Nietzsche's Will to Power: Biology, Naturalism, and Normativity

Abstract

The “will to power” remains one of Nietzsche's most controversial philosophical concepts. In this article I argue that the will to power ties in directly with Nietzsche's naturalistic discussion of normativity. The link between the will to power and normativity cannot be explained, however, along the lines of a psychological reading of Nietzsche's naturalism; rather, Nietzsche's naturalism is rooted in contemporary biological discussions. Biology comes first, psychology second. With the notion of a will to power Nietzsche seeks to describe the linkages between the natural and normative in a way that falls neither into the trap of physicalist reductionism, nor into the trap of idealist metaphysics: how can we obtain an understanding of the emergence of normativity without appealing to normativity as a standard separate from the agency, affects, conceptual commitments, and also cells and organs, that make us natural beings?

Fabricated Truths and the Pathos of Proximity: What Would be a Nietzschean Philosophy of Contemporary Technoscience?

“…In 1860, Gustav Theodor Fechner had published his elements of psychophysics (Elemente der Psychophysik), studying the relationship between physical stimuli and conscious sensations. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt had founded the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, devoted to developing a non-Cartesian psychology firmly embedded in physiology: in neural and somatic processes, in the body (Emden 2016). Fechner and Wundt represented small-scale pioneer beginnings of what today has evolved into a scholarly discourse of immense proportions.…”

“…These interpretations are continuously and actively enforced upon the Heraclitean-Democritean turbulence. For Nietzsche, interpretation is first and foremost a bodily (physiological, neuro-physiological) phenomenon moreover (Emden 2016). Our interpretations are produced by our bodies, rather than by our minds.…”