“Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master” (Zarathustra, “On Self-Overcoming”). Against Darwinian self-preservation and Schopenhauer’s will-to-live, Friedrich Nietzsche proposes that living things seek above all to discharge their strength.
It is psychology more than politics: the ascetic priest, the philosopher, the artist — all express will to power, often turned inward. The posthumous compilation titled The Will to Power was assembled by his sister and is not a book Nietzsche finished.
Compare Raskolnikov’s theory of the “extraordinary man” — written twenty years earlier, by an author Nietzsche later admired.
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related by shared connectionsBeyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche’s “prelude to a philosophy of the future” — an attack on the prejudices of philosophers, from Plato to Kant, and a sketch of the free spirit.
On the Genealogy of Morality
Nietzsche’s three essays tracing “good and evil”, guilt, and the ascetic ideal back to their hidden, all-too-human origins.
The Übermensch
Nietzsche’s “overman” — the human being who, after the death of God, creates new values and affirms life wholly.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florentine diplomat and political theorist whose Prince told rulers how power is actually won and kept — separating politics from conventional morality and giving the world the adjective “Machiavellian”.
Master and Slave Morality
Nietzsche’s genealogy — “good/bad” was the self-affirmation of nobles; “good/evil” was invented by the resentful weak to revenge themselves on the strong.
Muhammad Iqbal
The Urdu and Persian poet-philosopher of Lahore who preached “khudī” — the self’s dynamic development — as the heart of a reconstructed Islam, wrote “Sāre jahāṅ se acchā” for India, and later envisioned a Muslim homeland that became Pakistan.