Presocratic Primer III: The Will of the Occident

Nietzsche's Presocratian arche of the Will to Power was - like Schopenhauer's Will - the blind urge to life; but in Nietzsche that was all there was, and the categories of Platonic metaphysics or Kantian morality employed by Schopenhauer were to Nietzsche fictitious constructions of the human Will.
Life was Will to Power and nothing else; - a terrible oppressive force which must tragically be affirmed with joy [hence his use of the Dionysos 'mad god' symbol].

Nietzsche stripped the Schopenhauerian Will of all its metaphysical post-Platonic baggage, and meanwhile re-invigorated the Preplatonic tradition ['Preplatonic' is probably a better term than 'Presocratic', as it tacitly embraces the Sophists, many of whom were contemporaries of Socrates, and are also important to Nietzsche], a tradition which ranges across myth, poetry, philosophy and science.

This essay will look at the arche of the Will with particular reference to forbidden areas of Western thought, as the Will is strongest when it meets resistance - Nitimur in vetitum.

The Will of the Occident

The rapture of will, of an overfull, teeming will

[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols]

One: The Wave

I. Flux or Becoming

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store,

So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will,

One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.

[Shakespeare, Sonnet cxxxv]

When the 'first philosopher' of the Occident, the Ionian Thales, proclaimed that water was 'the arche', he was not merely making a metaphor, for it is undeniable that our watery earth, shimmering azure-like in the dark void of space would be bereft of flourishing life were it not for that essential 'element' of water.

The 'first philosophers' of ancient Greece knew that an arche needed to have some motivating force, i.e., a 'will', if life were to come into being. Empedocles said that mortal things never cease their continual change. Likewise Anaxgoras spoke of things 'revolving and separating off by force and speed'. Most notably, it was Heraclitus who spoke of life's fluxions when he said that;

"We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not." [quoted in Curd]

The classical 'elements' were seen to be both kinetic and static, a complementary/antagonistic duality of Being and Becoming. Man had to find an island of tranquility in the ocean of Heraclitean wave, lest he be swept away. But if Becoming is seen as only continual change, are we then really describing 'will'?

In the Bergsonian philosophy for example, 'time' or 'duration', is itself "absolute; a flowing that never ceases, never repeats itself, an always present changing, becoming, 'now'." [Carr]

Such a seamless torrent would preclude the notion of a decisive 'Will', which could just as well feature in a philosophy of Being or Becoming, in that it may either impel or restrain.

Western thinking on such matters has altered remarkably little since the Presocratics. Witness a modern writer of the Lovelockian Gaia school:

"Life developed at the ocean edge, and we still have a deep, even endless connection with water; life on land literally represents emergence, that is the rising up and spreading out of the sea. Life is a wave. The moon pulls at the water, lifting up a blue fold in the ocean that may travel a mile or so before crashing into the shore; as with the continuous recycling of water in the ocean to make waves, the pool of chemical elements from which we are made is finite. Matter, especially living matter, cycles."

[Sagan, D. Biospheres 1990]

Odin

II. Norse Paganism

This notion of life-cycles transports us beyond the ratiocinations of philosophy and onto the deep and ancient realm of myth. I want here to delve into the central Western idea of driving Will, and into a cycle of history which is now slowly coming to a close. We may designate it generally as 'Occidental', or more specifically, 'Teutonic'.

E. Titchenell gives a theosophical interpretation of Norse myths, showing them to have a close relationship with the older Indo-European traditions as described in the Indian Vedas. She also brings them into contact with modern science:

"There is a suggestive connection between what myths call the 'waters of space' - basis of all existence and the common ground of universes - and hydrogen [Greek hydor, water], when we remember that hydrogen is the simplest, lightest, and most abundant of elements, and the one which enters into the composition of all known matter."

Referring to the Norse creation story in the Icelandic Eddas, she says, "it is the chaos of Greek cosmogony before order [kosmos], comes into being. The Eddas call this the Fimbulvetr ['mighty winter'] - the long cold night of non-being. Before time began, no elements existed for there were 'no waves' - no motion, hence no forms or no time."

The Norse cosmogony of the twin polarities of fire and ice is apposite for a people who daily grappled with an environment where the ocean wave of Becoming was transmogrified into icy Being, while precious heat and fire could preserve life.
The Creation of the Earth is depicted by the Norse as a mighty act of Will. A primeval giant is sacrificed and dismembered, his flesh, blood and bone then used to make up the Earth and its atmosphere. The doer of this awesome deed is Odin [or Woden, or Wotan - the name means to rage], assisted by his two brothers, Ve ['awe'] and Vili ['will'].

