International Studies in Philosophy 36:3

THE WILL TO POWER:

PSYCHOLOGY AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY
David N. McNeill
What man wants, what every smallest part of a living organism
wants, is an increase of power . .. Let us take the simplest case, that
of primitive nourishment: the protoplasm stretches its pseudopodia in order to search for something that resists it-not from
hunger hut from will to power. It then attempts to overcome this
thing, to appropriate it, to incorporate it. What we call nourishment is merely a derivative appearance, a practical application of
that original will to become stronger. (WP 702; KSA 13:14[174})1

t various points in Nietzsche's Iate works and througho'ut the

. Nachlass we find claims, like the one above, that the world is char-

acterized by what Nietzsche calls the will to power. 2 The status of

these claims in Nietzsehe's work is notoriously controversial, and the
diversity of interpretations about them seems to hinge on two only
provisionally separable hermeneutical questions. The first question
deals with the intended scope of the will to power, that iSt what kind
of "theory" is the will to power. The interpreter asks: Is the doctrine
of the will to power Nietzsche's metaphysics, i.e., a speculative
inquiry into first principles? Is it a Nietzschean special science" -his
physics, cosmology, psychology, or biology? Or is it merely an
isolated empirical claim, a proposition within one or across many of
these different areas of inquiry? The second hermeneutical question
addresses itself to Nietzsehe's rhetorical and pedagogical activity as
author and the kind of truth claims we should attribute to the doctrine" of the will to power. Here we ask: Was it Nietzsche's intent to
propound a theory of the whole (or of the physical world, the organie
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DAVID N. McNEILL

world, or the soul) which he considered more true, more useful, or

more consistent than its theoretical rivals? Or was Nietzsche's aim
quite different, and the "will to power" not a doctrine of Nietzsche's
at all~is it an experiment; an ironic stance, part of a reductio ad
absurdum; or simply one of Nietzsche's many rhetorical voices?
In the following essay, I will focus on Nietzsche's account of the
will to power in Beyond Good and Evil, in particular the development
sketched out in aseries of four aphorisms leading up to what is
perhaps the most important single aphorism in the published work
for our understanding of the will to power, aphorism 36. 3 I will argue
that while Nietzsche presents the will to power as his psychology, his
conception of psychology (or p hysio-psychology") occupi~s a position in his thought analogous to the position which metaphysics
occupied in the history of pllilosophy before hirn: "queen of the
sciences" and "the path to the fundamental problems." Nietzsche
presents the will to power, I "'Till suggest, as a meta-theoretical constraint on our ability to represent to ourselves the world of our .
experience; that he describes tllis meta-theoretical constraint in psychological terms should indicate to us the limitations in those accounts that depend upon a sinlple opposition between "psycholbgical" and "metaphysical" inter}Jretations of the will to power.
Il

I. LIFE AND INTERPRETATION

The first mention of the "viII to power in Beyond Good and Evil
occurs in an aphorism (BGE 9) dealing with the Stoic dictum "live
according to nature," which Nietzsche contends is a massive piece of
self-deception.
" According to nature" you w'ant to live? 0 you noble Stoics, what
deceptive words these are! IInagine a being like nature, wasteful
beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure,' without purposes or
consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and
uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as powerhow could you live according to this indifference? Living-is not
that precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living-estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting
to be different? And supposing your imperative "live according to
nature" meant at bottom as mLuch as "live according to life"-how
could you not do that? (BGE 9)

