Saturday, July 20, 2013

Will to Power, Weakness, Abuse

It is difficult to determine whether Nietzsche's conflation, in II, 2, of the Genealogy of Morals, of incompetence and lying, is itself an expression of weakness, or one of abusiveness.  For, on the one hand, the reduction of all phenomena to the Will to Power seems to preclude from his system the possibility of a distinct concept of 'abuse of power'.  That is, if, as he proclaims in #1067 of the Will to Power collection, that everything is "the will to power--and nothing besides", the system lacks the capacity to recognize an 'abuse of power'.  On the other hand, insofar as the Will to Power is a principle of Growth, and to grow involves the "appropriation . . . of what is alien" (Beyond Good and Evil, #259), then the Will to Power is at least in part determined by alterior objects, just as healthfulness is contingent on the inner constitution of food.  Thus, the principle requires the enhancement of the objects of appropriation, with respect to which their "injury" (#259), for example, is an abuse of the power over them.  Accordingly, the classification of such mistreatment as a mere "consequence of the will to power" (#259) expresses an abuse of the principle, and not merely a weakness of it.

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