The will to power

This article deals with the book The Will to Power planned by Friedrich Nietzsche as well as compilations from Nietzsche's estate under this title. For Nietzsche's concept of thought, see Will to Power .

Under the title Der Wille zur Macht ( The Will to Power) , various compilations , some of which differ considerably, have been published since 1901 from records left by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche . In the German-speaking world, what is usually meant is a font first published in 1906 by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Heinrich Köselitz ("Peter Gast"), which was also included in Nietzsche editions and advertised as a systematic main work by Nietzsche.

Overview

There is agreement that Nietzsche wanted to write a work under this title at times and made a number of - sometimes contradicting - plans to do so, but ultimately refrained from doing so. His notes on this were mainly used in the works Götzen-Twilight and Der Antichrist or remained scattered in the estate.

All compilations (compare the overview given below) are considered untenable and falsifying (just like the volume The Innocence of Becoming, compiled by Alfred Baeumler ). They are selective, often do not follow Nietzsche's traditional plans, contain deciphering errors, give excerpts noted by Nietzsche as Nietzsche's aphorisms and contain changes and additions by the editor. Nevertheless, they have been and are still being distributed and used. Recently, several of the compilations have been reprinted in France, Italy and Germany, although the Complete Critical Editions of Nietzsche have now been recognized by Colli and Montinari as the only unadulterated editions of Nietzsche. Especially in the English-speaking world - an English translation of the Colli-Montinari edition is missing so far - The Will to Power continues to be used and mostly uncritically as Nietzsche's estate edition . The corresponding publishers - in Germany above all Alfred Kröner Verlag and Insel Verlag - are harshly criticized for the reprints from Nietzsche research. At the same time, however, these new editions also show that there is apparently still an interest (however motivated) in the book.

The compilations also had a philosophical effect. For example, Gilles Deleuze 's reception of Nietzsche has suffered a deciphering error at an important point: In Nietzsche's notebook there is "The victorious term› power ‹[...] needs an addition: it must be assigned an inner world, which I call, Will to Power '". In the compilations of the archive it says instead of “an inner world” but “an inner will”, and Deleuze commented on this sentence, which he calls Nietzsche's “[u] n des textes les plus importants” on this subject, almost word for word. Elsewhere, Deleuze takes the wording “power” from the compilations, where it says “power” in the notebook - precisely where Deleuze wants to differentiate between these terms.

More recently there have been voices calling for a critical new edition of the work as a historical document.

See also: Nietzsche Archive

Nietzsche's abandoned plans

Announcement of The Will to Power in the first edition of Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

After the last part of Also sprach Zarathustra had been printed in 1885, Nietzsche began to plan a larger, systematic work, for which from 1886 he usually provided the title The Will to Power . He also pointed this out in his published works Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886, see picture), Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) and Der Fall Wagner (spring 1888). His notebooks from that time contain a multitude of different plans and drafts for such a major work, mostly in four volumes.

From autumn 1887 to spring 1888 Nietzsche made a lot of notes on this. However, he was dissatisfied with the preliminary result and then first worked on the printing of Der Fall Wagner . In August he wrote letters complaining that his work had got stuck. He wrote a final draft of The Will to Power on August 26, 1888. After that, he changed his plans within a few days: he put together what he had already written in detail and wanted to publish this excerpt from his philosophy - this became the Twilight of the Idols .

However, he removed from it again four chapters with the titles We Hyperboreans , For us - against us , the concept of a decadence religion and Buddhism and Christianity . Now he was planning another publication entitled Revaluation of All Values in four books. These chapters should be added to the first book, entitled The Antichrist . Nietzsche completed this book by the end of September. Further slacking plans show that in the second and third books after Christianity "philosophy" and "morality" should be criticized, while Nietzsche wanted to carry out his own teaching in the fourth book.

But Nietzsche also gave up this plan at the end of November. He declared the Antichrist to be completely "revaluated", the finished book was given the title The Antichrist. Revaluation of all values. Finally he deleted this subtitle and replaced it with a curse on Christianity .

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche claimed after Franz Overbeck's death in 1905 that her brother had written at least a second and third book of the four-volume revaluation , but that many manuscripts had been lost through Overbeck's fault. These claims are unanimously rejected by today's Nietzsche research. On the contrary, it has been proven that Förster-Nietzsche and the Nietzsche Archives withheld documents in support of this claim and made false or misleading statements.

The different editions

There are at least five different compilations released under the title The Will to Power .

Erich Podach described the title of Max Brahn's edition as the “toothbrush title” : Nietzsche later used this design as a shopping list.

