Episode #091 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is about Nietzsche and his often-misinterpreted notion of the will to power. I hope you love the show today.

So, last episode we talked a lot about what we shouldn’t be doing. We talked about Nietzsche. We talked about his psychological analysis of the average person and how easy it is to convince yourself to believe in something or to do something that isn’t the most accurate, necessarily, but nonetheless it fills some sort of deep psychological void that you may have. But instead of talking about what you shouldn’t be doing, let’s talk about what you should be going.

And a pretty good introspective launching point for having this discussion is to ask yourself the following question: Why do you do what you do? What is the primary psychological motivation for whatever it is that you do? When you’re at any given decision point, there’s a million different things you could do. What are you specifically trying to accomplish when you’re choosing the one you’re actually going to do? Well, there’s a lot of different answers to this. A really common one when you talk to people, a very Aristotelian approach to the question, is that whenever somebody’s doing something, they ultimately are doing it because they think it’s going to bring them happiness. Whatever you’re doing, ultimately, somewhere deep down you believe that it will make you happy.

Now, some people argue with this. “No, that’s not me! No. No, forget my happiness. My life is about sacrifice. My life is about serving other people. I have 11 children. I volunteer down at the soup kitchen. In fact, I’ll often find myself just driving around the city looking for old ladies standing by a busy intersection so I can help them cross the street. In fact, I don’t even care if they need to cross the street. I’ll make them cross the street. That’s what I do with my life.” Now, a lot of people would argue back to that, “Well, no matter how much pain you’re putting yourself through on behalf of others, ultimately, you’re just doing it because it brings you some sort of positive emotional state for having done it. In other words, you did it because it makes you happy in some way.”

But then there’s people that would argue against that. They would say, “Sure, on the surface, that seems to hold water. But if people really are just doing things because it makes them happy, why do we see people so often engaging in behaviors that they know for certain are going to make them unhappy, but they do it anyway?”  I’m talking about things like guilt or jealousy or hate for somebody else. I mean, there’s no way somebody sits around and says to themself, “Ah, look at Facebook today. Oh! My ex-girlfriend got a new boyfriend. Hm, sure didn’t waste any time, did she? She seems to be really crushed like she said, doesn’t she?! You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to sit around and resent the two of them for weeks, wallowing in my own misery. And I’m going to do this because it makes me happy.”

Nobody says that. So why do they do it? Well, some people would say—a very Schopenhauer approach to things—that the reason there is this discrepancy is because people aren’t doing things because it makes them happy, necessarily. Ultimately, if you look at people’s behavior closely enough, it all comes down to survival, a will to life. The process of guilt or the process of jealousy—these are examples of processes that don’t make us feel amazing in the moment that we’re experiencing them, but they definitely give us very real benefits in terms of survival.

For example, if for millions of years you lived in a very hunter-gatherer, tribal setting as human beings seemed to have lived—and, by the way, look, I’m not trying to alienate anyone by saying that. I concede. The archeological record very well may have been an elaborate ruse by God to get you to question whether you believe in him or not, alright? But let’s just pretend that we did live in these tribes. These psychological processes serve a very useful function in terms of survival. In these tribal settings where your survival’s contingent upon being a member of this tribe, if the whole tribe works all day to make something like a coffee table, and at the end of the day you walk past the coffee table, you stub your pinky toe on it, and you ruin it; that horrible feeling of guilt is probably going to get you to think twice and be careful whenever you’re around coffee tables in the future. Because if you didn’t have that feeling of guilt, you might break another one the next day, and then another one the next day. Point is, eventually, they’re not letting you around their coffee tables anymore. You’re going to be out in the middle of the woods trying to make a shelter out of some twigs and leaves. This process of guilt, just like many other processes that we don’t enjoy in the moment, often help us survive.

