It’s not just Deleuze who reads will to power this way. Most postmodern interpretations of it emphasize that power is not under the control of the will , because the will want have any control over itself. It is splintered into competing drives.
The self-actualization of the will , which is tied to Hegelian dialectics, is a form of moralism that Nietzsche critiques.Creativity for Nietzsche is more about celebrating what thwarts our will than about willing what we want. — Joshs
Sounds like communism to many and will be resisted bitterly, even if it means a collective suicide. — Tom Storm
We might perceive it as instinct to survive and thrive.
Does this accord with postmodern interpretations? — Tate
I think the will he's referring to is Schopenhauerian. It's not a personal will. It's the animating force of the universe. — Tate
For Nietzsche it is about self-transformation , not survival. If it is a thriving , it is not cumulative addition to a valuative theme, but a continual change of direction of value and meaning. — Joshs
The way you’re putting it turns it into a form of self-consistency or self-continuity. — Joshs
Exporting buttloads of coal, as your country does, supports the formation of your community in far reaching ways. So I guess that's moral? — Tate
NZ is in fact world class - another Singapore or Finland - when it comes to effective public policy to deal with health, education, pandemics, trade, whatever. But climate change is another order of magnitude entirely when it comes to the scope of the problem in question.
Dig into the “morality” of the current responses - left or right - and it is all a mess ripe for cynical exploitation. — apokrisis
:fire:For Nietzsche it [will to power] is about self-transformation , not survival. — Joshs
:100:Power was always the wrong term for the universal thermodynamic imperative. The Cosmos is about the will to entropify.
The dialectic is then that it must have negentropic structure to achieve that. So power becomes the ability to do that work - construct the engines of dissipation.
Or at least that is how ecology and systems science now understands the general situation. — apokrisis
:yikes:We need a whole new way of conceptualizing our world, it's not just tinkering with existing systems, or adjusting our priorities. That kind of change takes time we don't have. — Tom Storm
Power was always the wrong term for the universal thermodynamic imperative. — apokrisis
The dialectic is then that it must have negentropic structure to achieve that. So power becomes the ability to do that work - construct the engines of dissipation. — apokrisis
I think my neighbors were simply driven by something like the will to power: a blind will live. In the same way a tree turns dirt and water into wood, we spray chemicals to eliminate annoying bugs: to transform the environment unto our own needs.
Is this not correctly called the will to power? — Tate
Or does it temper the will to power, which I interpret as the will to dominate one's environment? — Tate
I'll argue that it's opposed to life and the will to power. — Tate
All of life is a will to power. It does not make sense to interpret this as the will to dominate. — Fooloso4
In the Genealogy the development of Christian morality is the development of the will to power through man's self-overcoming. It is only later that it becomes life denying. — Fooloso4
Are you saying morality springs from the same source? — Tate
What is self-overcoming exactly? — Tate
And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people:
“I teach you the overman.Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All creatures so far created something beyond themselves; and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans?
What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.
You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape.
But whoever is wisest among you is also just a conflict and a cross between plant and ghost. But do I implore you to become ghosts or plants?
Behold, I teach you the overman!
The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!
The word Schopenhauer used for it is "will.". As phenomenology, it works, though it may seem strange if you're not familiar with S. — Tate
But he then projected the notion that this was suffering, a pessimistic burden, on to what is a neutral fact. — apokrisis
Consciousness requires unanswered questions, unresolved drama, in short, evil in order to stay awake. — Tate
Consciousness requires unanswered questions, unresolved drama, in short, evil in order to stay awake.
— Tate
But that is just more bad psychology. The view from a world being swept up in the industrial revolution. — apokrisis
Yeah, the industrial revolution was in England. Schopenhauer was German. — Tate
During the early stages of the industrial revolution, Schopenhauer initiated a tradition of radical critique of Enlightenment notions of historical progress, rationalism, and autonomous human agency.
Schopenhauer argued that the intellect or reason so hypostatized by much Enlightenment thought was actually in bondage to the practical motives of the will to live, a will concentrated in the sexual act, in the unconscious and irrational desire to perpetuate life. Schopenhauer viewed Will as the unique noumenal reality in a Kantian sense, a force which operated (a) largely unconsciously, (b) often repressively, and (c) in intimate conjunction with memory and sexuality.
The Enlightenment notions attacked by Schopenhauer, such as the scientific progress of civilisation and the perfectibility of individual and state through refinement of the faculty of reason, reached a climax in the philosophy of Hegel which represents the most articulate attempt to present a coherent bourgeois view of the world, incorporating elements from Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism as well as from Romanticism.
The “heterological” tradition opened up by Schopenhauer was continued by figures such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, thinkers who challenged the very discipline of philosophy and its claims to arrive at truth through reason. They emphasised instead the role of emotion, the body, the unconscious, as well as of pragmatic interests.
Schopenhauer offered an incisive critique of the bourgeois world: its vision of the present as alone real, its exaltation of a rationality answering merely to pragmatic needs and, underlying these, its self-abasement before the “crass materialism” of science.
Schopenhauer was especially contemptuous of attempts to historicise and rationalise the evils of the bourgeois world as part of an ordered teleogical plan; he dismissed Hegel’s “philosophy of absolute nonsense” as comprised of “three-quarters cash and one-quarter crazy notions…” He himself utterly rejected the notion that history exhibited any unity beyond eternal recurrence of the same miserable patterns of events.
https://habib.camden.rutgers.edu/talks/schopenhauer-and-freud/
Schopenhauer was one of the first of the irrationalist philosophers. This is a separate issue from his pessimism. — Tate
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