5.2—
Will to Power and Nietzsche's Naturalism

Will to power is not a metaphysical theory, if by "metaphysics" is meant some "transcendent" account of the world, a view "from outside." Nietzsche's criticism of such conceptions is most vehement in exactly those texts in which will to power plays a central role. Indeed, the doctrine is introduced precisely as an effort to view the world "from inside" (BGE 36). It is intended as an "interpretation" (BGE 22) of nature that competes with other such interpretations. That is, it is an empirical theory—a broad, hypothetical attempt to provide a unifying explanation for the observable features of the natural world.^[3] In this

[2] Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], chap. 7) poses this dilemma and reviews some of the critical literature on this issue. For an earlier analysis of various ways of interpreting will to power, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 204–7.

[3] Scientific theories are general, systematic schemes that attempt to account for empirical observations but are not reducible to them. They regularly have recourse to unobservable explanatory posits (e.g., forces, classes, quarks). To call on W. V. Quine's famous analogy, a theory is "like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. [ . . . ]But the total field is [ . . . ] underdetermined by its boundary conditions. [ . . . ] No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly, through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole" ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961], 44–45). Or see Norwood Russell Hanson (Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958], 109): "Philosophers sometimes regard physics as a kind of mathematical photography and its laws as formal pictures of regularities. But the physicist often seeks not a general description of what he observes, but a general pattern of phenomena within which what he observes will appear intelligible. [ . . . ] The great unifications of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger and Heisenberg were pre-eminently discoveries of terse formulae from which explanations of diverse phenomena could be generated as a matter of course; they were not discoveries of undetected regularities."

sense, it is akin to scientific theories such as mechanism, thermodynamics, and evolutionary theory; and Nietzsche affirms it as such. Yet will to power is meant to challenge just these theories, which, according to Nietzsche, still manifest what he calls "shadows of God." Thus Nietzsche proposes will to power as the naturalistic theory par excellence, a rigorously antimetaphysical attempt to account for the multiplicity and perpetual becoming of the natural world without recourse to ontotheological posits.

We have seen that, for Nietzsche, nature encompasses all there is. The spiritual, the mental, and the divine no longer occupy a world apart but are natural or explicable in naturalistic terms. Moreover, on Nietzsche's view, nature is univocal, without ontological hierarchy.^[4] Thus he rejects any strict opposition between mind (or spirit) and body (see PTA 10, p. 79; Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body"; BGE 36; A 14), human and animal (see HC ; GS 115; A 14), organic and inorganic matter (see GS 109; BGE 36; WP 655, 676; KSA 9:11[70]). The rejection

[4] In BGE 36, Nietzsche asserts "the right to determine all efficient force univocally [eindeutig ] as—will to power ." (Cf. A 14: "every living being stands beside [man] on the same level of perfection.") Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 304) has more fully developed this conception of "univocity," the notion that "[being] is said in a single same sense throughout all its forms" even if "[t]hat of which it is said [i.e., beings . . . ] differs." Deleuze sees Nietzsche as the last of three great thinkers of the univocity of being. In medieval philosophy, Duns Scotus asserted the heretical view that the ontological relationship of God to the rest of being is not analogical (Aquinas) or negative (Meister Eckhart) but univocal: distributed equally and neutrally, without hierarchy. In modern philosophy, this thesis is proclaimed by Spinoza, for whom God is immanent in all of nature, which, in turn, expresses or explicates God: "Deus sive Natura." Finally, Nietzsche accepts the univocal distribution of being asserted by Duns Scotus and Spinoza but eliminates God as the alleged source and point of convergence. Thus Nietzsche reformulates Spinoza's dictum: "Chaos sire Natura." See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35–42, and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 177–80, and §§4.6–4.7, above. Of course, this is not to say that, for Nietzsche, there is no such thing as hierarchy. It is only to say that Nietzschean hierarchy is one of power and relative value, not one of reality or being .

of these oppositions opens the way for a unified account of all natural phenomena. This is precisely the direction taken by modern science. Hence, mechanistic physics sees all material entities, regardless of kind, as governed by a limited number of forces and explains all physical movements and processes in terms of these. Modern chemistry follows suit. Rejecting vitalism, it maintains that all matter is explicable by the same set of physical and chemical principles and that living organisms differ not by the incorporation of some extra-natural substance but only by their different organization of natural material.^[5] Lastly, post-Darwinian biology dismisses creationism and essentialism, maintaining instead the continuity of "higher" with "lower" forms of life.^[6]

These scientific revolutions constitute major victories for naturalism in its struggle against metaphysics and theology; and Nietzsche allies himself with them on this count.

When I think of my philosophical genealogy, I feel myself connected with [ . . . ] the mechanistic movement (reduction of all moral and aesthetic questions to physiological ones, of all physiological ones to chemical ones, of all chemical ones to mechanical ones). (KSA 11:26[432])

We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals. [ . . . ] As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machine: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically. (A 14; cf. BGE 230)

Yet Nietzsche is also a sharp critic of both mechanistic physics and evolutionary biology (see GS 109, 373; BGE 22; GM I:1, II:12; WP 618–58). What explains this equivocal attitude? It is that, for Nietzsche, these theories are preferable to metaphysical and theological positions, but they are still not naturalistic enough . While they appear to advocate a thoroughly materialist conception of the world and an immanent con-

[5] See Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 12.

[6] In a margin note, Darwin admonishes a progressivist author: "Never say higher or lower" (quoted in Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991], 62, and Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin [New York: Harmony, 1996], 137). Taking his cue from the naturalist advances of modern science, Nietzsche extends this rejection of essential oppositions ("[t]he fundamental faith of the metaphysicians" [BGE 22]) into the moral domain and attempts to construct a moral theory that is "beyond good and evil." See, e.g., GS 1, 4; BGE 2, 24; WP 124.

ception of natural change, Nietzsche argues that they maintain a number of ontotheological posits that must be eliminated for nature to be fully "de-deified" and for becoming to appear in all its "innocence."