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In this aphorism Nietzsche distinguishes between two possible meanings of the word "nature" in the Stoic dictum: 1) "a being like nature,"
that is, nature conceived in its entirety; and 2) "the nature of a living
being"; and he claims that neither of these conceptions of nature
could provide the paradigm for a way of life which the Stoics sought.
If "live according to nature" means "live according the whole," then
it illegitimately abstracts from both the necessary partiality of life,
and the implicit purposiveness of any living being. If, on the other
hand, it means "live according to the nature of a living thing; live as
living things do," then it is vacuous. Nietzsche is, of course, aware
that the Stoics would have claimed that they found in the order of the
cosmos natural "laws" which were the expression of an immanent
intelligent first principle and that they viewed themselves as following these laws, a claim the later Stoics expressed as the "rational
selection of the primary things according to nature." Nietzsche, however, considers these Stoic claims to "read the canon of [their] law in
nature" to be delusions: the Stoics are in fact imposing their ideal on
nature, demanding that "she should be nature 'according to the
Stoa.'"
While Nietzsche characterizes the Stoic's hope to refashion the
world in their own image "insane," he is not criticizing all such
endeavors. Every philosophy that "begins to believe in itself," Nietzsche claims, must share in this attempt. "Philosophy," Nietzsche
writes, "is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power,
to the 'creation of the world,' to the causa prima." The problem with
the Stoics seems to be that they "see nature in the wrong way." The
Stoic interpretation of nature as bound by law is blind to the agonism
inherent in nature. This blindness prevents their interpretation from
being able to provide what they most want it to provide-a support
for a way of lifei-because, Nietzsche contends, this agonism is a
fundamental condition for alllife.
Nietzsche's critique of Stoic doctrine in aphorism 9 of Beyond
Good and Evil raises the specter of a familiar problem for interpretations of Nietzsche. On the one hand, Nietzsche's critique of Stoicism
takes the Stoic interpretation of nature as symptomatic of a certain
kind of life, Stoic. "self-tyranny" generalized to an attempted tyranny
of nature. The tendency to see every philosophical orientation as such
a symptomatic expression of a way of life is dominant throughout
Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche also writes that every great

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DAVID N. McNEILL

philosophy has been the unconscious memoir of its author and that
"the moral (or immoral) inteIltions in every philosophy constituted
the real germ of life from whi(~h the whole plant has grown" (BGE 6).
Nietzsche's primary concern seems to be the health or sickness that
such an interpretation reveals on the part of the interpreter rather
than the degree to which this interpretation corresponds to anything
in the world conceived of in alJstraction from this interpretation. The
strongest, healthiest interpretations are, moreover, the most creative.
As opposed to mere philosoI>hic laborers, content with a scholarly
overcoming of the past, genuine philosophers are commanders and
legislators ... their 'knowing' is creating, their will to truth is-will to
power" (BGE 211). On the other hand, Nietzsehe claims that the Stoics
have gotten something lvron~~ in their interpretation, that they deeeived themselves about a fUIldamental fact about nature, the inherent agonism of aillife. An ade1quate recognition of this fact seems not
only to be a necessary condition for the right kind of interpretation,
but it seems to provide groun1ds for calling those interpretations that
conflict with this view of life false. 4 This familiar tension-between a
radical perspectivism, most famously associated with the claim from .
the Nachlass that "there are no facts, only interpretations," and Nietzsche's insistence on a certairL view of "life" as the defining criterion
by which to evaluate all interpretations-will be central to our understanding of the developing picture of the will to power in Beyond Good
and Evil.
Each of the next two mentions of the will to power (aphorisms 13
and 22) deals with one of the two sides of this opposition. Aphorism
13 boldly restates the claim al>out the partiality of life as a principle.
"A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength-lif~ itself is
will to power." The context for this claim is Nietzsche's repudiation of
the principle of self-preservation as "the cardinal instinct of an
organie being." Self-preservation, Nietzsehe claims, is only an indireet result of the fundamental drive of living things to express themselves. Therefore, when physiologists posit an instinct for self-preservation they are introducing a superfluous teleological principle
which "method, which must be essentially economy of principles"
demands we exclude. In aphorism 22 Nietzsehe, in his role as an "o~d
philologist," reveals that wheIl physicists speak of "nature's conformity to law" they are engaging, like the Stoics, in "bad modes of interpretation" arising this time from "the democratic instincts of the
11

