26. Will to Power - Nietzsche’s theory of everything and what it means for you. Season finale, Part 1

Free will is the sacred cow of our modern civilisation. Everyone believes they have it but no one can justify this belief. 

In our season finale of The Will to Joy, we put that belief on the chopping block. I start by offering up a simple challenge: demonstrate free will. When that inevitably fails we follow the chain of consequences and travel into the deepest strata of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

This is the first part of a three part episode and it's most ambitious episode I’ve made: an odyssey from the birth of the solar system through the blind mechanics of evolution, the rise of consciousness, the illusion of choice, the social need for moral responsibility, and the psychological tricks that keep the myth of autonomy alive. Only then do can we get to the heart of it: Nietzsche’s will to power as a total theory of becoming — metaphysical, biological, psychological, and spiritual.

This isn’t a motivational gloss or a “Nietzsche for beginners” pamphlet. It’s a rigorous survey of the architecture of will to power. You’ll see why free will is a noble lie, why our institutions depend on it, why our minds fall for the illusion, and why Nietzsche thought its abandonment is the real beginning of freedom.

If you’re ready for a tour that runs from volcanic hellscapes to the chemistry of life, from memes to morality, from fumbling deliberation to Dionysus himself — lock the door. Pour a drink. Settle in.

Transcript

I have a challenge for you! Do you believe in free will?

If you do, and most people do: if you believe that we can make choices unfettered by external influences, I challenge you to demonstrate it—right now.

If free will is real, immanent, and common to all humans, this can hardly be dismissed as an unreasonable request.

I’m not being flippant here - this, I think, is a definitive test. If you can perform an action or even have a thought that is, in principle, free of any antecedent causes—any “determinants”, because they determine what happens—you have proof of free will.

Now, the fact that this simple, unpretentious request makes an absurd demand is, I suggest, evidence of the absurdity of the notion of free will itself.

So maybe the real question is why do we believe in free will, or maybe why do we need to believe in free will? 

But wait, this show is about Nietzsche’s WTP. What’s free will got to do with it? Ah…

So here it is, folks. The Will to Joy big season one finale. It’s taken me a few weeks to get this together for you, but I wanted to provide a complete explanation of Nietzsche’s will to power. So I think you’ll find the wait worth it. I’m going to lay out WTP for you comprehensively, from its metaphysical foundations, to its manifestations in natural phenomena, to its expressions in human psychology and behaviour, to its Nietzschean spiritual dimensions, and its real practical implications for your life. This has been quite the undertaking but I’m happy with the results and I think you will be too—at least I hope so.

Because of the breadth of the topic, I’ve had to made this show a three parter. I bet you never knew there was so much in it. Well, for sure it’s a big topic, but I wanted to lay this out to you piece by piece in the most accessible and practical terms, so that requires a little more circumspection and thoroughness. This should make comprehension much more reliable. I don’t doubt that those of you out there listening to this are smart, but podcasting is not the best way of delivering complicated information—certainly not for me. My mind wonders and gets distracted, so with that in mind, we’re going to take it step by step.

I opened this episode with a challenge and some questions about free will. For Nietzsche, neither you, I, nor anyone has free will. 

How do you feel about that?

Many people loathe this suggestion and even get quite defensive when their sense of their own autonomy is questioned. Nietzsche writes, “The strongest knowledge (that of the total unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.” — Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §50. Our defensiveness is understandable, because to strip us of our free will seems to diminish us somehow. But don’t switch off. Bear with me and I will explain. Believe it or not, rejecting free will does not rob you of any nobility—far from it—relinquishing free will even has benefits.

Free will—this may seem like a strange thing to bring up in an episode that is purportedly about will to power—and will to power in Nietzsche’s most expansive, most comprehensive sense. But it’s crucial relevance will become clear to you by the time we are done here. 

The interpretation of WTP I am about to unveil to you is, as far as I can tell, my own, though it overlaps with some others. In the 125 years since his death, a lot of ink has been spilled interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophy, so it’s possible other interpreters have found themselves ploughing this same furrough, but if so I haven’t been able to find evidence of it. 

