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This chapter argues that Nietzsche's conception of will to power underlies his explanations of moral values, and that its manifestations may be outward-directed or inward-directed, achieve genuine power or the feeling of power, and result in healthy or unhealthy states. In Genealogy II Nietzsche presents his historiographical principle concerning interpretation and origin, in which he implicates will to power: all interpretation is one thing exerting power over another, and Nietzsche blurs distinctions between natural and intentional explanation. The notion that the natural world is will to power is then discussed. Nietzsche does not propound a metaphysics of the world as thing in itself, but does explain all natural processes in terms of relations of dominance, in the human case the interaction of sub-personal drives or ‘under-wills’. Maudemarie Clark's reading of ‘the world as will to power’ as a projection of Nietzsche's values rather than a genuine assertion is examined and rejected.

This chapter develops the core idea that “the world is will to power” – what I call Nietzsche's “power ontology.” I give careful analyses of “will” and “power,” and clarify how he thinks these are things’ essence or being. I distinguish between two basic forms that will to power can take – the active and the reactive – which will lie at the root of his values. The chapter then shows how this notion of will to power grounds Nietzsche's conception of persons as systems or syntheses of such wills (or drives), as well as his distinction of three basic types of persons – master, slave, and overman – each clarified as a specific way such a system of drives can be organized.

Power now does the work that culture used to do. This is seen in the tendency toward the politicization of nearly everything. Politicization is most visibly manifested in the role ideology has come to play in public life, the well-established predisposition to interpret all of public life through the filter of partisan beliefs, values, ideals, and attachments. As a consequence, we find it difficult to think in ways to address public problems or issues in any way that is not political. Politicization means that the final arbiter within most of social life is the coercive power of the state. Our times amply demonstrate that it is far easier to force one’s will upon others through legal and political means than it is to persuade them or negotiate compromise with them. What adds pathos to this situation is the presence of ressentiment, defined by a combination of anger, envy, hate, rage, and revenge.

This chapter examines what links the seemingly conflicting, or even mutually exclusive, concepts of eternity and passing, and Paradise and its loss. To life as a cup running over, to life as divinity humanized, to human life marked by the effort to move out beyond everything human, to life flooded in a sunlight that is not human—to this irreducible aspect of human life Nietzsche applies the term overman, and the chapter once again returns to the character of Zarathustra in examining this concept. The chapter then turns to next concept that Nietzsche uses to characterize life—the will to power: “Where I found the living, there I found will to power.”

In contrast with views that attribute the biological utility of beliefs to their truth, Nietzsche maintains that their relative utility renders them proportionately more likely to be idiosyncratic expressions of species‐relative concerns. Nietzsche's sceptical ‘argument from utility’—the inference from the practical utility of beliefs to the improbability of their being metaphysically true—is examined and rejected. It is argued that Nietzsche is an early proponent of naturalized epistemology. His objections to the ‘best explanation’ defence of metaphysical realism are discussed. It emerges that the ‘evolutionary’ strand of thought is incompatible with his other sceptical arguments. The chapter pursues Nietzsche's doctrine that the ‘ruling drives’ representing the dominant manifestation of the will to power in an individual determine the standards for validation, evidence, and truth. The discussion proceeds to an examination of Nietzsche's remarks that the external world is created in a manner depending on the specific form of the will to power instantiated by the empirical subject.

Examines Nietzsche's anti‐essentialism (the denial of metaphysical truth) in the context of the metaphysics of the will to power, which posits an ontology of interactive and causally efficacious quanta of force characterized exclusively by relational properties. It is argued that this ontological model is marred by a fundamental incoherence. The concluding remarks touch upon the problem of relativism of truth and self‐reference. An attempt is made to situate the metaphysics of the will in the context of Nietzsche's whole philosophy.

Detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s later thought continues in a further chapter. His often-expressed hostility towards Darwinism is consistent with a preoccupation with themes that are central to the Darwinian tradition, such as the struggle for existence, adaptation, selection and ‘fitness’. Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘will to power’ signals a dramatic shift away from the hedonistic psychology he had championed throughout his partnership with Rée, and is also intended to provide the basis for a kind of natural selection, but one which is for individual exceptionality rather than for survival or reproduction.

This chapter examines Friedrich Nietzsche's metaphysics by addressing his justification of the will to power. It shows that the attribution of a metaphysics to Nietzsche is both textually and philosophically defensible because the will to power derives from Nietzsche's perspectivism. It discusses Nietzsche's argument that the will to power is a comprehensive perspective that unifies opposing points of view rather than reducing all explanation to one of them.

