The Will to Power
Encyclopedia
The Will to Power is the title given to a book of selectively reordered notes (with a few revisionist additions and changes) from the literary remains (or Nachlass
Nachlass
Nachlass is a German word, used in academia to describe the collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies. The word is a compound in German: nach means 'after', and the verb lassen means 'leave'. The plural can be either Nachlasse or Nachlässe...

) of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

 by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche , who went by her second name, was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894....

 and Heinrich Köselitz
Heinrich Köselitz
Johann Heinrich Köselitz was a German author and composer. He is known for his longtime friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave him the pseudonym Peter Gast.- Life :...

 ("Peter Gast"). The Will to Power is also the title of a work that Nietzsche had considered writing, but later abandoned in favor of Revaluation of All Values, which Nietzsche was unable to complete.

Initial publication

The first rendition of this collection was released with other unpublished writings in 1901, edited by Heinrich Köselitz
Heinrich Köselitz
Johann Heinrich Köselitz was a German author and composer. He is known for his longtime friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave him the pseudonym Peter Gast.- Life :...

, Ernst Horneffer, and August Horneffer, under the influence of Nietzsche's anti-Semitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. This version has been judged more than dubious, and later editions are considered more subtle in their presentation of Nietzsche's intent. Walter Kaufmann's English edition, following the German editions, is divided into four major parts: "European Nihilism", "Critique of the Highest Values Hitherto", "Principles of a New Evaluation", and "Discipline and Breeding".

Mazzino Montinari
Mazzino Montinari
Mazzino Montinari was an Italian scholar of Germanistics. A native of Lucca, he became regarded as one of the most distinguished researchers on Friedrich Nietzsche, and harshly criticized the edition of The Will to Power, which he regarded as a forgery, in his book The will to power does not...

 and Giorgio Colli
Giorgio Colli
Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher, philologist and historian. A native of Turin, taught ancient philosophy at Pisa's university for thirty years; he edited and translated Aristotle's Organon and the first complete edition of Nietzsche's work , together with his friend Mazzino Montinari...

, who edited the complete edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments from the manuscripts themselves, have called The Will to Power a "historic forgery" artificially assembled by Nietzsche's sister and Peter Gast. Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals) a new work with the title, The Will to Power: Essay on a Revaluation of All Values, this project under this title was set aside and some of its draft materials used to compose The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist
The Antichrist (book)
The Antichrist is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895. Although it was written in 1888, its controversial content made Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz delay its publication, along with Ecce Homo...

(both written in 1888); the latter was for a time represented as the first part of a new four-part magnum opus, which inherited the subtitle Revaluation of All Values from the earlier project as its new title. Although Elisabeth Förster called The Will to Power Nietzsche's unedited magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....

, in light of Nietzsche's collapse, his intentions for the material he had not by that time put to use in The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist
The Antichrist (book)
The Antichrist is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895. Although it was written in 1888, its controversial content made Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz delay its publication, along with Ecce Homo...

are simply unknowable. So The Will to Power was not a text completed by Nietzsche, but rather an anthology of selections from his notebooks misrepresented as if it were something more. Nevertheless, the concept remains, and has, since the reading of Karl Löwith
Karl Löwith
Karl Löwith , was a German philosopher, a student of Heidegger.Löwith was born in Munich. Though he was himself Protestant, his family was of Jewish descent and he therefore had to emigrate Germany in 1934 because of the National Socialist regime. He went to Italy and in 1936 he went to Japan...

, been identified as a key component of Nietzsche's philosophy, so much so that Heidegger, under Löwith's influence, considered it to form, with the thought of the eternal recurrence
Eternal return
Eternal return is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The concept initially inherent in Indian philosophy was later found in ancient Egypt, and was subsequently...

, the basis of his thought.

Background

After returning from Paraguay, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche , who went by her second name, was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894....

 founded the Nietzsche-Archiv in Naumburg
Naumburg
Naumburg is a town in Germany, on the Saale River. It is in the district Burgenlandkreis in the Bundesland of Saxony-Anhalt. It is approximately southwest of Leipzig, south-southwest of Halle, and north-northeast of Jena....

 in 1894 (after Nietzsche's mental breakdown), which she would later transfer to Weimar
Weimar
Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...

. The culmination of this organization was the publishing, in Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

 between 1894 and 1926, of the Großoktavausgabe edition. It was first published by C. G. Naumann, then by Kröner. In these 20 volumes, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche included part of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which she gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. With Peter Gast, she claimed that Nietzsche had died before completing his magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....

