"Will to power" as a manifestation of "will to will" (the ideas of F. Nietzsche and M. Heidegger today). Philosophy of the will of Nietzsche (will to power) What is the will to power according to Nietzsche

This concept is central to Nietzsche's philosophy. He came to the conclusion that humanity is driven by the will to power. Only this source should be recognized as the fundamental impulse of all our actions. This concept was intended to play the role of a constructive idea, with the help of which he intended to replace everything that was hitherto considered philosophy, and most of what was quoted as science. Nietzsche interprets the world in terms of his philosophy of the will to power. Nietzsche understood power as the will to power, the will to power is the essence of power. Power is not a political phenomenon according to Nietzsche. Nietzsche finds that where there is life, there is always also the will to power.

To understand what being is, we can only through life and the will to power. The will to power seeks what life really is. The will to power inherent in life is not the will to live as simply life. Being, which is the will to power, has life under it as something from which one must turn away for the sake of true being. The will to power is the desire for freedom in those who are in bondage, it is the desire to dominate and transcend others in those who are stronger and freer.

Despite the formulas in which the will to power is defined not as the will of this or that being, but as a struggle striving only to maintain itself, Nietzsche's decisive positions are determined precisely by the fact that the will to power, although always homogeneous, is not in its own way is the only one. Nietzsche's assessments always seem ambiguous: everything depends on the point of view from which they are carried out and receive their special right. The essence of the will to power can be both power proper and, conversely, weakness. Weakness in the will to power manifests itself, for example, wherever the motive force is the need to overcome danger. True power as a high value of being, being exercised in the world, can even paradoxically reject the path of direct increase in power. Nietzsche knows from his own experience that among the truly powerful, the struggle is both against brute power and against the actual superiority of impotence, and that the paradoxical relationship of power and value reaches its culmination in this. In fact, the will to power is a property that is invariant for all of us, both the weak and the strong. This is nothing but a property inherent in the whole genus of living beings. Most importantly, it is not some special impulse along with others, such as the sexual desire: both the sexual instinct and the need to satisfy hunger, and any other possible desires, are nothing but forms or variations of the will to power. Thus, we are right to say that the will to power is the fundamental driving force. However, the will to power is not something we have. And what we really are. Not only we are the will to power, but everything in general in the human and animal world, in the animate and material world. In the whole universe there is nothing more elementary, and in general there is nothing other than this striving and its varieties.

see also

Spiritually existential and spiritually cultural time and space
The human personality exists in a special spiritual-existential (or biographical) time - the time of its unique actions and internal reflections, communication with other people and creativity ...

Science in the context of culture
In everything I want to get to the very essence. In work, in search of a way, In heart trouble, To the essence of the past days, To their cause. To the foundations, to the roots, to the core. All the time grip...

Categories of dialectics
The world, which is in constant motion and development, corresponds to an equally dynamic thinking about it. “If everything develops… then does this apply to the most general concepts and categories of thinking? ...

F. Nietzsche "The Will to Power"

CONTENT

§ 1. Statement of the problem…………………………………………………... 3

§ 2. Analysis of the book by F. Nietzsche "The Will to Power"………………………………... 4

§ 3. Conclusions…………………………………………………………………. eleven

§ 4. Sources………………………………………………………………… 12

§ 1. Statement of the problem

Interest in Nietzsche has not waned for the second century. And if for his contemporaries he was rather a prophet of the spiritual crisis that had begun and the coming social catastrophes that shook Western civilization in XX century, then for us, living in a globalized world that is built according to the Western model, Nietzsche is perhaps the spokesman for the willful beginning of a civilization that is outwardly successful and dominant, but from the inside is stricken with unbelief and nihilism, which means a weakening of the will. Nietzsche's philosophy is ambiguous and enhances the crystallization of concepts and values. Civilization, which at this historical moment sets the tone for the development of the whole world, is trying to realize itself. And in this regard, Friedrich Nietzsche's passionately and strangely written book The Will to Power has not lost its poignancy.

It is all the more interesting for the Russian reader because for the first time in Russian, without censorship, the work was published in 2005. This "unfinished treatise" of Nietzsche existed only in outline and was published after his death in a reconstruction by his sister Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast.

Nietzsche conceived this book of life in 1883 and actively worked on it until his tragic illness - insanity, which began six years later, and death in 1900.

The material of "The Will to Power", according to the plan of the philosopher himself (1887), is divided into four books, or rather, parts: "European Nihilism" ( I ), "Criticism of former higher values" ( II ), "Principle of a new assessment" ( III ), "Breed and Cultivation" ( IV ). The entire book contains 1,067 passages (although there have been editions containing almost 9,000 passages, such as the German academic edition, 1967). But through the mosaic of sketches and judgments, a strict concept emerges, "a system in aphorisms".

