This book was written by Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick and published in 2012. The authors provide a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil. In this book, Nietzsche provides his famous argument for the concept of the will to power, the version that applies to biotic and abiotic systems. Clark has argued throughout her career that this version of the will to power is empirically implausible and Nietzsche did not intend for his readers to believe he endorsed the concept.
In this book, the authors write: “And then there is the fact that the notorious doctrine of the will to power has such a central presence in the book, much more so than in any other. That he called attention to the importance of power relations in human life is certainly to Nietzsche’s credit. But the doctrine put forward and defended in BGE is that life, human psychology, and perhaps even reality itself are fundamentally to be understood as will to power, and this claim has done little to enhance his reputation among philosophers. Nietzsche’s reputation continues to grow among serious philosophers, but always in spite of the doctrine of the will to power, never because of it” (2012, p. 4). We should acknowledge that they are correct about how philosophers have responded to Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. Later in the book, they write: “as we claimed in the Introduction, this doctrine [of the will to power] raises suspicions about Nietzsche’s status as a serious philosopher” (2012, p. 138). These philosophers that have devoted a significant portion of their life’s work to studying Nietzsche’s philosophy actually suggest that his ontological version of the will to power raises suspicions about Nietzsche’s status as a philosopher. One can imagine how other philosophers who were less interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy viewed this concept.
From the start, Clark made it clear that “Nietzsche rejected all claims to metaphysic or non-empirical knowledge of reality” (Clark, 1983, p. 458), so, in order for Nietzsche’s ontological version of the will to power to be considered as providing knowledge about reality, it would have to be “intended as an empirical doctrine” and she did not “believe it is plausible to so interpret it.” All the work that scientists in the “thermodynamic school” of evolutionary theory have done in the 20th and 21st centuries on the maximum power principle and the maximum entropy production principle and the evidence that supports these principles demonstrates that not only can Nietzsche’s ontological version of the will to power be interpreted as an empirical doctrine, but his development of this doctrine was extraordinarily prescient.
That being said, I do think that the response of philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries to Nietzsche’s ontological version of the will to power can be understood as a consequence of the exponential growth of science in these centuries, which I briefly discussed on the About page. In Nietzsche’s time, an exceptional scholar could attempt to keep up with all the latest developments in many different scientific disciplines. In the 21st century, it is not possible for a psychologist to keep up with all the developments in all the sub-disciplines of psychology, and this is the case in most academic disciplines. This exponential acceleration of the growth of knowledge has an impact on all academic disciplines, including philosophy.
Clark, Maudemarie and David Dudrick. 2012. The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick
