27. Will to Power - Nietzsche’s theory of everything and what it means for you. Season finale, Part 2

Dionysus wants to make you stronger, more evil, more profound – and more beautiful. 

In this second part of the season finale, we follow that cosmic pied piper into the heart of Nietzsche’s most explosive idea: the will to power.

Last time, we dismantled the myth of free will and showed that selection is the basic logic of reality – from molecules to memes. Now we pick up those threads and begin to trace their connection to Nietzsche’s patron deity. We explore Dionysus as the living symbol of a world without metaphysical safety nets: no God, no higher justice, no ultimate meaning – just an inexhaustible flux that delights both in creation and destruction. Greek tragedy, ecstasy, ego-death, joy in suffering: Dionysus is the world drunk on itself.

From there, we denude “will” and “power” and subject them to a thorough examination. Is a tree’s striving for light a kind of love? Does a rock “want” to fall? What if your own wanting is just a late, conscious complication of a more basic cosmic tendency? We track will from galaxies to genes to nervous systems, and power from brute survival to your everyday ambitions. 

Ultimately, we're going to expose will to power as the very machinery of existence. 

Transcript

I was confronted by the god Dionysus, and he spoke thus: ‘Man is to me an agreeable, brave, ingenious animal without equal on earth, he knows how to make his way through every labyrinth. I like him: I often ponder how I might advance him and make him stronger, more evil and more profound than he is.’ 

‘Stronger, more evil and more profound?’ I asked in alarm. 

‘Yes,’ he repeated, ‘stronger, more evil and more profound; also more beautiful’

–and as he said that the tempter god smiled his halcyon smile, as though he had just paid a charming compliment.’⁠1 

Welcome to part 2 of our season finale, esteemed listener. In the first show I spent a good deal of time deflating the myth of free will, which under the most cursory scrutiny is exposed as an incoherent notion. The universe is, like it or not, deterministic. 

And I was also emphatic in asserting  the validity of evolution by natural selection—indeed the validity of selection per se as a substrate neutral logic of existence: at work in material, social, psychological, and theoretical realms, not just in organic life. Selection is just the way our reality works. The simple rule is, forms—patterns of organisation—which are better equipped to exist, persist at the expense of those that are less well equipped, and once you have replicating forms with some variation, a self reinforcing cycle of escalating fitness is inevitable. A pattern of runaway fitness emerges, and that is how you end up with us—the process become aware of itself. Extraordinary.

You may still be wondering how evolution and determinism relates to will to power. Well, but the end of today’s show, those threads will have been brought together. But we will start by meeting Nietzsche’s patron deity, that great hidden tempter god and cosmos pied piper, Dionysus. And, you know what, glass of wine would not be inappropriate to accompany what follows.

Are you ready to enter the sacred grove of the mad god of will to power? 

Let’s do it.

Dionysus

We started the show with a little dramatic vignette of one of Nietzsche’s most enigmatic passages from BGE.295—the genius of the heart. In it Nietzsche describes his relationship with the god in very mysterious terms. It’s one of the strangest passages in all of western philosophy and warrants serious study. However for today, our focus will be elsewhere as we unpack the relationship of Dionysus to Nietzsche’s signature concept; the will to power.   

Nietzsche chose the greek god Dionysus as the eidolon—the living symbol—of his radical, affirmative philosophy. A philosophy beyond good and evil, born in the aftermath of the greatest crisis in human history: the death of God.

This “death” is not an event but a revelation. Following the enlightenment, it is the recognition that there is no absolute meaning, no divine order, no inherent justice, no higher plane behind the world. It is the final abrogation of all religious fantasies of metaphysical transcendence. What remains is existence itself: immediate, self-creating, self-sufficient, inexorable. Dionysus is that world made mythic.

Who was he? In Greek mythology, Dionysus is a paradox—a dancing god of contradictions. He is intoxication and fertility, joy and insanity, creation and destruction, agriculture and wilderness—the Ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus even claims he is one with Hades, the god of death. Dionysus is a beautiful boy or young man; he often appears barefoot, naked, crowned with ivy and grapes, sometimes horned, in one depiction, riding backward on an ass. He is the god of wine and all the fun, frolics, and exuberance that it inspires, but as we know, alcohol’s disinhibiting effects also sometimes ignite rage, conflict, and violence. And this savagery is Dionysus too—god of the brutal and the bestial.