§ 2. Analysis of the book by F. Nietzsche "The Will to Power"

The theme of the will to power runs throughout Nietzsche's entire work, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche understands the will to power as the principle of existence. But if at first the philosopher interpreted the unsatisfied will as a source of suffering, from which aesthetics, art, and later the intellect, empirical knowledge can free, then Nietzsche gradually comes to understand the will as an optimistic affirmation of life.

Now he interprets the will as the will to live, and hence to rule, because life is based on the desire for power, for power. The law of survival is survival of the fittest, which is consistent with Darwin's theory of natural selection. And since it is the struggle for existence, the fierce struggle for the survival of the strongest, that is the condition for the evolutionary development of species, this struggle should be accepted without complaint. We must strive for strength and power, and not for weakness and infirmity. This is the basic instinct of living beings. The weak must fall and perish, but the strong must rise above and be strengthened. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche glorifies the joy of a stubborn and bitter struggle for life.

So he tries to treat his sick, pampered eyelid. It is pessimism and relaxation, the philistine complacency of his contemporaries that he perceives as the decline and disease of culture. Life is growth, power, power, will in spite of obstacles. This means that they need to be overcome and the “will to power” revived. Nietzsche emphasizes that the will to power is the will to violence, domination. But it is precisely the will to power that is not in the highest human values - in the commandments, as he believes, on the contrary, the values of degradation, nihilism prevail. And the thoughts that rule the world must be strong, says Nietzsche. It is difficult to object to this, although this condition is hardly sufficient for the ideas that rule the world.

Nietzsche's goal in writing this book was a reassessment of all values, which is emphasized in the subtitle of the work. He seeks manifestations of the principle of will to power as the quintessence of life in philosophy, religion, natural science, politics, art, which, in turn, at odds with the accepted foundations of society, led to a revision of values. Values are a condition for the preservation and development of complex formations. And false value constructions, myths of culture, its traps and masks replace the “will to power” with the so-called “truth of being”.

Nietzsche rebels against the life of a "mere mortal" who obeys "herd instincts". He reproaches the old morality for indulging the weak and affirms new values associated with the will as a vital force and power. He believes that it is the will as the center of power that constructs the world and values. And since, according to Nietzsche, “God is dead”, because faith in the supernatural, the higher has been shaken and turned out to be debunked with the advent of the century of rationalism and nihilism, then in Nietzsche’s place of God there is a superman, whose essence “wills from the will to power”, and for him the future. This is how Nietzsche understands the loss of faith in the meaning of life and death, in "otherworldly" illusions - this is how "God dies."

The knowledge (scientific) that comes to the place of faith interprets the other world as "nothing". Faith and knowledge are replaced by nihilism. And although Nietzsche tries to overcome this disastrous triad, his own philosophy is built on the postulates of natural science. This is a kind of reaction to the growing influence of science and materialism, which have placed religion and morality in doubt and have been unable to offer anything but agnosticism (according to which any absolute foundations of reality are unknowable, since they cannot be confirmed by experimental science).

In Nietzsche, there is an involuntary substitution of the end and the means, because if the end can be life, knowledge, creativity, then the will is only an instrument, including the will to power. In the animal community, the desire for survival is instinctive, the means for which can be both dominance and submission, that is, a completely different attitude towards “power”. Yes, and the power itself is rather the concept of a human community, and not a zoological one. For this reason alone, the principle of the will to power cannot be considered universal, as Nietzsche insists.

In relation to human society and social life, power is one of the highest, often undeclared, values, but these are rather second-level, instrumental values, since survival in society is connected not only with power, it is only one of the mechanisms. The will to power must have a goal and a vector of development. If this is the superman, as Nietzsche imagines, then we are talking about about the cultivation of a power caste with a claim to change the nature of such a person, which is not new for history. But ambitions or claims will never replace essence.

The concept of power in Nietzsche turned out to be inextricably linked with the concept of nihilism. The statement and diagnosis of nihilism, this “most terrible of the guests”, in the words of the thinker himself, as the main problem facing European humanity from the first pages of The Will to Power sets the main line of Nietzsche’s questioning about power and outlines the possible contours of a new metaphysics authorities.

According to Nietzsche, the typical end of contemporary Europe XIX century, the general orderliness, intellectually observable and faceless, which has become a model of scientific knowledge, the desire for social and political equality, lead to a weakening of the vital forces of culture. The spirit of heroism and unpredictability disappears from it, as a result of which mediocrity triumphs, and the personality dissolves in the facelessness of the crowd. Nietzsche diagnoses the stages in the development of European culture that led it to a deplorable state as stages in the progressive development of nihilism.