Crucially, my theory relies on two axioms: firstly, there is no free will; secondly, power is relative, relational, and for us conscious beings a matter of subjective perception and judgement.

I think my theory nails what Nietzsche meant by this concept such that it unifies his whole philosophy into a coherent and highly credible theory of everything that happens: from the death of stars to your liking for strawberry ice cream; from the erotic genesis of all art to the warm feeling you get from social acceptance; from the development of moral conscience to the crazy excesses of romantic infatuation.

Some contemporary commentators confine will to power to a psychological theory about human motivation, others expand it to include all organic life, but Nietzsche at times suggests it’s the fundamental principle of existence itself, at least from the human perspective—which is of course the only perspective we ever get. As he writes in his unpublished notes: “This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!” (WP.1067)

By the time we are done, I hope to have persuade you that will to power is Nietzsche’s theory of everything, a theory that is not just logical, economical, and plausible—but actually useful for the aspiring individual—for you.  

And here’s another abrupt left turn, we begin our exploration of Nietzsche’s will to power by taking a wild ride into deep time, to the very birth of our solar system itself. Again, you may wonder, at first, what possible relevance this material can have, but let my tale unfold itself and all shall become as clear as the resounding peal of a temple bell at dawn. So turn off your communications devices, lock the door, mix yourself a stiff drink, and strap yourself in. We are travelling back into the most distant past, 4.5 billion years ago.

Chaos reigns.

Under the pull of gravity, the Earth has condensed into solidity from an enormous cloud of gas and dust rotating in the vacuum of space. This rough, dark sphere tumbling through the void is altogether unlike the familiar blue-and-green jewel that we will come to know and cherish. It is a hellish world: toxic, sterile, infernally hot, without liquid water or atmosphere. Its unstable crust means its surface is convulsed by violent volcanic activity. Rainless electrical storms split the skies, and an unrelenting sun bakes the planet with lethal radiation. With no substantial atmosphere, nothing insulates or shields the surface from the solar onslaught. The Moon looms unnervingly large on the horizon, ten times closer than in the far future, and the Earth itself spins much faster: days last only five hours. There are no blue skies vaulting over the valleys and mountains of this unending desert planet—just the yawning vastness of space wheeling slowly and inexorably overhead, strewn with its countless cold stars. 

From out of the blackness between the stars come terrifying, supersonic barrages of comets and asteroids that frequently hammer the planet, vaporising the rocky surface under the heat of impact over and over and over. This cataclysmic period in the young earth’s life is known as the late heavy bombardment, and it goes on for hundreds of millions of years. 

But the chaos of the bombardment is a sign of the solar system settling down; the sun and its infant satellites, earth among them, are mopping up the material debris still scattered across space as a result of the big bang almost 10 billion years ago. As you might expect, right now, earth is entirely without any life at all. 

Welcome to the horrors of the Hadean eon - named for Hades, the Greek God of the underworld. 

Evolutionary beginnings

Ages pass. In time, water—the first prerequisite for life—arrives, probably in the form of numberless icy comets from outer space. This celestial meltwater pools into the first oceans. They are acidic, hostile to life. Yet in the dark seabeds, or deep beneath the crust in hidden water deposits, conditions differ. Around hydrothermal vents and seams of radioactive rock, volcanic heat, chemical energy, and peculiar minerals create crucibles of change.

Minerals form strange lattices and membranes. Carbon chains twist, link, and fall apart again. It’s chemistry—nothing more—but it behaves as though it’s trying things out. For hundreds of millions of years, this endless experimentation continues. Most combinations fail instantly, collapsing back into the soup. But occasionally, some hold together a little longer. They survive—not because they’re “meant” to, but because, under the current conditions, they are constituted to continue existing—in evolutionary terms, they are “fit”.

This is selection without a selector. Mindless, mechanical, inevitable. Monkeys with typewriters at the molecular level, endlessly clacking out new permutations.

