Talk:The Will to Power

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Why doesn't this even say anything about WHAT the Will to Power is about or to outline it? gelo 05:46, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Because the bunglers who wrote this have an axe to grind, declaring the book as something made from thin air, which is obviously false. Just look at all the vandalism at the article Friedrich Nietzsche. Utterly pathetic and risible. "AS HE IS" my ass. And now the section that talks about the book and the overman have been deleted and moved to "their articles". Hah! This has to be changed. These incompetent morons have had their day in the shade but not any more.--67.65.35.62 03:07, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 disambiguation 2 The concept and its interpretations 3 Entire article is garbage 3.1 Better explanation 4 Consciousness as instinct? 5 "Of note, however, involving the biological interpretation..."

[edit] disambiguation

You know, I think this should really be split into two articles. This one, in title case, should be the book, and Will to power should be about the concept. mgekelly 09:02, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I quite agree. On expansion to your proposal, I suggest the case of his planned book go along with the concept itself in the prospective "will to power", since the two are inseparable, while the "forgery", which was contrary to Nietzsche's intent, that is The Will to Power go elsewhere. With these a disambig. message can be put atop each of the articles to sieve the differences most clearly. Perhaps this design for new article titles is more adequate: the forgery as The Will to Power (book); and the concept with details on the planned book as The will to power (and/or as Will to power).—^ignis _scripta 22:10, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The concept and its interpretations

Now... don't we need to make it more clear that a general description of the idea suffices after which we can separately describe the interpretations more carefully and apparently? Just a thought for those that might want to contribute. Aey 22:30, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

As a matter of fact the idea of "power" (Macht from machen [to do, to make, etc]) needs furthering as well. Aey 22:42, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

At this point, it is clear we cannot do with one section alone. It needs more organization: separate parts describing the ontological implications, Nietzsche's attitude to those categories, etc., etc., needs to be established for the readers' understanding. Aey 23:06, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Entire article is garbage

Another entry on Nietzsche by someone who is afraid of what people will do if they understand what he was saying. Article is also poorly cited. Will to power is about control over one's self? Does anyone actually believe this? No reference is provided to support such a ridiculous claim.

Not all philosophy is supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Nietzshce was vehemently anti-egalitarian and viewed most Western values as values for the weak. Learn to accept this.

Here are a few quotes from the actual book:

Morality consequently taught men to hate and despise most profoundly what is the basic character trait of those who rule: their will to power.

Moral valuations as a history of lies and the art of slander in the service of a will to power (the herd will that rebels against the human beings who are stronger).

No where does Nietzsche describe the will to power as a "tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces". What nonsense. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.83.248.178 (talk • contribs).

Poorly cited and poorly organized: Yes. Thus, instead of giving a pretentiously ascerbic statement, go about improving it - everyone can do so.

Yes, the "Will to power is [not] about control over one's self [sic]". I certainly have heard of this from a scholarly/academic sources. As to "tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces": something like this is described by R. Schacht in his book Nietzsche (no doubt in other places, too: it is far from being "nonsense") that gives a very good summation of his thought, to which too few give proper attention, but from that it sounded like the editor of that phrase was guided by something else... (As to your confused quotations: you really do not understand a modicum of Nietzsche's genealogy and how it relates to his entire work...) Too few cite their work to the detriment of the article, hence I've tried to clean it up some. I'll try to do more later on. Even so, the entire article is not "garbage"; there are many solid points in it. Aey 19:56, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Based on your tones I'm pretty sure you don't understand what Nietzsche was trying to say either. 71.68.15.163 19:08, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

This is an excellent article which certainly does not make Nietzsche 'warm and fuzzy'. It is more ontological - rightly so - and as such could not support a slave morality (i.e. post-WW2 liberalism).

Pete Hughes MA —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.69.223.191 (talk • contribs) 10:56, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

The article is clearly salvageable. There are some poor paragraphs, and it needs citations, and it needs clarity in a few places. But the idea of presenting the varied views is a sound one. What else is the article supposed to do? It could present the views that our angry commenter demands, but it cannot endorse them.

Will be back to add to this sometime.

My observation is that the final sentence needs to be expanded on. Those power quanta are N's most basic or fundamental level of description. Then there are the quanta gathering or subsuming other quanta. At the cellular level, similar events happen to bring about organisms. At the human level, persons do the same to bring about societies.

Nehamas (Life as Literature) and Golomb (N's Enticing Psychology of Power) discuss these power quanta. I can't specifically recall them in Schacht, but I am sure there have been more treatments. Not2plato 19:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Better explanation

Excellent summary that does not try to sugar-coat his work.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/travis_denneson/power.html

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.83.248.178 (talk • contribs).