1. The will to power. Attempt to reevaluate all values (studies and fragments) , published in 1901 by Ernst Horneffer , August Horneffer and “Peter Gast”, with a foreword by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Contains 483 alleged aphorisms. Common Sigel ¹WM .
2. The Will to Power , published in 1906 by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and "Peter Gast". This collection of 1,067 alleged aphorisms in four “books” has become the “canonical” one. It was included in the major octave edition in 1911 with a critical apparatus. This device, which perhaps involuntarily illustrated the extent of the falsification, was left out again in subsequent prints (in the Musarion edition in 1922, in the edition published by Baeumler at Kröner in 1930). Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had the co-authorship of this work confirmed by the court in 1931 in order to continue receiving royalties for it. The book has been reissued by several publishers to this day, supposedly as a "historical document". In fact, however, there is no critical apparatus and some - not all - deciphering errors have been tacitly corrected, which contradicts the purpose of historical documentation. Sigel common ²WM .
3. The will to power: an interpretation of everything that happened , published in 1917 by Max Brahn, new edition in the “Klassiker-Ausgabe” 1919/1921. Contains 696 alleged aphorisms. See also the picture on the right.
4. The will to power , published in 1930 by August Messer as part of Kröner's “Works in Two Volumes”. Contains 491 alleged aphorisms. Republished several times.
5. La Volonté de Puissance , published in 1935 by Friedrich Würzbach at Gallimard , contains 2,397 alleged aphorisms. It is the most widespread edition in France and is still being reissued by Gallimard today. In 1940 it appeared in German as Das Vermächtnis Friedrich Nietzsche. Attempt to interpret everything that happened and to revalue all values , reissued in 1969 and 1977, now under the title Revaluation of all values .

The works edited by Karl Schlechta in three volumes (1954 ff.) Contain the same material as ²WM under the title “From the estate of the eighties”, but without subtitles and in supposedly chronological order. In fact, the order is not chronological, and deciphering errors, rearrangements, assemblies, etc. have been adopted. According to today's view, the Schlechta edition has the merit of harming the legend of the existence of the “main prose work”, but it cannot be used as an edition of the estate itself. In addition, Schlechta mixed the philological question about the existence of the work with a criticism of the philosophical idea of ​​“will to power”, which made the discussion more complicated.

Examples of mistakes

“In the KGW concordances, one makes one! attention to particularly serious deciphering errors, omissions etc. in the earlier editions. This symbol was not adopted because hardly a single recording was correctly reproduced in the earlier editions [...] "

- Lit .: Haase / Salaquarda: Konkordanz, p. 247.

• Martin Heidegger often quoted the alleged aphorism 617 from ²WM in his lectures and writings and attached importance to its heading “Recapitulation”. He interpreted this to mean that Nietzsche summarized his entire philosophy in a few sentences. In Heidegger's interpretation, this “recapitulation” represents the end of Western metaphysics. In fact, the heading “Recapitulation” was added by Heinrich Köselitz, as was noted in the apparatus of the 1911 edition.

• Alfred Baeumler praised Nietzsche's "masterful characteristic of the 'three centuries'" in the supposed Aphorism 95 of ²WM. Nietzsche's remarks are, however, paraphrases and excerpts from Ferdinand Brunetière's 1887 book Ètudes critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française .

• The "aphorisms" 102, 103, 105, 106, 129, 131, 132, 141, 147, 164 and 393 from ¹WM as well as 166, 169, 179, 191, 193, 194, 207, 224, 335, 718, 723, 748 and 759 of ²WM are more or less direct quotations or paraphrases from Leo Tolstoy's Ma religion (Paris 1885). The source is given in Nietzsche's notebooks, and the excerpts are roughly in an order that follows Tolstoy. The Nietzsche archive kept the source secret, and the records were rearranged completely.

• A longer text with the title “The European Nihilism”, divided and dated by Nietzsche into 16 sections, was printed as Aphorism 10 in ¹WM (without the date). In ²WM it was broken up into the “aphorisms” 4, 5, 114 and 55 - in that order.

• Nietzsche himself categorized 374 of his notes in a notebook and assigned 300 of them to four books, which corresponded almost exactly to the plan used by WM (there are many other such plans in Nietzsche's estate). Montinari writes:

“So one might expect that [Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Heinrich Köselitz] would have followed Nietzsche's instructions - at least in this unique case in which he expressly left them. [...] Here are our results:

1. Of the 374 fragments numbered by Nietzsche with a view to the will to power, 104 were not included in the compilation; 84 of them were not published at all, 20 were relegated to volumes XIII and XIV and to Otto Weiss's comments in volume XVI of the large octave edition [...]