Over aeons, what lasts, what endures, becomes the backdrop for what follows. The stable becomes the stage on which new experiments play out. This is evolution in its most primitive sense: the slow, blind sorting of what persists from what doesn’t.

And then, somewhere, sometime, one novel molecule performs an unprecedented trick. It folds in such a way that it attracts other atoms into its own shape. A crude copy. Not perfect, but enough. And now there are two. The copies make more copies, and those copies copy too. What was once a single flicker becomes a spreading pattern. This is the evolution of the stable.

Imagine a shallow tide pool after a storm. Unfiltered sunlight beats down on its surface. In that film of water, countless varieties of inorganic molecules drift and collide. Most vanish instantly. But a few endure and even replicate. Each repetition leaves more of itself behind, seeding the pool with its own likenesses. Over time, the pool becomes colonised with its descendants.

It’s not alive—not yet—but it behaves as though it has one simple rule, one that will be the fundamental imperative for life: keep going!

No consciousness, no plan. Just mechanical, chemical repetition. A pattern that happens to keep happening.

Once copying begins, everything changes. Each generation brings tiny errors—mutations. Most are so minuscule they make no difference; some make copying harder; others make it easier. The easier ones, of course, win—if by winning we mean hanging on to existence, and with us humans, we usually do—that is our own pre-programmed prejudice. 

The robust and resilient molecules crowd out the fragile and ephemeral. They successful dominate their little world until their own success reshapes the environment that sustains them.

This is evolution by natural selection in its most elemental form. There is no purpose, no plan, no goal, no destiny—just repetition that reinforces itself: any copy that has a variation meaning it is slightly better at getting itself copied, tends to proliferate.

What’s most interesting, is that this iterative self-reinforcing process is substrate-neutral. It doesn’t care what it’s made of. All it needs are three conditions: 

- something that copies, 

- the possibility of variation in those copies, 

- and the fact that some variations last longer than others. 

Wherever those conditions occur—replication, variation, and differential fitness—evolution happens.

Genes do it in bodies. Crystals do it in rocks. Even ideas do it in human minds. Consider, for example, that a joke can be naturally selected to survive and reproduce itself. If it is funny, it will be replicated, being retold by an ever widening group. If it is not funny, it will perish, being quickly forgotten. The funny joke can even evolve as people misremember it or tweak it in their re-telling. If any such “mutation” makes it funnier, this “fitter” adaption will likely outcompete the original. This is memetic evolution by natural selection rather than the genetic one we are most familiar with. 

Even behaviours are subject to this logic. Consider this example: the behaviour of children copying adults to learn skills. The capacity for copying is a genetic predisposition that’s good at getting itself copied. Why? Because children who imitate adults are more likely to survive to sexual maturity and reproduce, passing on the genes that make imitation possible. But copying is memetic too: children don’t just copy copying itself; they also copy the specific behaviours they see in adults, and those behaviours can then spread through generations by imitation rather than heredity. And any specific behaviour can evolve too with more efficient variations outcompeting previous versions. 

Here we see the beginnings of culture—and how deeply biology shapes and underwrites it.

So the joke and the copied behaviour express the same recursive logic of selection, but mimetically—this is evolution at work on more abstract realms of replication.

Any pattern or organisation, whether it be material or informational, which endures, expands, appropriates, and replicates itself in forms that are better at enduring, expanding, appropriating, and replicating is “fit”, meaning that, within the conditions of its environment, it earns its existence.

The same basic dynamic applies to everything that endures. What works, works by making what works work better. This self-reinforcing dynamic accelerates and intensifies ENS. Over time, the world fills with forms—patterns of organisation—that share the characteristics of successful survivors from its own history.