5.2.1—
Mechanism and the "Shadows of God"

We can begin with mechanism. Nietzsche's objections to mechanistic physics proceed from his "rejection of being" (see §4.6.1, above). If mechanism sees the world as "matter in motion," Nietzsche argues that it has a false conception of "matter" and an inadequate conception of "motion." Mechanism views matter as composed of irreducible material atoms. Against this view, Nietzsche maintains that, like every atomism, "materialistic atomism" is the result of an ontological, psychological, and linguistic prejudice. It is founded on the privilege of being, the insistence that, somewhere, the earth "stands fast," "the belief in 'substance,' in 'matter,' in the earth-residuum" (BGE 12); and this privilege and insistence are inscribed in the very structure of our language:

Everywhere [language] sees a doer and a doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the "ego" [das »Ich «: the "I"], in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things—only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of "being" follows, and is derivative of, the concept of "ego." In the beginning there is that great calamity of error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity . Today we know that it is only a word. [ . . . ] I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. (TI "Reason" 5; cf. TI "Errors" 3; WP 488)

This dense passage—which moves swiftly from the grammatical "I" to "substance," "thinghood," "being," "free will" and "God"—contains, in aphoristic form, an argument widespread throughout Nietzsche's later work (see WS 11; BGE 12, 17; GM I:13; TI "Reason" 5; WP 624–25, 634–35). Nietzsche's view is that the grammatical subject, the idea of substance, and the posit of thinghood all rest on a conception of being as primary, prior to all becoming and activity. This conception is concomitant with the idea of free will, the alleged capacity of the subject to initiate proximal becomings while remaining outside the chain of becoming. And this idea of free will is but an incarnation of that ultimate, transcendent source of all becoming: God, Being itself.

Thus, the very posit of thinghood—and the separation of being from

becoming, doer from deed, entity from activity—is, on Nietzsche's view, the product of ontotheology. Insofar as its atomism is a form of thingontology, mechanism is darkened by a "shadow of God." Of course, the mechanistic worldview explicitly claims to do without such notions as "free will," advocating instead a purely deterministic system of cause and effect, action and reaction. Yet for it to become as naturalistic as it takes itself to be, Nietzsche believes that mechanism must forgo its thing-ontology in favor of an event- or force-ontology. Hence, against classical mechanics, he sides with Boscovich, who, rejecting the dualism of matter and force, asserts that force is primary and that material entities are but nodes in a field of force.^[7]

[T]he older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," that lump of matter in which it resides and out of which it operates. More rigorous minds [e.g., Boscovich],^[8] however, learned at last to get along without this "earth residuum." (BGE 17)^[9]

[T]here is no such substratum: there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything. (GM I 13)

If we eliminate these additions, no things remain over but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their "effect" upon the same. (WP 635)

But there are still other problems with the mechanistic worldview, as Nietzsche sees it. While it rejects the motive force of "free will," mech-

[7] Boscovich's conception of matter and force, proposed in 1769 but neglected for nearly a century, has become a central feature of contemporary physical theory (see Jonathan Powers, "Atomism," in The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, ed. J. O. Urmson and Jonathan Rée [London: Unwin Hyman, 1989], 32, and J. D. Bernal, Science in History, vol. 2, The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1954], 676). Boscovich was rescued from obscurity when, in 1844, his view was advocated by the great theorist of electromagnetism, Michael Faraday (Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 2 [New York: Dover, 1965], 290): "[T]he atoms of Boscovich appear to me to have a great advantage over the usual notion," Faraday wrote. "His atoms, if I understand him aright, are mere centres of forces or powers, not particles of matter, in which the powers themselves reside. If, in the ordinary view of atoms, we call the particle of matter away from the powers a, and the system of forces in and around it m, then in Boscovich's theory a disappears, or is a mere mathematical point, whilst in the usual notion it is a little unchangeable, impenetrable piece of matter, and m is an atmosphere of force grouped around it." Cf. the passages from Nietzsche cited in the text, below.

[8] Cf. BGE 12: "Boscovich has taught us to abjure belief in the last part of the earth that 'stood fast'—belief in 'substance,' in 'matter,' in the earth-residuum and particleatom."

[9] Cf. BGE 36: "'Will,' of course, can affect only 'will'—and not 'matter'."

anism does not replace this with any more immanent or naturalistic principle that would explain "motion" or "becoming." It does not tell us what motivates one entity to affect another—except that this motion is itself the effect of a prior "cause" and so on, producing a regress that terminates with the only genuinely active force: God the Watchmaker who sets the world-mechanism in motion.^[10] Thus, according to Nietzsche, mechanism is superficial, reactive, passive, and theological: "superficial" because it only "describes" immanent motions without "explaining" them, without getting inside them (see BGE 14; WP 618; 628–32, 660, 688); "reactive" and "passive" because every immanent "action" is truly only a "reaction" (see GM I:1, II:12); and "theological" because the true principle of motion lies outside the system in a transcendent cause (see WP 1062, 1066).

The mechanistic view is ontotheological in another sense as well. It sees the world as essentially static—a system closed, reversible, and in equilibrium. It posits a universe in which, from any given state, all other states, past and future, could, theoretically, be calculated. For classical dynamics, as one writer recently put it, "[a]ll is given in one moment—the changing 'now' is just our subjective window for experiencing the eternally present one instant at a time."^[11] It is this theoretical vantage point, this God's-eye view of an eternal present, to which the mechanistic physicist aspires.^[12] From this vantage-point, time, becoming, and

[10] Cf. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers: "Why was natural motion conceived of in the image of a rationalized machine? [ . . . ] Why did the clock almost immediately become the very symbol of world order? In this last question lies perhaps some elements of an answer. A watch is a contrivance governed by a rationality that lies outside itself, by a plan that is blindly executed by its inner workings. The clock world is a metaphor suggestive of God the Watchmaker, the rational master of a robotlike nature. At the origin of modern science, a 'resonance' appears to have been set up between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity" (Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature [New York: Bantam Books, 1984], 46, see also 47–50). Elsewhere (Order out of Chaos, 6–7), they write: "Western thought has always oscillated between the world as an automaton and a theology in which God governs the universe. [ . . . ] In fact these visions are connected. An automaton needs an external god."

[11] Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 54.