THE WILL TO POWER

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modern souL" This view of nature is, Nietzsche contends, "no matter
of fact, no 'text'" and he suggests the possibility of an alternative
mode of interpretation, and another kind of interpreter-one who
"could read <?ut of the same 'nature,' and with regard to the same
phenomena, rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless
enforcement of claims of power-an interpreter who would picture
the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all 'will to power' so
vividly that ... even the word 'tyranny' itself would eventually seem
... a weakening and attenuating metaphor."s
11. THE PATH TOTHE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS

The last mention of the will to power prior to aphorism 36 is

aphorism 23, which is also the final aphorism of the first book of
Beyond Good and Evil, "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers." In this
passage Nietzsche declares his psychology to be "the doctrine of the
development of the will to power" and suggests that a "proper
physio-psychology" will contain the view that "the affects of hatred,
envy, covetousness, and the lust to rule [are] conditions of life" which
must be "further enhanced if life is to be further enhanced." He closes
with the claim that the psychologist who cannot but pursue such a
psychology will "be entitled to demand that psychology shall be
recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and
preparatian the other sciences exist. Far psychology is nowagain the
path to the fundamental problems."
.
Aphorism 36 seems then to be an initial gesture of Nietzsche's
physio-psychology toward a confrontation with these fundamental
problems.
Suppose nothing else were "given" as real except our world of
desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any
other "reality" besides the reality of our drives-for thinking is
merely the relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to
make the experiment and ask the question whether this "given"
would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this
kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or "material") world? I mean,
not as deception, as "mere appearance," an "idea" (in the sense of
Berkeley or Schopenhauer) hut as holding the same rank of reality as
our affect-as a more primitive form of the world of affects in
which everything still lies contained in a powerful unity ... as a
kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions are still

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DAVID N. MCNEILL

synthetically intertwined along with self regulation, assimilation,

nourishment, excretion, and metabolism-as apre-form of life.
(BGE 36, Nietzsche emphasizes "sufficient''' and "pre-form"; all
other emphasis is mine)

It 1S important to note that despite the hypothetical form of this

aphorism,6 the experiment Nietzsche is describing is motivated by a
claim that is asserted as a psychological axiom-thinking is merely
the relation of drives to Olle another. Given this conception of
thought, and the conception of method first adduced in aphorism 13,
that of an "economy of principles," the experiment Nietzsche introduces takes the form of an imLperative.
In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the
conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of
causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has
been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense if I may
say so)-that is a moral of nlethod which one may not shirk today.
. . . In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not
affect will wherever "effeets" are recognized-and whether all
mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as force is active in them,
will force, effects of will.

The fundamental problem to which Nietzsche's experiment

addresses itself is the questio:n we began With, the Stoic's question of
how to conceive of nature in its entirety, or 110W to orient oneself to
what iso But unlike the case of the Stoics, whose harmonious view of
a law-governed nature conflicted with the demands of life, Nietzsche
begins with his view of life as the principle that guides our orientation to what iso As the language of the aphorism indicates, Nietzsche
sees his will to power "psychology" as an alternative to two views of
reality he believes to be in so:me sense unava.ilable, materialism and
idealism,7 the "down" and tile "up" to which the hypothesis of the
aphorism denies us any aCCE~SS. And Nietzsche's rejection of these
views seems to be bound up with the problem of reconciling "life"
with "interpretation." An adequate account of Nietzsche's opposition to idealism would have to deal with his confrontation with
Socrates and Plato, a subject outside the scope of this essay, but
prefatory to that discussion w'e can say that idealism8 falls prey to the
mistake of the Stoic conception of nature-it is blind to the necessary
partiality of life. Materialisml, on the other hand, is incomplete according to Nietzsche. It is no better than idealism in its inability to

THE WILL Ta POWER

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account for primary phenomena of our world, the phenomena of life. 9

