released with other unpublished writings in 1901, edited by Heinrich Köselitz, Ernst Horneffer, and August Horneffer, but under the pressure and influence of Nietzsche's anti-Semitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. This version has been judged more than dubious (Martin Heidegger already criticized this unauthorized publishing in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche (see, for ex., beginning of Nietzsche II)), and later editions are considered more subtle in their presentation of Nietzsche's intent. Walter Kaufmann's English edition is divided into four major parts: "European Nihilism", "Critique of the Highest Values Hitherto", "Principles of a New Evaluation", and "Discipline and Breeding".
Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli, who edited the complete edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments from the manuscripts themselves, have called The Will to Power a "historic forgery" artificially assembled by Nietzsche's sister and Peter Gast. 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: Essay of a Transvaluation of all Values, this project was finally abandoned and its draft materials used to compose The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888). The Will to Power, which Elisabeth Förster called Nietzsche's unedited magnum opus, was in fact abandoned as a book by Nietzsche himself. Nevertheless, the concept remains, and has, since the reading of Karl Löwith, been identified as a key component of Nietzsche's philosophy. So The Will to Power was not written by Nietzsche. But the concept of "will to power" is certainly in itself a major motif of Nietzsche's philosophy, 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.
After returning from Paraguay, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche founded the Nietzsche-Archiv in Naumburg in 1894 (after Nietzsche's mental breakdown), which she would later transfer to Weimar. The culmination of this organization was the publishing, in Leipzig between 1894 and 1926, of the Großoktavausgabe edition. It was first edited by C. G. Naumann, then by Kröner. In these 20 volumes, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche included part of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which she gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. With Peter Gast, she claimed that Nietzsche had died before completing his magnum opus, which he allegedly wanted to name "The Will to Power, in Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". This compilation of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, selected and ordered under his sister's authority, led to the book commonly known as The Will to Power. Until Colli & Montinari's edition, this would form the basis for all successive editions, including the 1922 Musarion edition, often commonly used even today.
While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, 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 posthumous fragments, which Förster-Nietzsche had cut up, mixed and pasted together, according to her own antisemitic views (which were a bone of contention between her and Nietzsche himself). 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 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 "Project for a reversion of all values", and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
In fact, according to Montinari, the earlier editions, which all depended on the Großoktavausgabe, are technically nonsense, as Nietzsche's fragments were cut up in various places and ordered according to his sister's will; and are a case of revisionism, as it was left to his sister to artificially combine Nietzsche's fragments into a unified opus magnum (which very concept is alien to Nietzsche's philosophy and style of writing), whose meaning was distorted according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's anti-semitic and Germanist biases. Gilles Deleuze himself saluted Montinari's work declaring:
- "As long as it was not possible for the most serious researcher to accede to the whole of Nietzsche's manuscripts, we knew only in a loose way that the Will to Power did not exist as such (...) We wish only now that the new dawn brought on by this previously unpublished work will be the sign of a return to Nietzsche"
Deleuze said in this regard: "Tant qu'il ne fut pas possible aux chercheurs les plus sérieux d'accéder à l'ensemble des manuscrits de Nietzsche, on savait seulement de façon vague que La Volonté de puissance n'existait pas comme telle (...) Nous souhaitons que le jour nouveau, apporté par les inédits, soit celui du retour à Nietzsche in Mazzino Montinari and Paolo d'Iorio, "'The Will to Power' does not exist"
Not only did this critical philological work, a milestone in Nietzsche studies, prove case-by-case the distortions accomplished by Nietzsche's sister on his posthumous fragments, it also called into question the very conception of a Nietzschean magnum opus, given his style of writing and thinking.
See also