[12] This idea was made famous by Pierre Laplace, who hypothesized that a being like us, but with far greater powers of calculation, could, beginning from any given state, determine any event in the universe, whether past and future. See Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. F. W. Truscott and F.L. Emory (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1917), 4. Nietzsche remarks that this Laplacean aspiration and the mechanistic language of the "laws" of nature "savors of morality" (WP 630). They interpret the fact that something "always act[s . . . ] thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the 'law'" (WP 632). That is, "laws

difference are reduced to the eternal present, being, and the equivalent, to "a sort of shifting and place-changing on the part of a 'being,' of something constant" (WP 631). And even if the thermodynamic revolution of the nineteenth century alters this picture by introducing time, irreversibility, and openness, it does so only to reintroduce stasis, indifference, and being as the telos of the system: entropic equilibrium.^[13]

5.2.2—
Beyond Mechanism:
Will to Power

Nietzsche aims to correct these defects and eliminate these residues of theology. Denying both free will and mechanistic determinism, he attempts to formulate a theory of motion, change, and becoming the principle of which is immanent, active, and explanatory. He begins, as we have seen, by rejecting the dualisms of doer and deed, matter and force, and proposes instead an ontology according to which "the deed is everything" (GM I 13) and there exist "only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta" (WP 635). In opposition to the passive and reactive character of mechanism, this ontology is fundamentally active; and the principle of its activity, motion, and becoming is not transcendent (as with the divine watchmaker or free will) but immanent:

In our science, where the concept of cause and effect is reduced to the relationship of equivalence, with the object of proving that the same quantum of force is present on both sides, the driving force is lacking: we observe only results, and we consider them equivalent in content and force. (WP 688)

The victorious concept of "force," by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as "will to power." (WP 619)^[14]

[13] It is for this reason that Nietzsche rejects the conclusions of thermodynamics: "If, e.g., the mechanistic theory cannot avoid the consequence, drawn for it by William Thompson, of leading to a final state, then the mechanistic theory stands refuted" (WP 1066; cf. WP 639).

[14] Note that the Kaufmann/Hollingdale translation mistakenly renders Nietzsche's "an inner world [eine innere Welt ]" as "an inner will."

This "will to power" must not be thought of as a capacity that inheres in individual entities. For Nietzsche repeatedly criticizes both this conception of "things" and this conception of "the will":

Is "will to power" a kind of "will" or identical with the concept "will"? Is it the same thing as desiring? or commanding? Is it that "will" of which Schopenhauer said it was the "in itself of things"? My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all [ . . . ] one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its "whither?" (WP 692)

There is no will: there are only treaty drafts of will [Willens-Punktationen ] that are constantly increasing or losing their power. (WP 715; see also GS 127; BGE 16, 19; TI "World" 5, "Errors" 3; A 14; WP 46, 488, 668, 671, 765)

That is, in place of an ontology of atomic unities each of which contains "will" as an effective capacity, Nietzsche substitutes a holistic ontology of relatively stable power-complexes essentially bound to one another by lines of force (resistance, domination, submission, alliance, etc.). Hence, each of these complexes exists in an intricate web of tension with neighboring power-complexes; and "will"—"will to power"—is just a name for this state of tension, this straining "towards which" and "away from which " (BGE 19; cf. WP 636). Moreover, this struggle is just as much internal as external. Each power-complex strives to maintain its integrity, its dominance or control over its component powers, which constantly threaten to revolt or secede (see WP 492 and §3.3.3, above).

Change, then, is no longer a matter of "cause" and "effect," conceived on the classic billiard-ball model as a rigid, one-directional system of colliding atoms; rather, it is a matter of myriad macro- and microscopic struggles and the new configurations of power which result:

Two successive states, the one "cause," the other "effect": this is false. [ . . . ] It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the measure of power of each of them. The second condition is something fundamentally different from the first (not its effect): the essential thing is that the factions in struggle emerge with different quanta of power. (WP 633; cf. BGE 19; WP 631, 688–89)

Indeed, this change or becoming does not leave the original parties intact. Rejecting the conception of substance maintained by the mechanistic-atomistic worldview, Nietzsche asserts that change is not merely

the qualitative alteration of essentially enduring entities but the constant production of new entities:

There are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads: here, too, "beings" are only introduced [hineingelegt] by us. [ . . . ] "Forms of domination"; the sphere of that which is dominated continually growing or periodically increasing and decreasing according to the favorability or unfavorability of circumstances. [ . . . ] "Value" is essentially the standpoint for the increase or decrease of these dominating centers ("multiplicities" in any case; but "units" are nowhere present in the nature of becoming)—a quantum of power, a becoming, in so far as none of it has the character of "being." (WP 715; cf. WP 488)

"Becoming," then, is the result of this pressure and tension of forces and powers. Just as the work of a system is a function of the differences in temperature, level, pressure, and potential of its component parts, the dynamic force of will to power is a function of the difference of powers and the tension between them.^[15] A generalized equivalence or equilibrium of forces, then, would signal an end to this power-struggle and, hence, an end to becoming. But Nietzsche denies this possibility ("the adiaphoristic state is missing," he writes, "though it is thinkable" [WP 634]) and views the very supposition as ontotheological, merely another attempt to subordinate becoming to being.^[16] His rejection of God and being requires the elimination of both an absolute origin and an absolute end to becoming (see §4.6.1, above). Dismissing the hypothesis of "a creative God" (WP 1062) and "a created world" (WP 1066), Nietzsche maintains "the temporal infinity of the world in the past." Given this premise,

[i]f the world could in any way become rigid, dry, dead, nothing, or if it could reach a state of equilibrium, or if it had any kind of goal that involved

[15] Cf. Prigogine and Stengers (Order out of Chaos, 111): "Nietzsche was one of those who detected the echo of creations and destructions that go far beyond mere conservation or conversion. Indeed, only difference, such as difference of temperature or potential energy, can produce results that are also differences. Energy conversion is merely the destruction of a difference, together with the creation of another difference. The power of nature is thus concealed by the use of equivalences."

[16] For the same reason, he sees equalizing measures on the social level (socialism, democracy, peace) to be disastrous and antinatural: "from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general [ . . . ] would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness" (GM II:11).

duration, immutability, the once-and-for-all (in short, speaking metaphysically: if becoming could resolve itself into being or into nothingness), then this state must have been reached. But it has not been reached: from which it follows. (WP 1066; cf. HL 9; WP 639, 688, 1064)

With this, Nietzsche challenges both the mechanistic hypothesis of God the watchmaker and the thermodynamic hypothesis of thermal equilibrium or "heat death." If the nineteenth century saw the introduction of time, history, and becoming into a previously static scientific and philosophical worldview, Nietzsche, at the end of that century, seeks to eliminate teleology, the last bulwark of God, eternity, and being.^[17]

5.2.3—
Evolutionary Theory and the "Shadows of God"

No modern scientific theory did more to challenge the static, closed, deterministic, deistic view of the world than Darwin's evolutionary biology.^[18] The Darwinian revolution opposed the physical worldview of Descartes and Newton and biological worldview of Lyell and Agassiz. Against these, it asserted the primacy of time, becoming, chance, and struggle in nature and liberated this becoming from being, essence, and God. Rejecting the belief in a constant world, Darwin revealed a nature in incessant alteration and transformation.^[19] In place of the doctrines of creation and design prevalent among natural theologians and biologists alike, Darwin proposed the mechanisms of random variation and natural selection and candidly described a nature that is, by moral standards, "capricious, cruel, arbitrary, wasteful, [and] careless."^[20] Op-

[17] In doing so, he philosophically anticipates the experimental discoveries of the "Brussels School," which has reinterpreted the second law of thermodynamics to include spontaneous transformations from disorder to order, from simplicity and equivalence to complexity and difference. See, e.g., Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, passim . Also see p. 211n. 109.