Nietzsche himself defines nihilism as the denial of life and higher values. And if earlier nihilism meant the depreciation and denial of life in the name of higher values, such as God, then the modern era, according to Nietzsche, gives rise to a new form of nihilism - the denial of these previously affirmed higher values and replacing them with values “human, too human” (this is the name of one of the Nietzsche's books). Morality replaces religion, as, for example, in the philosophy of Kant and in the Enlightenment in general; utility, progress, history take the place of divine institutions.

Nihilism for Nietzsche is not only the positivist spirit of science XIX century, but a broader historical movement that affects the entire history of the West in recent centuries and only manifests itself with particular force in positivism, pessimism and socialism. Nietzsche's interpretation of the very essence of this nihilism boils down to the short formula "God is dead." In Nietzsche's words we are confronted not with the expression of the personal convictions of an atheist, but with the penetrating statements of a prophet. “God is dead”: this means that the Christian God, the God of Western metaphysics, is already a dead fiction of the mind, a “naked idea”, an abstract meaning. At best, this God is a kind of idol, a kind of conditional “value”. Indeed, it does not affect the life of a European in any way, it does not at all give meaning to the existence of man, the world and history. In the West the place of God is empty: God is absence. This absence destroys all vital truth beyond decay and death and determines the content of European nihilism. Precisely because European metaphysics proposes an absolutization, a rationalistic acceptance of God, it prepares the possibility of a rationalistic denial of him. The death of God is the result of almost a thousand years of historical development of this absolutized and double-edged rationalism in the space of Western European civilization.

Nihilism is a historical process in the course of which the "supersensible" in its dominant height becomes shaky and insignificant, as being itself loses its value and meaning. Therefore, nihilism is not just another fashionable view or current of thought with its idols, founders, representatives. On the contrary, nihilism is what is now destined to manifest itself in all views, for it is the history of being, when the death of the Christian God in the hearts of Europeans slowly but inevitably comes to light. Yes, this God will be believed for a long time and considered that he still has a decisive influence on the world and the fate of mankind, but for Nietzsche, such faith is like the light of an already extinct star, when the star itself has disappeared, and its light is visible for some time. , creating an ontic illusion of presence. The death of God for Nietzsche is the main event of our time, first felt and fully understood by him. This event requires a new reassessment of all values, since the old values associated with the Christian God and the sphere of the supersensible have lost their meaning altogether. And now the classically understood nihilism means liberation from the old values, but for a new reassessment of values - the task that Nietzsche sets for his own philosophy. This means that the passive nihilism of disappointment in the values of the past must be replaced by an active nihilism of the growth of the power of the spirit and vitality, which strongly criticizes the old values and affirms new goals, values and perspectives. At the center of this affirmative nihilism, Nietzsche places his doctrine of the will to power and the superman.

At the last stage of nihilism, all the values of previous eras fall into decay, everything becomes meaningless and the will plunges into inaction. Modern man, in fact, really does not want anything anymore, but only tries by inertia to continue the impulse of life he once received, more and more plunging into the routine of petty benefits and pleasures. But it is precisely at this moment of the twilight of culture, when its fate, it would seem, is predetermined, and the last opportunity for its survival opens up, the opportunity for a re-evaluation of all former values, for a new rethinking of the concepts of good and evil. And this is not just a return of the will, it is a new impulse, never seen before.

Here, according to Nietzsche, the will to power supported by the initial impulse of life, devoid of any moral counterbalances, comes to the fore. "What well? - asks Nietzsche and himself gives the answer: everything that increases in a person a sense of power, the will to power, power itself. What's wrong? Everything that comes from weakness."

Here it is necessary to clarify what Nietzsche means by "power". “Power” here does not at all mean the disposal of other people, this power is not political or social, but metaphysical, built consciously as a principle of life. The nature of the will to power, according to Nietzsche, is not simply to dominate, dispose or take (this would not require such a fundamental reassessment of all values), but to create and bestow.

The will to power is the conscious will to be intoxicated with life. This is the very secret of life, the main feature of all that exists. Everything that exists, insofar as it exists at all, and in the form in which it actually is, is "the will to power." And knowledge, if it has not died in the abstractions of reason and has not been torn away from life completely, is really only as an instrument of power. The laws of science are but useful fictions, and the truth is a useful error. Nietzsche rejects Christianity as a religion that deliberately weakens life and opposes the "will to power", that is, as a religion directed against life and the laws of the universe, and therefore a religion (in the new, Nietzschean scale of values) immoral.

