[Buddha-l] Nietzsche was a bachelor (was: Batchelor)

[Barnaby Thieme]

Hello, 

The inimitable Richard Hayes said: 
> I know that section pretty well and apparently read  
> it 
differerently than you do. 

Well, certainly the primary interpretive challenge posed by Nietzsche is his resistance to systematic exposition, as you previously noted. It's hard to avoid reading any passage in the light of what one takes to be his general meaning. I'll make a better effort in the next day or so to make a stronger and more expansive case for my reading of the doctrine of the Will to Power. 

My sense of the doctrine is that Nietzsche used it in different contexts, primarily as a psychological principle by which individuals seek to maximize their self-expression over and against the competing self-expression of others, perhaps exemplified by the ancient Greek concept of agon, which he presents quite well in "Homer's Contest". As he thought more deeply on the idea over the years, in my view he came to regard it as a kind of quasi-metaphysical principle -- that all phenomena in nature are self-expressing unto the point at which they are constrained by limiting factors or competing processes. That interpretation of the Will to Power is made clear in Beyond Good and Evil -- as I recall off the top of my head, he's fairly clear about it in his section on Natural Law. 

In that reading, the Will to Power rather reminds me of Spinoza's idea of "conatus", which holds that each thing has an intrinsic nature which it naturally tries to express through its being and action. Nietzsche, of course, admired Spinoza. 

It seems to me that Nietzsche meant many things by Will to Power, and sometimes used it to describe the literal overcoming of people through force, though in my overall reading of his work I seem to recall that he held violence to be a base and low expression of Will to Power, which finds its highest expression in acts of true creation and revaluation. 

I tend to (over?-)react to a strong reading of the Will to Power as the domination of others, in parts because of quotes like the one I provided from "The Wanderer and His Shadow", in part because of his clear rejection of violence, which is perhaps more clear in his biography than his writing, and in part because for decades Nietzsche was grotesquely miscontrued as a proto-Nazi or fascist. I think Walter Kauffmann, in addition to providing the most poetic translations of Nietzsche into English we possess, also effectively dismantled the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche. 

The clearest relationship that I see between Nietzsche and Buddhism is in Nietzsche's rejection of essentialist metaphysical postures, such as we find in "How the Real World Became a Fable" in "Twilight of the Idols", which to my ears closely resemble the arguments of Madhyamikas like Candrakirti. 

pax, 
Barnaby


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More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path
leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.
Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen

 		 	   		  
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