[18] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 35–67.

[19] This summary presentation draws heavily on Stephen Jay Gould's and Ernst Mayr's superb accounts of the essential features of Darwin's revolution. See Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin," in Darwin's Legacy, ed. Charles L. Hamrum (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), and Mayr, One Long Argument, chaps. 4–5. While I find them particularly compelling, these reconstructions of Darwinism are not uncontroversial. For criticisms, see, e.g., Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 169–79, and Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 229–312.

[20] D. L. Hull, quoted in Mayr, One Long Argument, 14. Nietzsche uses remarkably similar language in BGE 9 and 22 to combat the design theories of the Stoics and mechanists. On Darwin's arguments against creation and design, see Gould, "In Praise of CharlesDarwin," 5–6, and Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

posing philosophical and biological essentialisms, Darwin discovered that there are no essential disjunctions between species and showed that every species is itself only a statistical abstraction over a population of irreducibly unique individuals, a variation without which evolution would be impossible.^[21] Moreover, Darwin refused to grant any divine exception to human beings, viewing them as material through and through and continuous with the rest of nature.^[22] Biological evolution also seemed to contradict the trajectory of thermodynamics. If the latter hypothesized a solar system becoming steadily more uniform and disordered, the former revealed a world in which difference and complexity increase, rather than decrease, over time.^[23]

The Darwinian revolution thus effected a profound de-deification of nature and naturalization of humanity—a fact occasionally acknowledged by Nietzsche (see HL 9; GS 357; GM III:25; A 14). Yet Nietzsche seems to have known Darwin primarily through what Stephen Jay Gould has recently called "Darwin's spin doctors," who, under the guise of disseminating Darwinism, continued to insinuate ontotheological posits into the theory of natural selection.^[24] In his quest to eliminate

[21] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 39–42, and Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 160–66. We have seen, in §2.2.4, that Nietzsche, too, argues against essentialism along these nominalist lines. Indeed, Mayr (One Long Argument, 41) presents an argument concerning the linguistic basis of essentialism that reads like a paraphrase of passages in TL and TI: "Essentialism's influence was great in part because its principle is anchored in our language, in our use of a single noun in the singular to designate highly variable phenomena of our environment, such as mountain, home, water, horse, or honesty. Even though there is a great variety in kinds of mountain and kinds of home, and even though the kinds do not stand in direct relation to one another (as do the members of a species), the simple noun defines the class of objects."

[22] See Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 21–27, and "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 6.

[23] See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972.), 18, and Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, 127–28.

[24] Gould, Full House, 19. Gould argues that, in both the popular and the scholarly literature, the evolutionary story continues to be "spun" in this manner and that we still need to "complete Darwin's revolution" (see Full House, chap. 2). Nietzsche's critique thus remains as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. In his recent book on philosophy and evolutionary theory, Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 181–83, 46167) explicitly acknowledges the significance of Nietzsche's Darwinian critique of "Darwinism." Yet his presentation of Nietzsche's position is both superficial and patronizing. Moreover, Dennett dedicates a substantial portion of this book to a critique of Gould (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 2.29–312), who is seen as fortifying Darwin's theory with superfluous metaphysical posits. I do not find this in Gould. Indeed, I read Gould as sharingNietzsche's commitment to the thorough elimination, from evolutionary theory, of all the "shadows of God."

the "shadows of God," Nietzsche subjects such "Darwinism" to a naturalizing critique.^[25]

This critique appears throughout Nietzsche's corpus—from the 1873 essay, "On Truth and Lies," to the sections and notes of 1888 entitled "Anti-Darwin" (TI "Skirmishes" 14; WP 647, 684–85). Recurrent in these texts is an argument against a notion of evolutionary progress that takes human beings to be the goal and pinnacle of nature. In "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche remarks that the pride of humanity—the human intellect—is an evolutionary variation no better, and in many ways worse, than the "sharp teeth of beasts of prey" and that human existence will surely turn out to be but a "shadowy and transient," "aimless and arbitrary" moment in geological time (TL, pp. 79–80).^[26] Evolutionary progressivism and anthropocentrism, Nietzsche suggests elsewhere, are merely secular translations of biblical creationism—attempts to shift the ontotheological weight from the origin to the end of history:

Formerly, one sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction! One therefore now tries the opposite direction: the way mankind is going shall serve as proof of his grandeur and kinship with God. Alas this, too, is in vain! [ . . . ] However high mankind may have evolved—and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning!—it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its "earthly course" rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. (D 49)

We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: his intellectuality [Geistigkeit ] is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too—as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means

[25] "Darwinism," here refers to the view of the "spin doctors," not to Darwin's view itself, with which Nietzsche, albeit unbeknownst to Nietzsche himself, is in very substantial agreement.