Dionysus is followed by a wild entourage of nymphs, satyrs, and especially maenads—frenzied women who dance in ecstatic delirium and, at the height of their possession, tear living creatures apart with their bare hands and eat them raw. Terrifying, grotesque, yet radiant with joy.

He is the shameless god, festooned with flowers and splattered with blood, who dissolves all boundaries: between life and death, ecstasy and agony, the self and the world; between man and beast and god.  

Dionysus was no marginal figure to the Greeks; in one ancient account he is acknowledged by father Zeus himself as the greatest of the gods. But in Nietzsche’s conception, Dionysus is not a god to be worshipped. He cares nothing for the tinsel and trappings of religious piety. As Nietzsche writes in BGE.295: “a god like this will have no use at all for this honourable rubbish and splendour. “Keep this for yourself,” he would say, “and for those like you and anyone else who needs it! I – have no reason for covering my nakedness!”

Nietzsche’s fascination with Dionysus began in The Birth of Tragedy, where he interprets Greek art as the tension between two primordial forces: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These are not “gods” in a religious sense but metaphysical principles—two varieties of consciousness.

Apollo is the principle of form, order, and clarity. He erects boundaries, draws distinctions, discriminates objects, creates categories, establishes opposites. Apollo is the hand that measures and the voice that bestows names on things. He is cognition, memory, imagination, differentiation, and order—the dream of intelligibility and concrete selfhood.

Dionysus, by contrast, is preconsciousness; the principle of formlessness—pure becoming. He is the intoxication that dissolves identity, the surge of life that forgets itself—forgets everything—it has no memory, living only in the moment—which of course is all that can ever be really said to exist. 

Where Apollo is the sculptor, Dionysus is the raw material; where Apollo is the form, Dionysus is the force, where Apollo is the simplified map of the world enabling us to navigate it rationally, Dionysus is the infinitely complex terrain known through instinct and the senses. The Dionysian world is the flux postulated by Heraclitus. The Apollonian world is our interpretation of the flux—the projection of objects in space and time and the logical relations that can be formulated between them. Apollonian consciousness is data compression to make rational mental processing possible. So, for instance, every tree is completely unique, but for convenience all tree-ish things are brought under a single category: tree. In this way we misrepresent the world as it really is, in order to be able to think and communicate with each other about it. We do not have the bandwidth, or the time, to give each unique tree its own unique word. 

Dionysus does not even see a tree as a distinct thing—it is networked into everything else—as is everything else. 

In antiquity, Dionysus was also strongly associated with the mask. In tragic theatre, all the performers wore masks, but I think the mask itself is an attempt to create a comprehensible emblem of an incomprehensible deity. The mask itself is an Apollonianisation of Dionysus. For anything to be understood intellectually, it must be Apollonian. And if one takes away the Apollonian mask, one’s finds there is nothing behind it—nothing that can be comprehended by a sane person at any rate. To look into the face of Dionysus unmasked is to be reduced to a gibbering madman. We can see why Dionysus is so strongly linked to the untamed nature god Pan—he who creates panic. In Orphic and mystery traditions, Pan becomes a form of Dionysus —“the All”—because, of course, Pan means “all”.

So you see why Nietzsche came to realise later in his career that the Apollonian is not in opposition to the Dionysian—it is merely a phase of the all encompassing Dionysian, a means of apprehending it.

The essential Dionysian experience annihilates the ego. It collapses the divide that separates subject from object. In Dionysian ecstasy there is no “I,” no ego, only the immediacy of happening—knowing through sensation and intuition. I describe it, yet all descriptions must be faint, colourless sketches, because it cannot be spoken—language is Apollonian after all. The Dionysian can only be experienced, not conceptualised—and this experience is overwhelming in every way.

