Will to live
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A key aspect of Schopenhauer's thought is the investigation of what makes man less than reasonable. This force he calls "Wille zum Leben" or Will (lit. will to life or will to live), by which he means the forces driving man, to remain alive and to reproduce, a drive intertwined with desire. This Will is the inner content and the driving force of the world. For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought, and, in a parallel sense, Will is said to be prior to being.
Compared to Nietzsche's will to power
- main The Will to Power
Schopenhauer posited a "will to live," in which living things were motivated by sustaining and developing their own lives. Nietzsche instead posited a will to power, a significant point of contrast to Schopenhauer's ideation, in which living things are not just driven by the mere need to stay alive, but in fact by a greater need to wield and use power, to grow, to expend their strength, and, possibly, to subsume other "wills" in the process. Thus, Nietzsche regarded such a "will to live" as secondary to the primary "will to power", and more generally there are varied manifestations of it, two prominent distinctions by Nietzsche are: a "life-denying" modality and a life-"enhancing" or -"affirming" one. Henceforth, he opposed himself to social Darwinism, as he contested the validity of the concept of "adaptation", which he considered a narrow and weak "will to live".