[26] Cf. Gould, Full House, 18: "If we are but a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent bush of life, and if our twig branched off just a geological moment ago, then perhaps we are not a predictable result of an inherently progressive process (the vaunted trend to progress in life's history); perhaps we are, whatever our glories or accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never rise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions."

the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection . . . And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, the one who has strayed the most dangerously from its instincts. (A 14)^[27]

Despite Darwin's antiprogressivism, evolutionary theorists continued to see the phenomenon of evolutionary "adaptation" as progressive. According to a view promoted by Herbert Spencer, one of Nietzsche's prime targets (see GM II: 12), natural selection gradually promotes an increasingly better fit between organisms and their environment. But such "adaptationism" projects into the evolutionary process a false teleology, amounting to a revival of the "argument from design" that Darwin's theory explicitly opposed.^[28] Thus, Gould writes:

Evolutionary biologists have too often slipped into a seductively appealing mode of argument about the phenomenon of adaptation. We tend to view every structure as designed for a definite purpose, thus building (in our imagination) a world of perfect design not much different from that concocted by eighteenth-century natural theologians who "proved" God's existence by the perfect architecture of organisms. [ . . . ] But [the] current utility [of traits] does not imply that they were built directly by natural selection for the purpose they now serve. [ . . . ] We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. [ . . . ] The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What "play" would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose? [ . . . ] Selection works for the moment. It cannot sense what may be of use ten million years hence in a distant descendant. [ . . . ] Future utility is an important consideration in evolution, but it cannot be the explanation for current preservation. Future utilities can only be the fortuitous effects of other direct reasons for immediate favor. (The confusion of current utility with reasons for past historical origin is a logical trap that has plagued evolutionary thinking from the start.)^[29]

[27] Cf. HL 9; GM III: 25; WP 90, 401, 684–85. Also see Gould, Full House, for an extended argument against the notion of evolutionary progressivism and anthropocentrism.

[28] Thus Darwin wrote in his Autobiography: "The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley . . . fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of the bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows" (quoted in Mayr, One Long Argument, 57).

[29] Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 155–56, 170. This argument runs throughout Gould's work. The most sustained version is presented in Gould and Richard Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205 (1979): 581–98.

Nietzsche makes a strikingly similar point in §12 of the Genealogy 's second essay, which bears citing again in this context:

[T]he cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adjustment through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of a physiological organ [ . . . ], this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older ears—for one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose, the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understand the reason why it originated—the eye being made for seeing, the hand made for grasping. [ . . . P]urposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a "thing," an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in purely chance fashion. The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but the succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions.^[30]

In place of the steady upward climb imagined by the progressivists and adaptationists, Gould and Nietzsche view the trajectory of evolution as an unpredictable, ateleological movement. "Adaptation" and "success" are local and contingent; and subsequent forms can claim only temporary victory in a perpetual and shifting agon rather than global advance on "the ladder of progress."

Neither the longevity of an organism nor its complexity or later appearance are any evidence of progress or superiority. Gould points out that, however simple, "bacteria, by any reasonable criterion, were in

[30] For an earlier critique of progressivism and adaptationism as manifested in the Hegelian dialectic, see HL 8–9.

the beginning, are now, and ever shall be the most successful organisms on earth"^[31] and that the relatively late and rare appearance of complex organisms such as Homo sapiens is no sign of an inherent tendency to complexity but only a consequence of life's diversification in the only direction available to it.^[32] As Nietzsche puts it:

[M]an as a species does not represent any progress compared to any other animal. The whole animal and vegetable kingdom does not evolve from the lower to the higher—but all at the same time, in utter disorder, over and against one another. The richest and most complex forms—for the expression "higher type" means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility. The former are achieved fairly rarely and maintain their superiority with difficulty. (WP 684)

In short, criteria of progress or excellence are criteria of value; and such criteria are not found or given in the nature of things but must be made and defended . Once we give up the notion that a teleology is inherent in the evolutionary process, criteria other than preservation, survival, and adaptation become available for assessing excellence.^[33] Thus Nietzsche remarks: "Greatness ought not to depend on success"; "the goal of humanity cannot lie in [ . . .  the] end [of history], but only in its highest exemplars" (HL 9, p. 111).^[34] Given the central role Darwin's theory assigns to chance,^[35] we can liken evolution to a dice game. On this model, Nietzsche suggests, excellence need not be assigned to statistical averages or probabilities but to those rare "lucky throws" [Glückswürfen ].^[36] "The brief spell of beauty, of genius," he writes, "is sui generis: such things are not inherited" (WP 684; cf. 685).

Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. "Progress" is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea. The European of today is vastly inferior to the European of the Renaissance: further development is altogether not accord-

[31] Gould, Full House, 38, see also 175–216.

[32] Ibid., 167–75.

[33] See Nietzsche's 1873 notes on history (in The Portable Nietzsche, 39ff.), and HL 9; D 106, 108; GM I:17, II:12; TI "Skirmishes" 44; A 14; WP 647–48, 684–85.

[34] See GM I:9, where Nietzsche's irony hints that the "success" of "slave," "mob," "herd," or "democratic" ideals is no indication of their superiority. Also see Nietzsche's various remarks to the effect that "one always has to defend the strong against the weak" (WP 685; cf. WP 864, GM: III:14).

[35] See Mayr, One Long Argument, 48–49; Gould, "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 5; and Monod, Chance and Necessity .

[36] See GM II:16: "From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus' 'great child,' be he called Zeus or chance." See also GM III:14; A 3–4; WP 684–85, 864.

ing to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength. In another sense, success in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures: here we really do find a higher type, which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of overman. Such lucky strokes [Glücksfälle ] of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. (A 4; cf. WP 881)

5.2.4—
Beyond the "Struggle for Existence":
Will to Power

This argument forms part of a wider polemic against views that assert the primacy of preservation and adaptation in the natural world. Nietzsche contends that organisms do not, first and foremost, struggle to live, to survive, to preserve themselves. Such a conception is both too reactive and too teleological: it locates the impetus for natural becoming in a reactive attempt to adapt to environing conditions and takes the aim of this adaptation to be the preservation of existence for as long as possible (see BGE 13; GM II: 12; WP 70, 647, 681, 684). Nietzsche writes:

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results . In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!—one of which is the instinct of self-preservation. (BGE 13; cf. Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; WP 650, 688)

This view is repeated and elaborated in the fifth book of the Gay Science:

The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation. [ . . . O]ur modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this [ . . . ] dogma [concerning the instinct of self-preservation] (most recently and worst of all Darwinism with its incomprehensibly one-sided doctrine of the "struggle for existence").^[37] [ . . . But] in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the life-will. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in

[37] The famous title and subject of On the Origin of Species, chap. 3.

accordance with the will to power which is the will of life. (GS 349; cf. TL §2; Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; BGE 262; GM II:11; TI "Skirmishes" 14, 44)