Online sources aren't entirely reliable unless the writer is a known scholar. The case is a simple one: paper (or "hard") literature tends to be much more reliable. A summary like this (which sounds like poor lecture notes) misses so much in Nietzsche's idea: for instance, it misses the point that such dominating over other's is a declination in life; and another (amongst many more), Nietzsche does not "approve of the violent conquest of others", he merely sees it as a very frequent occurrence in life. Briefly, it fails as an "explanation".

It seems strange that there is a recent appearance of (mostly anonymous) individuals who are against "sugar-coating" and "softening": are they oblivious to the ideas of progressing and improving scholarship on Nietzsche? I suppose someone should tell them how droll and idiosyncratic they appear! To be against "sugar-coating", or for any other predilection, will undoubtedly lead to shoddy scholasticism - and this has long been the situation in Nietzsche scholarship (e.g., Nietzsche has been characterized as a "proto-Nazi" and all the rest of it). Is it too bad things are improving? (That is, how could you presume to see that a paper is against "sugar-coating" unless you already uncritically accepted a sort of interpretation? How ironic it is that you beg the question just here.) Aey 19:56, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Consciousness as instinct?

the line "In fact, Nietzsche considered consciousness itself to be a form of instinct" is incorrect. Nietzsche instead understood consciousness to be a linguistic product of communication initiated out of the necesity of social interaction. He explains in the Gay Science that life originally had no need for consciousness and it is only after one is drawn into the herd that one begins to "know" himself via the general categories provided by language.

There is something correct in what you say, but in Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that the opposition between consciousness and instinct is a false one because conscious thinking is instinctive. Not2plato 02:01, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Of note, however, involving the biological interpretation..."

I'm not trained in philosophy beyond a 100-level course in college, but I'm a reasonably bright guy. I've been trying to make sense of the latter half of this paragraph for a while now, and it's turning into a losing battle; there are a lot of big words obscuring the meaning more than they clarify it. My best translation of the "then such concinnity" clause is: "the idea of W2P is so at harmony, and so interrelated, with the rest of his ideas that one can actually consider the other ideas to be based upon it." Related to the sentence as a whole, then, it strikes me as a tautology: W2P is the most central concept of Nietzsche's work because his other ideas are based on it. But there must be something here I'm not getting, and it seems to have to do with Nietzsche's use of the word pathos, not as a synonym for sympathy or for the evokation of sympathy, but as a term meaning the concept of "becoming." (Do I read that right?) If Nietzsche's particular definition of pathos is so vital to understanding this interpretation of his work, then perhaps more information on his definition is in order — or, perhaps, the text is just getting so dense that we need to consider whether it's suitable for a work like Wikipedia. There have been, after all, some significant battles going on here about the nature and meaning of Nietzsche's work, and maybe too many of the spent shells are still left lying on the battlefield? --Jay (Histrion) (talk • contribs) 19:32, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

mmm, gibberish. I've tidied the grammar and readability, I hope without changing the meaning too much, of the first half of the last para. The last part I have removed and copied here, because I can't make head nor tail of it:

Additionally, one interpretation (which lends significant credence to the view of the will to power as the most central concept of Nietzsche's thought) says that if attention were given to the will to power "as pathos", according to Nietzsche's own definition, as the fundament of his conception of becoming, then such concinnity vis-à-vis his work suggests a more thoroughgoing interrelation to the ideas prevalent throughout his work in its entirety and how other ideas might be shown to be based upon it. Such a view is then taken further to view Nietzsche's ontology as a part of a much larger conception of a process philosophy.

If anyone knows what it might be about, I'd be interested to see a clearer version back in the article. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 18:28, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I gather that the author's intent was to highlight the passive aspect of W2P versus active, voluntary will. Thus, W2P is the pathos, the capacity to be affected, and therefore to change. This is not uninteresting, but because of its complex nature, deserves more than four lines to be clearly explained at all. Finally, I'd like to recall to Wikipedians that philosophy, no more than mathematics, is an easy thing, and clear for all. When I stumble unto the mathematic article discretization, I don't understand much of it... So why should someone who totally ignores Nietzsche's philosophy should be able to easily understand Nietzsche's concepts? The point of Wikipedia articles on Nietzsche is to eliminate any misunderstandings (and such misinterpretations exist — as a philologist, Nietzsche did not consider all interpretation to be equivalent, as some readers of Nietzsche would have it) rather than to make them believe that one can understand Nietzsche without (slowly) reading his texts. Lapaz 19:08, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

"Concinnity" is a musical term appropriated by postmodernists to give themselves airs. It should be removed and something intelligent, rather than vain, should replace it.Not2plato 19:28, 27 February 2007 (UTC)