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Will to Power As the Self-Overcoming of Will to Truth

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Will to Power As the Self-Overcoming of Will to Truth WILL TO POWER AS THE SELF-OVERCOMING OF WILL TO TRUTH By Adam Turk Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy December, 2012 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Charles Scott Professor David Wood Professor Lisa Guenther Professor Michael Hodges Professor Ellen Armour Copyright © 2012 by Adam Turk All Rights Reserved ii To Mom, Dad, Mariko, and Natania iii Acknowledgments I would like to begin by thanking the members of my committee for their thoughtful engagement with this project and for their questions which even now continue to motivate new reflections on Nietzsche as well as on my broader philosophical engagements with the world. I would like to specially name David Wood, Michael Hodges, and Lisa Guenther as teachers and thinkers I repeatedly sought out in my graduate years. I also thank Daniel Conway for first introducing me to Nietzsche as an undergraduate. I want to give special thanks to Charles Scott for his insightfulness, generosity, and encouragement during his direction of this dissertation. Beyond his professional help, I consider him a philosophical role model and am most grateful for his keen eye (not unlike Zarathustra’s) for new affirmative possibilities in thinking and living. Finally, I owe my greatest gratitude to my family – both the one into which I was born and the one that I have found. Their love provides me with a sense of being at home in the world from which I can venture into the philosophical wilds. Their wisdom is an infinite reminder of why I have taken up the task of philosophy. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Dedication ......................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iv List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction .................................................................................................................... viii Chapter I. THE MEANING OF “NOBLE” AND “SLAVE” ........................................................ 1 Concurrence of Noble Signs of Power and Esteem ................................................ 4 The Noble as Natural, Affective, and Instinctual ................................................. 11 The Noble Economy of Suffering ......................................................................... 16 The Interior Domain of Value............................................................................... 26 The Temporal Domain of Value ........................................................................... 32 The Slavish Economy of Suffering ....................................................................... 36 II. SLAVE MORALITY AS WILL TO TRUTH ............................................................ 39 The Bad Conscience and the Relationship between Debt and Guilt .................... 41 The Primeval Relation .............................................................................. 43 The Noble Relation ................................................................................... 45 The Slavish Relation ................................................................................. 46 The Sovereign Individual as Temporalized Exteriority ........................................ 48 The Evangel as Immediate Interiority................................................................... 51 The Cultivation of Ressentiment and the Ascetic Priest ....................................... 55 The Innocent Methods of the Ascetic Priest ............................................. 57 The Guilty Methods of the Ascetic Priest ................................................. 59 The Integrated Projection of the Ascetic Ideal ......................................... 62 Masks of the Will to Truth .................................................................................... 67 v III. THE SELF-OVERCOMING OF WILL TO TRUTH ............................................... 72 Anachronisms of the Ascetic Ideal ....................................................................... 75 Contemporary Expressions of the Ascetic Ideal ................................................... 81 Wagner and the Artist ............................................................................... 82 Schopenhauer and the Philosopher ........................................................... 85 Schopenhauer’s Mask ............................................................................... 87 The Overcoming of Christianity as Dogma by Christianity as Morality .............. 91 Nietzsche’s Will to Truth ...................................................................................... 98 Nietzsche Contra Schopenhauer ............................................................. 104 Affirming the Will to Nothingness ......................................................... 107 IV. WILL TO POWER .................................................................................................. 114 Zarathustra and the Saint .................................................................................... 117 Zarathustra and the Marketplace ......................................................................... 120 The Three Metamorphoses ................................................................................. 122 On Self-Overcoming ........................................................................................... 126 Nausea ................................................................................................................. 128 The Affirmative Moment .................................................................................... 135 The Eternal Recurrence as the Excess of Noble and Slavish Valuations ........... 141 Zarathustra’s Will to Power ................................................................................ 146 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 151 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................153 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AC = The Antichrist BGE = Beyond Good and Evil D = Daybreak GM = On the Genealogy of Morals GS = The Gay Science NCW = Nietzsche contra Wagner TI = Twilight of the Idols TSZ = Thus Spoke Zarathustra WP = The Will to Power vii INTRODUCTION The purpose of this work is to develop a reading of Nietzsche’s concept of will to power. I will argue that will to power cannot be understood apart from Nietzsche’s concepts of self-overcoming and of will to truth. More specifically, I claim that the meaning of will to power emerges only at the point of the self-overcoming of will to truth. It is a curious feature of Nietzsche’s published writings that will to power is mentioned as infrequently as it is, given the centrality of this concept in his thought. There are different conclusions one can draw from this fact. One strategy in reading Nietzsche has been to turn to the Nachlass in order to address some of his more direct, expositional passages regarding this will. There is nothing in principle objectionable about this tactic, but I think that it is needed only if the published works don’t provide a sufficient account of will to power. But while it’s true that will to power appears with a rarity disproportionate to its importance, I think that Nietzsche develops a robust and integral account of its meaning in these published works alone. The integrity of Nietzsche’s account was my primary criterion in deciding whether to incorporate materials Nietzsche didn’t intend to publish. Based on the relationship to the self-overcoming of the will to truth that I develop, I think that the relative infrequency of explicit developments of will to power is to be expected. For I will claim that Nietzsche’s concept of will to power is a will that is creative and affirmative, and that the possibilities for the exercise of this will have been occluded by the long dominion of the will to truth, which is expressed by the perpetual devaluation of viii all values. Such possibilities are only now emerging as the value-creating force of will to power can only be glimpsed from under the shadow of the slave moral temples. Because I contend that will to power can be understood only by relation to the self-overcoming of will to truth, those places where Nietzsche develops both self- overcoming and the will to truth are also sites where he develops the meaning of will to power. Thus the central text for this project is On the Genealogy of Morals, which I read as a systematic account of the will to truth and an argument for the necessity of its destructive self-overcoming brought about through the devaluing force of this very will itself. This work is the primary textual focus of the first three chapters of this dissertation. The fourth chapter will be textually rooted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which I read as an attempt to portray, through the character of Zarathustra, an embodiment of the creative aspect of self-overcoming. Zarathustra’s primary task is not the rejection of the valuational standards of truth, but instead the development of a new mode of affirming. Zarathustra’s will to power, produced in the creative
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