This is why Dionysus is at once the god of madness and the god who cures it. The “madness” he heals is not insanity in the pathological sense, but the false consciousness of the Apollonian ego—the veil of Maya; the fever of believing oneself separate from the world, the delusion of selfhood, reason, and, of course, free will. 

The experience of Dionysian de-individuation resembles the samadhi or nirvana of the East—the dissolution of the self into the totality—ego-death. But there is a crucial difference. Where the Eastern mystic seeks stillness, Dionysus revels in movement, in dance, in animality and the thrill of erotic intoxication. His truth is not serenity but frenzy—the wild ecstasy of flux. 

In their tragic theatre the ancient greeks intuitively acknowledged the flimsy artificiality of culture’s apparent order, reason, and meaning; that pain, suffering, injustice, and death were inevitabilities. That beneath civilisation’s veneer there roiled an undifferentiated chaos from which, like everything, man springs, and to which, like everything, he must return. 

But this formless Dionysian realm is not some kind of hell—it is the eternal “womb of being”, as N calls it in BT—and through rites that invoked Dionysian experience, the greek Dionysian initiates could, for a time, divest themselves of the false sense of self and experience an epiphanic identification with the cosmos in its entirety—that ecstasy of absolute oneness with all.  

The word ecstasy, of course, comes from the greek Ex Stasis, literally “out of place”, meaning to be outside of one’s self.

The Greek affirmation of the Dionysian provides a theodicy, or more accurately here, a cosmodicy—a justification or explanation for the sufferings and evils of the world. Dionysus is creation and destruction, joy and pain, and we cannot have one without the other—this is not just true metaphysically, but empirically. Every act of creation is really a reconstitution of something that had to be disintegrated to provide the material. This Dionysian world is a beautiful garden and a meat grinder, and the garden is the grinder, and the grinder is the garden. Every healthy, thriving garden is grown out of death, decay, waste and corruption. The most fragrant rose is cultivated on a heap of dung. Every new born baby is formed from the organic matter appropriated, disaggregated, and absorbed by its mother. 

Nietzsche writes of this Dionysian conception of the world in WP.1066, “it develops, it passes away, but it never began to develop, and has never ceased from passing away; it maintains itself in both states. It lives on itself, its excrements are its nourishment.”

In greek tragedy, life affirms itself not despite suffering it entails but through it. The Dionysian does not deny pain and destruction; it glorifies it as the necessary rhythm of existence. It sanctifies suffering. Dionysus is the innocent child building sandcastles on the beach to amuse itself and then destroying them for fun. He is the world revelling in itself in its infinite dance of endless becoming.

In this unending becoming, seas rise and fall, as do mountains, as do civilisations! Milk sours, flowers wilt, swords rust, bones crumble to dust, and every human triumph, no matter how spectacular, is utterly effaced from memory. An infant unexpectedly matures into extraordinary beauty or phenomenal ability, like a new star lighting up the night sky—so ephemeral—doomed to be ravaged by time, a wonder that will ultimately trace an unswerving downward trajectory towards ugliness and decrepitude, becoming in the end nothing more than a feast for worms. 

Even the stars themselves, unimaginably vast, diminish, smoulder and are completely extinguished in the fullness of time. The seasons turn inexorably and everything falls apart—yet it is renewed, again and again! In EH Nietzsche writes of ‘the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I call the Dionysian…’ This world, our world, is inexhaustibly productive. There will be new prodigies and there will be new stars—perhaps even new universes. 

What is Will?

A question for you: does a tree love the sun?

Or how about this: does a rock want to roll down a hill?

Take a long look at a tree—any tree—reaching for the sky, limbs outstretched like a worshipper before the face of its god. Look how it strains, contorts, twists its entire body toward the light. This straining can be seen particularly well in mature beech, yew, and sweet chestnut trees all of which can look so muscular. Look at how every tree silently competes with all other trees. If you sped time up so that a hundred years was compressed into a minute, you would see what looks a battle being waged—for space and for sunlight. 

And the rock—look at how it tumbles downhill with what seems like a strange kind of eagerness, rushing to get close and clasp itself to the bosom of the earth.

