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== Interpretations == In contemporary Nietzschean scholarship, some interpreters{{who|date=August 2019}} have emphasized the will to power as a psychological principle because Nietzsche applies it most frequently to human behavior. However, in Nietzsche's unpublished notes (later published by his sister as "The Will to Power"), Nietzsche sometimes seemed to view the will to power as a more (metaphysical) general force underlying ''all'' reality, not just human behavior—thus making it more directly analogous to Schopenhauer's will to live. For example, Nietzsche claims the "''world is the will to power—and nothing besides!''".<ref>Nietzsche, ''The Will To Power'', §1067</ref> Nevertheless, in relation to the entire body of Nietzsche's published works, many scholars{{who|date=August 2019|Douglas Burnham=Jordan Peterson}} have insisted that Nietzsche's principle of the will to power is less metaphysical and more pragmatic than Schopenhauer's will to live: while Schopenhauer thought the will to live was what was most real in the universe, Nietzsche can be understood as claiming only that the will to power is a particularly useful principle for his purposes. Some interpreters also upheld a biological interpretation of the ''Wille zur Macht'', making it equivalent with some kind of [[social Darwinism]]. For example, the concept was appropriated by some [[Nazi]]s such as [[Alfred Bäumler]], who may have drawn influence from it or used it to justify their expansive quest for power. This reading was criticized by [[Martin Heidegger]] in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche—suggesting that raw physical or political power was not what Nietzsche had in mind. This is reflected in the following passage from Nietzsche's notebooks: {{Blockquote|I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.) The powerful natures dominate, it is a necessity, they need not lift one finger. Even if, during their lifetime, they bury themselves in a garden house!<ref>Friedrich Nietzsche. ''[[The Will to Power (manuscript)|Nachlass]]'', Fall 1880 6 [206]</ref>}} Opposed to a biological and voluntary conception of the ''Wille zur Macht'', Heidegger also argued that the will to power must be considered in relation to the ''[[Übermensch]]'' and the ''[[Eternal return|thought of eternal recurrence]]''—although this reading itself has been criticized by [[Mazzino Montinari]] as a "macroscopic Nietzsche".<ref>[[Mazzino Montinari]], ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (1974), 121.</ref> [[Gilles Deleuze]] also emphasized the connection between the will to power and eternal return. Both Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze were careful to point out that the primary nature of will to power is unconscious. This means that the drive to power is always already at work unconsciously, perpetually advancing the will of the one over the other. This thus creates the state of things in the observable or conscious world still operating through the same tension. Derrida is careful not to confine the will to power to human behavior, the mind, metaphysics, nor physical reality individually. It is the underlying life principle inaugurating all aspects of life and behavior, a self-preserving force. A sense of entropy and the eternal return, which are related, is always indissociable from the will to power. The eternal return of all memory initiated by the will to power is an entropic force again inherent to all life. Opposed to this interpretation, the "will to power" can be understood (or misunderstood) to mean a struggle against one's surroundings that culminates in personal growth, self-overcoming, and self-perfection, and assert that the power held over others as a result of this is coincidental. Thus Nietzsche wrote: {{Blockquote|My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.<ref>Nietzsche, ''The Will to Power'', §636 = {{Cite book|title=Digitale kritische Gesamtausgabe, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1888, 14[186]|url=http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1888,14[186}}</ref>}} It would be possible to claim that rather than an attempt to 'dominate over others', the "will to power" is better understood as the tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces' relations to each other. While a rock, for instance, does not have a conscious (or unconscious) "will", it nevertheless acts as a site of resistance within the "will to power" dynamic. Moreover, rather than 'dominating over others', "will to power" is more accurately positioned in relation to the subject (a mere [[synecdoche]], both fictitious and necessary, for there is "no doer behind the deed," (see ''[[On the Genealogy of Morals]]'') and is an idea behind the statement that words are "seductions" within the process of [[Self-esteem|self-mastery]] and [[self-overcoming]]. The "will to power" is thus a "cosmic" inner force acting in and through both animate and inanimate objects. Not just instincts but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the ''will to power''. This includes both such apparently{{Request quotation|date=June 2011}} harmful acts as physical [[violence]], lying, and domination, on one hand, and such apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, [[love]], and [[praise]] on the other—though its manifestations can be altered significantly, such as through art and aesthetic experience. In ''[[Beyond Good and Evil]]'', he claims that philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective, absolute truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their will to power; this will can be life-affirming or a manifestation of [[nihilism]], but it is the will to power all the same. Other Nietzschean interpreters{{who|date=August 2019}}<ref>{{Cite book|last=Burnham|first=Douglas|url=https://philpapers.org/rec/BURRNA|title=Reading Nietzsche: An Analysis of "Beyond Good and Evil"|date=2006|publisher=Routledge}}</ref> dispute the suggestion that Nietzsche's concept of the will to power is merely and only a matter of narrow, harmless, humanistic self-perfection. They suggest that, for Nietzsche, power means self-perfection ''as well as'' outward, [[politics|political]], [[elitist]], [[Aristocracy (class)|aristocratic]] [[:wikt:domination|domination]]. Nietzsche, in fact, explicitly and specifically defined the egalitarian state-idea as the embodiment of the will to power in decline: {{Blockquote|To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be 'unjust,' since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character. One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable: that, from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general perhaps after the [[communism|communistic]] cliché of [[Eugen Dühring|Dühring]], that every will must consider every other will its equal—would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.<ref>Nietzsche, ''On the Genealogy of Morals'', II:11</ref>}} Nietzsche thought that the drive is to manifest power rather than self-preservation. He thought it was most of the time incorrect that organisms live to prolong their life-time or extend the life of their species. Resistances are not painful annoyances but necessary for growth to occur. Suffering annoyances and being thwarted in ones attempt to accomplish a goal are necessary pre-conditions for our power. In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' Nietzsche said "And life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself." Nietzsche thought it necessary to have the power to discharge ones strength and thus fulfil one's purpose in the manifestation of will to power. {{Blockquote|"Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power- self preservation is only one of the indirect and most infrequent consequences of this."<ref>Nietzsche, ''Beyond Good and Evil''</ref>}} {{Blockquote|"Human beings do not seek pleasure and avoid displeasure. What human beings want, whatever the smallest organism wants, is an increase of power; driven by that will they seek resistance, they need something that opposes it - displeasure, as an obstacle to their will to power, is therefore a normal fact; human beings do not avoid it, they are rather in continual need of it".<ref>Nietzsche, ''The Will to Power''</ref>}} === Individual psychology === {{main|Individual psychology}} [[Alfred Adler]] borrowed heavily from Nietzsche's work to develop his second Viennese school of psychotherapy called individual psychology. Adler (1912) wrote in his important book ''Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Constitution)'': {{blockquote|Nietzsche's "Will to power" and "Will to seem" embrace many of our views, which again resemble in some respects the views of [[Féré]] and the older writers, according to whom the sensation of pleasure originates in a feeling of power, that of pain in a feeling of feebleness (Ohnmacht).<ref>{{Cite journal|author=Adler, Alfred|author-link=Alfred Adler|year=1912–1917|title=The Neurotic Constitution|pages=ix|publisher=Moffat, Yard and Company|location=New York|url=https://archive.org/details/neuroticconstitu00adle}}</ref>}} Adler's adaptation of the will to power was and still is in contrast to Sigmund Freud's [[Pleasure principle (psychology)|pleasure principle]] or the "will to pleasure", and to [[Viktor Frankl]]'s [[logotherapy]] or the "will to meaning".<ref>Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) [https://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:FrKYAo88ckkJ:www.materdei.ie/media/conferences/a-secular-age-parallel-sessions-timetable.pdf+%22Stan+Seidner%22&hl=en&gl=us "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology"]. ''Mater Dei Institute''</ref> Adler's intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of [[social equality]]. His interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power was concerned with the individual patient's overcoming of the [[Superiority complex|superiority-]][[Inferiority complex|inferiority]] dynamic.<ref>{{cite book |last1= Ansbacher |first1= Heinz |author-link1= Heinz Ansbacher |last2= Ansbacher |first2= Rowena R. |title= The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler |year= 1956 |publisher= Harper Perennial (1964) |pages= 132–133 |isbn= 0-06-131154-5}}</ref> In ''Man's Search for Meaning'', Frankl compared his third Viennese school of psychotherapy with Adler's psychoanalytic interpretation of the will to power: {{blockquote|... the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a ''will to meaning'' in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the ''will to pleasure'') on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the ''will to power'' stressed by Adlerian psychology.<ref>{{cite book |last= Frankl |first= Viktor |author-link= Viktor Frankl |title= Man's Search for Meaning |year= 1959 |publisher= Beacon Press |location= Boston, Massachusetts |page= [https://archive.org/details/manssearchforme000fran/page/154 154] |isbn= 0-671-02337-3 |url-access= registration |url= https://archive.org/details/manssearchforme000fran/page/154 }}</ref>}}
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