This is surely a parable of mankind's struggle for survival in the Northern hemisphere: a constant battle of Will against the periodic cycles.

Since the Middle Ages, Europe has seen a series of profound cultural 'waves', in which one phase would ebb, to recapture past glories perhaps; followed by another which would flood out towards the future with reform and revolution. The revival of Teutonic paganism in various guises has recurred at decisive points in the past millennia. This may be due to the fact that in Northern Europe the conversion to the alien Eastern religion of Christianity was far from complete. The Norse Weltanschauung was not extirpated despite some determined efforts. [such as Charlemagne's religious persecution of the pagan Saxons, who in 785 AD were forced to adopt Christianity]. [1]

Note:

1. http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Wars 

III. Jung's Wotan

In the following passage from Jung we might well substitute 'Will' for  'Wotan' each time it appears:

"Wotan is a fundamental attribute to the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilisation like a cyclone and blows it away: Wotan is a Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans: because the behaviour of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images we can speak of an archetype 'Wotan'. As an autonomous psychic factor, Wotan produces effects in the collective life of a people and thereby reveals its own nature."

On the history of the Wotan archetype - which Jung associates with the 'element' air:

"The disturber of the peace is a wind that blows into Europe from Asia's vastness, sweeping in a wide front from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering the nations before it like dry leaves, or inspiring thoughts that shake the world to its foundations. It is an elemental Dionysus, breaking into the Apollonian order."

Here Jung is referring to the supposed 'Asiatic' origin of the 'Aesir', that family of gods in the Norse pantheon of which Wotan is the chief member; while the Thracians, a Nordic barbarian people, were said to have given the Greeks the Bacchic cult of Dionysus. [2]

Wotan is a 'seizer' [German Ergreifer] of men, in the sense of a mad possession. We shall see later that Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power involves this same notion of 'seizure'.

The Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, i.e. restraint versus frenzy, is associated with Nietzsche's analysis of it in his 'The Birth of Tragedy' - which also includes a dithyramb to that great Wotanist Richard Wagner.

Making the Nietzschean contrast between Dionysos and Apollo, [and therefore making the comparison of Dionysos and Wotan possible] Spengler says that;

"In the Apollonian world there is no directional motion; only the purposeless and aimless see-saw of Heraclitus' Becoming."

Note:

2. Dionysos was also said to have come from Asia in some accounts  www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LX/TheBacchaeEuripides.html
Modern opinion is that Dionysos and Wotan are indigenous gods.

Guido von List

IV. Von List

Profound dualities are central to the dynamic of the Will; as Jung recognised, "the conflict between the realm of ideas and life, between Wotan’s' dual nature as a god of storm, and a god of secret musings: Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the Devil."

It is worth noting here that the so-called Occult arts, like alchemy for example, are concerned with the working of the magician's Will. Similarly, those 'possessed' by 'Wotan' identified their own Will with that of the god, and like the berserkers of the Viking Age, were reputed to have performed deeds of miraculous strength and courage;

"Wotan is not only a god of rage and frenzy who embodies the instinctual and emotional aspect of the unconscious. Its intuitive and inspiring side also manifests itself in him, for he understands the runes and can interpret fate."

An important figure in the Germanic revival of the late 19th/early 20th centuries was the Austrian magus Guido von List. His book of 1908,  Das Geheimnis der Runen  ['The Secret of the Runes', translated by Flowers] gave a historico-mystical version of the Viking rune-row by way of Odin's Rune Song in the Poetic Edda. His commentary on the rune called Is ['Ice] for example, illustrates this peculiarly Germanic concept of 'Will'. The stanza in the Edda he refers to has Odin describing his power to calm the seas;

"Through the 'doubt-less consciousness of personal spiritual power' the waves are bound - 'made to freeze' - they stiffen as if ice. But not only the waves [Wellen] (symbolic of the Will [Wille]), all of life is obedient to the compelling Will. Countless examples of the 'ag-is-shield' [this is related to the 'aegis-hjalmer': the helm-of-awe or terror, which was a part of the Nibelungen treasure won by Sigurdhr] of Wotan such as the 'Gorgon's Head' of the Athenians, all the way down to the hunting lore and practice of causing an animal to 'freeze' [the magic of 'making something freeze' in hunting lore and practice is substantiated as 'hypnosis'], are all based on the hypnotic power of the forceful Will of the spirit symbolised by this rune. Therefore; 'win power over your self and you will have power everything in the spiritual and physical world that strives against you'."

Later on we shall meet again with the Will as a self-overcoming and its ability to impose Being on Becoming in Nietzsche's will to power and eternal recurrence of the same.