, which he allegedly wanted to name "The Will to Power, An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". This compilation of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, selected and ordered under his sister's authority, led to the book commonly known as The Will to Power. Until Colli & Montinari's edition, this would form the basis for all successive editions, including the 1922 Musarion edition, often used even today.

Colli and Montinari research

While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, philologist
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

s Giorgio Colli
Giorgio Colli
Giorgio Colli was an Italian philosopher, philologist and historian. A native of Turin, taught ancient philosophy at Pisa's university for thirty years; he edited and translated Aristotle's Organon and the first complete edition of Nietzsche's work , together with his friend Mazzino Montinari...

 and Mazzino Montinari
Mazzino Montinari
Mazzino Montinari was an Italian scholar of Germanistics. A native of Lucca, he became regarded as one of the most distinguished researchers on Friedrich Nietzsche, and harshly criticized the edition of The Will to Power, which he regarded as a forgery, in his book The will to power does not...

 decided to go to the Archives in Leipzig to work with the original documents. From their work emerged the first complete and chronological edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which Förster-Nietzsche had cut up, mixed and pasted together, according to her own antisemitic views (which were a source of contention between her and Nietzsche himself). The complete works comprise 5,000 pages, compared to the 3,500 pages of the Großoktavausgabe. In 1964, during the International Colloquium on Nietzsche in Paris, Colli and Montinari met Karl Löwith
Karl Löwith
Karl Löwith , was a German philosopher, a student of Heidegger.Löwith was born in Munich. Though he was himself Protestant, his family was of Jewish descent and he therefore had to emigrate Germany in 1934 because of the National Socialist regime. He went to Italy and in 1936 he went to Japan...

, who would put them in contact with Heinz Wenzel, editor for Walter de Gruyter's publishing house. Heinz Wenzel would buy the rights of the complete works of Colli and Montinari (33 volumes in German) after the French Gallimard edition and the Italian Adelphi editions.

Before Colli and Montinari's philological work, the previous editions led readers to believe that Nietzsche had organized all his work toward a final structured opus called The Will to Power. In fact, if Nietzsche did consider producing such a book, he had abandoned such plans in the months before his collapse. The title of The Will to Power, which appears for the first time at the end of the summer of 1885, was replaced by another plan at the end of August 1888. This new plan was titled "Attempt at a revaluation of all values" [Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe], and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

In fact, according to Montinari, the earlier editions, which all depended on the Großoktavausgabe, are technically nonsense, as Nietzsche's fragments were cut up in various places and ordered according to his sister's will; and are a case of revisionism, as it was left to his sister to artificially combine Nietzsche's fragments into a unified opus magnum (a concept, in itself, alien to Nietzsche's philosophy and style of writing), whose meaning was distorted according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's anti-semitic and Germanist biases. Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

 himself saluted Montinari's work declaring:
"As long as it was not possible for the most serious researcher to accede to the whole of Nietzsche's manuscripts, we knew only in a loose way that the Will to Power did not exist as such (...) We wish only now that the new dawn brought on by this previously unpublished work will be the sign of a return to Nietzsche"


Not only did this critical philological work, a milestone in Nietzsche studies, prove case-by-case the distortions accomplished by Nietzsche's sister on his posthumous fragments, it also called into question the very conception of a Nietzschean magnum opus, given his style of writing and thinking.

Versions

"Der Wille zur Macht" was first translated into English by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910, and was published in Oscar Levy
Oscar Levy
Oscar Levy was a German-Jewish physician and writer, now known as a scholar of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works he first saw translated systematically into English. His was a paradoxical life, of self-exile and exile, and of writing on and against Judaism. He was influenced by the racialist...

's edition of Nietzsche's papers. The introduction of the most recent edition by Walter Kaufmann  and R. J. Hollingdale
R. J. Hollingdale
Reginald John Hollingdale was best known as a biographer and a translator of German philosophy and literature, especially the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, G. C. Lichtenberg, and Schopenhauer. Hollingdale was also elected president of The Friedrich Nietzsche Society in 1989...

offers both praise and criticism for Ludovici's edition, saying that, "Dr. Levy was probably quite right when in a prefatory note he called Ludovici 'the most gifted and conscientious of my collaborators,' but unfortunately this does not mean that Ludovici's translations are roughly reliable....Let us say that Ludovici was not a philosopher, and let it go at that."
(Revised third edition 1925, published by The Macmillan Company) (First edition)

Another translation was published by Kaufmann with Hollingdale in 1968:
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