Nietzsche's explanation of spirit in terms of the will to power

Kearney, Gary P. (1985) Nietzsche's explanation of spirit in terms of the will to power. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The subject of this thesis is Nietzsche's criticism of the belief in spirituality or subjectivity. The tendency of Western civilization to regard the "inner" world as vastly more important than the "outer" world, to rank spirit above nature is, in Nietzsche's view, a sure indication of the triumph of nihilism. Given his principle of the will to power, it would not have been sufficient for Nietzsche merely to have decried the preoccupation with spirituality; he had to give an account of it in terms of that very principle. The difficulty, then, is to explain how the will to power can accomodate what normally would be considered to be its opposite: the spiritual realm. -- The thesis is divided into three chapters: the first chapter relates Nietzsche's account of the creation of the soul as the effect of man's radical break with his animal nature and how this result is itself an effect of the state's coming into being; the second chapter attempts to give Nietzsche's explanation of how human life, having been forced out of its instinctive, natural forms, manages to reconstitute itself on a new, spiritual or "inner" plane, and as well, the fundamental role played by the ascetic priest in the formation of this new community will also be noted; the third and final chapter will examine the relationship of the ascetic will to power to philosophy, wherein, perhaps, asceticsm reaches its apotheosis.

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