Now—you might laugh. There is no “mind” inside trees or rocks. There is no one experiencing these feelings of love or desire—no subject, no consciousness. Of course the tree does not love, not like we love. And of course the rock does not want, not like we want. But you misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the tree loves like we love, or the rock wants like we want. Things are completely the other way around. I’m saying we love like the tree loves, and we want like the rock wants—just with a few extra whistles and bells.

We call these whistles and bells consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, or the capacity for experience. But is it these things that make the love or the wanting real? Does willing require consciousness? Nietzsche is not so sure. In BGE.36, he asks if events in the mechanical, material world might not possess, “the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves – as a more primitive form of the world of emotions in which everything still lies locked in mighty unity and then branches out and develops in the organic process” 

If so, the tree’s love of the sun, the desire of the rock—these are not metaphors. They are not projections of human agency onto the inanimate. They are expressions of the same basic reality we call will—only in different registers. The tree really wills—just look at it. The rock really wills—just watch it. The world is not inert, static, fixed. It is always in motion, always changing, always becoming, always willing.

You may be sceptical, fine. So let us investigate this right down to its foundations: what is will?

Let’s take it step by step.

Let’s start with will as it is most familiar to us. We experience it as something about ourselves. We desire. We deliberate. We choose. We act. These psychological experiences seem so intimate and personal, so metaphysically special, so apparently unconstrained, that we find it easy to believe we actually possess not just will, but free will. But we’ve already seen that this is an illusion. Every thought, every impulse, every act, is the outflow of causes—psychological, physiological, environmental, ancestral—that determine its character. Our willing is not an exception to nature’s determinism—it is part of its unified fabric being expressed in and through an organic consciousness. But still, determined or not, free or not, will seems to something uniquely tied to consciousness, right?

But does will really have to be conscious? Beneath this conscious will, aren’t we also steered by unconscious will? Ambiguous moods. Reflexes. Instinctive compulsions. Hidden neuroses. You flinch when you touch something hot—that’s not a conscious decision, right? You catch a falling object without thinking. The hairs on the back of your neck involuntarily erect when you hear a piece of music, you blush at the glance of an attractive stranger. And you sometimes sabotage yourself in ways you don’t understand—say if a parent tells a child they will never amount to anything and in later life they unconsciously undermine their own successes, even if they can’t consciously remember the inciting event. These are not choices. But they move you, determine your feelings, thoughts, and actions. They will through you. You do not control them; it’s truer to say they control you.

Now consider animals. Even the most primitive ones display purposeful behaviour. The snail retreats into its shell when touched. The sea anemone recoils from a shadow. A single-celled amoeba will flee acidic regions in the pool where it lives and even learn to avoid them, despite having no brain or central nervous system. These creatures may lack consciousness as we know it, but they respond, adapt, seek things out. Their bodies carry out functions shaped by aeons of evolutionary refinement, selected for survival advantage. They do not choose, but they still strive. Their willing is not a matter of choice, but an expression of the evolved functions built into their bodily structures.

Let’s go further: beneath this: life at its bare minimum. Organic molecules—RNA, DNA—self-replicating structures behaving as if driven by a purpose. They aren’t conscious. They have no plan. But they persist. They copy themselves. They outcompete others. They behave, in effect, as if they want to continue. Here again is will, structural, mechanical, and free of any desire or conscious purpose.

And we can keep going: below life: matter in motion. Inorganic molecules have behaviours too—characteristic interactions. They are less structured, less organised into evolved self-sustaining structures, but the difference between them and organic molecules is merely one of complexity, not of type. This is a sliding scale. In all matter, something is happening—happening all the time, and every happening is will. A river flows. A flame consumes. Crystallisation, precipitation, radiation, decomposition. Every kind of force- force itself! 

A gravitational body pulls others toward it. Not because of desire in any conscious sense, but because this is what things do. This is what they are. They are what they do. And all doing for Nietzsche, all happening, all change, is will.

And we can go up the willing scale as well as down. Consider human organisations, or even animal ones. Don’t herds of wildebeest express a will—a pattern of apparent intention—making their enormous ancestral migrations, for example? Don’t colonies of ants? Doesn’t a nation, an ideology, a commercial business? 