Two: The Will of Faust

V. The Faust 'Legend'

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

[Tennyson, Ulysses]

If we accept a Jungian perspective, then the Will archetype as embodied by the master of disguise Wotan, later slipped into the persona of Faust. The Christian Satanic absorption of Wotan could explain the medieval legend of man making a bargain with the Devil, which in turn strongly echoes the story of Wotan giving over one of his eyes in return for 'knowledge'. [cf. Pierce]

During the Renaissance period this legend becomes associated with a 16th century German necromancer named Faust. This identification of legend with a historical personage is reminiscent of Snorri Sturluson in the Younger or Prose Edda That Wotan was originally a tribal chieftain who led his Aesirs out of Asia.

Marlowe's treatment of the Faust Legend has been viewed in post-Renaissance times purely as a portrayal of the 'over-reaching-hero'. However, it seems that Marlowe's character, like the Faust legend itself, was meant as a caricature, created to denigrate the type of Renaissance Natural Philosopher, or Magus, as exemplified by Heinrich Agrippa [1486-1536]. [3]

The great respect for learning which we associate now with the Renaissance doesn't take cognisance of the fact that it was also a period of witch-crazes and moral contagion. As Frances Yates points out, Marlowe's Faustus is actually a reaction against Renaissance humanism, which advises its audience to "avoid unlawful things,

'Whose deepnesse doth intice such forward wits,

To practise more than heavenly power permits'."

But, as we shall see, Faust like Wotan, will not be deterred just yet;

Men weak by time and fate, but strong in will,

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

[Tennyson, Ulysses]

Note:

3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agrippa-nettesheim/

VI. Virtú and Goethe

Life strives to rise and in rising to surpass itself.

[Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra XXIX]

The philosophers of the Will, could not help but draw deeply on the culture of the Renaissance. Nietzsche called this the era of the 'Sovereignty of the Will', this because, being aristocratic, it 'imposes order', and 'is severe against the heart, not cosy, without sentiment.' It displays 'self-belief' and has at bottom 'much beast of prey' and 'much ascetic habit to remain master. The era of strong Will; also of strong passion.'

Renaissance virtú, described by Ezra Pound as "the potency, the efficient property of a substance or person",  [Pound's Introduction to Sonnets And Ballate Of Guido Cavalcanti] had by the 18th century been challenged by the decadent feminism which promulgated a specious equality rather than aristocratic values.

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we see German Idealist philosophers begin to reassert the primacy of the Will, while the great man of letters, Goethe, takes up the Faust theme. Most importantly, Goethe emphasises the dualities in the Faustian soul, as noted by Jung in 'Wotan'.

In its most general terms, this duality was the acceptance of contradictions which Protagoras preached in Preplatonic Greece, a doctrine that was anathema not only to Platonism and Christianity, but also to the 'age of Reason'.

Oswald Mosley wrote that, "the essence of Goethe is the concept of polarity, which is also reflected in the mind of Nietzsche, and of many of the great German thinkers. The duality is the wholeness of the teaching."

Forever in conflict, the polarities produce "the 'ewig Werdende' [eternal becoming]; which must in turn be related to the 'ewig Strebende' [eternal striving]; it is impossible to become without effort."

As Goethe wrote in his Faust;

He only earns freedom and existence
Who daily conquers them anew.

Oswald Spengler

VII. Spengler and the Faustian

Spengler dubbed this Western culture as 'Faustian'. Writing in his 'Years of Decision' [1933], he put the point unambiguously:

"The Celtic-German 'race' has the strongest will power that the world has ever seen. but this 'I will', 'I will!' - which fills the Faustian soul to the brim, makes up the ultimate meaning of its existence and prevails in every expression of Faustian culture in thought and deed in creative act and demeanor - awakens consciousness of the total isolation of the self in infinite space. Will and loneliness are at bottom the same." [quoted in Griffin]

This last sentence marks out Spengler's own brand of strong pessimism. He thought that he who willed his own greatness, also willed his own destruction:

"It is this defiance of the individual towards the whole world, his knowledge of his own indestructible will, the pleasure he takes in irreversible decisions and the love of fate even in the moment when he goes under because of them. To submit out of free-will is Prussian. The value of the sacrifice lies in this difficulty."

Spengler chose 'Faustian' to symbolise the Will [rather than follow Nietzsche's Classical Dionysian for example] because he thought that, "Classical man, belonging wholly to the present, is without that directional energy, as a feeling of Future. He is will-less."

And, "to call the Faustian culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits: but it was not so, in the Classical, or in India, or in China."

