Will to power (Nietzsche)
Nietzsche's view that the basic drive in living things isn't survival or pleasure but the expansion of their own force: growth, mastery, overcoming, giving shape to things. Pleasure and self-preservation are by-products. It drives creation and self-overcoming as much as domination.
What drives it
For reading people, it asks what each behaviour expands. Much apparent kindness, humility or suffering is power exercised by other means, and much ambition is less about money than about feeling one's force.
How it shows
Work
The founder who sells and starts again because running a stable company doesn't feel like growth; the leader who seeks out the hardest problem. Indirect forms: the expert who controls through information, the helper who gains power through indebtedness, the reluctant leader who arranges to be begged. The healthy form is self-overcoming: raising the bar on yourself.
Relationships
Power through generosity ('after all I've done'), through suffering (you must look after me), through withholding. Long fights over who decides small things.
Self
Notice what feels most alive: winning, mastering, making, being needed. When you're 'only helping', ask what the satisfaction is.
What tells it apart
Needs for achievement, affiliation and power (McClelland): McClelland's need for power is measured as wanting influence over people; Nietzsche's will to power also covers mastery with no one else involved. The tell: does the satisfaction require someone to yield?
Striving for superiority and the superiority complex (Adler): Adler, who borrowed from Nietzsche, roots the striving in a felt inferiority; Nietzsche needs no wound. If the drive spikes exactly where they feel small, read Adler.
Status motive: The status motive is about standing in others' eyes; will to power includes solitary mastery, such as a climb or a craft no one sees.
A test
Remove the external reward and audience and see whether the drive persists on the hard problem.
Questions to carry
- With the reward and the audience removed, how much of the drive on the hard problem remains?
- What does my kindness or my modesty expand for me, and how would it feel to admit it?
How strong the research is
weak. A metaphysical and psychological thesis, not a testable construct; its measured neighbours are McClelland's need for power and self-determination theory's need for competence, neither of which claims all motivation reduces to power.
Where it comes from
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883 to 1885; Beyond Good and Evil, 1886; On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887 (The Will to Power, 1901, is a posthumous compilation of his notes edited by his sister)
On the family tree: Friedrich Nietzsche
Sources
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)