8 - Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Will to Power

Summary

When Nietzsche writes that the world is the will to power and nothing else, he seems with this clear statement to be giving us a key to understanding that aspect of his thinking with which philosophical interpreters are acquainted: he is naming the ground of being, and from there determining being as a whole; his thinking is metaphysics in the sense familiar to us from the long history of Continental philosophy. Understanding his thinking in this way does not confront us with fundamentally new problems. Even if Nietzsche expressly turns against metaphysics, we can still quickly persuade ourselves that he is speaking of it only in the sense of a two-world theory. If we do not construe it so narrowly, then Nietzsche’s claim that his philosophy is not metaphysics cannot be supported. Nietzsche, we could say, only adds a further link to the chain of metaphysical interpretations of the world.