Nor can it account for the fact of its own status as an interpretation. lO
Nietzsche's thinking about the will to power can be seen as an
attempt to reconcile his claims about "life" with his claims about
"interpretation" by viewing the problem of "life" and the problem of
"interpretation" as one problem, and his attempt to think this problem through in as radical a way as possible. We have seen in some
provisional way why the problem of "life" would lead to the problenl
of "interpretation" for Nietzsche. Any adequate recognition of life as
a phenomenon in our world seems to include for Nietzsche the
recognition of the arbitrary, violent, and unjust character of aillife,
and we can see how this recognition could provide grounds for
doubting any claim to a "disinterested" access to the truth by any living being. We can also see, I believe, how the problem of "interpretation" leads to the problem of "life" for Nietzsche by considering the
implications of his radical theory of interpretation, a theory of interpretation which attempts to evade the logic of originals and texts.
111. LIFE AS A PRINCIPLE OF UNITY

Alexander Nehamas, in his Nietzsehe: Life as Literature, argues that

tlle doctrine of the will to power is a consequence of Nietzsche's antirealism, that is, his denial that the world has a nature independent of
the interpretations placed on the world by interested subjects. In

particular, he associates Nietzsche's claim that "a thing is the sum of

its effects" with Saussure's claim that each unit in a linguistic system,
whether a phoneme or an idea, is constituted by its systematic differences from other such units. "Prefiguring one of the great intellectual
events of the next century," writes Nehamas, "Nietzsche in effect
claimed that nothingin the world has any intrinsic features of its own
and that each thing is constituted solely through its interrelations
with, and differences from, everything else."n Lacking any positive
character "in itself," what character the world has at any moment is
determined by a conflict between interpretations of that character.
Some kind of anti-realism is doubtless a necessary aspect of a
theory of the will to power. But it must be supplemented by an idea
that Nehamas has a tendency to understate. This is the drive Nietzsche posits on the part of all (living) things to incorporate the
whole. "The victorious concept 'force,' by means of which our physi-

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DAVID N. McNEILL

eists have ereated God and fhe world, still needs to be completed: an
inner world must be aseribed to it, which I designate as 'will to
power,' Le., as an insatiable clrive to manifest power." (WP 619; KSA
11:36[31])12 It is important to note that according to Nietzsche the
positing of such a drive is not an ad hoc hypothesis without which his
anti-realist views eould stan<:! alone. The reason for this can be seen
by considering a problem which Nehamas addresses but does not
solve-the problem of the unity and identity of any existent thing in
the theory of the will to power .13
Nehamas writes, "Nietzsche's radical view immediately generates a serious problem: hovv can we determine that some effects
belong together and form a urtity? How do we know we are using the
pronoun correctly when we say, 'A thing is the sum of its effects?"'14
That Nietzsehe denies the coherence of the idea of an underlying
subject in which properties in.here is weIl known, and Nehamas notes
that Nietzsehe instead favors the notion of unity as "simply the
organization of features." WIlLat Nehamas does not address, however I
is what constitutes the unity of that "organization" and it is precisely
this question that Nietzsche considers the hypothesis of a "drive to
mastery" to answer. All levels of"organization" including the human
body and its organs are, according to Nietzsehe, manifestations of

will to power, and the unit)' of all such levels of organization are
precisely that drive. 15
Put another way, the s:vstem of differences described above
cannot account for any kind of unity within such a system without
the addition of some principle that organizes and makes determinate
relations within the whole. The drive to mastery provides Nietzsehe
with that principle.
The will to power interprets (it is a question of interpretation when
an organ is constructed): it defines limits, determines degrees,
variations of power. Mere variations of power could not feel
themselves to be such: there must be present something that wants
to grow.... In fact, interpretation is itself a means of becoming
master of something. (The organic process constantly presupposes
interpretations.) (WP 643: }~SA 12:2[143])

If we return to Nehamas's analogy between the will to power and

structuralist linguistics, we can recognize this very point as a crucial
aspect of the post--structuralist critique of structuralism. In The Savage
Mind, to choose one example, Claude Levi-Strauss makes reference to