For Nietzsche, both the equality of people before God, affirmed by Christianity (life has created people unequal, because they have different strength of will to power), and religious humility (which again means the suppression of this will to power in oneself) are equally unacceptable. Nietzsche also rejects all kinds of socialist teachings, seeing in them "an uprising of slaves in morality." The place of the deceased God of the former culture must be replaced by a superman who despises the former moral values and asserts his boundless will to power. The image of the superman arises from the pages of Nietzsche's main work - "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (1885), where Nietzsche puts into the mouth of the ancient Persian religious reformer stylized by him his innermost thoughts about the superman (the model of which Nietzsche's Zarathustra is). Zarathustra, the superman, is a “dancing star”, eternal movement and becoming, devoid of the attributes of a stable being, he is a pure will to power, an affirmation of life beyond truth and falsehood, beyond good and evil. In his last works, Nietzsche prophesies about the death of his contemporary civilization, about world wars and a new order of the world. And although Nietzsche's predictions seemed to his contemporaries overly pessimistic, a kind of morbid imagination, many of them in XX century were realized (suffice it to mention the two world wars, the appearance mass culture and a united Europe), and his philosophy influenced the entire European culture XX century.

Power is constantly in motion, and the “will to power” is opposed not by the achieved and acquired power, but by the “will to anarchy”. The essence of power lies precisely in the "will to power", that is, in the will to overcome and expand itself. But when only the amount of increased and organized power becomes the measure of everything, then we move into a completely nihilistic dimension, denying the very possibility of asking questions about the existential sources and goals of power itself.

§ 3. Conclusions

The will to power is the basic concept in Nietzsche's philosophy, used by him to denote the principle of explaining everything that happens in the world as such; its substantive basis and fundamental driving force. It is that by which everything must ultimately be interpreted and to which everything must be reduced.

The will to power is a concept that has been subjected to unprecedented distortions and falsifications in the history of philosophy; to this day it remains the object of a wide variety of interpretations, partly because Nietzsche himself did not particularly care to explain what he meant by it.

At the same time, Nietzsche could not know that his aristocratic construct - the superman - would be a convenient screen for "people from the crowd", faceless and weak, inferior and infringed, and therefore prone to violence and immoralism, inhumanity and cruelty. The Superman turned out to be the Inhuman, and not the God-Man.

Nietzsche wrote to G. Brandes that "the whole world will shudder" when they see his new book: "I am a real disaster." This is truly a book that explodes the established understanding of things. There is an anticipation of a monstrous crisis and catastrophes in it. XX centuries, which at first took place not in the socio-economic and political spheres, not in material existence, but in the minds and souls of people.

I think that perhaps the most terrible retribution for the “revaluation of values” and understanding of life primarily as the will to power, for its absolutization is the destruction of the soul and the descent from the mind - both as an individual (which happened to the author of the book), and as whole societies, and in the limit - all of humanity. For the hypertrophied will to power is akin to madness and leads to destruction, which is clearly confirmed by recent history.

§ 4. Sources

1. Semenova, to power: [review] / // Power. - 2005. - N 8. - S. 84-85.

2. Myurberg, I. about modern man in the political space // Questions of Philosophy. - 2009. - N 5. - S. 47-60.

3. Kosykhin, authorities and the problem of nihilism in European philosophy // Power. - 2008. - N 3. - S. 90-94.

Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power / Per. with him. - M .: Cultural Revolution, 2005. - 880 p.

18. Philosophy of rationalism by R. Descartes: doubt as a principle of philosophizing, the basic rules of the method, intuition, deduction.

20. Philosophy of I. Kant: epistemology and ethics.

22. Anthropological materialism l. Feuerbach

23. The main ideas of the philosophy of Marxism: the problem of man, materialistic understanding of history, dialectics, theory of knowledge.

24. General characteristics of postclassical philosophy: basic concepts and ideas.

25. Schopenhauer's irrationalism (will to live, life as suffering).

26. Philosophy of Nietzsche (the concept of the will to power, the concept of the superman).

27. Western philosophy of the 20th century: main problems and directions.

28. Philosophy of positivism in its historical development: from positivism to neo - and postpositivism. Principles of verification and falsification.

29. Philosophy of existentialism: the problem of the essence and existence of man, freedom, choice, responsibility, loneliness, alienation.

30. Religious philosophy of the 20th century: neo-Thomism and Christian personalism.

31. Hermeneutics: basic ideas (understanding as a method, the principle of the hermeneutic circle).

32. Philosophy of postmodernism (rhizome, principle of deconstruction, text)

33. Features of Russian religious-idealistic philosophy of the late 19th - early 20th century. (Soloviev, Berdyaev).

34. Materialistic trend in Russian philosophy: a. I. Herzen, n. G. Chernyshevsky.

35. The problem of being in philosophy. Forms of being. Significance of the problem of being for medicine.

36. The problem of being philosophy. Forms of being. Significance of the problem of being for medicine.

37. Movement and its properties. Classification of forms of motion of matter.

38. Space and time as forms of existence of matter.

39. The subject of dialectics. Historical forms and alternatives

40. Principles of dialectics. Dialectical and metaphysical thinking.

41. Basic laws of dialectics and their methodological significance for medicine.

42. Categories of dialectics and their methodological significance for medicine (general and singular, essence and phenomenon, cause and effect).