Consider a corporation? Doesn’t it try to grow, expand, to dominate its niche? And if you attack it, doesn’t it defend itself with antibodies called lawyers. But could you call a corporation conscious in any conventional sense? How about a nation? Even more so, an ideology. Is christianity conscious? It acts like a living thing—it’s even evolved an immune system with which it protects itself: the principle of faith. Would Christianity have survived this long if it hadn’t had that?

How about capitalism? Is it alive? Is it willing?

These organisations certainly behave like they’re alive and like they are trying to survive, flourish, squeeze out competitors. 

All of this—up and down the scale—is what Nietzsche calls will. Your will is only one of the latest, most refined instantiations of a universal will. Nietzsche speculates that we might view “our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will” (BGE.36)

Will here is the fundamental activity of becoming in everything. It’s not that the universe wills like you will; its that you will like the universe wills. We don’t have will, we are conduits for it. Talking about this new understanding of will, Nietzsche puts it this way in TI.6,3. “The “internal world” is full of optical illusions and mirages: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, so it no longer explains anything either—it just accompanies events, and it can even be absent.” And a little later he goes not to say: “There aren’t any mental causes at all! ”

Once you give up your need to believe in free will, you realise that you are an inevitability as is everything you do. Everything is an inevitability. There are only inevitabilities. 

But don’t despair, not yet.

From the spin of galaxies to the desire for sex, from volcanic pressure to a political revolution, all is becoming becoming. And that becoming is directional. It moves toward persistence, expansion, appropriation, and overcoming. Everything that exists now, does so because it has outcompeted everything else that no longer exists. It has prevailed. It is the boxer left standing at the end of the current round.  

So everything is in a competition—consciously or not—for existence, expansion, and development, but in the organic—the realm where self-replication has made phenomenal leaps—this logic compounds. 

To rehearse what we said in the last show, when a form replicates, chance may produce a fitter successor with an enhanced ability to replicate. Such traits are selected repeatedly, accelerating the spread of forms that are not only fit, but increasingly capable of generating fitter copies too. This creates a circular, compounding logic: selection favours what enhances selection, driving a runaway escalation of fitness. It does not aim at this, of course: there is no purpose here—these are structural inevitabilities—outcomes of the logic of replication and natural selection. 

Everything that happens is an expression of the same fundamental will. In a universe that is inherently active—never static—will is the logic of becoming—its directedness. All becoming is, as N puts it in BGE 36, “as an antecedent form of life?” Sentient life is merely one of its latest and most sophisticated expressions.

Will is not something possessed by agents. Will is what agents are. It is the force that moves through them, shapes them, composes them. The self is not in charge of its will, it is a manifestation of that will. A momentary configuration of force, expressing a directional trajectory within the flux of existence. But directed towards what?

What is Power?

We’re here to understand will to power. And we’ve discussed will.

If the universe is a ceaseless flux of will, what, then, is power? 

Consult a few dictionaries and you will find the consensus is that power is energy, or it is the ability, capacity, or potential to do some work or have some effect. What the dictionaries overlook, I suggest, is that the meaning of power might be best found in the perceiving subject rather than the objects and phenomena the subject perceives in the world. 

Power is relative and it expresses a relationship. I might find a piece of music powerful; you might find it tediously pompous. A blessing from the pope may feel powerful to the Catholic faithful, whereas to the atheist it is inconsequential—perhaps even absurd. A sergeant is powerful to the thirty-or-so soldiers in his platoon, but his quantum of power is paltry from the standpoint of a Field Marshall who commands many thousands of troops. 

When we say something is powerful we are saying something about the impression that a certain experience evokes in us or imposes on us. Power, like beauty, is ‘in the eye of the beholder’. Power is identified by its effects, actual or potential, on us. Like beauty—a not unrelated concept—power is a kind of value judgement. 

A terrifying thunderstorm, a pungent scent, a muscular body, a rousing speech, a captivating work of art, a concussing blow, a moving performance, an army on the march: these things are powerful because they press themselves upon our reality, physically or psychologically. 

