How does will to power differ from the ego/ where does nietzsche best define the will to power in opposition to the...

how does will to power differ from the ego/ where does nietzsche best define the will to power in opposition to the concept of "ego"

Nietzsche believed the self was made out of a plurality of drives each interpreting the world and wanting to impose itself, each having a worldview and therefore having (or being, same thing) will to power. The ego is, for Nietzsche, just the result of the strongest drive at a particular moment or, what amounts to the same thing, a resonance between drives. It is an illusion, but a very powerful one in that it guarantees a body can act towards a unifying goal (when it works, most of the time a drive interrupts the process and another blames or justifies it, hence the need to train discipline aka empower a particular drive over others). Check his text entitled The Dawn for details, among many other (especially posthumous) texts. So for Nietzsche there is a kind of egoism without a proper metaphysical individual (because drives can have contradicting goals), will to power being the characteristic of a plurality of wills or drives. Deleuze wrote quite a bit about the Nietzsche-Stirner debate in Nietzsche and Philosophy and while Deleuze is an unconventional reader, I think he is correct at least in part on this.

thanks for the post user. my confusion has actually come up during my reading of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, having previously read Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil

>the Nietzsche-Stirner debate
say more

What exactly do you mean by 'ego?'
Great post, user.

neetshe plagurised stirner.

For Deleuze at least this doesn't matter much because their methods were radically different: Stirner was a hegelian working with nothingness (the creative nothing) while Nietzsche was a pluralist going for the affirmation of various forces looking to differenciate themselves and to enter into relations of domination.

You need to read these guys OP. The ego is what happens when the will to power doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

Which is, basically, explode in schizophrenic rainbows.

i am reading Deleuze and it's him who prompted my question by saying nietzsche rejects the concept of the ego

How high do you have to be to understand this?

is will the mediator of these forces? I have never read nietzsche

>Nietzsche believed the self was made out of a plurality of drives each interpreting the world and wanting to impose itself, each having a worldview and therefore having (or being, same thing) will to power. The ego is, for Nietzsche, just the result of the strongest drive at a particular moment or, what amounts to the same thing, a resonance between drives

Can you point to where this is implied? In his deepest elaboration of the will to power, he doesn't seem to suggest anything of "pluralism" and describes it as more of like a soup, like Anaximander's depiction of the origin of the world.

High on life. Granted, I was summarizing a very complex matter so it was bound to sound weird and mystical.

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly, but it seems to me like the will (to power, as for Nietzsche there is no other proper will although there are countless disguises that the will to power takes) is a characteristic of drives or forces (as interpretation and evaluation are themselves physical phenomena in some sense), their inner desire (to use an even more anthropomorphizing term) to differenciate themselves from one another and to project themselves upon the world and to go to the end in what they can do (for better or worse). Maybe the will can be thought as the condition of possibility of their interaction if that's what you're getting at, I don't know.


The Will to Power fragments on perspectivism offer some insight into the play and conflict of drives. There's also several passages in The Dawn that spell it out quite clearly. The leap from forces in an ontological, fundamental sense (a typical 19th century idea), to drives as psychological is nonetheless a strange move in Nietzsche and it can mostly be found in his posthumous fragments (not just the Will to Power, but his entire Nachlass). Klossowski dedicated a book to Deleuze called Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle that analyzes some of those fragments.

>There's also several passages in The Dawn that spell it out quite clearly
Can you quote some here?

Regarding this will plurality, there's the §19 in Beyond Good and Evil

Just reread it. I see now. I heard pluralism and instinctively thought it was an interpretation that was trying to claim we have multiple minds or personalities or some such, rather than a more complex illustration of will as a combination of forces.

Nietzsche at times strikes me as a mystic who doesn't believe in God or the supernatural.

Honestly, I feel that Nietzsche's worldview mixed with a belief in a deity could pass as some strange esoteric Hindu or Sufi sect.

Yes that's quite different things, if one thinks about a "mind" or an "ego" as an indivisible thing, that would only repeat the problem

Nietzsche suggested that the will to power was the natural driving force of all human activity. That is, our ambitions, the desire for success, and the realization of those pursuits at the highest potential level were what influenced our behavior. This unconscious drive is what secured a continued existence. William Rolph expounded upon this by suggesting that all life, in any environment, will naturally seek to expand itself through the consumption of all resources available to it.

The ego is the "I" or "I am". It consciously perceives the surrounding world as it relates to one's self or perceived identity. Accordingly, the "I" is the fundament of knowing or knowledge itself. Nietzsche, however, rejected the claim that ego possesses reality. Instead, the ego had arisen as a necessity, or complimentary tool, for a mind living in the age of reason.