Spengler's strict separation of the Classical and Western cultures is somewhat controversial, a 'grain of truth' argument not shared by most philosophers. Heidegger for example saw much in common between Aristotle's study of 'force' [in Metaphysics IX] and Nietzsche's concept of the will to power [Wille zur Macht].

Both a metaphysical and a sociological duality is seen in Spengler when, "at the beginning of every high culture, the two primary orders, nobility and priesthood take shape. They are the embodiment of mutually exclusive ideas. The noble warrior/adventurer lives in a world of facts; the priest scholar/philosopher in his world of truths: and nowhere has this opposition taken more irreconcilable forms than in the Faustian culture. This difference appears, in all its magnitude in the contrast between the Vikings of the blood and the Vikings of the mind, during the rise of the Faustian culture.

He identifies the 'vikings of the blood' with the Northmen and their depredations after the fall of Rome, also with the first explorers, colonisers of the European Age of Expansion. The 'vikings of the mind' are those like Copernicus and Galileo, who furthered the scientific advance of the Western world. To outsiders such 'vikings of the blood or mind' are often regarded as 'devilish', 'evil', just like Wotan, Faust, and the flawed heroes of the Romantic period.

Schopenhauer

VIII. Schopenhauer

To Romanticise is nothing other than an exponential heightening.

[Novalis, 1798]

Heidegger cites Schelling's statement of 1809; "in the final and ultimate instance there is no other Being at all than Willing. Willing is Primal being", adding that, "such a doctrine within Western metaphysics is not arbitrary but perhaps even necessary," while Hegel (1807), 'grasps the essence of being as knowing', he grasps 'knowing as essentially identical to Willing'.

Significantly Hegel was aware that "the need to destroy belongs essentially to creation: to the essence of Being nullity belongs, not as sheer vacuous nothingness, but as the empowering 'no'." [Heidegger Nietzsche Vol. 1]

But of all philosophers of this period, it is Schopenhauer who is most associated with the Will. In his main work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung of 1819 he sought to close the polarity that had existed in German idealism by describing the will as 'pure'. [The problem which the cosmologist Lee Smolin described as, "the dualistic opposition of intelligent spirit and degenerate matter that seems to have captured the Western mind by Plato's time", was now, according to Schopenhauer, solved] He wrote;

"The Will is free from all multiplicity, although its manifestations in time and space are innumerable ."

So, there is no split between the world of appearance and the thing-in-itself [the dualism of Kant's work], because all things are merely objectifications of the Will: Life is a 'mirror of the Will'.

The novelist Thomas Mann described Schopenhauer as the 'philosopher and psychologist of the Will', and therefore as the "father of all modern psychology. From him the line runs, by way of the psychological radicalism of Nietzsche straight to Freud."

This by dint of Schopenhauer’s maintaining that intellect was merely the after-glow and slave of the will, which itself was a 'blind urge'. Freud himself wrote:

"Probably but very few people have realised the momentous significance for science and life of the recognition of unconscious mental processes. It was not psycho-analysis, however, let us hasten to add, which took this first step. There are renowned names among the philosophers who may be cited as its predecessors, above all the great Schopenhauer, whose unconscious 'Will' is equivalent to the instincts in the mind as seen by psychoanalysis. It was this same thinker, moreover, who in words of unforgettable impressiveness admonished mankind of the importance of their sexual craving."

This is obviously a reference to Schopenhauer’s astonishing assertion that "the genitals are properly the focus of Will", and his advocacy of a Buddhistic denial of the Will as the way to 'salvation'. It is ironic that the philosopher of the Will sought not only to remove the dualism so necessary to Faustian man, but actually promulgated that man should turn away from the Will itself.

IX. Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer

Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire.

[Schopenhauer World as Will]

To Schopenhauer, only the Will - which he admits is an 'occult quality' - lies 'outside the province of the law of motivation.' In other words, only the primal, groundless, blind urge known as the Will can be called free. All of life, as the 'objectification' of this Will, is thrown out and completely determined by the Will. For this reason it was, says Spengler, "that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin's main work was published in 1859. Schopenhauer's system is anticipated Darwinism: we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature; the human intellect as master weapon in that struggle and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest."

Nietzsche's philosophical inspiration began with his discovery of Schopenhauer [an early essay was entitled 'Schopenhauer as Educator']; but he soon became critical of his master, writing of "Schopenhauer's basic misunderstanding of the Will (as if craving, instinct, drive, were the essence of Will)." This was not only in Nietzsche's view a 'mistaken lowering' of the value of the Will, but was tantamount to 'hatred against willing.' Schopenhauer had attempted to "see something higher, indeed that which is higher and valuable, in willing no more, in 'being subject without aim and purpose' (in the 'pure subject free of will')."

