The Will to Power

The modern man is found more in search of himself with every passing year. Modernity has brought, as in every era, more questioning, for we have more and more… and still more… of which to be aware. Yet our subconscious knows better than to consider this an equal to those eras prior…

Our science brings newness to light at a rate for which we can never be consistently aware. Rarely are we able to define this changing to a degree that seems to all as comprehensive enough for public comprehension, and rarely are we content to know and study only this — our present reality — and instead, pursue we novelty of every kind.

With each passing moment, we are presented new icons worthy of worship and celebrity. The demand on the young to know of these widening celebrated is as ever-increasing as the number of those among them. Who could have friends amongst these? Who could discern true value with this inundating slough?

“The” society (here, that which is recognizably comparable amongst Western peoples) as a whole has become increasingly obsessed of that which increases our inscrutable social standing, and less mindful of our institutions and the drink we imbibe by them. The growing gap between that which propels society and that which simply revels in its glories has left the innovative dismembered in the in-between; we pull and pull at the fore and hind legs of our intellects (or, for those less keen to brave their arguments, our scarecrow of them) until the flesh rends and the husk drops as a shell to our feet, free to rot in the run-off of social influences and sloganism.

How should we be surprised or dismayed to have our Michael Eric Dysons, our Nikole Hannah-Joneses, our Judith Butlers, even as last century boasts its Carl Jungs, Nietzches, Robert Maynard Hutchinses — yes, even its Foucaults? For their faults in thinking, they thought, rather than reacted… they created, even deftly, rather than speaking only to inflate their standing. Yes, even last century’s Foucaults outlie amongst our modern comparisons.

“A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.”

For all of the moral objection I may have to Michel Foucault, his intellectual inheritance (Hegel, Marx), and intellectual inheritors (Judith Butler and Žižek), his vision of modern slavery does not confuse, but rather, clarifies our plight.

I borrow a title from the prescient Frederich Nietzsche here. This is no accident, though I should note that I intend not to imply that I am of a similar mind about all things, nor to ascribe a similar genius to my writing by association. ‘The Will to Power’ (here, the phrase/idea) is Nietzche’s attempt at creating that which should be a comprehensive deconstruction of life; he makes the imperative of living the power which we can will ourselves to grasp — by our achieving, we validate our living. Living is not a moral proposition, in his assessment, but a proposition of power, averse in various degrees, to risk.

Enter his “man and super-man,” (in German, Übermensch, or “overman”) famously coined of the German “super,” or “over,” a linguistic use inspiring the same verbage in English, as well as, more familiarly and indirectly, a character apart of the Western canon.

The “fully-developed man,” or “super-man,” is not only positioned to defend himself and his interests, but has armed himself with competence to attack those ideologies he encounters in his going out. Man, at arms against super-man, can not match, for his, “drowsiness brought on by moral narcotics,” his cumbersome “shield” (morality); Nietzsche observes, “he is still in armor,” while super-man is, “above all, provided with weapons.” (The Will to Power, th. 727-728)

Nietzche here forgets what he may have remembered had he made this critique at the same time as he bathed himself in the Scriptures for the writing of Antichrist: the God of our faith cares for our weaponization against the world as well as for our defense. The armament of God, as we are admonished to take in full (Ephesians 6:10-18), gives us the sword of the Spirit — the literal word of God — as our weapon for conquering. Disciples of all nations come as the flesh is cleaved from the Spirit by this Word — a miserable, sometimes painful undertaking, though higher than those worldly miseries, as the former brings us closer to righteousness by His law, and likeness with Christ.

In a short and rather sickly life, Nietsche endlessly battled (extrinscially) the philosophical behemoth of creeping nihilism and lamented, rather famously and ironically, the loss of the Christian ethic (a “slave religion,” as he regarded it), and what it meant for Western society as a whole. In sentiments similar to those folkisms recorded by Aleksander Solzhenytsin in the latter days of the century (e.g. “Man have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”), Nietzche writes that though he cannot stomach the Biblical breadth of living, with all of its self-injurious nature and universally assumed guilt under the law of God, his inquiry into the continuing impact of Christ led him to believe that Christianity was absolutely necessary. His continuing criticism of the Christian faith was always constrained by the danger he saw in an increasingly post-modern public, where secularism intersects a seductive nihilism at almost a one-to-one rate at the height of academia. His famous, “God is dead. (…) And we have killed Him,” is a lament… likely, a painful one, as Nietzche, I’m sure, would have liked to exclaim this in triumph, and not concern himself with the consequences of the forgotten morality.

While flawed, his intentionally absurdist and succinct Antichrist remains one of the most singular arguments against the Christian faith, and one Christians should consider encountering with the Sword, for its quintessential nature.

It helps to know the enemy. But almost exclamatory in the heart of the Christian reading Nietzsche’s Will to Power is this: our Will to Power is by and for the Holy Spirit — the imbibing of the Spirit of God and His law. (John 14:12-14, Acts 1:5, Romans 8:14-17)

Yahweh, whom man ultimately longs for… God, for whom man is created… gives us coal to burn our indecencies and decadent natures. (Isaiah 6:7) Both our will and power are impossibly less than can achieve, segregated from our Creator. (John 15:5) Both the necessary will and power (that is, the will to do as we should by the natural Law of creation and the power to do so) come by His revelation to us (Proverbs 29:18), and therefore, separate of Him, can not validate our living. This is evident in the decline of man in his post-religious enlightenments.

Our sudden (or what poses as sudden — perhaps quiet) great awakening to our self-sufficiency, heroic and defiant nature, and our needless mores and taboos restraining this defiant nature, has resulted in a change in both rhetoric and action: we in the West are Godless.

Our sudden realization of Godlessness and self-sufficiency in this agnosticism or atheism or the like made sudden change… Nietzsche saw its inception:

“The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries. (…) … the twentieth century would be a century of wars such as have never happened on earth, wars catastrophic beyond all imagining.” (The Gay Science, p. 98)

“I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism… For some time now, our whole European culture is moving as toward a catastrophe (…) restlessly, violently, headlong…” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, th. 2.)

“The object [of the “barbarians of the twentieth century,” supplanters of the Übermensch] is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, th. 964.)

The brilliancy of this brutality is blinding. The impossibly burning light in the death of the murdered millions is a horrifying, sudden (read, quiet) explosion.

Impossible, equally, is Nietzsche’s prediction here. Hard to think for any man that any man would be capable. Hard to think that any man would have foreseen it.

This is the reason for the title. What the Bible clarifies, man muddies, even in what he may consider the pursuit of a righteous, right end, or at least an end of his own madness. God will confound the wisdom of the wordly (1 Corinthians 1:27) to the end of their belief in self. Even as Nietzsche so long strained to develop a secular ethic, even as he so tried to do away with the “moral” for the bounds of man, he could not conclude anything but Christ’s (present, at least) necessity. The will to power for the Christ follower is our will for the power of Christ in us and in the world. Singularly, the human will to power is a will to experience the power of God in man.

Modern man is on a precipice, in search of his soul. He can continue to abhor all power greater than himself, or he can place his will to power in the hands of that Power which governs, already, his sense of inner morality, (Romans 1:20) and disillusions him of his desires and false idols. (John 16:8)

The Spirit clarifies, and the will to man’s power can not aid… the Spirit clarifies, and the man has but to choose: God or man, and all the things of man, teetering above the murderous, always.