Then, there’s other people that would say—what Nietzsche would say is that survival doesn’t seem to really explain all the reasons why people do stuff. I mean, if we really were just making choices based on what’s going to ensure our survival, why does anybody go skydiving? Why does anybody drive a car? We see it in the animal kingdom. If the goal truly was just ensuring our survival at all costs, why would an animal ever take an unnecessary risk? Why wouldn’t we just see them securing food and water and then staying inside of a little cul-de-sac that they never venture out of for fear of dying? No, it seems to be more complex than that, to Nietzsche.

And there’s tons of answers to this question that we could talk about. But Nietzsche would say, no, it’s not a will to happiness. It’s not a will to life. We do what we do as a pursuit towards a will to power. We’re all looking for power. Now, real quick, power—alright, once again, one of these really loaded words that everybody’s going to come to the episode with their own conditioned definitions of. What does he mean by power? Well, I’ll tell you what he's not talking about. He’s not talking about electrical power. He’s not talking about militaristic power, necessarily. He’s not talking about getting more power like in the gym or something, lifting the heavy plates, working on your fitness. The best way I’ve ever seen it put is that power is becoming who you truly are. Self-expression is how it’s often put, not being enslaved by things. But this whole notion’s actually pretty nuanced.

So, to start to clarify what Nietzsche’s talking about here, let’s talk about what he means by being enslaved. And maybe a good place to start doing that is to look at the animal kingdom. Make no mistake, we as human beings are a part of this animal kingdom. Yeah, we may have these cordoned-off areas that we live in with these concrete streets and buildings where all the buffalo aren’t going to come and attack you. You got to watch out for those, by the way. But, despite that, we are still a part of this process of life. We are part of an ecosystem. And when you take a step back and you look at that process that we’re all a part of, how does life behave typically? Well, a bear or a frog or trees and plants—these things are all fueled by a will to power. Their aim is to express themselves fully, that self-expression often being to improve the quality of their life, to harness control over certain variables that might make their situation better or worse. If an animal’s out in the middle of the woods and it’s barely scraping by an existence, there isn’t some wave of satisfaction that washes over them because they’re surviving. No, they try to improve their circumstances even if it means taking risks.

Nietzsche says, we’re the same way. And it shouldn’t be a surprise to us that we’re the same way. The thing with us is, we just make things a lot more complicated than a bear does. See, we have these brains, these brains that allow us to consider all kinds of different options, right? They allow us to make agreements with each other. We can form alliances for peace. We can be cool to each other. But they also allow us to do the opposite, right? Horrible things. Not only do these brains magnify all the possibilities of the sick ideas we can come up with for how to enslave other people or things around us, but they also allow us to do it in tricky, covert ways, ways that we can often convince other people are either perfectly justifiable or good for the person that’s being enslaved.

But here’s the thing, regardless of what side of this equation you fall on—whether you’re enslaving people or you’re helping old ladies across the street—think about this: both of these things are motivated by a will to power. Both of these things are acts of self-expression. We’re going to see a lot of this with Nietzsche. He talks about how there’s tons of examples of behaviors that we often see as opposites, but when you take a closer look at them, they start to look like the same mental process manifesting itself in two different ways: things like shame and pride or arrogance and self-deprecation. These things when you look at them start to look like two sides of the same coin. Needless to say, he’s a huge fan of Heraclitus.

Now, there’s a lot of different interpretations of Nietzsche, not only because he was highly controversial, not only because he tends to contradict himself a lot throughout his work, but even just because after he died his sister took over his intellectual estate. And when she did that, she thought it would be a good idea to tweak a few nobs over here, turn a few dials over there so that his thinking more corresponded with her Nazi sensibilities. This is the reason a lot of people have misinterpreted Nietzsche’s philosophy over the years as a kind of justification for the Third Reich. But of all the misinterpretations of Nietzsche, probably the most interesting, or at least thought provoking, is this concept of the will to power and how far it extends.