This was nothing other than a "great symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the Will: for the Will is precisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and measure." Nietzsche felt that it was necessary to condemn Schopenhauer in such strong terms because "a philosophy which teaches denial of the Will is a teaching of defamation and slander."

Rosenberg also rounded on Schopenhauer:

"Will is always the opposite of instinct and not identical with it as Schopenhauer seemed to teach. My will is divided into two parts; sensuous-instinctive, and super-sensuous willed. These are the two souls which Faust felt within his breast."

And further, "either one recognises the possibility of victory of the will over instinct, or one makes a violent sweep, and declares the whole of the world unfree."

Of course this is also a different position to Nietzsche. If we may advert to his Apollo/Dionysos antinomy we might say that the blind urge of Schopenhauerian Will is Dionysian Will, while the rational Will which curbs that blind Will  is Apollonian Will. And in the synthesis of Apollo and Dionysos we might have the exaltation of that blind Will channeled by the rational Will. Nietzsche later [i.e. after The Birth of Tragedy] went beyond this dualistic picture of the Will and rather extolled a multiple Will commensurate with the view of the will to power as an Arche.

X. Schopenhauer's Will-Denial

It appears then that Schopenhauer lacked the heroic concept of Will: his ideal type was the Saint, the world-denier. The Will wrought only suffering; to confront this suffering was pointless. The Saint sought deliverance by starving all desire, all Will. Even the man of genius was one, who - trance-like - achieved the 'completest objectivity', and then by 'deliberate art', was able to reproduce 'what has thus been apprehended.' To Schopenhauer, he is one "whose excessive power of knowledge frees it at times from the service of the Will."

To him - like Nietzsche - tragedy was the 'summit of poetical art.' This may seem to be contradictory at first, as tragedy is hardly the most objective of art forms, but its high rank is due to its 'representation of the terrible side of life', where, "we see the noblest men, after long conflict and suffering at last renounce the ends they have so keenly followed, and all the pleasures of life for ever, or else freely and joyfully surrender life itself."

But the apex of all art forms in the Schopenhauerian pantheon was music, which is "entirely independent of the phenomenal world. Music is as direct and objectification and copy of the whole Will as the world itself."

Schopenhauer then, is to Nietzsche, a kind of buddhistic pessimist; the ascendancy of his philosophy marks the decline of Faustian Will.

In 1840, Carlyle could write that;

"This is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men."

Greatness of course, requires great Will;

"Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero."

 

Lord Byron

Three: The Over-Reaching

XI. Romanticism

"Faced as we are with this destiny, there is only the choice of Achilles - better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without content."

[Spengler 1931]

The 'doomed' quality of the Romantic Hero is due to his inescapable realisation that his Will is not unlimited. As Colin Wilson put it, the question asked by the Romantic is 'why is man not a god?'

Appropriately, Russell, in his 'History of Western Philosophy' entitled four consecutive chapters thusly;

The Romantics,

Byron,

Schopenhauer,

Nietzsche.

Byron is the archetypal Romantic Hero. So much so, that Goethe put him in his Faust as Euphorion.

Byron's dramatic poem 'Manfred' is a concise manifesto of the Faustian hero;

I could not tame my nature down; for he

Must serve who fain would sway; and soothe, and sue,

And watch all the time, and pry into all place,

And be a living lie, who would become

A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such

The mass are, I disdain'd to mingle with a herd,

Though to be a leader - And of wolves.

The lion is alone, and so am I.

[Act III]

When Manfred is implored to hear 'heavenly patience', he scoffs;

Patience and Patience! Hence - that word was made

For brutes of burthern, not for birds of prey;

Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine;

I am not of thine order.

[Act II]

XII. Nietzschean Will

Compounded of all Elements of the Cosmos of souls

[Ezra Pound]

While Nietzsche may have agreed with Schopenhauer that Will was the fundamental principle of life, he was sharply at variance with the latter's analysis of what was the nature of this Will, as we have seen. Nietzsche was far from content to call it an 'occult quality'; as he wrote in the posthumously published 'The Will to Power';

"I require the starting point of will to power as the origin of motion. Hence motion may not be conditioned from the outside - not caused - I require beginnings and centres of motion from which the will spreads."

This may indeed be an impossible task: as Heidegger remarked in his lectures on Nietzsche;

"In the strict sense of the Nietzschean conception of will, power can never be pre-established as will's goal, as though power were something that could first be posited outside the will."