There is an apparent equivocation, in these passages, about the nature of "will to power." On the face of it, will to power would seem to be the drive to acquire power; yet both passages assert that it essentially concerns the expenditure ("discharge," "sacrifice," "overflow and squandering") of power, "even to the point of absurdity." Furthermore, having criticized one "superfluous teleological principle," the instinct of self-preservation, Nietzsche seems to substitute another, the desire for power. Lastly, this desire (for power) would seem to signify a fundamental lack (of power), that is, a fundamental indigence and distress, which, however, here and elsewhere, Nietzsche repeatedly denies is the basic condition of nature.^[38]

These difficulties rest on a teleological interpretation of will to power and disappear as soon as we begin to understand Nietzsche's doctrine otherwise. If the fundamental condition of life is one of superabundance and exuberance rather than indigence and distress, power is not primarily something an organism wants or needs but something an organism is or has and must exercise . Will to power, then, is not a teleological principle but a dynamic force, like a stretched spring or a dammed river.^[39] The "willing" of will to power, Nietzsche writes, "is not 'desiring,' striving, demanding"; rather, it is "[t]hat state of tension by virtue of which a force seeks to discharge itself" (WP 668).^[40]

If Nietzsche's language is puzzling, his basic hypothesis is fairly straightforward. It is one later taken up and developed by the French

[38] This rejection of indigence and utility, and the assertion of superabundance and exuberance as the primum mobile of life, are basic themes in Nietzsche's work from beginning to end. See, e.g., BT passim and BT SC:1, SC:4, SC:5; TL, pp. 90–91 (on the indigent scientific vs. the free artistic intellect); Z: Prologue 1, 4, Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; GS 370; BGE 260, 262; GM I (on master vs. slave morality); TI "Skirmishes" 8–9, "Ancients" 4–5; EH "Books" BT:2; WP 797, 802, 843, 864, 1050.

[39] For various metaphors of power as superabundance, see GS 285, 370; Z Prologue 1, Z: 1 "On the Gift-Giving Virtue," Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; BGE 260, 262; TI "Skirmishes" 8–9, 44, "Ancients" 3; A 1; EH "Books" BT:2; WP 576, 802, 846, 852, 1022.

[40] Thus, in GM II: 17–18, Nietzsche calls will to power "the instinct for freedom " that must "discharge and vent itself." TI "Ancients" 3 describes it as an "inner explosive [ . . . ]," a "tremendous inner tension." In Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming," will to power is "the unexhausted procreative will of life," and life is "that which must always overcome itself ." Resonating with these passages is BT SC: 5, which glorifies the "amoral artist-god [ . . . ] who, creating worlds, frees himself from the distress of fullness and overfullness ."

Nietzschean Georges Bataille: namely, that the dynamic force of nature (that which propels growth, sexuality, procreation, struggle, and death) and of culture^[41] (production, form-giving, creativity, and play) is the superabundance of energy in the biosphere and the compulsion to expend it.^[42] As Bataille puts it, "it is not necessity but its contrary, 'luxury,' that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems ."^[43] For both Bataille and Nietzsche, the source and archetype of this expenditure is the sun and its prodigality:

Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without receiving. [ . . . ] Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander.^[44]

In the natural world, growth constitutes a temporary accumulation of energy; but this accumulation eventually ceases, often giving way to procreation, a luxurious expenditure through which life is given to an-

[41] This distinction between "nature" and "culture" does not mark an opposition between two fundamentally different domains but only a conventional division of the same domain: Nature writ large. Nietzsche's point is, precisely, that will to power operates throughout both "nature" and "culture."

[42] See Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988). Nietzsche, too, attempts to view "[t]he organic functions translated back to the basic will, the will to power" (WP 658); cf. Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; BGE 36; WP 651–57, 680, 688.

[43] Bataille, Accursed Share, 12.

[44] Ibid., 28–29. Cf. Zarathustra, which opens with praise of the sun, that "overrich star," that "cup that wants to overflow, that the water may flow from it golden and carry everywhere the reflection of [its] delight" (Z: Prologue 1). Later in the Prologue, Zarathustra echoes this passage, proclaiming: "I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away and does not want to preserve himself" (4). See also the section on "The Gift-Giving Virtue"—"the highest virtue," which, like gold, "is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its splendor; it always gives of itself" (Z: 1 "On the Gift-Giving Virtue"). For further discussion of the gift-giving theme in Nietzsche's work and suggestions concerning its relationship to Bataille's conception of "general economy," see Gary Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 13–51, and Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 82–101.

other.^[45] So, too, is it within the domain of "culture." Nietzsche notes that peoples are acquisitive and conservative until they reach such a point of power and abundance that they burst the bounds of their moralities and ranks, producing a flood of individualities and new systems of value (BGE 2.62.).^[46] If law and justice temporarily stem this tide, Nietzsche insists that,

from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general [ . . . ,] would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness. (GM II: 11; cf. BGE 259; GM II: 12; and WP 728)

In short, while provisional limits and restrictions can be imposed upon the impulse to expenditure, this accumulation can only ever be in the service of a more magnificent squandering. Ultimately, the movement of expenditure can only be channeled, not thwarted.^[47] Denied outward discharge, the will to power turns inward (GM II:16). And even the ascetic who attempts to negate life and will to power implicitly affirms them, for asceticism, Nietzsche famously argues, is merely a perverse will of life against life itself, "a will to nothingness " that, nevertheless, "remains a will! " (GM III:28; cf. GM III:10–13; TI "Morality").

The affirmation of life, then, requires an affirmation of will to power as the will to expenditure, the drive to discharge strength and exude energy. According to both Nietzsche and Bataille, human history and anthropology reveal the extent and variety of forums developed for the satisfaction of this drive. Festivals, spectacles, games, athletic and aesthetic contests, orgies, feasts, sacrifices, wars, monumental construction, gambling, nonreproductive sex, and sumptuous gifts all attest to this impulse to dissipate energy and discharge strength at the cost of preser-

[45] See Bataille, Accursed Share, 33–35; and Nietzsche, Z: 2 "On Self-Overcoming"; TI "Ancients" 4; WP 655–58, 680.

[46] Cf. WP 933: "A culture of the exception, the experiment, the danger, the nuance as a consequence of a great abundance of powers, this is the tendency of every aristocratic culture. Only when a culture has an excess of powers at its disposal can it also constitute a hothouse of luxury cultivation" (modified on the basis of the original, KSA 12:9[139]).