THE WILL Ta POWER

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the distinction between an overarching "logie of the system" and the

particular "locallogics irtserted in it./ 16 Upon reflection, however, it
does not seem as if a purely structuralist theory has the resources to
make any sense f this distinction. Once we are presented with a
claim like Levi-Strauss's, we seem forced to ask: what gives us access
to the distinction between Iocal and systemic logics? And in asking
this question, we are cnfronted with the determinative role our own
interpretive activity plays in selecting out any particular local
"mytheme." In post-structuralist critiques, this recognition of the
primacy of individual interpretive activity is seen as undermining
structuralism's claim to universality and objectivity.
In "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Jacques Derrida points first to Nietzsche's ctitique of "the
concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts
ofplay, interpretationand sign (sign withoutpresent truth)" whenhe
tries to indicate the cttlcial decentering "event," " whert language
invaded the universal problematic, when, in the absence of center or
origin, everythirtg became discourse./ 17 We don't have to follow
Derrida all the way here, I think, to see that even if we were to grant
that oppositions within a system of differences cduld account for the
determinacy of the entire system (a claim that it Is by no rrteans
obvious we should grant), what they cannot seem to accourtt for is
any determinacy within some localized nn-comprehensive part of
that system. It Seems that the hypothesIs of "a system of differenceS
Il

must either deny interpretation any significant role in determining

meanirtg arid view the deterrrtirtacy of the whole system as determinative for all aspects (jf that system, or it must radicalize the nation of
interpretation~as Nietzsehe does. As the above passage from the
Nachlass indicates, Nietzsche contertds that the tinity of the will t
power is the unit)' of an interpretation; in the hypothesIS f the will to
power i interp'retatiofi attd dtive to fiiastery are the same phenomenon
viewed frm different petspectives, r aS Nietzsehe writes in a note
from 1885: "(t)he essertte f a thing is nly an opinzon abotit the
'thing.' Ot father: 'it is consldered' 1s the feal'it i5,' the sole 'this 1s.'
Orte mety hot ask: 'who then interprets?' ft the irtterptetatiort itself is
a form f the will t power, exists (but fiot cis Cl 'being i but as a ptoc.;o
eSSi a becomlttg) ciS rt ffetti' (WP 556i KSA 12:2[1~51]).
Ifi ciS I haVe sugge'sted the will t pOWet is an attempt to thirtk the
ptoblem ()f "titell afiGi the' problem of 11 int-efpfeftirtiJ 8S' ne problem,
j

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DA V1D N. McNEILL

as an attempt to occupy a fund.amental orientation which sees life as

interpretation and interpretation as life, how are we then to con~eive
of Nietzsche's access to this fundamental orientation? Nietzsche's
designation of psychology as "queen of the sciences" in Beyond Good
and Evil 23 is, I believe, an extremely important indication of the
direction in which we should look for an answer to thisquestion. The
title of queen of the sciences had been traditionally given to meta~
physics. 18 Instead of simply dismissing the claim of metaphysics or
any science to have this status Nietzsche appropriates the title for his
psychology. In so doing Nietzsche forces us to try to conceive of a
psychology which could have the status of first philosophy, a psychology which would be the path to fundam.ental problems-problems of "life" and "interpretation"-to which the other sciences have
no independent access.
Two of Nietzsche's earliest works, The Birth ofTragedy, and On the
Uses and Disadvantages of His tory for Life, claimed to look at science,
art, and history from the perspective of life. Whatever the full scope
of this claim, it seems clear that Nietzsche considered that various
cultural practices disclosed a fundamental orientation to the world
that could be either "life-affirming" or "life-denying." But it is also
clear, as we have seen, that wllat Nietzsche means by "life" cannot be
synonymous with the continued existence of a biological organism. ~n
fact, concern with simple survival seems to be, for Nietzsche, evidence of a life in decline. Furth.ermore, the fact that all cultural practices, all modes of "interpretation," always already constitute some
fundamentallife-affirming or life-denying orientation to the world
seems to preclude Nietzsche from any naive appropriation of the
results of any of these modes of interpretation. Thus, Nietzsche's
awareness of the problem of "life" precludes any simple access to
various modes of "interpretation" and Nietzsche's awareness of the
problem of interpretation precludes any simple access to the phenomenon of life. Nietzsche's psychology" of the will to power seems
t() be a kind of phenomenology of types of soul and modes of interpretation; it is a psychology v/hose object cannot be given prior to or
determined externally from that psychology. As such, Nietzsche's
psychology attempts to occupy amiddie ground between a wholly
empirical psychology, WhiCtl take its object, the human psyche, as
given, and what used to be called rational psychology.19 Nietzsche's
attempt to occupy this tenuous middle ground means not only that
l