Sorry, but I'm on my phone for a while and it would be a chore. I did look up the passages in the book and they are from The Dawn, book 2, passages 109, 115 and 119. There are probably more in there, but these are the ones most often quoted as proof in secondary literature as far as I know.

Oh, there's also passage 481 from The Will to Power, the one on perspectivism. I think it's partly quotes on Wikipedia as well iirc.


Well in some superficial sense it can be claimed that we suffer from multiple personality disorder in that the intellect tends to become subjected to a more fundamental drive and becomes its tool (even if it is a drive for discipline), however it must be pointed out that someone suffering from multiple personality disorder loses, first of all, the resonance between forces that allows for complex interactions and relations because the forces get isolated and this situation is rare because the drive to say "I" is a very powerful one in that it has countless advantages in survival and growth in power.

Will to power = Heraclitus' Fire
It is a single process opposing itself to itself, thus creating all things. It does not have the reflexive quality of an ego and is also not a substance

There seem to be a few quality posts ITT
Do any of you anons have any suggestions over some literature I can check out in preparation for an exam on The Gay Science?
Except The Gay Science

Which grade? Assuming you read The Gay Science, what else did you read by Nietzsche?

>Which grade
University if that's what you meant
Or did you mean to which grade I have to analyze The Gay Science? Pretty in depth
>What else did you read by Nietzsche?
Nothing in full, I read excerpts from Thus Spoke Zarathustra Twilight of the Idols, On the Genealogy of Morality. I'm gonna read a little bit of Beyond Good and Evil for I have that handy,
What I'm really after is some good analysis or commentaries I can quote to my professor

I was thinking grade as bachelor or master. Is it a commentary at university in a limited time, an essay you do at home then give to your professor?
If you don't have much time left, I would read Beyond Good and Evil, and re-read The Gay Science. Zarathustra will not really help you if you don't already have a grasp on what Nietzsche is talking about.

In the case of a commentary, usually philosophy professors don't wait for you to quote and demonstrate you simply heard of such or such author (in the hope to have a sort of added-value compared to other students), such quotation has very great chances to be trivial in their field of research. The game is rather to be faithful to the author thought, thinking alongside with the author, trying to be receptive to the originality of the thought and follow its developments. The icing on the cake is to raise what the author didn't say and especially why, whereas such words could have been expected when following the text or knowing the people the author was implicitly responding to. But this "negative" view is extremely difficult without an in-depth philosophy formation. This is easier if you read a lot but you may still be receptive to this originality reading one author who pleases you. So if you've read something else you want to quote, it must be in regard to this aspect (and then it would be a good idea), and not just a way to "display".

I need to re-read nietzsche because I basically read him as a high schooler browsing Barnes and Noble and thinking "Nietzsche sounds important!". I didn't understand him much at the time and have gathered fragments of secondary interpretations that I check against my memory of what I read.

But question is, does Nietzsche only describe this process of the creation of the illusion of ego, or does he also sort of discuss what he thinks is the proper way to approach this dilemma of a sort of discordant personality? As in, does he think anything should be done about this, or is he only concerned with pointing out that the ego is false and really there is a plurality of drives all coming up or resonating to appear as certain forms of action?

Also, I know you mentioned Deleuze, but I'm under the impression Deleuze didn't really care much about accurately representing philosophers he wrote about. Rather, he used their writings as an input for a creative process of philosophy that didn't regard their intentions so much as the reader's ability to make their own concepts out of the material. If that is true, then are you describing a Deleuzian Nietzsche, or Nietzsche as he really thought?

Nietzsche was all about education and formation. He believed that the drives should be shapes through training so that they serve a unifying purpose which is growth in power as opposed to the degeneracy of drives dominating in their wild state of alternation.

As for Deleuze, he was faithful to the authors insofar as he used their words (did not falsify them), but his interpretations are indeed creative and involve a shifting of accents and they were monstrous according to his own words. He described it as taking the author from behind and giving him a monstrous child that the said author can neither embrace nor deny outright. Deleuze was always about taking what you find useful for yourself rather than arguing for or against an author or approach.

Ego is ignorance. Will to power is damnation.

oh, come on

It's like all writers, Foucault's Nietzsche isn't Deleuze's Nietzsche. Though there's a certain level of engaging one author's thought. Even with what Deleuze said about ways to read and how he prompted people to take what they want in his books ( ), he was still a very dedicated reader.
Anyway concerning ego etc., I think the thread gave some paths. Nietzsche complicates the question, you can not really speak of a simple "ego" anymore after him. To caricature, it's less a matter of knowing if "ego doesn't exist" (it may very well exist as a fiction, a process, a result, a mask, etc.) than addressing the different forces in work.

>The leap from forces in an ontological, fundamental sense (a typical 19th century idea), to drives as psychological is nonetheless a strange move in Nietzsche and it can mostly be found in his posthumous fragments (not just the Will to Power, but his entire Nachlass)
What is this leap you're talking about? How is it a strange move in Nietzsche work?