But not to get ahead of ourselves, in the Hadean era, with our primordial cocktail, if you mix the right ingredients, provide a steady energy source, and let it all simmer for—oh, I don’t know—a few billion years, what you get is chemistry that starts to look suspiciously like life. It’s not alchemy; it’s statistics. Given a drinks cabinet and enough time, even without a recipe, you’ll eventually come up with a decent margarita. The margarita of this story is RNA and DNA—self-replicating molecules that have evolved such that they carry detailed replication information: through the recursive, self-reinforcing logic of ENS, they are copies that are good at getting themselves copied. Proto-life, in its first fragile forms, enters the frame.

Notice again what’s missing: no plan, no guiding hand, no cosmic goal. Just endless variation and differential survival. Purpose doesn’t exist in this vast godless hell. Purpose emerges much, much later, inside us humans, as a by-product of nervous systems sophisticated enough to imagine a future. Purpose, like the desirability of hanging onto existence, is another human prejudice. 

For now, the universe doesn’t care. It simply and unfailingly does what it does—with marvellous results.

What is Free Will? In HH.18, Nietzsche writes: “we believe fundamentally that all feelings and actions are acts of free will; when the feeling individual considers himself, he takes each feeling, each change, to be something isolated, that is, something unconditioned, without a context. It rises up out of us, with no connection to anything earlier or later.”

Free will is usually taken to mean the capacity to choose and act independently of causes—an ability to have done otherwise than one did under identical conditions. Without it, the world is determined: every event follows necessarily from those preceding it, in line with the laws of nature. Given the past, the present could not be otherwise; and the future is already implicit in what exists right now.

Our most important social institutions—economics, democracy, contract law, criminal justice, and morality itself—presuppose free will. The rich, the powerful, and the successful, those with disproportionate influence over culture and politics tend to be its strongest advocates. As Nietzsche notes in JS.258, “no victor believes in chance.” The powerful want to claim all the credit for their success and make the less fortunate morally culpable for their misfortune. “You make your own luck,” they insist.

The persistence of our faith in free will reflects its crucial psychological and social function in maintaining social order and cohesion. Can you even imagine what our societies would look like in its absence? 

—Well, ancient Greece and Rome might provide clues. Those prodigious pagan societies believed in destiny, not free will. There’s something to think about there, but that’s for another time.

Morality 

Nietzsche from HH.107: “Man’s complete lack of responsibility, for his behaviour and for his nature, is the bitterest drop which the man of knowledge must swallow, if he had been in the habit of seeing responsibility and duty as humanity’s claim to nobility. All his judgments, distinctions, dislikes have thereby become worthless and wrong: the deepest feeling he had offered a victim or a hero was misdirected; he may no longer praise, no longer blame, for it is nonsensical to praise and blame nature and necessity. Just as he loves a good work of art, but does not praise it, because it can do nothing about itself, just as he regards a plant, so he must regard the actions of men and his own actions.” 

Let’s consider a case of purported free will. Picture a starving man who steals a loaf of bread. His hunger drove him to the act: it was the decisive determinant—the most significant antecedent cause. For those that reject free will, he had no choice—the theft was the inevitable outcome of all the factors pressing on him at that moment. Yet when he is caught, the judge takes it for granted that he acted freely, that he knew the moral path but chose the immoral one, and so must be punished.

But perhaps blame, vilification, and punishment are not appeals to free will at all. Perhaps they are—unknowingly—attempts to forge stronger determinants. The aim is simple: to ensure that when the offender faces the same temptation again, the fear of punishment outweighs his hunger and tips the balance in favour of restraint.

In the thief’s mind, the process feels like deliberation. The first time, he weighs his hunger against the risk of discovery. Hunger wins, and he steals. The second time, hunger is again strong, but now he recalls the punishment already endured, imagines worse to come, and remembers how easily he was caught. These new determinants outweigh his hunger, and he refrains. In this case, fear beats hunger.

He thinks he chooses freely. The law claims he chooses freely. At no point does he do so. At no point does he possess free will. He is steered inexorably by determinants in each case, with different outcomes in each case. 

The truth is that the past is necessary; it could not have been otherwise; and so too is the future. The thief is neither free nor truly responsible—and neither is the judge who condemns him.