50. Creativity and knowledge.

51. Science and society. The functions of science. The role of science in solving global problems of our time.

52. The evolution of science, the main stages of its development. Classical, non-classical, post-non-classical science.

53. Empirical and theoretical levels of scientific knowledge, their forms (fact, hypothesis, problem, theory).

54. Specificity of scientific knowledge. The concepts of ethos of science and paradigms. The moral responsibility of a scientist.

55. Patterns of the development of science (traditions, innovations, scientific revolutions).

56. Methods of scientific knowledge.

57. The concept of society in the history of socio-philosophical thought.

58. Society as a system, its properties as a system: integrity, stability, self-sufficiency.

59. Economic and social spheres of public life.

60. The political sphere of society. Rule of law and civil society.

61. Spiritual sphere of society: Social consciousness and its structure (theoretical and ordinary level of social consciousness, social psychology and ideology, forms of social consciousness).

62. Modern theories of ideal social development (K. Popper, F. Hayek)

63. The meaning and direction of the historical process. Types of historical dynamics and basic models of history.

64. Formational and civilizational approaches to the analysis of the historical process.

65. Philosophical anthropology as a direction of modern Western philosophy (M. Scheler, H. Plesner, A. Gelen)

66. The problem of man in the history of philosophy.

67. Modern problems of human philosophy (essence and existence, bodily and spiritual).

68. Biological and social in man. The problem of anthroposociogenesis.

69. Personality and social values. The problem of freedom and responsibility of the individual.

70. Philosophy about the meaning and purpose of life: basic concepts.

71. Man and the problem of communication in modern society

72. The problem of death and immortality in the philosophy of medicine.

73. Philosophy as a worldview and methodology of medicine.

74. Philosophical categories and concepts of medicine: life, death, health, illness, norm, pathology.

26. Philosophy of Nietzsche (the concept of the will to power, the concept of the superman).

F. Nietzsche - an outstanding German philosopher, shocked his contemporary philosophical thought. The essence of his views is a hymn to a strong man. He considered himself a student of Schopenhauer and shared his irrationalism. The world is an eternal formation, an eternal stream in which everything returns to normal. A person should not be afraid of death, because the world repeats itself in time with minor changes. The world is life. basis life, according to Nietzsche, is the will to power or the desire for self-affirmation of all living things. Target philosophy is to help a person adapt to the world around him and realize himself - to assert himself.

In order to survive a person must be strong. It is this provision that explains Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity - the ideology of the weak - slaves, not masters ( life). Christianity preaches humility, compassion, patience, meekness, non-violence. However, these moral principles have not been accepted for a long time as a guide to action in society by those who really want to achieve something in life- and reaches. Christian morality is “the sum of the conditions for the preservation of poor, semi-successful and completely unsuccessful types of man,” writes F. Nietzsche. Christianity is dead (God is dead!), it is not capable - and never was able - to be a guide for people. European culture is a culture of pampered people, and Christianity is to blame for this.

F. Nietzsche calls for a "revaluation of values", for replacing the morality of slaves with the morality of masters - "supermen". The philosopher contrasts the "simple man" and the "aristocrats of the spirit." Ordinary people are worthless, weak, half-hearted, soft-bodied, unable to create and rule, they are slaves by nature and can only obey.

"Superman" is a creature of the highest biotype. He is absolutely free, is outside the generally accepted (Christian) moral norms, outside good and evil. His morality implies the art of commanding, breadth of will, truthfulness, fearlessness, hatred of cowardice and cowardice, confidence in the deceit of the common people, cruelty in overcoming the total lie of earthly existence. The "Superman" is neither a hero nor a great man. This is an absolutely new breed of people, which has not yet been in the world - the fruit of the development of all mankind, not some separate nation. The "Superman" will transform the future culture and morality of mankind, will give the peoples new myths instead of the old ones. The "weak" must perish and make way for a new generation of "superhumans".

Nietzsche opposes European rationalism, opposing feelings and instincts to it: reason is essentially insignificant, logic is absurd, because deals with frozen forms that contradict the dynamics life. There is no truth. Knowledge is always nothing more than a subjective interpretation of facts. A person "interprets" the big world, creating his own "small" world of illusions.