Some people would say that Nietzsche believed that this will to power not only explains the motivations behind human behavior but that it also extends onto the universe as a whole. They’d say that this will to power is the metaphysical foundation upon which Nietzsche builds all the rest of his philosophy, that everything in the universe is ultimately governed by this notion of a will to power. It’s actually a popular way that scientists were thinking about the universe during the time he was alive, the general idea being that physical stuff—like atoms combined to make molecules combined to make matter—these things aren’t the fundamental building blocks of what exists, but that there may be some underlying force, some unseen thing that physical matter is just one manifestation of.

For example, if you’re out in the backyard having a barbecue and you light up the charcoal, you cook the food, you come back in a couple hours, the charcoal’s gone, where did that charcoal go? What are you a magician? No. No, you’re not. No, the carbon that was in the charcoal was converted into heat energy. Physical matter as we often see it now is sort of a savings account for energy. It’s not that what made up the charcoal no longer exists; it’s just flying around out there in the sky after being converted into heat energy. This is an example of how something else like energy can be an underlying building block of things while physical matter is just one manifestation of it. Now, some people would say that Nietzsche is using this concept of the will to power as a similar sort of unseen thing that can explain how everything behaves in the universe—everything from people to supernovas to that big, red, terrifying storm that is wreaking havoc on the surface of Jupiter. All these things are just various highly subjective examples of this will to power.

Now, I don’t think this is what he was saying. I think most people don’t think this is what he was saying. For one thing, Nietzsche spends a lot of his work rebuking unverifiable speculation like this. Seems kind of weird he would all of a sudden come up with one of his own. Though, people that read him the other way would point to his undying skepticism and say that even he would see this as just a mere interpretation of things. It still is kind of weird. Also, he never actually wrote about this metaphysical will to power in any formal philosophical work of his. He really only mentions it in his personal writing, and whenever he does, he sort of softens it and frames it as kind of like a fun thought experiment—hey, guys, what if this were true? What if, right?

Regardless of what interpretation is correct, thought, think about what this means if it’s true. What if the mysterious foundations for why life behaves the way that it does is the same foundation for why everything in the entire universe behaves the way that it does? In other words, because we as human beings are things in this universe not unlike stars or distant nebulas, is it possible that we can look really closely at the nature of our own experience and potentially learn something awesome about the nature of everything else out there? Do we have access to the secrets of the universe right in front of us right now; we’re just not looking at it correctly? I think it’s safe to say that Nietzsche would have thought this was a really interesting thing that we can all at least think about.

But what all parties that interpret Nietzsche seem to agree upon is how important this concept of the will to power is when understanding why people do what they do. See, that’s the thing. The will to power is not a single thing that you can point to. It’s not even a single set of behaviors. It could truly be anything. I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings about the will to power. I think people hear the word “power,” and they conflate it with their own definition of power. They think, “Power, oh yeah, that’s going out there and making waves in the world. That’s starting a business. That’s expanding to 300 locations. That’s having the GDP of a small country. That’s power.” But power could just as easily be, you know, “All I need is my truck, my wife, some muskrats to shoot, and I’m fine.”

Remember, because the will to power is just becoming who you truly are. It’s self-expression. Both those people I just referenced have overcome a lot of stuff. Big word for Nietzsche, by the way, self-overcoming. Both those people have overcome all sorts of various things in the external world that may have enslaved them and made them not capable of fully expressing themselves. What are these things that they need to overcome? Well, again, if you’re a bear out in the middle of the woods and you want to exercise your will to power and improve your lot in life, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that there are certain things that you have to overcome. Maybe it’s environmental conditions. Maybe it’s a scarcity of food. Maybe you’re being hunted by a predatory buffalo or two. Again, you got to watch out for those. Whatever it is, there are very real things that you need to overcome out there, right?

Well, just like that bear, we as human beings have things that we need to overcome as well. And just like I said before, not only do we got to worry about predatory buffalos, we got to worry about all the different creative ideas, all the ideas that other human beings have come up with over the years that either deliberately or by accident enslave other human beings—sort of covert relics of our culture that often keep people enslaved.