N writes: “Neither punishment nor reward are due to anyone as his; they are given to him because it is useful” (HH.105)

What are the social implications? Are we to excuse and absolve every criminal of their crimes? Clearly not. A tornado, an earthquake, or a flu virus may not be morally blameworthy, but they are “evils” for us nonetheless. The rat, the leech, and the mosquito are not responsible for what they are, for their natures, but we seek their eradication nonetheless. 

With humans, we are usually less extreme, and some degree of non-lethal coercion or rehabilitation is often aimed at. And with humans, whatever their nature, and the character they have developed through their lifetime of interactions with the wider world, they are all capable of some degree of change. This is Nietzsche’s notion of “second nature.” Our first nature is that with which we are born—our physio-psychology. Our second nature is acquired from our physio-psychology’s inevitable, unique interactions with its environment. We are all capable of becoming something other than we now are. But of course, it depends on whether or not it is our fate to do so—on what lessons and challenges our environment presents us with. As Nietzsche writes in WP.1040 “a man only has what he needs.”

Blame and the myth of moral responsibility are the scaffolding of our civilisation. Without these fictions, our current order would collapse. This is why free will is our civilisation’s indispensable, to borrow a term from Plato,  “noble lie.” 

The Illusion of Choice

It’s easy to see why free will is such a convincing notion. Our ability to hypothesise gives the impression of freedom and agency: we can imagine different futures flowing from our present choices, and we can picture past events as if they had transpired otherwise. We seem to inhabit a world where all manner of things could occur, not only the things that do occur.

But consider that when you deliberate and make a choice, that choice is, in principle, causally explicable—there are reasons behind it, explanations. At lunch, you may freely opt for pudding or pie without feeling compelled, yet when you reach for the pudding, it is the result of countless factors: your taste preferences, memories, associations, the way the food is presented, your mood, bodily state, and other contingencies. Perhaps the pudding is chilled and the pie is warm from the oven, so you choose pudding because it’s a hot day—and this is due to the seasonal tilt of the Earth relative to the sun. If the earth’s position in the solar system had been different and the air temperature cooler, you’d have had pie instead. You can even imagine having had pie instead, so it seems like it must have been possible. 

But for your dessert dilemma to have been resolved differently, all its causes would have had to be different—not just one. Every cause is enmeshed with all the rest—“everything chained, entwined together, everything in love,” as Nietzsche writes in TSZ, IV, Drunken. Only in a wholly different universe could you have chosen otherwise.

Rationality as Deterministic Adaptation

There are those who say they see no problem here. So called compatibilists argue that free will and determinism are, well, compatible. They claim that reason grants a type of freedom: so long as actions follow rational deliberation, they count as free. 

But reason is itself bound by causal necessity; each thought flows from prior thoughts and generates subsequent thoughts—they are all causally linked and need to be if thinking is to do its job—is to make sense. Reason itself is premised on a logical and coherent succession of connected ideas. A thought unconnected to the matrix of all your thoughts is like a link uncoupled from a chain—it’s isolated and therefore inert, arbitrary, redundant. 

From WS.11: “In truth, however, all of our acting and knowing is not a consequence of facts and empty spaces in between, but rather a continual flow.”

Naturally, just as in the external world, nothing in your inner life pops into existence spontaneously from nothing—ex nihilo in Latin. And nothing can be the cause of itself. In BGE.21, Nietzsche calls this notion of self-causation—Causa Sui in Latin—a “logical rape and abomination”

Rationality is not freedom; it is an evolved cognitive capability that is just as deterministic as everything else. How and why did it evolve?

Imagine early organisms—basic forms of life—responding mechanically to environmental stimuli. Individuals whose reactions best ensured survival persisted and reproduced. As environments grew more complex, fixed reflexes proved insufficient. Sentience—the ability to feel pleasure pain, fear and desire—could have constituted a more probabilistic, rule of thumb system for making choices in a world with more uncertainties. 

Then in humans, the ability to simulate possibilities—mental trial and error—conferred a selective advantage. Thus, consciousness and reasoning evolved as extensions of the same blind evolutionary process.