Well Nietzsche tried to think interpretation and evaluation outside of subjectivity in that they are a part of typology. Everything is subjective, as they say, but those subject-object combinations are facts (certain people tend to think a certain way). Basically in each "individual" a certain drive comes to dominate and use the intellect as a tool, endlessly producing theories and images (of course things are more complicated than this, it's a play and conflict of drives even if one dominates). Nietzsche thinks this in terms of forces (the 19th century bit being that it was fashionable at the time, maybe it still is, to think of nature as being fundamentally made of forces while objects were secondary). So forces make up a human body (obviously with matter that they influence), human bodies make up an institution created on the basis of dominant forces and which is then influenced by said forces and all this composes a higher force (society, community, etc.) so you get pre-individual (ontological) force > institutional force > political force. This basically gets us to micropolitics, that is to say that in fact politics was already present as pre-individual.

Nonetheless, while this approach is very fruitful, as all of poststructuralist French philosophy shows, there is a bit of a gap in my opinion: the natural force cannot be thought of as the origin of a drive on its own. For example, what if the drive is merely an after effect of various interactions of fundamental forces rather than being representative of a particular force as such? I'm mostly interested in this because Deleuze tries to solve such problems, especially in Difference & Repetition which is a very difficult work. He tries to paint the ontological picture of various pre-individual singularities that all have their own becoming (they differentiate themselves from others and change constantly without losing their eternal essence). While I like how this explains the psyche, it nonetheless moves from, to put it naively, the becoming of various brain regions (of course it's more complicated than that, but this is just to illustrate) to fundamental natural forces, a sort of platonic Idea without precise representation (not "Justice", "Truth", etc. but something more fundamental).

Hopefully you understand what I'm getting at. I tried to be as clear as possible, but most of the time authors fail to illustrate their entire plane of immanence (every concept they know and connect) which is a big part of why communication tends to fail.

Nah senpai, while on Stirner the Ego is the beginning and the end and only self interest keeps us going, after the destruction of morality Nietzsche instead imposes the übermensch's ethic, which trascends it.

Thanks for the input. It seems you read it on a dualistic scheme (physis vs idea, hence the leap between both), but I was rather under the impression that Nietzsche's issue was to express al of this on a single realm (no care particularly given to a physicalist predominance) despite the dualism of his times, and even against his own remnants of dualism

The dualism is reinforced further by his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, although he later criticized the book as being full of the errors of youth. So I can see why some readers might interpret him this way.

You're right about Nietzsche being against dualism. But Deleuze does not mean idea in the sense of a concept, but rather something like an essence or singularity that precedes the composites formed by proper platonic ideas. So it's not a dualism of physicalism vs idealism or whatever but an attempt to unify the two. Still, my point is that our drives as we feel them do not necessarily have to lead us to ideas or forces in this final sense.

>He tries to paint the ontological picture of various pre-individual singularities that all have their own becoming (they differentiate themselves from others and change constantly without losing their eternal essence). While I like how this explains the psyche, it nonetheless moves from, to put it naively, the becoming of various brain regions (of course it's more complicated than that, but this is just to illustrate) to fundamental natural forces, a sort of platonic Idea without precise representation (not "Justice", "Truth", etc. but something more fundamental).


I think you're way off track here. Its fruitful to look at singularity in the gometrical sese, cause thats were Deleuze picks it up. Singularities are points in an almost manifold that can cause it to become a manifold (a euclidean space) if under a force. Actually a singularity is a singularity insofar a force han been applied to it. So no force =no singularity.

So for Deleuze singularity become points of identification, where forces meet and produce new forms. An individual is so because such and such singularity (product of forces) can be traced to him (Caesar isn't Caesar without the crossing of the
Rubicon) so that the event both creates ("Subjectivity is determined as an effect") his objects and subsumes it.

Theres no point in talking essence here. Deleuze is explicit in his rejection of platonism, singularities dont come before essence form. Essence are stable, always an unchanging defnition, singularitis are by themselves points that are subject to variations (differences) of forcese

There's no dualism between idea and matter, cause its forces and their (differential) clashing, theres not even some form of hylomorphism as there's no place where this play of forces is moving to.

Thanks for the reply. You're right about the singularity part, but Deleuze does still retain a sense of eternal essence even if it is not the platonic unchanging one, but something in becoming (that nonetheless retains some sort of identity even as it transforms) by following Spinoza in his concept of essence and mixing it with Nietzsche's eternal return and affirmation.

My point was that drives can be further separated from forces in such a way that Nietzsche's temptations to attribute drives to organs for example are risky and imprecise. Of course Deleuze avoids this through the concept of assemblages at least.

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