So, for the sake of clarity, let’s just recap this for a second. To Nietzsche, the primary psychological motivation for why people do what they do is an insatiable desire for power, power meaning becoming who you truly are, or uninhibited self-expression. But in order to reach that state of self-expression, a sad fact of the world is that there are tons of ideas that are conditioned into us throughout our lives that we need to overcome in order to be our true self. Now, I could probably talk for an entire episode about all these different things that we need to overcome. I guess I’ll probably do that next episode, not this one. I can’t talk about it today.

See, because we’ve arrived at a bit of a crossroads in Nietzsche’s philosophy. “Two roads diverged in yellow wood.” And to be able to fully understand the next episode, we got to understand a little bit more about this will to power and what it means for us. The good news, though, is that this other road diverged in yellow wood—the one we’re going to be talking about right now—is, in my opinion, the most profound idea in all of Nietzsche’s philosophy. But it’s funny, despite it being such a special idea, it all starts with something that’s actually very simple, something we’ve probably talked about a hundred times on this show over the years.

See, because one thing that naturally follows if you are an individual agent navigating this universe, exerting your will to power, is that everyone and everything else is also existing in this universe exerting their will to power. And when you have all these different individual wills to power interacting with one another, the unfortunate reality is that all of our aims don’t always align. In fact, they often directly contradict each other. Your will to power could be directly sabotaging somebody else’s will to power and vice versa.

Now, I realize this isn’t a breakthrough concept here. Let’s just put it in real-world terms. You don’t always get what you want in this life. The extension of that is, sometimes really bad things are just going to happen to you. Each and every person alive, everybody listening to this goes through pain and hardship all the time. We don’t have total control. We don’t have control over whether our boss irrationally decides to fire us one day. We don’t have control over whether that guy cuts us off in traffic. And it’s not just people. We don’t have control over the universe. You don’t have control over whether some gravitational anomaly sends Halley’s Comet plummeting towards earth. And it plummets towards earth in a fiery ball; it hits the exact spot that your mom and dad were riding through the park on their tandem scooter together. That’d be horrible, wouldn’t it? Bad stuff happens. We don’t have total control over the external world.

Now, this idea that we have no ultimate control over the external world, this is nothing new. This has been echoed all throughout the cannon of philosophy. And historically, when philosophers have tried to figure out what the solution to this problem is, 99% of the time, they’ve arrived at some variation of the same idea, the idea that you can’t control the external world; all you can ever hope to control is the internal world—the way that you interpret that external world, the ways you frame your existence, the way you respond and adapt to whatever happened externally. Tons of examples of this: Buddhism, Vedism, stoicism, Epicureanism. Montaigne spoke a lot about it. Point is, we have dozens and dozens of examples all throughout history of schools of thought that say that when you realize you can’t control the external world, you should focus on strengthening your internal world.

Now, the same way you strengthen a muscle by exercising, you strengthen your mind by doing any number of mental exercises. It could be mindfulness meditation, lovingkindness, premeditated pessimism, visualization. All of these are different tactics to change your perspective of the world and remove yourself of these earthly attachments, remove yourself of all these things in the external world that you place so much value on the outcome of that you ultimately have no control over, the ultimate goal being in many of these practices to arrive at some sage-like state, whether that’s enlightenment, whether that’s stoic apatheia. Either way, it’s a state where you’ve arrived at complete acceptance of your lack of control over things in the external world, a state where you’ve removed yourself of all of your earthly attachments.

Now, even if you practice these disciplines and never achieve this sage-like state, you’re still going to have a greater level of acceptance of your lack of control than somebody who’s never trained their mind before. And that’s great. But if you eventually train for many, many years, the fifth degree black belt when you’re training in these disciplines is ultimately to have such a strong internal game that you reach a level so devoid of earthly attachments—people throughout history have talked about it again and again—they say that you can reach a state where you can literally watch your firstborn child die a horrific death right in front of you and not bat an eyelash about it. That’s how much acceptance a sage would have of their lack of control over what happens to them. You need not suffer when bad things happen to you. Pain is certain; suffering is optional.

