PHILOSOPHER'S WILL TO POWER

One of Nietzsche’s most refreshing leitmotifs (and a telltale indication that the late Leo Strauss was a loyal Nietzsche reader and borrower) is his distinction between the Philosopher and the Scholar. The former is a free spirit, an inventor, a creator. The latter is a collector and organizer of other people’s ideas, an analyzer of already-created realities. Considering my thought that at the foundation of science lies a hypothesis upon which the whole structure of the science is being built, through most scrupulous rationalization and logical reasoning, Nietzsche’s philosopher is the postulator, the fiat-sayer or to put it rather irreverently, the God of his own created universe, while the scholar is the developer of such basic ideas in accordance with the rules of the scientific trade. In the phrase R&D, the philosopher is the R, and the scholar is the D. In other words, the philosopher is the Law, and the scholar is the Rule.

While I should further work on this fundamental complex idea, which includes Nietzsche’s legitimate and insightful distinction between intuitive inspiration and intellectual thoroughness, here is a relevant passage from his Jenseits (211):

“People should stop confounding philosophical laborers, and scientific men generally, with philosophers. It may be necessary for the education of the genuine philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all these steps, on which his servants are still standing. Perhaps, he himself must have been critic, and skeptic, and dogmatist, and historian, and also poet, and collector, and traveler, and solver of riddles, and moralist, and seer, and “free spirit,” and almost everything, in order to pass through the whole range of human values and value feelings and to be able to see with many different eyes and consciences. But all these are merely preconditions: his task demands that he create values.

“Those philosophical laborers, after the noble model of Kant and Hegel, have to determine and to press into formulas [whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought, or art], some great data of valuations, that is, former positings of values, creations of value, that have become dominant and are for a time called “truths.” It is for them to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far, easy to look over, to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even time, to overcome the entire past, an enormous and wonderful task. Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, thus it shall be!”

Curiously, in my initial spontaneous comment on this last sentence, I raised some doubt about Nietzsche’s consistency here:

…Very interesting, but isn’t Nietzsche once again overenthusiastic in his glowing dream of the “man of the future”? I may be able to see and understand his distinction between the creator and the working bee, but I do not associate the loner-type philosophical spirit with the will to command and legislate, which ought to necessarily require a forceful display of leadership qualities: commanders are leaders, not loners.

My very next comment reconciled the seeming contradiction:

…Does it mean that an original thinker can also be a Nietzschean philosopher of the future, one determined to command and legislate? The answer is yes for in his own created world of pure fiction the philosopher is always the commander and legislator, the anything and the everything, just because there is nobody else out there, to fill all the vacancies!

But as I kept thinking about it, it struck me that genuine philosophers do not have to be commanders and legislators necessarily within the confines of their own minds, which my intermediate comment seemed to suggest. In fact, the philosopher’s mind has no confines, and can even spill over into the outside world:

In my Leaders And Followers entry, I noted that a genius-leader is a genius, too, but, unlike a herd-leader, the genius sees the crowd not as his milieu but as his métier. From this observation it follows that the act of destiny, which turns a genius philosopher into a genius leader, is exactly that spilling over of the genius’s mind into the world of real people and real events. Philosophy as the will to create evolves into the will to command and legislate, and spilling into the real world, as it knows no bounds, becomes indistinguishable from the will to power.

Philosophy as a will to power? So what? Welcome to Nietzsche’s Jenseits (9):

“Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the causa prima.”

Here is another proof of Nietzsche’s claim that creation is an act of supreme egoism (if I may be forgiven this aphoristic paraphrase). Once again, he talks about the greatest thinkers and the greatest philosophies. Extreme subjectivity, the most spiritual will to power… This is not an occupation, this is a preoccupation! Playing God, the creative urge, he is not just implying it, he says it explicitly… So what? Isn’t every great artist, every great writer of fiction such a creator of his own world glorifying and generalizing the author’s moral principles and fantasies? I might go even farther: every great writer of non-fiction, be that history or any other science, or statesman in his political activity, fictionalizes objective reality, appropriates it, owns it by the right of creator, refusing to accept its existence independently of him. He desires absolute control, not independence of his subject matter. In fact, we may go even further, suggesting that the sole difference between a statesman and a politician is exactly such a creative urge, a will to control and to own. Great men of history were despots. George Washington was a great military leader who imposed his “fiction” both on the British and on his own colleagues and supervisors. He won by creating history. For George Washington being the commander-in-chief could never be a job. As the military leader he was despotic, yet he rushed to refuse the title of king for himself, perhaps realizing only too well that peace was not the best season for his greatness.

It is interesting to find a strong disagreement on the point of “philosopher-king” in Kant’s Perpetual Peace, where he argues:

“…That kings should become philosophers, or philosophers, kings, can scarcely be expected; nor is it to be wished, since the enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.” (Supplement II.)

The key word here is, in my opinion, enjoyment. Whenever enjoyment results in contentment, whenever it focuses on the nonphilosophical side of being, such enjoyment does indeed corrupt. But great philosophers are all tragic figures, and their enjoyment is necessarily of a tragic nature. It flows out of reason, it is fed by the philosopher’s liberty. Such enjoyment of power is not drawn by the pleasurable paraphernalia of power and cannot be corrupted by them. But Kant’s point is still well taken. It makes one think...