I’d like to make some comment, but only a general one and not directly connected to the matter of this thread. I hope this is OK…
I came across the phrase "God is dead" and heard about Nietzsche years ago, but wasn’t interested enough to read anything about it. I just looked up "will to power" in Wikipedia and another place, but they were difficult to read (for me, given the aversion to reading in general and unfamiliar ideas here in particular). I’ve only come away with a vague understanding of the concept, and I’m reacting because it goes against my understanding of the way things are.
What I understand this philosophy to be saying is that all actions by all beings are aimed at power over everything around itself and this is a basic instinct beyond that of survival. According to the author it is therefore of equal value one person’s drive for material gain, another person’s influence over other people and another’s quest for moral integrity. In other words, greed aimed at one’s own pleasure at the expense of others, aversion in relation to trying to control another’s behavior and an act of kindness aimed not at one’s own happiness, these are all in fact driven by the “will to power”. One significant conclusion of this philosophy therefore is that, the quest for enlightenment and the achievement of this is nothing but a result of this same instinct.
Well, the very concept of ‘enlightenment’ itself points to the fact that Nietzsche’s “will to power” philosophy should not be taken seriously, which even he would admit as being just a preferred way of thinking about things and a result of influences of ideas expressed by other people. Neither he nor those influences would claim to be enlightened. Of course he would likely dismiss any claim to enlightenment and coming to know the ‘Truth’ as being perhaps deluding oneself and put all the findings there as yet other objects of this “will”. But it would be silly of him not to be open to the possibility of means of acquiring knowledge beyond the one which he knows and relies upon. Besides, he’d have to admit that his own line of thought and quest to develop the idea must have been driven by this very same instinct, and so again, should it be taken seriously at all?
The Buddha on the other hand, had something else to offer.
He was enlightened to the Four Noble Truths and taught this to others. The first which is Dukkha, refers to all that we experience and know, such as seeing, feeling, perception, kindness, compassion, attachment, ignorance, envy, generosity, wisdom, sound, taste, thinking, attention, concentration, pleasure, pain, conceit, calm so on and so forth. By “dukkha”, it means all the above are extremely fleeting in nature and can therefore never be ‘satisfactory’, hence the word ‘unsatisfactoriness’ is sometimes used to describe this.
The second Noble truth is “Cause of Dukkha” or ‘craving’, which itself is also dukkha by nature. However, this is what leads to the arising more and more, of such conditioned and ephemeral experiences through the five senses and the mind. It is what keeps us going on and on in the cycle of birth and death.
The third is Nirvana or the unconditioned reality. It is with the experience of this at enlightenment that first, “wrong understanding” and doubt are eradicated completely, and in subsequent occasions, attachment to sense objects and hence aversion, and finally ignorance, conceit and any little craving which is left.
The fourth Noble truth is the Eightfold Path or “wisdom”, describes sometimes as the Middle Way.
My point is that none of the objects we otherwise seek are in reality, worth craving for. The reason we do it, besides being driven by the accumulated tendency to craving, is because of ignorance which conditions a wrong perception, wrong cognition and sometimes “wrong understanding” of the nature of experience and its object. Indeed these are often expressed in terms of the “three perversions”. Nietzsche may have observed the conventional manifestation of ‘craving’ for sense objects as well as for being and non-being. However this is not the same as coming to understand the Second Noble Truth, and is reflected in that his “will to power” is clearly a philosophy based on self-view. And self-view and wrong view / understanding are intimately connected. In other words, his observations are a result of a perversion not only of perception and consciousness, but most particularly of view / understanding.
The fact that craving rules our lives and that indeed we love ourselves more than anyone else is a fact not to be refuted. But this is not the whole picture. Kindness, generosity, morality, compassion are also very much *real* although they arise very rarely by comparison. More importantly however is the fact that the mental reality which is “wisdom”, this too is real. Wisdom seeks wisdom exactly because it understands the danger in ignorance. Right understanding works to correct wrong understanding, because there is a big difference between the two, in that one leads to the good and the other to more evil. And good and evil are not abstracts created by the human mind while driven by the so-called “will to power”, but are what they are exactly because they each have different characteristic, function, manifestations and cause and lead to different results. Kindness clearly stands in direct opposition to cruelty, generosity to miserliness, detachment to attachment and wisdom to ignorance. This is what the wise know and is reason for their inclination to the one and not the other.
And so it seems that Nietzsche in deriving pleasure from his idea about “will to power” and therefore encouraging craving, will continue going round and round in the cycle of existence quite *powerlessly*. ;-)