Now, Nietzsche would say to all this, hey, good on you if you can do that. Congratulations, you’ve done it. You are completely detached from the world. Nice job. But the flipside to that—the flipside to being completely detached from your firstborn child being brutally slaughtered in front of you is that you’re also completely detached from when your firstborn child smiles at you for the first time. Nietzsche would ask, why is being completely detached from the world the pinnacle of being a human being? Why is going up to the mountains for 30 years, coming down wearing an orange trash bag, telling everybody about how detached you are—why is that something to strive for?

Nietzsche would say, this isn’t how people actually experience the world. Fact is, we are attached to things in the external world. Yeah, we can’t ever have ultimate control over what happens to us. There’s always going to be the pain that the world throws your way. But why not have a different strategy? Why not work as hard as you possibly can to become as powerful as you can and have as much control over your circumstances as possible?

Think of the bear in the woods. When the bear wants more control over its circumstances, when it wants to prevent other animal’s wills from interfering with its will, should the bear just meditate day and night trying to remove itself from all these earthly attachments that it has? Or would you say no? No, exert your will to power. Go out and get what you want, Mr. Bear. Well, if that’s the case, why should we have the opposite approach? Why should we train our minds for 30 years just so we can accept how powerless we are over our circumstances?

Nietzsche would say, no, control your circumstances, or at least try. Work tirelessly. Exert your will to power and rise above those circumstances. Sure, you can’t ultimately control everything. You can’t control with certainty whether you’re going to lose your job or not. But I think he’d say, if two different people with the exact same job really wanted to keep their job—you know, they both had this earthly attachment to their job—it’s not that controversial to say that the person that goes in early and stays late, the person that gives 110% effort every day, constantly trying to improve, constantly cordial to their fellow employees—that person’s probably a lot less likely to lose their job when the economy tanks than the person that just mails it in every day, goes home and meditates in preparation for when they lose their job.

To see life as a constant struggle for contentment with what we already have, to Nietzsche, is to deny what kinds of creatures we actually are. Whether we like what it says about us or not, we’re always wanting more power, whatever that means to us. When you get your dream car, sure, it feels great to drive around in it and feel cool for a few weeks. But eventually, after five or six shopping carts get slammed into it, eventually it just becomes your car. Then inevitably there’s a new car that you want. Now, oftentimes we’re told to reject this idea. You should just be happy with what you have.

Nietzsche would say, instead of rejecting this fact and trying to spend the rest of your life meditating the evil away, why not embrace it? He says that in the same way that you would look at the bear trying to improve its life out in the woods, and you would implore that bear not just to scrape by, you would implore it to actively fight to improve its life even if that means taking risks, Nietzsche says that we should look at our lives the same way. In a world where so many people take the path of least resistance, so many people spend their lives talking about all the stuff they’re going to do— “Oh, I’m going to travel the world.” “I’m going to start my own clothing line.” “I’m going to be a celebrity dog whisperer.” So many people make all these grandiose claims about what they’re going to do, but how many of them actually do it? And if the number’s low, why is it so low? Why don’t they do it?

Nietzsche would say the reason why is because the vast, vast majority of people are just mediocre people. They never really try that hard. And the reason they never take action on any of these things that they say they want to do—it comes from one of two places. It’s either fear or laziness. But Nietzsche would say, he’s not writing his philosophy for those people. He’s not writing his philosophy for the masses. He’s writing it for that small, small percentage of people that are actually going to try, the ones that want true fulfilment and happiness out of life. And in his eyes, one of the worst things we can ever do is to let fear of failure ragdoll us around for the rest of our lives.

The only way to achieve the highest level of happiness—not unlike the bear out in the woods—is to take calculated risks, to live dangerously. He says, “For—believe me—the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it.” In other words, embrace the danger. Embrace the risk as a catalyst for the best life possible.