Modern physicists are searching for a theory 'to explain everything' but have found, as Stephen Hawking says, that "what we regard as reality is conditioned by the theory to which we subscribe", and "it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory."

Nietzsche thought Schopenhauer wrong to regard the Will as pure, undivided and monistic: in fact he denounced all such abstract conceptions;

"There exists neither 'spirit' nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use: there is no question of 'subject' and 'object', but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness."

Language begins to falter at this extreme point of scepticism, and we do find elsewhere Nietzsche having to use those concepts he calls 'fictions' above. But when he does so, he often re-evaluates them, so that in Nietzsche's mouth, 'will' is not a singularity but a complexity; "a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and consciousness; a kind aristocracy of 'cells' in which dominion resides; the only force that exists is of the same kind as that of the will; a commanding of other subjects, which thereupon change."

So what is often seen as self-contradiction is down to Nietzsche having to both use and simultaneously re-define the only available language [not with-standing logical symbols - however, Nietzsche rejects logic itself, claiming it to be based on a false similitude of entities, as in the 'alw of non-contradiction']. The same difficulty was faced by that first great relativist Protagoras as presented in Plato's Theaetetus. [4]

To Nietzsche, knowledge can only "be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense", and it is "the utility of preservation" which "stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service."

Here we have a radical philosophical precursor of the modern Neo-Darwinism of a Richard Dawkins. In another passage, Nietzsche hints at the 'Uncertainty Principle';

"One may not ask, 'who then interprets?' For the interpretation itself which is a form of the will to power, exists as an affect."

 Heidegger grasped the will to power as an opening onto the 'ultimate question' of Being itself.

Again from Nietzsche's The Will to Power;

"Being as universalisation of the concept 'Life' [breathing], 'having a soul', 'willing', 'effecting', 'becoming': the sphere of a subject constantly growing or decreasing, the centre of the system constantly shifting; in cases where it cannot organise the appropriate mass, it breaks into two parts. On the other hand, it can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without destroying it; and to a certain degree form a new unity within it. No 'substance', rather something that in itself strives after greater strength, and that wants to 'preserve' itself only directly [it wants to surpass itself-]."

Note: 

4. Protagoras’ dictum was that ‘Man is the measure of all things’, which will be the subject of a future essay here.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-theaetetus/

XIII. Heidegger on Will to Power

All things organic are dying in the grip of organisation.

[Spengler]

Because a system, by its very definition, implies a limitation, Nietzsche 'avoided and distrusted' systematisation in philosophy, adopting instead a multifarious approach which preferred the aphorism as a vehicle of expression. Despite this, Heidegger claimed that Nietzsche intended to make a major systematic statement [or enter the halls of German Idealism as he put it]. While this may have been an intention, it seems that Nietzsche abandoned the project, leaving his magnum opus uncompleted.

In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger endeavoured to quarry the many fragments of the work [entitled by Nietzsche's archivers as 'The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values’]

Heidegger begins by asking the following question; - 'what does the will to power mean? And quickly dispenses with the 'usual view', that 'Will is a kind of desiring that has power as its goal rather than happiness and pleasure.' Shaw perceived the same flaw when he said, "Nietzsche, thinking out the great central truth of the Will to Power, had no difficulty in concluding that the final objective of the Will to Power was Power over self, and that the seekers after power over others and material possessions were on a false scent."

But Heidegger would not agree with Shaw on there being any 'final objective' because, "will to power is never the willing of a particular actual entity. It involves Being and essence of Beings: it is this itself. Therefore we can say that will to power is always essential will."

Nietzsche often spoke of the Will as "the original form of affect." [5]

In this it has the character of "willing out beyond" ourselves in a "manifold and Protean sense." And that, "since all this becomes manifest as a whole, we can conclude that a multiplicity of feelings haunt our willing."

The most 'original' of these feelings has been referred to earlier in the discussion on Wotan as Ergreifer, or seizure. Anger, for example, is a seizure which 'overcomes' one. In the multiplicity of the Will there is also 'passion', which unlike seizure, can be nurtured;

"To passion belongs a reaching-out and opening-up to oneself; it gathers our essential Being to its proper ground, it exposes our ground for the first time in so gathering, so that the passion is that through which and in which we take hold of ourselves and achieve lucid mastery over the beings around us and within us: Will is, in our terms, resolute openness; Now the characteristic traits are not seizure and agitation, but the lucid grip which simultaneously gathers the passionate Being."

