By Shai Tubali
If we could take the deepest and most intense look into our psyche, in search of its one driving force, what would we see at the core? What would a perception that has managed to pierce through all the defenses and sophistications of the mind unveil as the spring from which our entire streams of psychological motions diverge and rush onwards? Is there one force out of which the manifold psychological behaviors and actions of man come into being – one source for all man’s desires and fears, pains and torments, ecstasies and elevations, attractions and repulsions, beliefs and yearnings?
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed with all his heart that he had chanced upon such a force. Ecstatically inspired, he therefore dedicated a large portion of his tireless studies and writings to establish this through philosophical, biological and psychological arguments and evidence.
As Nietzsche’s treatises deepened and matured, the notion of a unitary essential drive that encompasses not only the human psyche but the entire dynamics of life and the cosmos crystallized in his mind. Nietzsche was thrilled to tap into a force that enkindles every organism on the planet and even the silent matter of the universe; a particular force that makes atoms bind to form molecules as well as makes us react and behave the way we react and behave. This element, he claimed, activates everything and the human, being a product of natural evolution, cannot be outside of its dominion. This fundamental proved to be, as literary scholar Jurgen Nirad puts it, Nietzsche’s principal statement about life and the world, and accordingly the pivot of the comprehensive theory towards which he strove.
About sixty years before Nietzsche first referred to his newly discovered unitary driving force, his predecessor and mentor, another German philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer, had too set before him the mission to decode the mystery of life’s primordial motive. Schopenhauer, probably more melancholic than ecstatic, had formulated the idea, inspired by the forefather of Buddhism Gautama the Buddha, that the one primordial desire behind the whole of life is the will to live, the will for self-preservation and continuity. To him, this had been an actual metaphysical, all-directing element. Naturally, this will gives rise to desires that bring about suffering to their possessors. Since life is will, and will is suffering, there’s no real escape from this predicament. The only ‘way out’ is for man to maintain a rather ascetic way of living, as much as he can, and strive to attain the state of the ‘negation of will’.
In many respects, Nietzsche’s own drive was the outcome of his inner dialogue and argument with Schopenhauer. At first Nietzsche had admired Schopenhauer’s image and stance, and even dedicated an entire essay to him in his Untimely Meditations, entitled ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’. However, with the passing of time he could no longer accept what he realized to be an extremely limited view of the force of life. In 1880 he began to speak of the ‘desire for power’ in his The Wanderer and his Shadow, then in Daybreak, and then in a more expanded form, in The Gay Science. In Beyond Good and Evil he goes as far as warning against the metaphysical notion of the will to live: Physiologists should think again before positing the drive to self-preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing wants above all to vent its strength – life itself is the will to power: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it. In short, here as everywhere be on your guard against superfluous teleological principles! – such as is the drive to self-preservation.
As we can see, Nietzsche deliberately replaced the ‘will to live’ with the ‘will to power’, as if to emphasize the overcoming of his mentor’s previous statement. For him, the struggle for existence was more than just a simple Darwinian survival; it was, as the 19th century evolutionary anti-Darwinist William Rolph put it, a struggle for the increase of life and not merely a struggle for life. In his Gay Science Nietzsche powerfully writes: The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation… In nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the lifewill. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power – in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life.
Nietzsche’s most elementary logic in negating the will to live is that it simply makes no sense that an organism would wish only to survive, since it is already alive. As soon as it comes into being, based on the already existing grounds of being alive, it wants so much more – more life, more of itself, more strength and more control. Everyone living already survives, and when an organism only wishes to survive this means that its will has been dramatically reduced: this is its most minimal state and greatest level of weakening – in other words, the will to power in its most limited form.
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Shai Tubali is a published author and international speaker who specializes in the field of self-transformation. He lives in Germany. The Journey to Inner Power is published by Changemakers Books, ISBN: 978-1-78279-713-5 (Paperback) £11.99 $20.95, EISBN: 978-1-78279-712-8 (eBook) £6.99 $9.99.