27. Western philosophy of the 20th century: main problems and directions.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there is a reassessment of values and a paradigm shift by philosophers, i.e. the nature (model) of the formulation of philosophical problems and their solutions. Classical philosophy - the philosophy of the New Age - is characterized by boundless faith in the power of the human mind, faith in social and scientific progress and the establishment, on the basis of the discovery of the universal laws of the development of nature and society, of man's dominance over nature, the creation of a society of social justice and changes in human nature itself. Since the second half of the 19th century, this type of thinking - the rationalistic paradigm - has been subjected to the most severe criticism and the transition to non-classical philosophy begins. The philosophy of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries refuses:

rationalism as the only way of philosophizing , recognizing reason as the basis of knowledge, behavior and activity of people;

rigid division of all philosophical schools and trends according to the principle: materialism or idealism;

from dogmatism in philosophy - an indispensable reference and reliance on authorities, from "party spirit" in philosophy

Mainfeatures of philosophyXX century:

Pluralism in philosophical thinking.

During this period, various directions and concepts:

More and more new objects of reality become the subject of study, which leads to the emergence of fundamentally new directions:

philosophy of culture, philosophy of politics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of science, etc.

Tolerance (tolerance) of modern philosophy. Different schools try not to enter into a sharp confrontation with each other.

Dialogue is the main way of interaction not only within one philosophical tradition, but also between the West and the East.

Anthropocentrism of modern philosophy - in the center of its ideas and reflections is a person, his essence, the meaning of his life and activity - freedom. Man is considered not one-sidedly, but in all its integrity and inconsistency. The question of the meaning of the existence of mankind as a whole, of the crisis of man and history, will be raised especially sharply.

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F. Nietzsche "The Will to Power"

1. Statement of the problem

2. Analysis of the book by F. Nietzsche "The Will to Power"

Sources

1. Statement of the problem

Interest in Nietzsche has not waned for the second century. And if for his contemporaries he was more likely a prophet of the spiritual crisis that had begun and the coming social catastrophes that shook Western civilization in the 20th century, then for us, living in a globalized world that is being built according to the Western model, Nietzsche, perhaps, is an exponent of the strong-willed beginning of a civilization that is outwardly successful. and dominant, but from the inside struck by unbelief and nihilism, which means weakening the will. Nietzsche's philosophy is ambiguous and enhances the crystallization of concepts and values. Civilization, which at this historical moment sets the tone for the development of the whole world, is trying to realize itself. And in this regard, Friedrich Nietzsche's passionately and strangely written book The Will to Power has not lost its poignancy.

It is all the more interesting for the Russian reader because for the first time in Russian, without censorship, the work was published in 2005. This "unfinished treatise" of Nietzsche existed only in sketches and was published after his death in the reconstruction of his sister Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast Nietzsche, F. Will to Power / Per. with him. - M.: Cultural Revolution, 2005. - 880 p. .

Nietzsche conceived this book of life in 1883 and actively worked on it until his tragic illness - insanity, which began six years later, and death in 1900.

The material of "The Will to Power", according to the plan of the philosopher himself (1887), is divided into four books, or rather, parts: "European Nihilism" (I), "Criticism of the Former Higher Values" (II), "The Principle of a New Evaluation" ( III), "Breed and Cultivation" (IV). The entire book contains 1,067 passages (although there have been editions containing almost 9,000 passages, such as the German academic edition, 1967). But through the mosaic of sketches and judgments, a strict concept emerges, "a system in aphorisms."

2. Analysis of the book by F. Nietzsche "The Will to Power"

So he tries to treat his sick, pampered eyelid. It is pessimism and relaxation, the philistine complacency of his contemporaries that he perceives as the decline and disease of culture. Life is growth, power, power, will in spite of obstacles. This means that they need to be overcome and the “will to power” revived. Nietzsche emphasizes that the will to power is the will to violence, to domination. But it is precisely the will to power that is not in the highest human values - in the commandments, as he believes, on the contrary, the values of degradation, nihilism prevail. And the thoughts that rule the world must be strong, says Nietzsche. It is difficult to object to this, although this condition is hardly sufficient for the ideas that rule the world.

In relation to human society and social life, power is one of the highest, often undeclared, values, but these are rather values of the second level, instrumental, since survival in society is connected not only with power, it is just one of the mechanisms. The will to power must have a goal and a vector of development. If this is a superman, as Nietzsche imagines, then we are talking about the cultivation of a power caste with a claim to change the nature of such a person, which is not new for history. But ambitions or claims will never replace essence.

According to Nietzsche, the general orderliness, intellectually observable and faceless, which has become a model of scientific knowledge, the desire for social and political equality, characteristic of contemporary Europe at the end of the 19th century, leads to a weakening of the vital forces of culture. The spirit of heroism and unpredictability disappears from it, as a result of which mediocrity triumphs, and the personality dissolves in the facelessness of the crowd. Nietzsche diagnoses the stages in the development of European culture that led it to a deplorable state as stages in the progressive development of nihilism.