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THE WILL TO POWER

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we cannot wholly separate questions of life from questions of interpretation, but also suggests that we cannot wholly extricate the
question of Nietzsehe's doctrine from the question of Nietzsehe's
rhetoric.

NOTES
1 All citations are from Kaufmann's translations of WP and BGE.
2 Any discussion of the significance of the will to power in Nietzsche's thought must confront the controversy surrounding the use of
materials from Nietzsche's Nachlass. Opinions on the place of the literary
remains in interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy run the gamut from
Heidegger's claim that we should see the published works as propaedeutic to Nietzsche's fuHy developed philosophical thought, which we can
find only in Nachlass materials, to interpreters such as Karl Schlechta who
entirely discount the relevance of the Nachlass. In general, I endorse the
view that the rhetorical and literary character of Nietzsche's published
writings renders questionable any interpretation in which the Nachlass
does not play an ancillary role to arguments drawn from the published
works. That said, I believe that there are cases in which Nietzsche's notes
can play an important role in the development of an interpretation of his
published works. First, in the case of assessing the significance of the will
to power in Nietzsche's thought, the sheer volume of notes on the subject
present a very strong primafacie argument against those interpreters who
want to claim little or no significant role for the will to power in Nietzsche's thought. That is, the extent of Nietzsche's Nachlass devoted to an
investigation of the will to power seems to mandate an effort on the part
of the interpreter to offer an interpretation which attends to the role of the
will to power in Nietzsche's thought. However, as these notes do not, for
the most part, provide anything like a sufficient context to determine the
intent with which Nietzsche undertook these investigations, an interpretation of the will to power, no less than any other aspect of Nietzsche's mature philosophy, must orient itself primarily with reference to the published works. Secopd, in some few cases (notably in the drafts which have
come to be called Nietzsche's Philosophenbuch), the notes in question begin
to approach the finished quality of Nietzsche's published works. In these
cases the interpreter seems justified in drawing more extensivelyon the
Nachlass Jl}aterials. However, even in cases such as these it is necessary to
establish the rhetorical framework within which these unpublished
materials should be interpreted, and such a rhetorical framework, I believe, must be established with reference to one or more of Nietzsche's
published works. On the Nachlass problem in general, see the discussions

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DAVID N. McNEILL

in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche.. 2 vols. (Pfulligen: Neske, 1961); Karl

