36 pages • 1 hour read
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ed. Walter Kaufmann, Transl. R.J. HollingdaleThe Will to Power
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1901A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4, Part 1 Summary: “Order of Rank”
Nietzsche explores the concept of the “higher type” or “higher species” of humanity in more depth. In these sections, he examines the nature of the higher types, their relationship to ordinary people, or “the herd,” and how to encourage their development. Nietzsche argues that the growth of the global economy, and the increasing importance of machines in life and culture, will contribute to the homogenization of human beings. The growth of mechanization will also lead to an increased division of labor, forcing each individual to increasingly become a specialized cog in the economic machine. Nietzsche describes this process as a “dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialized utility” (463-64).
However, there is also a counter tendency whereby what Nietzsche calls “overmen” come into being (463). In contrast to the narrow specialization of ordinary men, these overmen are synthesizing and holistic in their relation to the world. They bring together the highest human qualities of the past. By so doing, they give meaning to, and justify, the lives of the majority. The overmen cannot be assessed by ordinary criteria of social usefulness or a calculus of the benefits versus the costs they bring. To do this would be, Nietzsche says, “to appraise a work of art according to the effects it produces” (469). Values brought into being by the higher type are not commensurable with, that is measurable by the same standard as, ordinary values. The value produced by the overmen, because they are so different, cannot be measured on a common scale. The higher type cannot be straightforwardly known either. Their unique experiences and way of life mean that, from the viewpoint of the ordinary people, there always remains something enigmatic and incommunicable about the overmen.
Nietzsche next broaches the question of how such higher types are to be encouraged and cultivated. He says that “until now, ‘education’ has had in view the needs of society: not the possible needs of the future” (477). In other words, education has aimed at social utility and producing good citizens. It has not sought to produce exceptional individuals. Yet, it is not clear that an educational system, at least as it is ordinarily understood, could serve this function. Nietzsche suggests that higher types will be bred by exceptional experiences of adversity, challenge, and suffering rather than by institutions.
Book 4, Part 2 Summary: “Dionysus”
Nietzsche argues that the highest types will have a “Dionysian relationship to existence” (536), meaning that they will be capable of “an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life” (539). They will be able to see the suffering of life not merely as a necessary evil to attain joys but as an essential aspect of them. They will be able to understand the fundamental unity of joy and suffering and to not only accept but will the latter. This “Dionysian” attitude defines the fundamental opposition of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the contrast between, as he says, “Dionysus and the Crucified” (542). The latter refers to the Christian-moral attitude, which sees suffering as a problem and a reason to escape from life. This is an expression of the fundamental weakness symbolized by Jesus on the cross. In contrast, the Dionysian or “tragic” attitude is strong enough to affirm even great suffering since it understands adversity as part of the recurring creative force of life.
Book 4, Part 3 Summary: “The Eternal Recurrence”
In the last part of Book 4, Nietzsche expands on the Dionysian affirmation of life through his theory of the “Eternal Recurrence of the Same.” His idea is not that the existence of the world and everything in it has no beginning and no end. Rather, he suggests that everything will recur in the same way for all eternity. Nietzsche bases this radical idea on a certain understanding of “becoming.” If all existence is in a state of constant transformation, then all possible states of affairs must have already happened. That is, in an infinity of time all possible rolls of the dice must repeat an infinite number of times. Everything recurs, and will recur, eternally.
Book 4 Analysis
Like Plato in The Republic, Nietzsche is concerned with the education of different types of people. For the mediocre majority, their place in life will be to fulfill mechanical duties in certain predetermined, specific roles. These could be for example the sometimes overlapping functions of civil servant, spouse, parent, office worker, and soldier. And these roles will involve large amounts of monotonous, boring activity. The purpose of education here is to ensure such people “learn to endure […] learn to see boredom enveloped in a higher charm” (474). By teaching that a life of boring routine is not only virtuous but oddly satisfying, the educational system will ensure that most people fulfill their roles efficiently and without complaint.
For prospective higher types, however, Nietzsche has something else in mind. He says, “to those human beings who are any of concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities” (481). Their “education” should be one of personal calamities and hardship, physical, personal, and social, perhaps involving debilitating sickness, loss of family, friends, or partners, and damaging calumny and social exclusion. These experiences teach strength of will and the ability to overcome adversity. As Nietzsche says, they teach the overman “to oppose suffering, self-contempt, pity, sickness, vice, with the query as to whether one cannot become master of them” (493). Indeed, Nietzsche advocates asceticism as part of this human development. In contrast to religious asceticism, which takes self-denial an end in itself, Nietzsche sees denial as a school to train the will, allowing for the mastery of one’s desires and impulses.
Nietzsche says that the higher type “not only copes” with suffering but “emerges from such hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness; and most essential of all, with a new increase in the blissfulness of love” (532). In being able to overcome adversity the overman can affirm and love life more deeply through the feeling of joy in strength and a will that has overcome profound distress. In understanding the interconnectedness and necessity of all things, the overman achieves “the great pantheistic sharing of joy and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life” (539).
In realizing that to affirm ourselves and existence means affirming all of existence, we see that truly affirming life means affirming not just the moment after the ordeal but the ordeal itself even when there is no after. It means saying “yes” to the recurrence of all those moments, including the most painful and darkest ones, endlessly. Nietzsche calls the idea of eternal recurrence “the heaviest weight” (545). Because there is absolutely no beginning and no end, it seems that there can be no point or meaning either. Thus, the thought of the eternal return, and the sense that we must go through it all again, can be crushing. Equally, it can be liberating. For Nietzsche, it serves as the ultimate and final test for those nascent “overmen” of the future. It serves to distinguish who can affirm life as a process of endless struggle, as will to power, without hope of heaven or expectation that life will get “better.” It distinguishes those who have found meaning beyond the redemptory logic of Christian morality.
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