The Impasse Between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche regards philosophy as a spiritual Will to Power, which ironically applies to himself. Especially when we look at his cherished ideas of the Overman, the Child, and the Eternal Recurrence, in my opinion, most of what Nietzsche says is ironically HIS WILL TO POWER. And this can be hard to discern, in a way, I have learned to read him very broadly and generally. His writings are filled with his own opinions and judgments, some useful and some not, others, confusing.
What becomes interesting is when we compare Schopenhauer and Nietzsche together. It would be hard for me to believe that Nietzsche overcame Schopenhauer. When we look at Schopenhauer’s later writings it becomes clear where Nietzsche got the idea of eternal recurrence1. Arguably Schopenhauer's hungry will to live, I speculate, Nietzsche transforms into his concept: Will to Power.
Although Nietzsche appears to have mainly focused on challenging the way we think about morality and values. He describes life itself as the will to power, the discharging of strength. Arguably, everything then is will to power, insofar as we are interpreting life and inscribing values upon it.
Nietzsche’s philosophy puts us in a double bind where everything thrown against him is the proof of his idea of will to power, and yet also HIS WILL TO POWER. In this case, Schopenhauer’s whole philosophical system about a will to live and the worthlessness of life as proof that a denial of a will to live is a much better option is also his own WILL TO POWER.
However, what would Schopenhauer say? Since Nietzsche asserts the claim that it is our values that drive our interpretation of things, Schopenhauer might say that Nietzsche’s whole philosophy is a disguised will to live, masked as WIll TO POWER. For Schopenhauer, the intellect is a secondary phenomenon whereas the blind will without knowledge is primary. Therefore, we can imagine Schopenhauer rebutting Nietzsche with the response that the intellect is required to “assert values and interpret life” and as a consequence, the will to power is nothing but a secondary phenomenon depended upon the intellect.
But Nietzsche’s concept of the will is much more complicated than Schopenhauer’s. Nietzsche’s will is an entanglement of sensation, thinking, and MOTIVE. Not to mention the duality between the commanding and obeying affects found in the will. Since Nietzsche appears to stuff everything in the will, intellect included. Schopenhauer’s speculated response would fall short. Regardless, we would still find ourselves at a standstill. Nietzsche’s whole philosophy can still be viewed as a WILL TO LIVE through Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It does not matter if we are asserting values or advocating for their re-evaluation that is still a will to live. Meaning, a hungry will that wants and desires to continue for eternity.
On the other end, this hungry will per Nietzsche is power hungry, hence his perpetual assertion of the Will to Power. So, this is the impasse between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, where futile assertions can be thrown by saying Schopenhauer’s philosophy is simply an expression of the will to power or Nietzsche’s philosophy is only an expression of the will to live. What gets even more interesting between the two, is that for Schopenhauer the will to live and the denial of the will to live are the same thing. The same can also be said for Nietzsche, a will to power can be found in the denial of the will to power.
On the Suffering of the World