The powerful is that which inspires, thrills, intimidates, compels, enchants, seizes control, terrifies, or exalts. It is force that can be put to use—happily, in the service of our interests or, less happily, against them. Ultimately, power is that which we crave for ourselves. 

Power is cause that has significant effects—significant to whom? To us. The more its effects impose, the greater we deem the power to be. But everything in existence is a cause, inasmuch as everything produces effects. It is only by virtue of a thing’s effects that we apprehend it as a thing at all. As Nietzsche puts it, “A thing is the sum of its effects, synthetically bound together by a concept, an image.” WP.551—That concept, that image, is the word we use to designate that thing. A thing’s effects we call its properties. 

So everything that exists has properties, it produces effects—is its effects—and so everything is power—power to a degree contingent on the evaluation of the perceiver. The most basic form of power then is to exist; all other power-expressions require this precondition. Whether it be a scientific theory, a species, a nation, a galaxy, or a law of physics: surviving and enduring must come first, only then growing, adapting, competing, having effects, overcoming, and dominating. Survival is not an end in this struggle, it is a means—an opportunity to pursue greater forms of power. But merely to persist is itself to instantiate power. It is to be that boxer still standing when the current round ends.

Power is our evaluative interpretation of phenomena; the most imposing phenomena we deem the most powerful, but of course the whole world imposes itself upon us continually in incalculable, subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Indeed, the entire world as you experience it right now is a manifestation of power: a momentary iteration that has prevailed over all previous iterations, whether from a minute or a million years ago. Every single thing in your world, including yourself, is also a temporarily prevailing iteration. 

So in the primordial flux, prior to life and consciousness, where mindless forms jostle for existence and dominance by necessity due to the logic of natural selection, we would judge the forms that prevail in this struggle as power. Remember, a form is a pattern of organisation. For a form to persist is already to have resisted dissolution, to have overcome—to have won its existence from the roil of the flux. And now as an existing thing it is necessarily engaged in a battle for continued existence, expansion, and development—blindly and mindlessly, in the case of the inorganic, and with some degree of emotional investment and purpose in the case of conscious life. Either way, that directedness towards power is will!

That’s power as we recognise it out there in the world, but what about the subjective experience of power within oneself? For Nietzsche, power is the ability to create and maintain conditions that are favourable to one’s self. The ability to get what you want—to have power is to possess, to be able to bestow, to impose your preferences, to exert influence, claim territory, assert dominance, sweep aside opposition, and take control. It is to have faith in oneself, to fear nothing. It is to feel effective, strong, unstoppable, unconstrained—to feel free; it is to feel oneself a force of nature. 

If external power is recognised by its effect on us, our internal power is recognised by our capacity to effect the external world.

So now, understand, will is everything that happens, all change, all becoming. 

All discernible forms within that becoming—all phenomena—are power in expression, but their degree of power is always a matter of perspective. The measure by which you evaluate forms is their power relative to your own power interests—do they serve you or hinder you; are they threats or opportunities. And as you judge, so shall you be judged, because you too are just another form expressing power, pursuing it, competing for existence. Only, you are a form-type that has evolved the capacity for sensation and thought—you are that inevitable, deterministic process of becoming become self-aware. 

The Psychology of Will to Power

We’re nearly ready to coalesce our thoughts into a final definition of Nietzsche’s will to power. But first, let’s take a look at how this universal will—this ceaseless flux of becoming—manifests in the human psyche? How does it feel, from the inside, to be a creature carried along by the unrelenting current of existence?

In the popular understanding, Nietzsche’s will to power evokes images of ripped, bare-chested, battle-scarred barbarians roaming a wasteland or insane megalomaniac bond villains building doomsday devices, but these are caricatures of will to power. ‘Power’ is a morally-loaded word in our contemporary culture; one with uncomfortable associations—compulsion, domination, and exploitation. But in truth, we all need power and we continually express power and we cannot do otherwise. One must understand that it is a question of degree, of application, and of aspiration. 

