Wednesday, January 07, 2004
(10:44 PM) | Anonymous:
Car batteries and the will-to-power
Sorry this is getting out so late and luckily I can blame it on my waking at 5:15 in the A.M. so that I could get to work by 8:00 only to find my 1986 E-150 Cargo Van refusing to start. After waking Hayley and forcing her, very reluctantly, to drive me to the train station I did make it to work and promptly began to unload a semi-truck in the freezing cold. Found that my foot has a strain of some kind making it very uncomfortable to walk. Then had to do two hours of French followed by a discussion on Ernst Troelsch's typology of Churches and sects with some classmates who were not the least interested. Finally made it home after all of that at around 7:00 in the P.M. only to drop Hayley off at work, followed by a half and hour of down time, then the task of wrenching my aged battery out of the van and dragging my ass to Lowe's to buy cement bags to weight down the aged van so that it will not give itself to the chaos of the road which would surely result in my death. I bought 320 lbs. of cement, which was far too heavy for the cart causing it to tip open and break apart one of the 80 lbs. bags. Some poor Lowe's employee had to clean it up and I'm sure he called me a "fag". Then I went to Wal-Mart, bought the battery and assumed putting it in would be easy and it surely would have had I paid attention to what polarity went where. After a half hour of me trying to make the battery work despite its constant sparking, I killed my pride and called my dad. He quickly explained how to fix the problem and I am now proud to say I changed my first car battery. That's the mother fucking will-to-power!
Now I know I said I was going to write on Nietzsche and the divine but due to the events of my day I couldn't help but think about the will-to-power. This is often the least understood aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy as nearly every Nietzsche scholar will tell you and then go on to offer there own conceptions of what the will-to-power means. Therefore you will find that Deleuze would disagree with Kaufmann and Kaufmann would disagree with Heidegger and Krell would disagree with both and I likely would as well, although my knowledge is thin compared to these men (Where are the woman? Well, it seems they have more creative things to do with Nietzsche than merely study him!). Still I think the will-to-power can be defined without too much error as the desire to live life well instead of merely living. I find in nearly every piece of literature I read on the will-to-power that this is the short version of their analysis.
For those of you who are familiar with Bataille's analysis in The Accursed Share of potlatch this is the vulgar version of living well. Exerting power over other people in order to show your wealth being more than theirs, you kill 50 slaves in thanksgiving to the person who gave you the death of 25 and you are shown to be the wealthier for being able to do without. For all of Nietzsche's rightful hatred of Christianity as it was and is, he still admired the Crucified (Kaufmann reports when his madness was entering its final seizure of Nietzsche he would sign his letters alternately Dionysus and the Crucified) because Jesus one-upped the law. He did not give into the naivety of revolution (we can talk about that later) nor the conformity of the status quo, instead he practiced the will-to-power and let them kill him and in so doing showed that the Kingdom of God was in his heart.
When we practice the will-to-power we show our wealth to be more than the sum of the vulgar idea of our material wealth. Instead we overcome even that desire. For Christ he overcame both temptations to give in and to fight, he kept his life from walking the steps of other men and showed that he was higher. Nietzsche, to, did much the same. I'll be honest, I try to practice the will-to-power everyday I travel to Chicago because full well knowing that my life is harder and harder because of it. Financially, physically, emotionally the commute and the work load beat against my whole being. Yet, I know that those who have good health can overcome sickness (Kaufmann), even the sickness unto death (I know that is Kierkegaard but go with me for a minute) which surely grips me when I think about the future. Yet the will-to-power welcomes the chance and unpredictability of that future that comes (Deleuze calls this the dice throw of life) because that future can be overcome by those who have the heart and spirit even if that means throwing yourself atop a beaten horse out of mercy or hanging from a cross for not being the kind of political criminal you should have been. Victory is carried in the heart, and our kingdom has no end.