Nietzsche himself defines nihilism as the denial of life and higher values. And if earlier nihilism meant the depreciation and denial of life in the name of higher values, such as God, then the modern era, according to Nietzsche, gives rise to a new form of nihilism - the denial of these previously affirmed higher values and replacing them with values "human, too human" (this is how one from Nietzsche's books). Morality replaces religion, as, for example, in the philosophy of Kant and in the Enlightenment in general; utility, progress, history take the place of divine institutions.

Nihilism for Nietzsche is not only the positivist spirit of nineteenth-century science, but a broader historical movement that affects the entire history of the West in recent centuries and is only manifested with particular force in positivism, pessimism and socialism. Nietzsche's interpretation of the very essence of this nihilism boils down to the short formula "God is dead." In Nietzsche's words we are confronted not with the expression of the personal convictions of an atheist, but with the penetrating statements of a prophet. "God is dead": this means that the Christian God, the God of Western metaphysics, is already a dead fiction of the mind, a "naked idea", an abstract meaning. At best, this God is a kind of idol, a kind of conditional “value”. Indeed, it does not affect the life of a European in any way, it does not at all give meaning to the existence of man, the world and history. In the West the place of God is empty: God is absence. This absence destroys all vital truth beyond decay and death and determines the content of European nihilism. Precisely because European metaphysics proposes an absolutization, a rationalistic acceptance of God, it prepares the possibility of a rationalistic denial of him. The death of God is the result of almost a thousand years of historical development of this absolutized and double-edged rationalism in the space of Western European civilization.

The death of God for Nietzsche is the main event of our time, first felt and fully understood by him. This event requires a new reassessment of all values, since the old values associated with the Christian God and the sphere of the supersensible have lost their meaning altogether. And now classically understood nihilism means liberation from former values, but for a new reassessment of values - a task that Nietzsche sets for his own philosophy. This means that the passive nihilism of disappointment in the values of the past must be replaced by an active nihilism of the growth of the power of the spirit and vitality, which strongly criticizes the old values and affirms new goals, values and perspectives. At the center of this affirmative nihilism, Nietzsche places his doctrine of the will to power and the superman.

Here, according to Nietzsche, the will to power supported by the initial impulse of life, devoid of any moral counterbalances, comes to the fore. "What well? Nietzsche asks, and he himself gives the answer: everything that increases in a person a sense of power, the will to power, power itself. What's wrong? Everything that comes from weakness."

Here it is necessary to clarify what Nietzsche means by "power". “Power” here does not at all mean the disposal of other people, this power is not political or social, but metaphysical, built consciously as a principle of life. The nature of the will to power, according to Nietzsche, is not simply to dominate, dispose or take (this would not at all require such a fundamental reassessment of all values), but to create and bestow.

The will to power is the conscious will to be intoxicated with life. It is the very mystery of life, the basic feature of all that exists. Everything that exists, insofar as it exists at all, and in the way it really is, is "will to power." And knowledge, if it has not died in the abstractions of reason and has not been torn away from life completely, is really only as an instrument of power. The laws of science are but useful fictions, and truth is a useful error. Nietzsche rejects Christianity as a religion that deliberately weakens life and opposes the "will to power", that is, as a religion directed against life and the laws of the universe, and therefore a religion (in the new, Nietzschean scale of values) immoral.

For Nietzsche, both the equality of people before God, affirmed by Christianity (life has created people unequal, because they have different strength of will to power), and religious humility (which again means the suppression of this will to power in oneself) are equally unacceptable. Nietzsche also rejects all kinds of socialist teachings, seeing in them "an uprising of slaves in morality." The place of the deceased God of the former culture must be replaced by a superman who despises the former moral values and asserts his boundless will to power. The image of the superman arises from the pages of Nietzsche's main work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), where Nietzsche puts into the mouth of the ancient Persian religious reformer stylized by him his innermost thoughts about the superman (of which Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a model). Zarathustra, the superman, is a "dancing star", eternal movement and becoming, devoid of the attributes of a stable being, he is pure will to power, the affirmation of life beyond truth and falsehood, beyond good and evil. In his last works, Nietzsche prophesies about the death of his contemporary civilization, about world wars and a new order of the world. And although Nietzsche's predictions seemed excessively pessimistic to his contemporaries, a kind of morbid imagination, many of them came true in the 20th century (suffice it to mention two world wars, the emergence of mass culture and a united Europe), and his philosophy influenced the entire European culture of the 20th century.

conclusions

At the same time, Nietzsche could not have known that his aristocratic construct - the superman - would be a convenient screen for "people from the crowd", faceless and weak, inferior and infringed, and therefore prone to violence and immoralism, inhumanity and cruelty. The Superman turned out to be the Inhuman, and not the God-Man.

