The Will to Live

One of the most deeply-ingrained traditional doctrines is that the fundamental human drive is the Will to Live, aka Self-Preservation, the Survival Instinct, etc. Even Darwin, who is assumed to assert that Evolution is the most basic law of nature, adheres to that orthodoxy, insofar as he holds that Evolution is ultimately only a means to survival, not an end-in-itself. Likewise, an underappreciated problem with the Will to Live that Spinoza raised is that it fails to explain how suicide is possible in a creature governed by self-preservation. But refusing to challenge the latter premise, he can only conclude that suicidal tendencies are actually destructive external forces that have been internalized. Perhaps dissatisfaction with that analysis led Freud to posit the existence of multiple psychological drives, including the Death Instinct. But the innovative heterodoxy came earlier, from Nietzsche, who proposed that the fundamental life-force is the 'Will to Power', a doctrine that has been as hysterically interpreted by Nazi-haters as it was tragically misappropriated by Hitler. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which understands Nietzsche as promoting something like a lust for power, his notion is a descriptive alternative to the Will to Live, namely, that all beings aim to not merely live, but to prevail. Such prevalence comes in multifarious forms, artistic shaping of material, and self-control, as much as tyranny over others. Other novel principles, such as the Will to Evolve and the Will to Create, might differ from the Will to Power, but they agree in their rejection of the Will to Live thesis. The idea of 'expanding horizons' is derived from those two basically equivalent former principles.