[47] See Bataille, Accursed Share, 21, 25.

vation and the utility of resources.^[48] Yet, as we have seen, will to power is not only concerned with the expenditure and dissipation of strength. It is also taken up with "growth and expansion," the acquisition of strength and power in the service of an even more grandiose expenditure. Hence, it favors neither total dissipation of power nor complete destruction of the object on which power is exercised. Such results will only negate, rather than affirm, the will of life. In contrast, Nietzsche sees will to power as exemplified by the Greek agon . These contests are not "fights of annihilation" (HC, p. 35), which manifest what, following Hesiod, Nietzsche calls "the evil Eris": struggles motivated only by ressentiment and the desire to destroy.^[49] Rather, they affirm Hesiod's "good Eris," fostering an ongoing forum for the release of strength, the testing of claims to power, and the drive for competitive distinction.^[50] Because "will to power can manifest itself only against resistances," every contestant "seeks that which resists it" (WP 656). Competing forces will be worthy opponents only if their respective strengths and directions are more or less similar. The exemplary contestant derives no satisfaction from competing against an inferior power, nor does he or she wish to dominate the field absolutely. Such situations undermine the contest; and the proper response to these situations, Nietzsche suggests, is "ostracism," the banishment of these over-bearing contestants (see HC, p. 36). For the good contestant "resist[s] any ultimate peace," and, instead, "will[s] the eternal recurrence of war and peace" (GS 285).

The agon may well result in the acquisition of strength and the feeling of power that accompanies it. Yet, again, this condition is not its aim: will to power is ateleological.^[51] It desires not a final state but the perpetuation of the contest. Paradoxically, power can be acquired only through expenditure (think, for instance, of athletic training); and its acquisition leads once again to this desire to expend. Bataille illustrates this well with his privileged manifestation of the will to expenditure, the

[48] See Bataille, "Notion of Expenditure," 118–23, Accursed Share, passim; and Nietzsche, HC; HL 9; GM II:6–7; TI "Ancients" 3–5.

[49] The notion of ressentiment appears nowhere in "Homer's Contest." But I think Nietzsche's characterization of "the evil Eris" in this text has much in common with his description of the ressentiment that characterizes the slave's will to power in the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I.

[50] See HC, p. 35, and Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 1–50.

[51] One is reminded of a claim repeated throughout Nietzsche's corpus: "every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment" (BGE 22). Cf. HL 1, p. 66; BT SC: 5; WP 55, 634, 708. Also cf. Bataille ("Notion of Expenditure," 118): activities of expenditure "have no end beyond themselves."

ritual of potlatch practiced by a number of Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast.^[52] "Potlatch," Bataille explains,

is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining. More often than not it is the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging and obligating him. The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. He can only reply, a short time later, by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first: He must pay back with interest.^[53]

Bataille remarks that "[t]here would be no potlatch if, in a general sense, the ultimate problem concerned the acquisition and not the dissipation of useful wealth."^[54] Yet, it gives rise to a paradox:

We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring a power . Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he has had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses. He enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.^[55]

[I]t turns out that the giver has only apparently lost. Not only does he have the power over the recipient that the gift has bestowed on him, but the recipient is obligated to nullify that power by repaying the gift. The rivalry even entails the return of a greater gift: In order to get even the giver must not only redeem himself, but he must also impose the "power of the gift" on his rival in turn. In a sense the presents are repaid with interest . Thus the gift is the opposite of what it seemed to be: To give is obviously to lose, but the loss apparently brings a profit to the one who sustains it.^[56]

Bataille maintains, however, that this acquisitive interpretation of potlatch is misleading. Acquisition is only a moment in the endless cycle of

[52] Though the term "potlatch" properly describes the practice of a particular group of peoples, Bataille (Accursed Share, 67) notes that "[e]thnographers now employ this term to designate institutions functioning on a similar principle; they find traces of it in all societies." Indeed, he writes, "a good many of our behaviors are reducible to the laws of potlatch; they have the same significance as it does" (69). For his anthropological data, Bataille draws heavily on Marcel Mauss's extremely influential "Essay on the Gift" (1923–24), itself based on the work of Davy, Boas, Swanton, and Malinowski. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 37.

[53] Bataille, Accursed Share, 67–68; cf. "Notion of Expenditure," 121.

[54] Bataille, Accursed Share, 68.

[55] Ibid., 69.

[56] Ibid., 70.

potlatch: every gift prompts, in response, an even greater gift, a more glorious expenditure. One does not give in order to acquire; acquisition is merely an effect of one's giving.^[57] "[I]f it is ultimately a source of profit," Bataille writes, "the principle of [potlatch] is nevertheless determined by a resolute squandering of resources that in theory could have been acquired."^[58] Moreover, in this endless cycle of gift-giving, what is genuinely acquired is not things but rank, esteem, value, glory. And this rank is determined, principally, not by what one has, but by what one is able to risk, expend, put in play: "the players can never retire from the game, their fortunes made; they remain at the mercy of provocation."^[59] As soon as one retires from the game, one's prestige becomes a thing of the past.

The example of "potlatch," of agonistic giving, may appear to be an anthropological curiosity. Yet Bataille sees in it something characteristic not only of human activity but of natural life as a whole: the burden of excess energy and the need to expend it. So, too, does Nietzsche see in his privileged metaphor of the agon not a rarefied cultural practice but something characteristic of natural processes generally. Bataille's "potlatch" and Nietzsche's agon are exemplary instances of will to power, intended to help us see that "power" is not primarily about acquisition, not primarily something a being wants or can have for its own, but something that circulates through living beings and that propels the myriad movements of organic life.

5.2.5—
Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism:
Nietzsche's Materialism

Recall, however, that Nietzsche rejects any fundamental distinction between organic and inorganic nature. As we have seen, he believes that the hypothesis of will to power helps to explain even the most basic inorganic, physical processes. The solar power that animates the biosphere,

[57] cf. BGE 13 and GS 349, cited above. See WP 935: "True graciousness, nobility, greatness of soul proceed from abundance; do not give in order to receive—do not try to exalt themselves by being gracious;—prodigality as the type of true graciousness, abundance of personality as its presupposition." Cf. WP 943, 864.

[58] Bataille, Accursed Share, 70.

[59] Bataille, "Notion of Expenditure," 122–23. Thus Bataille: "power is characterized as power to lose" (122; cf. Accursed Share, 71), and Nietzsche: "how much injury [one] can endure without suffering from it becomes the actual measure of [one's] wealth" (GM II:10). Cf. also WP 949.

then, must be only one of many forms of energy that drive natural becoming. Let me, then, conclude this discussion by working backward from the domain of culture, life, and biology to the realm of the inorganic from which we began.