Heidegger puts this into the following formula;

"Affect, the seizure that blindly agitates us: Passion; the lucidly gathering grip on beings: it displays that self-composed superiority characteristic of Great Will." Heidegger introduces the duality which Rosenberg put as 'Will and Instinct'. Present in all willing, though, is thought itself. In this, notes Heidegger, Nietzsche's conception has much in common with German Idealistic philosophy as well as Aristotle. Nietzsche wrote, "in every act of Will there is a commandeering thought." [BGE]

Summing up the Will Complex, Heidegger said;

"Will as mastery over something, reaching out beyond itself; Will as affect (the agitating seizure); Will as Passion (the expansive plunge into the breadth of beings); Will as feeling (being the state of having a stance-toward-oneself); and Will as command."

Although he warns that an enumeration of concepts and meanings does not give understanding of the ultimate question itself;

"In order from the outset to avoid the vacuity of the word 'Will', Nietzsche says 'Will to Power'; every willing is a willing to be more. Power itself only is in as much as, and so long as, it remains a willing to be more power: in Will, as willing to be more, as Will to Power, enhancement and heightening are essentially implied; life not only exhibits the drive to maintain itself, as Darwin thinks, but also is self-assertion. Self assertion is original assertion of essence."

This will to power has been associated with a particular aspect of Western Culture; the twentieth century saw its apotheosis as the symbol of German nationalism. This could be seen as a Nietzschean countermovement against the deliquescence of late 19th century decadence and the profound nihilism engendered by the Great war.

Note:

5. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/affect

Hephaestus

  XIV. Will to Form and the Worker

National self determination is, in the final analysis, a determination of the will; and nationalism is, in the first place, a method of teaching the right determination of the will. 

[Kedourie 1960]

At the twilight of Nietzsche's life, his sister Elisabeth organised the Nietzsche Archive, which presented the philosopher as a prophet for the 'modern age'. E. Horneffer, who worked on the Archive, offered a politicised interpretation of the will to power;

"Only through concentration, ordering and organisation, can the will come to its fullest expression, can it fully exhaust itself." [quoted in Aschheim]

Horneffer called this version of will to power, 'will to form';

"Form was required which would provide will with a stable framework. The will did have a goal after all: shaping itself into form. It sought to bring unity, sequence, and consequence out of chaos: will would have to be historically channeled."

As well as organisational will to form, there emerged an aesthetic, propounded by Stefan George, who envisaged Will as, "the power of the Seer who would transform the nation, especially with the help of beautiful heroic youth."

During the Great War, right-wing journals were imbued with a pseudo-Nietzscheanism. The political became a question of 'the problem of will', which was answered by a 'fearless German will-to-power and self-assertion'. By the time of the Third Reich period [1933-45], Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism was seriously being applied to the 'people' [Volk].

"In K. Kassler's 'Nietzsche and the Law' [1941], Nietzsche, wrote Kassler, recognised 'the strong unbreakable tie of the law to the power political necessity of every Volk.' Law was a dynamic instrument in the life of a Volk and an integral part of its biological and anthropological development which served its political needs and its will to power."

E. Junger's career spanned this period [and beyond, he died in 1998], and his own vision was formed during combat experiences he gained during the Great war; his philosophy was influenced by Nietzsche's 'military school of life', and he saw the 1914-18 war as profound a revolution as that of 1789. In him it did not produce nihilism, but affirmation: the distopianism of the technological future was actually embraced by him.

The Great war signaled the end, as he saw it, of the era of chivalry and traditional heroic values. Junger did not waste his time mourning this loss, rather he longed for the modern age where the bourgeois individual would disappear into the urbanised mass. There, a 'new front' for the national struggle would be created, the reality of 'permanent global conflict'.

Junger had a similar idea of 'will to form' as Horneffer, although to Junger, form [Gestalt], was 'pre-formed power'. The dominant 'form' is 'work' in the widest possible sense: i.e. that which aims to give 'form' to the world;

"Work is the means by which the modern world is totally mobilised, the expression of a special form of being. Science, love, art, faith, culture, war; all is work: work too is the vibration of molecules and the force which drives the stars and planets. Work is not so much an activity as the will which is 'at work' within an activity, the 'will to will', which is the creative force of history."

Will to power, "is expressed through work, which succeeds in mobilising," To Junger the Worker is a 'Titanic Personage', and the 'antithesis to the liberal bourgeoisie';

"Ancient religions tell us that at the origin of civilisations there was a struggle between Gods and Titans. For millennia the Titans held the Gods in awe and kept their distance, but now it is the Twilight of the Gods and the Giants are returning. they are returning by means of the immense force which technology has unleashed. Confronted with the unchaining of the elemental, all the old defences, old attitudes, old doctrines are withered: one day technology, reaching its amplitude, its perfection, will be able to dominate the entire world: only by mastering the world, can man retain his humanity."