Let’s look more closely at the evolved function of rationality to see past the illusion it creates. Suppose you go out partying the night before a job interview. You wake up hungover, the interview goes badly, and you don’t get the job. You berate yourself for your foolishness. Yet in truth, your choice to party was inescapable: the weight of causal determinants made it inevitable. It could not have been otherwise. Perhaps it was a phone call from a friend inviting you to a get together that was the decisive determinant. So you go party and ruin your chances of getting the new job. But—and this is the crux—imagining afterwards that it might have gone differently, picturing yourself staying home preparing, picturing the interview without the hangover, means that next time you face a similar situation you might just act differently—you might firmly decline your friend’s invitation. If so, you’ve learned from experience—well done!—and that learning is itself a determinant—one that may override your impulse to party in future.

And yet even your imaginings are determined, based on, for example, your life experience and cognitive abilities. Rationality is not a magical escape from causality but a sophisticated adaptation within an inflexible deterministic reality, naturally selected because it has helped the human species survive-for-reproduction. When you deliberate, your brain is running predictive models built from memory and expectation. This isn’t free will. We get computers do run predictive models all the time, and we don’t infer that this gives them free will. 

The animal that can run predictive models, learn from past experience and project outcomes into the future can fare better—at least in some circumstances—but it is just as causally bound as the animal that acts unthinkingly on instinct, or the computer than mindlessly executes its predictive programming.

But as Christopher Hitchens said “of course I believe in free will. I have no choice.”

And Nietzsche expresses the same sentiment when he writes “The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculable mechanism.” HH.106

Free will is a kaleidoscope of recursive self-referencing. To prove you are free you try to act contrary to your normal patterns of choice, but this act too is caused by your desire to break the deterministic chain and so it is just another link in that chain.

Why its nonsense

It only takes a moment’s thought to realise that free will is a completely incoherent notion—one among a number of cases of magical thinking in contemporary humanity. In what sense could it be useful for a subject to make a decision that was disconnected—even marginally so—from the network of causal determinants within which it lives? To be able choose for no reason at all, which is what free will adds up to, is madness. Even if we had that capacity, its uselessness—indeed its dangerousness—would mean it would quickly be naturally selected out of existence.

This also connects to the main rebuff to those who hope quantum indeterminacy might save free will. Even if sub-atomic particles seem to spontaneously pop in and out of existence, leaping from that to the claim that human choices do so is unjustifiable. And it still wouldn’t be free will! If choices spontaneously popped into existence with no antecedent causes, how could anyone be held responsible for them? Responsibility presupposes volition, which means causation; an uncaused choice—one that you haven’t caused, haven’t chosen, that occurs for no reason—is not a choice. 

The fact is, you never experience spontaneous, non-deterministic, quantum events. Do you observe objects appearing and disappearing miraculously? Do you find the colour of your car has changed overnight? Isn’t the supermarket always in the same place each time you go get your groceries? The world makes sense because it is deterministic!

The elaborate contortions and mind-boggling justifications that people construct to save free will reveals just how desperately we cling to the illusion of autonomy and the dignity we think it bestows. 

The anxiety, I think, is that no one wants to be thought a meat puppet; a mindless automaton whose every action can be predicted—a being utterly unfree. 

But this concern is misplaced, I feel. Because the real import of this issue is retrospective: free will says you could have acted differently than you did in the past, and that makes you morally responsible and blameworthy for all your past actions. There’s a hint here at the social function of the free will myth. Determinism says all this free will stuff is absurd—only in a different world with different determinants would you have acted otherwise than you did. 

Looking forward, the future may be inevitable—it may be absolutely determined—but we don’t know, and can never truly know, what it holds. And even knowing this its own determinant.

Back in the 90s everyone was talking about chaos theory. That interest has since waned, but one of its central insights is highly relevant here: tiny changes in a system can quickly compound into massive differences—making accurate predictions shaky at best. This is the principle of the butterfly effect—a butterfly flapping its wings in China might, in principle, contribute to a storm in Canada.