Darwin's revolution promoted the conception of a naturalized humanity thoroughly enmeshed in a de-deified nature. Rejecting creationism, essentialism, progressivism, adaptationism, and teleology, it saw species as mere statistical generalizations, viewed all living beings as derived from a common ancestor, and refused to see human beings as apart from, or as the pinnacle of, this natural distribution. Indeed, Darwin espoused a thoroughgoing materialism that denied the immateriality of the soul (or mind) and the existence of any extra-natural vital force in the organic world.^[60]

Nonetheless, scientists and laypeople alike continued to view human beings as fundamentally different in kind from animals and to make an analogous separation between living and nonliving matter.^[61] It is in this context that Nietzsche intervenes to complete Darwin's revolution.^[62] The rigorous naturalist cannot accept such essential divisions in nature. If Nietzsche and Bataille often restrict their hypothesis of will to power and expenditure to the realm of life, Nietzsche, at least, often realizes the inadmissibility of this restriction and seeks to extend it to the whole of nature. Thus, Nietzsche counts among "man's four errors" that "he endowed himself with fictitious attributes [ . . . ] and placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature" (GS 115). Against vitalist evolutionary theorists, and despite his critique of mechanism, Nietzsche retains the materialism promoted by classical physical theory, which asserts the continuity of the organic with the inorganic world (see KSA 11:26[432] and A 14, quoted in §5.2, above). Organic matter is the result of a set of peculiar chemical reactions that took place in "the primeval soup" and set off the evolutionary chain. Hence, though

[60] See Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, together with Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks, ed. Paul H. Barrett (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974); Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 21–27, and "In Praise of Charles Darwin," 5–6.

[61] See Stephen Jay Gould, "Eternal Metaphors of Palaeontology," in Patterns of Evolution as Illustrated by the Fossil Record, ed. A. Hallam (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1977), 14 and passim .

[62] Again, like many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and laypeople, Nietzsche seems not to have fully appreciated the radical nature of Darwin's de-deification and naturalization. Despite this ignorance, Nietzsche undertakes a philosophical campaign that, in many respects, continues and furthers Darwin's revolution.

remarkable in many ways, living beings are not so by virtue of any extra-natural origin or endowment. "The entire distinction" between "the inorganic and the organic world," Nietzsche writes, "is a prejudice" (WP 655). "The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type" (GS 109).

Recall that Nietzsche criticizes mechanism for promoting a passive, reactive principle of natural movement that could only have been made possible by an original divine push. Similarly, he criticizes biology for taking a reactive principle, "adaptation," to be the driving force of evolutionary change.^[63] In place of these, Nietzsche seeks an active principle that can explain natural movement and change without recourse to ontotheological posits. Moreover, Nietzsche's naturalism requires that this principle apply equally to mechanical, chemical, biological, and cultural change. It is this that leads him to propose will to power as a unifying theory. Thus, after noting that all human functions (including thought and reason) and, indeed, all organic functions (nutrition, excretion, procreation, etc.) can be explained in terms of the interrelation of "desires," "passions," and "drives," he suggests that this might "be sufficient for also understanding [ . . . ] the so called mechanistic (or 'material') world" (BGE 36). "In short," Nietzsche continues, "conscience of method demands" that we "risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever 'effects' are recognized—and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as force is active in them, will-force, will-effects." If one grants this hypothesis, "one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power . The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its 'intelligible character'—it would be 'will to power' and nothing besides."^[64]

[63] See GM II:12, and WP 70, 647, 681, 684. Cf. Gould ("Eternal Metaphors of Palaeontology," 21–22): "physical scientists are forever trying to extend their 'billiard ball' models to major events in the history of life. (By 'billiard ball model,' I refer to a habit of explanation that treats organisms as inert substances, buffeted by an external environment and reacting immediately to physical stress without any counteracting, intrinsic control or even temporary resistance.) [ . . . ] I have labeled as 'physicalist' these purely environmental explanations, based upon billiard ball models: i.e., stimulus leads to immediate and passive response. [ . . . ] For all my general support of environmental control, I applaud the attempt of several palaeontologists to counteract these physicalist explanations by asserting the independence and internal dynamic of biological processes in complex systems, particularly of ecological interaction and the genetic and morphological prerequisites of complexity."

[64] Cf. WP 619: "one is obliged to understand all motion, all 'appearances,' all 'laws,' only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end.In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source."

One could take this hypothesis as an attempt to resolve the quarrel between mechanism and vitalism by asserting a sort of hypervitalism that would extend the vital force over the entire domain of matter. But this is not Nietzsche's move. Time and again he asserts that human beings and life itself must be "translated back into nature," not the reverse: "life is merely a special case of the will to power" (WP 692), he writes. On the issue of mechanism and vitalism, Nietzsche advocates the position held by most twentieth-century scientists: that the very distinction ought to be rejected.^[65] For Nietzsche, the trouble is that both positions retain theological posits, vitalism proceeds from the spiritual conviction that life must be more than, higher than, different from the rest of the material world; and mechanism maintains a passive and deterministic conception of matter that is incapable of explaining becoming and the production of difference without recourse to an extra-natural motive force. Instead, Nietzsche looks at matter and everywhere sees motion and change, from the simplest chemical reactions and the most basic material forces to the nutritive and reproductive activity of animals and plants and the formative activity of artists and athletes. Everywhere this motion and change is driven by struggle and pathos: by attraction, repulsion, tension, resistance, integration, disintegration, assimilation, incorporation, alliance, and so on. Having rejected any transcendent source, Nietzsche comes to hold that the principle of this becoming and struggle must lie in material things themselves, things considered as "dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta" (WP 635). In the words of Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine: "since there is no one to build nature, we must give to its very 'bricks'—that is, to its microscopic activity—a description that accounts for that building process. [ . . . M]atter is no longer the passive substance described in the mechanistic world view but is associated with spontaneous activity."^[66]

[65] See, e.g., Gould, Flamingo's Smile, 377–91, and Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, 8–21.

[66] Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 7, 9. Nietzsche's view might also be compared with that of another materialist, atheist, antidualist critic of mechanism, Denis Diderot, who asserts "a simple hypothesis that explains everything—sensitivity as a property common to all matter or as a result of the organization of matter" (Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream, ed. and trans. Leonard Tancock [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966], 159).