Saturday, June 8, 2013

Will to Power, Will to Live, Teleology

In #13 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche asserts of the "instinct of self-preservation" that it is a "superfluous teleological" principle.  However, that formulation is ambiguous, since it can entail either that 'all teleological principles are superfluous', or that 'some teleological principles are superfluous'.  Now, because of a subsequent reference to the "inconsistency" of the rigorously anti-teleological Spinoza, Kaufmann seems to opt for the former of the two possibilities, which implies that the focus of Nietzsche's criticism in the passage of the Will to Live is that it is a Teleological principle.  However, that criticism would leave unexplained Nietzsche's own equivalence to 'Will to Power' in the passage: "seeks . . . to discharge its strength", the teleological structure of which seems to difficult to deny.  Furthermore, his formulation of the relation between the Will to Power and the Will to Live, that he presents in #349 of The Gay Science--that the latter is a special case of the former--is independent of  any classification as Teleological.  So, the decisive term in #13 of BGE is "superfluous", not "teleological", as Kaufmann seems to suggest.

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