The same unpredictability applies to human behaviour—or any future event, for that matter. We can make probabilistic predictions, but over time they grow increasingly unreliable due to systemic complexity. And no system is more complex than the world itself. Its determinants are effectively infinite. This is why Nietzsche rejects the idea of determinism in the sense normally understood. He rejects the mechanistic metaphor that is implied in it—the idea that causes and their effects can easily be identified and isolated—like parts in a great machine. This woefully under-represents the immense complexity of the processes underlying human behaviour (and all existence itself, for that matter). Can causes really be neatly distinguished from their effects? Isn’t every effect a cause, and every cause an effect? Cause and effect: Nietzsche thinks that in the real world ‘such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces’ (JS.112). Here we must imagine the world as described by the ancient greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who wrote Panta Rhei—everything flows. There are no causes or effects, just a ceaseless flow with no inherent separation. It is us humans that chop the world up into discrete chunks in order to be able to create discrete concepts, without which no rational language is possible.

Nietzsche calls Heraclitus his precursor and asserts that in every occurrence ‘there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect’ (JS.112). 

Mechanistic metaphors are clearly inadequate and merely reflect our psychological need to break the world up into intelligible pieces. His preferred metaphor suggested in HH.1.1 is chemistry which better reflects the infinite incalculability of the multitudinous causal relationships at work. But another metaphor that might help is one I mentioned back in episode 18: that of a roiling pool of water. Can a particular current in such a pool be isolated? Can it be separated from the other currents that form, merge, diverge or clash with it? Can its boundaries be precisely marked?—can we definitively identify where it began? Can we even identify it at some future moment as the selfsame current? The current is real because it has real effects, but identifying it materially, precisely is problematic. 

The fact is, that the current isn’t some sort of separable entity in the pool, it is of the pool; its existence is supported and explained by all the activity of the entire pool. 

Such is the character of the world in Heraclitus and Nietzsche’s view.

If you are a current, changing constantly, how can your journey through the pool be predicted with complete accuracy? And the world is a far vaster and stranger than our little metaphorical pool. To predict the future with 100% accuracy would require absolute knowledge of the entire universe and infinite computing power. That’s never going to happen.

The surrender of free will does not make the future or your actions any more predictable than they currently are; we cannot truly know what will happen, what any person might do—might become. Your fate may, in some sense, already be written, but it remains unknown and ultimately unknowable. It is discovered moment by moment in the present, and everything can turn on a sixpence. The fateful wake-up call that changes everything for you could be in train but yet to happen. Or it could have happened already but you are yet to feel its consequences. Will you be ready for it when it comes? Will you even recognise it?

Summary and promo for next episode

So, let’s take stock.

We began with a challenge: prove you have free will. You couldn’t I’m guessing, and that was the point. The idea of a choice free from antecedent causes collapses under the simplest scrutiny. Every thought, every impulse, every decision arises out of a vast network of determinants— physiological, psychological, social, environmental, material, cosmic—the tributaries of which stretch back into primordiality—and beyond. You didn’t summon them; instead their confluence in the present constitutes who you are. If this makes you a meat puppet, well, you are a puppet that can see its own strings and this knowledge can itself create new determinants—loosening old strings and creating new ones. Whatever the case, the future is an unmapped land full of possibilities and the absence of free will does not constrain your possibilities. 

You didn’t choose yourself and everything that has happened to you in the past had to happen—you bear no responsibility—no one does. That can be a difficult mouthful to swallow—for lots of reasons.

In part 2 of this season finale, we’ll answer two key questions germane to this enquiry into Nietzsche’s WTP: namely, what is will?, and what is power? We’ll trace a path from the physics of becoming, through the instincts of life, into the psychology of ambition, and eventually, into the spiritual domain of Nietzsche’s highest mode of existence. This will bring us face to  face with Nietzsche’s divine eidolon of WTP: Dionysus.