Wille zur Macht — German expression usually rendered as will to power, a central concept of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche the will to power does not primarily mean the human desire to dominate others, but a more fundamental tendency: the drive of every living force to expand, to overcome resistance, to grow and to impose form on its surroundings. It is less a conscious wanting than the basic dynamic running through all organic life and, in some formulations, through the whole of reality. The concept comes to the fore in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) and in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where Nietzsche sets his thesis against Schopenhauer’s will to live (Wille zum Leben): living beings, he argues, do not merely seek to preserve themselves but above all to discharge and enlarge their strength. A recurring example is his reading of morality itself: values such as humility and compassion would be, on Nietzsche’s account, indirect ways in which the weak exercise their will to power. The title The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht) also designates a posthumous compilation of notebook fragments, assembled from 1901 under the direction of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast; later philological scholarship, above all the Colli–Montinari edition, showed that this arrangement does not correspond to a work Nietzsche himself planned. The concept is closely bound up with the eternal recurrence and with the figure of the overman (Übermensch).
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