With that paradox, Junger seems to have returned, via a parallel cycle, to the age of the Eddas; pre-historical and pre-philosophical. Could it be that with this modern technological Fimbulvetr we have reached 'the end of metaphysics'?

Heidegger

XV. The End of Metaphysics

Spengler thought so;

"Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity out-ward, soul-less."

But it was Heidegger who gave 'the end of philosophy' its epitaph;

"The basic form of appearance in which the will-to-will arranges and calculates itself in the unhistorical element of the world of completed metaphysics can stringently be called 'technology'. The name 'technology' is understood here in such an essential way that its meaning coincides with the term 'completed metaphysics'."

The Will has willed its own demise; man is now a slave of his technology;

"At the summit of the completion of Western Philosophy these words are pronounced [by Nietzsche]: 'To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the highest Will to Power.' The 'Being' Nietzsche thinks here is 'The Eternal Recurrence of the Same'. It is the way of continuance through which 'Will to Power' wills itself and guarantees its own presencing as the Being of  Becoming."

And here Nietzsche reaches the non plus ultra of the Will with the eternal recurrence [Nietzsche connected this doctrine with Heraclitus] and its associated doctrine of amor fati. One transforms one's past - the 'it was' - into 'I willed it so'. I will my own fate to the extent that I will it to recur eternally into the future.

And so we too Will the philosophical questions of the Presocratics eternally into our future philosophy, following the pathways of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Prometheus

Bibliography/Links:

Aschheim, S. E. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, California 1992

Byron, G. Manfred 1817 [http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/manfred.html ]

Carlyle, T. On Heroes and Hero Worship 1841

[Online versions: www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/heroes-and-hero-worship/

www.fullbooks.com/Heroes-and-Hero-Worship.html]

Carr, H.W. Henri Bergson, The Philosophy of Change, Jack 1911

Curd, ed. A Presocratic Reader, trans. McKirahan, Hackett 1996

Goethe, W. Faust Part One, 1808 [http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faustidx.html ]

Griffin, R. Fascism Reader, Oxford 1995

Heidegger, M. Nietzsche, trans. Krell Harper Collins 1991[ http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/heidegger1.html ]

Jung, C.G. Essays on Contemporary Events Ark 1988

Kedourie, E. Nationalism Hutchinson 1960

List, Guido von The Secret of the Runes 1908 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Geheimnis_der_Runen]

Mann, T. The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer, Cassell, 1939
Marlowe Doctor Faustus 1589 www.gutenberg.org/etext/779 ] [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/faustus.html ]

Mosley, O. Policy and Debate, Euphorion Books 1954

Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra 1883-5 http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1998
http://www.literaturepage.com/read/thusspakezarathustra.html

Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power 1885-9
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/the-will-to-power-pdf.html 
http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_the_will_to_power/index.htm

Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil 1886 [BGE] http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4363

Nietzsche, F. The Twilight of the Idols 1895 [http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html ]

 

The Poetic Edda, trans Hollander, Texas 1962 [http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/index.htm][ http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/poetic_edda.html] [http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/index.htm ]

Pierce, W. ed. The Best of Attack, National Vanguard  1984

Rosenberg, A. The Myth of the Twentieth Century, trans. Bird, Noontide 1982

Russell, B. History of Western Philosophy 1945

Schopenhauer, A.  The World as Will and Representation 1819 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation]

Shaw, G.B. Back to Methuselah 1922

[ http://www.fullbooks.com/Back-to-Methuselah.html ]

Spengler, O. The Decline of the West, trans. Atkinson, Unwin 1926-8

[http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp41658]

Sturluson, Snorri The Prose Edda, trans. Faulkes Everyman, 1995[ http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/prose_edda.html][ http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/pre/index.htm]

Tennyson, Poems 1842[ www.portablepoetry.com/poems/alfredlord_tennyson/ulysses.html]

Titchenell, E.B. The Masks of Odin, Theosophical 1985
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/odin/odin-hp.htm 

Walker, M. ed. The Scorpion, #18 Scorpion 1997 [http://thescorp.multics.org/]

Yates, F. The Occult Philosophy 1979

 Additional Links:

Nietzsche Bibliographies - http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/Bio/Nietzsche/ntzbibl.htm

Spengler - [http://www.toqonline.com/2009/06/spengler-an-introduction/]

Understanding 'the will to power' - http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80254/Nietzsche/W_P.html

Will (philosophy) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_(philosophy)