But I guess the most important thing that we should learn to embrace, to Nietzsche, is pain. Pain. Let me explain what he means by this, because I think a lot of people at this point in the conversation often say, “Okay, I get it. I get it. Nietzsche’s taking the opposite approach. Instead of training for years to be able to learn to accept when things don’t go our way, train for years to be able to have as much control over the things that matter to you as possible. But what about when things don’t go your way, Nietzsche? What about when hardship hits you like a freight train, Nietzsche? And here you are, this arrogant little human with absolutely zero means of quelling all the suffering that’s going to be coming along with that pain. Pain is a certainty in this life. It doesn’t bother you that you were completely untrained when it comes to accepting it?”

Nietzsche would say, no. You just said it right there. Pain is a certainty in this existence. Look, there is a 0.0% chance that you’re going to get to the end of your life without experiencing a pretty significant amount of pain. It seems certain, alright? It seems to be an inevitable part of human existence that you will experience pain. But what do people typically do when they’re faced with that reality? They run from the pain. They spend their entire lives trying to be as comfortable as they possibly can. They nerf their life.

But instead of running from the pain, instead of running from the suffering that comes along with that pain, Nietzsche would want us to ask, what purpose does that pain serve to us? Pain and hardship is nothing to run from. It’s the only way that we grow as people. He talks about a mountain. He says, to climb a mountain is rife with all of its own struggles, right? It’s horrible. For hours and hours you’re short of breath, muscles burning, fighting your way up the side of this mountain, all the while experiencing tons of pain and hardship along the way. But it’s only from the top of that mountain that you can see the most beautiful views that life has to offer.

This is a metaphor for having the best life you can. Just like climbing a physical mountain, the only way we’re ever going to experience the most fulfilling and happy life we can is by going through intense hardship, hard work, and pain in whatever endeavors we choose. He says, there seems to be a direct relationship between the intensity of the lows that you’ve experienced and the intensity of the highs that you’re capable of achieving.

Like, have you ever gotten really good at something? You ever trained super hard, put yourself through an immeasurable amount of discomfort solely in the interest of mastering something? Well, much like climbing the mountain, Nietzsche would say that by putting yourself through all that pain over the years, by surmounting all that hardship, the gratification that you feel for having accomplished your goals, that great feeling, that’s kind of like the great feeling you get by summiting a mountain. And here’s the other thing, it’s only people that have the courage to summit that mountain that will ever get to see that view.

Nietzsche knew a lot about pain. He contracted syphilis young. He didn’t ever have much money. He spent most of his life in extreme loneliness. He fell madly in love with multiple women, asked them to marry him. They said no. But despite all that, Nietzsche didn’t feel sorry for himself. In fact, if anything, crazy enough, he may have felt guilty for having so many more opportunities for growth than most of the other people around him. He seriously thought having this sort of life wrought by pain was a privilege. He wished it upon his closest friends and family. He said, “To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”

So, instead of running from pain, instead of trying to train ourselves to not be bothered by it, we should embrace the pain. We should learn to see it for what it truly is: an opportunity to become the greatest person we can possibly be. Nietzsche would say, oftentimes it’s really easy to just manufacture the most comfortable life you possibly can. When you’re faced with a mountain to climb, you ride a pony to the top of it. When you’re faced with the hard reality that the universe may not have a meaning for you, look for eternity in some other world, and try to forget about this one. But Nietzsche would say, maybe it’s useful for us to look for eternity in this world.

Nietzsche says, try to imagine your life like this. Take a good look at your life for a second. Imagine if after you die you have to live this same exact life that you just lived down to the smallest detail exactly the same way over and over again for the rest of time. Imagine simply by doing something you are essentially sentencing yourself to an eternity of making that decision over and over again. If that decision causes you suffering, you’re sentencing yourself to an eternity of suffering. If it causes you joy, an eternity of joy. In that world, when you look at your life in that way, how precious does every decision that you make during your limited time here become?

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.