The Will to Power

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher and author of the notes making up The Will to Power. Nietzsche authored and published many other important works including The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1892), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). After Nietzsche’s descent into madness, in 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche collected his late unpublished notes. These would be organized under various thematic headings to become The Will to Power. Due to Förster-Nietzsche’s later links to the Nazi Party, and her desire to read Nietzsche through a nationalist, antisemitic lens, Nietzsche was for a long time tarnished with this Nazi association. This was not helped by the Nazi regime’s own efforts to appropriate Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Since the 1960s, however, Nietzsche has been rehabilitated in the English-speaking world due in part to new translations and interpretations by Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980), who brought Nietzsche’s texts to a wider audience. Nietzsche’s philosophy has influenced and inspired countless writers and thinkers including Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). As this diverse list suggests, Nietzsche’s legacy is hotly contested. He has been variously claimed as an existentialist, a forerunner of psychoanalysis, and a herald of the post-structuralist “death of the subject.” Due to his troubled life, he has also come to epitomize the tortured philosophical genius.