Will to power

Brandes reads Nietzsche as an enthusiast who knew his own masterful bias and held that humanity has not outgrown commanding and obeying, yet who in ethics condemned modern morality for exalting obedience instead of the power to dictate one's own morality.

Humanity's ancient relation of commanding and obeying persists, as Napoleon's reception showed.

Brandes sets out Nietzsche's genealogy: man's nobility lies in answering for himself, the sovereign man's conscience; memory for promises was burnt into him by frightful punishments; guilt originates as debt in the creditor–debtor relation, whose compensation was the pleasure of making the powerless suffer; and society stands to its members as creditor to debtor.

The creditor's compensation is the delight of exercising power over the powerless.

Brandes reports that for Nietzsche there is no right or wrong in itself, since life is essentially exploitation aimed at power, and that he replaces Schopenhauer's will to life and Darwin's struggle for existence with the will to power, life seeking self-increase rather than preservation; Brandes objects that there is no difference of principle, since the struggle for existence necessarily becomes a fight for power.

Defines will to power against will to life and struggle for existence, and questions its novelty.

Brandes argues that Nietzsche, like Hartmann, denies the possibility of equality and peace because life is inequality and war, praising the good war that hallows every cause, and that both reflect the militarism of the new German Empire, Nietzsche differing only in wanting war so that manliness may not die out.

Nietzsche insists on the necessity of the struggle for power and its value to culture.

Mencken argues, citing Zarathustra's account of the tables of many peoples, that every moral code is a changing expression of a people's expediency and will to power, that a people's god merely reflects its current ideas, and that the Ten Commandments are no more immutable than acts of Parliament.

Takes Zarathustra's 'voice of their will to power' as the source of each people's catalogue of virtues.

Mencken explains, quoting Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy, that Nietzsche held all life to be at bottom exploitation and will to power, so that injury and annihilation cannot in themselves be wrong and the rights of others are only compromises for the benefit of the mass.

Defines will to power as the appropriating, injuring, vanquishing character of all life.

Mencken says that Nietzsche's immoralism needed a standard and a goal, and that Nietzsche supplied the standard by defining good as all that heightens the feeling of power and bad as all that proceeds from weakness, happiness being the feeling that power increases and resistance is overcome.

Makes the feeling of increasing power the measure of good, bad and happiness.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche offers a gospel of intelligent selfishness and absolute individualism, citing Zarathustra on loving oneself rather than one's neighbour, and an aristocracy that sacrifices the masses as scaffolding for a higher race under the law of natural selection.

Makes increase of the aristocrat's mastery the sole criterion of good.

Mencken argues that for Nietzsche instinct and experiment reveal one's power, that happiness lies in unrestrained yielding to the will to power through constant contest, citing Zarathustra's 'not to peace, but to victory' and casting dice with death, and that this means a crusade against ethics of self-sacrifice for inferiors and a transvaluation that frees the will to power from infamy.

Interprets will to power as universal emulation and contest, never infinite but always becoming.

Mencken explains Nietzsche's view that Christian humility, the Golden Rule and sympathy make a man throw away his strength and his 'feeling of increasing power'; sympathy is a depressant that preserves what is ripe for extinction and, disguised as 'the other world', is hostile to life.

Life is defined as an instinct for growth and power, which the Golden Rule squarely opposes.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche distinguished present from eternal truth and believed the will to power in higher men is an instinct for truth that grows more accurate over time, so that errors diminish until, with truth supreme, the superman would walk the earth.

Thinking itself is read as an expression of the will to master one's environment by interpreting it accurately.

Ludovici explains that Nietzsche is a moral relativist for whom good and evil are expedients by which each species or type gains power, that Christian values protect a low type of man, and that history is a war between the master-morality of the strong and the slave-morality of the weak.

Moral concepts are in origin means of acquiring power.

Ludovici states that for Nietzsche good and evil are, in their origin, merely expedients for acquiring power.

A crisp formula subordinating morality to power.

Ludovici says that 'The Thousand and One Goals' opens Zarathustra's doctrine of moral relativity, declaring all morality a means to power, with verses on the Greeks, Persians, Jews and Germans, and that its close diagnoses the root of modern nihilism: man has no goal.

All morality is declared a mere means to power.

Ludovici calls 'Self-Surpassing' the best exposition of the will to power in the book, and argues that Nietzsche was no iconoclast by choice: the saying that the creator in good and evil must first be a destroyer shows his esteem for law and self-discipline.

Names this chapter as the book's central statement of the doctrine.

Ludovici presents paragraph 10 of 'Old and New Tables' as a protest against reading a moral order into life, citing Nietzsche that life is essentially immoral and is will to power, appropriation and conquest, while Spencer's adaptation is only a secondary re-activity.

Defines life as appropriation and conquest, with adaptation as mere reactivity.

Ludovici sets out Nietzsche's relation to Darwin and Spencer: Nietzsche accepts evolution but makes the organism's formative will primary over environment, treats adaptation as mere reactivity, and replaces the passive struggle for existence with an active struggle for power, of which self-preservation is only an indirect result.

Will to power as the force behind organic life, beyond the struggle for existence.

Ludovici calls Nietzsche's principle that the higher the type the seldomer it succeeds very important: the most deplorable waste is among higher individuals, because highly organised beings rarely reach full development, so the blind will to power in nature needs direction by man.

Nature's blind will to power needs human direction.