2. Of the remaining 270 fragments, 137 are incomplete or reproduced with arbitrary text changes (omission of headings, often complete sentences, fragmentation of related texts, etc.); of these are in turn

a) 49 in the comments by Otto Weiss improved; the normal consumer of the “will to power” [...] will never get to know these improvements;

b) 36 only poorly improved in those comments [...]

c) 52, finally, are entirely without comment, although they contain similar errors [...]

3. Up to number 300 - as I said - the fragments were distributed among the four books of his plan by Nietzsche himself. Not even this distribution was retained by the compilers, in at least 64 cases. "

literature

• Dieter Fuchs: The will to power: The birth of the "main work" from the spirit of the Nietzsche archive in: Nietzsche studies 26 (1997), pp. 384–404.
• David Marc Hoffmann: Nietzsche "Philology". Little edifying things about Nietzsche's 150th birthday in: Librarium Volume 37 (1994), Issue 3, pp. 177–183.
• Mazzino Montinari : Nietzsche's estate from 1885 to 1888 or text criticism and will to power in: Nietzsche read . de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1982. ISBN 3-11-008667-0 , pp. 92-120. Slightly changed version of the text in the Critical Study Edition (KSA), Volume 14, pp. 383–400.
• Mazzino Montinari, “La volonté de puissance” n'existe pas, with an afterword by Paolo D'Iorio , Paris, Éditions de l'éclat, 1996, 192 pp.
• Wolfgang Müller-Lauter : “The will to power” as a book of the “crisis” of a philosophical Nietzsche interpretation in: Nietzsche Studies 24 (1995), pp. 223–260.
• Karl Schlechta: Philological review in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Works in three volumes , Munich 1954 ff., Volume 3, pp. 1383–1432, here in particular pp. 1393–1408.
• Andreas Urs Sommer : Commentary on Nietzsche's Der Antichrist. Ecce homo. Dionysus dithyrambs. Nietzsche contra Wagner (= Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (ed.): Historical and critical commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche's works, Vol. 6/2), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-029277-0 ( works in detail on how Nietzsche said goodbye to the idea of ​​the “will to power” and switched to the project of a “revaluation of all values”, which finally took shape in The Antichrist ).

A concordance for ¹WM, ²WM, Schlechta's edition and the Critical Complete Edition can be found in

• Nietzsche Studies 9 (1980), pp. 446-465 (created by Marie-Luise Haase and Jörg Salaquarda), additions and corrections to this in
• Nietzsche studies 25 (1996), p. 378 f. (by Dieter Fuchs)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lit .: Müller-Lauter, p. 257 ff .; see. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and die Philosophie , Hamburg 1991, p. 56 f., And S. Günzel, Wille zur Differential ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Section 3. The underlying fragment is now in the KSA estate 11, 36 [31], p. 563, but still with a deciphering error: instead of “having created God and the world” it must read “God made out of the world”. 
2. ^ On the Genealogy of Morals , Third Essay, Section 27 (KSA 5, p. 408 f.)
3. ^ The Wagner case , Section 7 (KSA 6, p. 26).
4. ↑ cf. Nietzsche Archive # The Basel “counter archive” , especially footnote 10.
5. ↑ Lit .: Müller-Lauter, p. 241 ff. The underlying fragment is now in the KSA estate 12, 7 [54], p. 312 f.
6. ↑ Lit .: Müller-Lauter, p. 257. Compare Elisabeth Kuhn: Cultur, Civilization, the ambiguity of the “modern” in: Nietzsche-Studien 18 (1989), pp. 600–626.
7. ↑ KSA 12, pp. 211-217
8. ↑ Lit .: Montinari, Nietzsche read, p. 107 f.

Web links

• Mazzino Montinari: "La Volonté de Puissance" n'existe pas full text (French) with an afterword by Paolo D'Iorio
• David Brolin: The will to power. In analysis of the editionsteoretiska striden om Friedrich Nietzsche's literary era kvarlåtenskap (Swedish, PDF; 691 kB)
• Helmut Walther: The will to power: Nietzsche reception 1939 On the use of the "main work" in National Socialism. It should be added: Baeumler's afterword from 1964, quoted here, is weakened in comparison to the editions in the Third Reich and writhes around concessions to the now well-known criticism - see lit .: Wolfgang Müller-Lauter.
• Literature on the work Der Wille zur Macht , index of the Weimar Nietzsche bibliography
• Digital Critical Complete Edition Works and Letters , based on the Critical Complete Edition by Colli and Montinari, edited by Paolo D'Iorio, Paris, Nietzsche Source, 2009–
• The "Will to Power" - not a book by Friedrich Nietzsche , a selection from Nietzsche's estate, with texts on the philosophical concept of the will to power as well as on the unrealized book projects of the same name, edited by Bernd Jung on the basis of the Digital Critical Complete Edition , 2012 / 13