Chapter 3 explores Nietzsche’s concept of the contest. His early essay on Homer’s Contest shows that the contest is a social institution that restrains and limits violence, and thus is comparable to Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition that culminates mastery and servitude. The contest is oriented towards competition, but not in order to produce a winner and a loser, or victor and vanquished. The guiding idea is that no one should be the best. The idea is that contestation itself is intrinsically worthwhile because it drives the competitors to greater levels of excellence. This assumes that the other has an affirmative rather than a merely negative significance. The contest is a social institution, grounded in an intersubjectively constituted common will, even though it is justified principally by instrumental considerations about producing greater individual excellence. The chapter examines Lawrence Hatab’s claim that inherent in the contest is an agonistic view of the will to power itself, and the germ of a theory of affirmative, noble community, one that has potential convergences with Hegel’s concepts of recognition and ethical life.

Nietzsche is obviously a very passionate philosopher. He also has a good deal to say about the passions. In particular, he distinguished between two sorts of passions, life-enhancing and life-stultifying. For good reason, he was cited by Freud and Adler as the progenitor of “Depth Psychology.” I explore Nietzsche views on emotions and offer a defense of the passions. I suggest that Nietzsche anticipates not only Freud but contemporary physiological theories of emotion. I also discuss Nietzsche’s conception of the “Will to Power” suggesting that the idea is both exaggerated in Nietzsche interpretation and disastrous in terms of Nietzsche’s own aims. I do defend a version of the will to power as the passionate life.

This chapter uses a roughly Nietzschean account of agency to argue that action has a second constitutive aim: power. It begins by offering a novel interpretation of Nietzsche’s obscure claim that all actions manifest, and are to be evaluated in terms of, “will to power.” In particular, it argues that Nietzsche’s will to power thesis can be read as a version of constitutivism. This Nietzschean version of constitutivism is based on a series of subtle claims about the psychology of willing and the nature of satisfaction, which jointly imply that all actions aim at encountering and overcoming resistance (this is what Nietzsche means by “will to power”). After arguing that we should accept the Nietzschean points about willing and satisfaction, the chapter concludes that action constitutively aims at power.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche uses the title character as a medium for exploring the project of a cultural founder or creator. Zarathustra’s project fundamentally differs from that of Free Spirits, since the Free Spirit project is in the first place one of self-cultivation, whereas Zarathustra’s project is (or begins as) one of cultivating broader human community. The motivating force that draws Zarathustra into engagement with the broad swath of humanity is his defining trait of love. Zarathustra’s love is not a romantic love that finds satisfaction in a particular person, but it is a kind of neediness which requires others for its fulfillment (others whom it can benefit through its creative activity). The drama of the work consists of Zarathustra’s attempt to fulfill this need (or determine whether it can be fulfilled). Zarathustra's self-understanding therefore evolves over the course of his journey, as he is forced to wrestle the question of how (or whether) his need for love can be made compatible with truth. On this reading, the primary function of the work's famous doctrines of the will to power and the eternal return is to drive forward Zarathustra's drama of evolving self-understanding.

Although there are several recognizable themes in Nietzsche's discussion of freedom (such as independence from societal pressures and some sort of self-rule or individual sovereignty), at many places he seems especially interested in the issue of ‘self-overcoming’. In these passages he considers freedom a kind of perpetual self-overcoming. Freedom is not a metaphysical capacity to have done otherwise, nor the unconstrained expression of one's identity, but: (i) a psychological self-relation, a relation to one's own drives, desires, commitments, etc; (ii) a difficult achievement that depends neither on force of will or self-knowledge, or reflective endorsement alone; (iii) a paradoxical form of mindedness, at once affirmative and negative, whole-hearted and ironic (a ‘tension of the spirit’); and (iv) a form of self-mastery or an expression of the ‘will to power’, very unlike what traditional interpretations ascribe to Nietzsche. This chapter argues against literary self-creation models of this self-relation, and focuses attention on the underlying issue in all the relevant passages: the proper status of Nietzschean ‘psychology’, and why Nietzsche considers such a psychology the new ‘queen of the sciences’.

The previous chapter argued that action has a constitutive aim of power. To aim at power is to aim at encountering and overcoming resistance. This chapter explains how the constitutive aim of power generates normative conclusions about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to value. The chapter also considers the way in which the constitutive aim of power interacts with the constitutive aim of agential activity. It argues that the bipartite structure of this constitutivist theory enables it to overcome two important objections. The first objection is this: why should we treat inescapable tendencies as normative rather than as deplorable accidents? The second objection is this: even if we are committed to aiming at some end, why should we strive to fulfill this aim maximally?

The most virtuous life need not be the life of calm tranquility, peace of mind, and merely intellectual contemplation. There is also a good life to be had that is defined by emotions, by impassioned engagements and quests, by embracing affections, by constant striving, even frenzy, typified by insatiability and impossible passions. So, too, the virtues are not all about moderation. Not all passions are irrational, out of control, or “violent.” A life without passion would be a life barely worth living.