Schlechta, I'Nachwort" in Nietzsches Werke in drei Bnden (Munieh: Hanser,
1954), vol. 3, pp. 1381-1432; Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana Uni". Press, 1981), pp. 72-88; and Wolfgang
Mller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy 0/ Contradictions and the Contradictions 0/ his PhiIosophy, trans. David J. Parent, (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois
Press, 1999), pp. 124-26.
3 In selecting out these four aphorisms of BGE for special attention I
will be following an example set by Maudernarie Clark in her Nietzsehe on
Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 21227, but my account of the significance of these four aphorisms differs
greatly from hers. Most significantly, her argument depends on precisely
the kind of radical opposition between "psychological" and "metaphysical" interpretations of the will to power that my argument wishes to call
into question.
, 4 Cf. BGE 186, where Nietzsehe speaks of, and seems to be identifying
with, those who have feIt deeply "how insipidly false and sentimental this
(Schopenhauerian moral) principle is in a world whose essence is will to
power."
.
5 Nietzsche's admission at the close of this passage that this view is
also" only an interpretation" does not put this latter interpretation on a
level with the interpretation of the physicists, as it is often taken to by
commentators. The view of nature's conformity to law is called "a bad
interpretation" and "a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion
of meaning," and one measure of the superiority of the "will to power"
interpretation is that it can take into account the fact of interpretation
while that of the physicists cannot.
6 Cf. Karl Schlechta, Der Fall Nietzsche (Munieh: Hanser, 1959), pp.
120-22 with Mller-Lauter, pp.. 124-30. In general, my interpretation of
BGE 36 should be compared to :Mller-Lauter's discussion of the dispute
between Baumler and Schlechta on the significance of Nietzsche's use of
the subjunctive mood in this passage. Despite Mller-Lauter's apparent
recognition of the significance of Nietzsche's esotericism (124-25), his
interpretation reHes on a simplistic distinction between "Nietzsche's
ultimate 'insights'" and the "questioningattitude of the 'ftee spirits,'''
without any attempt to discern in Nietzsche's published works a rhetorical strategy which might provide a basis for interpreting the distinction
between esoteric and ~xoteric modes of expression in Nietz5che's texts.
Thus Mller-Lauter claims that "the Nachlass-text, which is an 'earlier
stage,' deserves interpretive priority over the published version" (128).

THE WILL TO POWER

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7 This may be another reason that Nietzsche's argument concerning

the will to power in BGE begins with the Stoics. The Stoic conception of
nature can also be seen as a rival to two powerful alternatives, Aristotelian and Epicurean, to which it is related as something of amid-point
between two extremes." (A. A. Long, IIThe Stoics on World Conflagration
andEverlasting Recurrence," The Southern Journal ofPhilosophy, Vol. XXIII,
Supplement [1985]: 14.) See also BGE 44 and 227 for Nietzsche's identification with Stoicism.
11

8 By which I mean, as Nietzsche seems to mean when he discusses

idealism, a rational idealism as exemplified by Hegel's famous claim that
IIthe real is the rational," thus bracketing the question whether Nietzsche's claims relating truth to the needs of a certain form of life are
accurately characterized as a IIbiological idealism." Cf. Heidegger, pp. 3948.
9 IIOf all the interpretations of the world attempted hitherto, the
mechanistic one seems today to stand victorious in the foreground ...
Everyone knows these procedures: one leaves 'reason' and 'purpose' out
of account as far as possible, one shows that given sufficient time, any. thing can evolve out of anything else, and one does not conceal a malicious chuckle when 'apparent intention' in the fate of a plant or an egg
yolk is once again traced back to pressure and stress; in short one pays
heartfelt homage to the principle of the greatest possible stupidity, if a
playful expression may be allowed concerning such serious matters.
Meanwhile, apresentiment, or anxiety, is to be noted among select spirits
involved in this movement, as if the theory had a hole in it that might
sooner or later prove to be its final hole: I mean the shrill one which one
whistles through in an extreme emergency. One cannot 'explain' pressure
and stress themselves, one cannot get free of the actio in distans" (WP 618;
KSA 11:36[34]).

10 Without addressing here the question of whether Nietzschean perspectivism is self-refuting, one can nonetheless see that it has a prima facie
claim to better take into account its own status as interpretation than
materialist theories do.
11 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsehe: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 81-84.
12 Kaufmann translation, but following the KSA's lIinnere WeIt" for
Kaufmann's lIinner will."
13 Nor is it clear that Nehamas believes hirnself to have solved it; see
Nehamas, pp. 177-90. See also Mller-Lauter, pp. 130-47.

DAVII) N. McNEILL

14 Nehamas, p. 81.
15 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsehe and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), p. 40: "What defines a body is
a relatidn between dominant and dominated forces."
16 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1972) pp. 161-63.
17 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 280.
18 Cf. Kant' s introduction to the Critique ofPure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan Co. Ltd., 1963), p. 7.
19 Cf. Hege!'s characterization of the distinction between empirical
and rational psychology in the Philosophy ofMind (Part 111 of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1971) 378, 378Z.