Nietzsche wrote to G. Brandes that "the whole world will shudder" when they see his new book: "I am a real disaster." This is truly a book that explodes the established understanding of things. It contains an anticipation of the monstrous crisis and catastrophes of the 20th century, which at first occurred not in the socio-economic and political spheres, not in material existence, but in the minds and souls of people.

I think that perhaps the most terrible retribution for the "revaluation of values" and understanding of life, first of all, as the will to power, for its absolutization is the destruction of the soul and the descent from the mind - as a separate person (which happened to the author of the book), so and entire societies, and in the limit - all of humanity. For the hypertrophied will to power is akin to madness and leads to destruction, which is clearly confirmed by recent history.

Sources

1. Semenova, A.E. Will to power: [review] / A.E. Semenova // Power. - 2005. - No. 8. - S. 84-85.

2. Murberg, I.I. F. Nietzsche on modern man in the political space // Questions of Philosophy. - 2009. - No. 5. - S. 47-60.

3. Kosykhin, V.G. Metaphysics of Power and the Problem of Nihilism in European Philosophy // Power. - 2008. - No. 3. - S. 90-94.

4. Nietzsche, F. The will to power / Per. with him. - M.: Cultural Revolution, 2005. - 880 p.

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11. Friedrich Nietzsche: the will to power

Have you ever thought that you should praise the difficulties encountered on your life path and the occasional spiritual decline as the highest values in life? Do you prefer to think that the purpose of your life is rational thinking, calmness, independence, the ability to reflect on your problems and come to reasonable decisions? Do you think that philosophical books should only describe developing thought? Think again. Nietzsche's writings may seem harsh and harsh to you. For him, it cost nothing to call those who disagree with him "stupid". Nietzsche can turn your whole worldview upside down, but don't let him take over your mind! Consider his philosophy impartially, try to evaluate it from a critical standpoint.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Life

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Saxony (East Germany) in 1844. His father was a Lutheran pastor. He died when little Friedrich was 5 years old. The upbringing of the future philosopher was carried out by his mother, grandmother and aunts. A religious atmosphere has always reigned in the house.

The young Nietzsche attended the local gymnasium, or high school, from 1854 to 1858. He later attended a boarding school. Even in his youth, he began to admire the spirit of Greek culture; he was also interested in music and poetry.

In 1864, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn, where he studied philology. He later moved to the University of Leipzig. At this very time, under the influence of Schopenhauer and his atheism, Nietzsche ceases to consider himself a Christian. Soon he, despite the lack of a doctoral degree, was accepted as a professor of philosophy at the University of Basel. He delivered his first lecture in 1869. The following year was marked by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, during which Nietzsche served as a field hospital orderly. For some time he was seriously ill, but then returned to his work in Basel. During this period of time, Nietzsche became close to the composer Richard Wagner and became a frequent visitor to his house in the Vierwaldstet lake area.

Nietzsche's early works, such as the Untimely Meditations, were debatable and not recognized by the scientific community. The friendly relations between Nietzsche and Wagner gradually became cooler, as Nietzsche realized that the latter's works were "too Christian". Nietzsche's philosophical thought was never logically connected: earlier writings criticized Socrates' rational way of thinking, while later ones actually praised his rationalistic worldview and the ideas brought into public life by the French Enlightenment. However, it should be noted that the thoughts of most philosophers are characterized by development. Nietzsche began his philosophy by criticizing metaphysics and arguing that morality has a materialistic basis. Good and evil, according to Nietzsche, were originally only ways to indicate the social usefulness or harmfulness of certain human actions. It so happened that people have lost their idea of this basis, necessary for ethical judgments. From that moment on, they began to think of good and evil as absolutes.

Deteriorating health and disgust with the accepted order in 1879 forced Nietzsche to leave the university chair. From that moment on, his life became a constant search for a place to live, the most suitable for poor health. Nietzsche especially liked mountains. His work The Gay Science, published in 1882, spoke of Christianity as "the enemy of life." Nietzsche later developed the idea that all time is made up of cycles that repeat over and over again. He believed that everything that had already happened would inevitably happen again. This idea came to him like a revelation, which became his message to the whole world, and was recorded in the form of a statement by the Persian sage Zarathustra in the work “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (“Also sprach, Zarathustra”). Apparently, this is Nietzsche's most famous book, which contains his ideas about the eternal repetition of cycles, the Superman and the transvaluation of values. Nevertheless, this work seems to be only one of the stages in the development of Nietzsche's philosophy. This book is written in a declamatory and prophetic manner. The work "Beyond Good and Evil", published in 1886, more clearly outlines to us the very outline of Nietzsche's philosophical thoughts. This text is an introductory piece.

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