Der Wille zur Macht

Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum

Help Support Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

mimizu

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 26, 2006
Messages
622
Reaction score
0
... Nietzsche's concept that the ultimate power in the universe is the desire for power itself. What do you think about it? Especially when applied to inanimate objects.

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on.

some interpreters might claim that rather than an attempt to 'dominate over others,' the "will to power" is better understood as the tenuous equilibrium in a system of forces' relations to each other. While a rock, for instance, does not have a conscious (or unconscious) "will," it nevertheless acts as a site of resistance within the "will to power" dynamic.
I don't think a rock acts a site of resistance. It's not resisting anything, since it's composed of the same particles as everything else that surrounds it. There isn't actually any difference between the rock and what surrounds it, rocks are just abstractions that humans (and animals) make.

They mentally slice up the physical space around them, depending on the look and touch characterestics of it in different places. So somewhere where it's hard and grey, it's a "rock", and somewhere where it's brown and tall, with green foilage on top, that's a "tree". Using this logic, humans separate the "tree", from the air and the earth around it, but it's not really a separate "object". Separate objects are just easier to think about than a chaotic whole.

Now, when I think of the "Will to Power" about living things, it reminds of boiling water to me. There are a bunch of little particles, composing bosons and fermions, which compose atoms, which compose molecules, which compose "living creatures", who constantly struggle against each other, steal chunks of matter from each other's bodies and adapt them into their own, and later decompose and the chunks of matter that used to compose them are adapted into other "living creatures'" bodies, while they also spawn some new bodies out of themselves, who continue to do the same thing. The whole process looks utterly pointless. :) It's a colossal ancient struggle about nothing.

Life is a struggle about nothing. We are born, we struggle trying to stay alive (and avoid being in pain) for a while, and then we die anyway.
 
If you want to view all things as just particles hitting each other, everything does look quite pointless. However the fact that we do exist and we have become capable of reason and are advancing constantly, you can't deny that everything moves in a very specific direction. You could say that its part of the entropy of the universe itself which is always decreasing and there must be order in its place. Humans still look insignificant and pityful to the universe but so were the primordial bacteria that came before us compared to the earth. So don't look at it as a pointless stuggle but it is all a movement forward, an "evolution" as some would call it. :p

There are also plenty of extra-dimensional forces which we can't explain but do affect us because we are stuck in this reality of ours. It is far too pretentious to think of everything as a pointless stuggle because in my view, everything is converging on one point :)

And to be honest, I have thought of it in your perspective whenever I'm disgusted with life, but then I'm get quite optimistic about the potential of the human race.

Personally i think Internet itself is the most comparable thing to our universe, who knows it could become an entire reality with its own form of life.

If you've read Issac Assimov's "The Last Question" (Which if you haven't please go read it and don't skip to the end!), that is the view I share.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top