In us, Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power comes alive. It is not an abstract process but a lived reality. Within us, the universal motion of becoming is experienced as desire. It is the felt rhythm of existence itself—the drive toward stronger, better, faster, higher, more.

This is not the mere wish to survive, but to ascend—to amplify one’s range of effect, to grow, accumulate, to create, to overcome resistance, to feel the surge of vitality and the joy of self-surpassing. Sure, we might have only the most pedestrian ambitions: mere financial security and comfort—but this is will to power at its lowest amperage—security and safety are the conservation and protection of the power we already possess. And comfort quickly becomes tiresome. You spend two weeks on vacation sitting by a pool and drinking Pina colada’s, but admit it, by the end of the fortnight, it starts to become boring—it’s not enough. Life, in its highest sense, does not cling to safety, security, or comfort; it seeks to expand, to risk, to affirm itself against resistance. The will to power is that tendency made conscious.

Peter Sloterdjik, the contemporary German philosopher, calls the human, autoplastic, and this is a useful concept for us. From the greek, Auto meaning self, and Plastic meaning mouldable and shapable. Therefore the autoplastic human is the animal able to purposefully change and shape itself. All things express will to power, but the human does it consciously and often with a vision of what it wants to become: itself realised at a higher octave. 

Yet, in human experience, this primal orientation to power is almost always masked. Culture, morality, religion, and social order channel, repress, and disguise it. The raw impulse to expand and dominate becomes moralised as piety, charity, duty, humdrum career aspirations, or social climbing. Civilisation does not extinguish the will to power; it domesticates it, converting its dangerous energy into stable forms that serve the collective entity's interests—the herd quasi-organism. But the current still crackles beneath the surface and it is the engine of all human activity.

Like all instincts, the will to power is, in itself, non-purposive in humans. It has no goal outside itself. It does not pursue happiness, virtue, or salvation; it pursues only its own discharge. Its satisfaction is experienced in its own expression and intensification. It must express itself. And when it does so in us, its natural trajectory tends toward values that encapsulate what Nietzsche calls life ascending: growth, creativity, mastery, and joy in health, strength, beauty, and pride.

The tragic character of human existence is implicit in will to power, however. Desire, is never completely satisfied for more than a spell. Its very nature is to reach beyond every attainment. Dissatisfaction and failure are inalienable aspects of the desire and attainment dynamic. As we’ve explored in previous episodes, this dynamic has some notable psychological characteristics. These are the hedonics of will to power:

1. Hedonic restlessness: In Z we read, “life must overcome itself again and again! Life wants to raise itself on high with pillars and steps; it wants to gaze into the far distance and out upon joyful splendour – that is why it needs height! And because it needs height, it needs steps and conflict between steps and those who climb them! Life wants to climb and in climbing overcome itself.” Stasis is inherently unsatisfying, even a comfortable stasis where all of one’s needs and whims are satisfied. The human has a psychological need for continuous improvement in its situation—for life to be getting better and better, on whatever terms—and so it seeks opportunities to make life better. The implicit requirement is that the future must be better than the past if any amount of fulfilment is to be realised. When, though misfortune, life follows an apparently irreversible downward trajectory, this portends misery and despair.
2. Hedonic adaptation: the euphoria of every conquest, no matter how gratifying, recedes; the thrill wanes. Contentment regresses back to the baseline of normality, which is the state of hedonic restlessness. Then once more comes restlessness, new dissatisfaction, and so new striving begins.
3. Resistance–reward: a tougher struggle magnifies the feeling of triumph, of having overcome. Victory without challenge is no victory at all. A goal must be potentially out of one’s reach to be of greatest value; to be worth pursuing—and so, because improbable goals are the most worthy goals, failure is likely. Yet, the more likely you are to fail, the greater the feeling of pleasure if you do manage to succeed. So life seeks resistances to overcome so it may test itself and have the chance to experience the intoxication of power. Nietzsche writes in WP.694: “The measure of failure and fatality must grow with the resistance a force seeks to master; and as a force can expend itself only on what resists it, there is necessarily an ingredient of displeasure in every action. But this displeasure acts as a lure of life and strengthens the will to power!” 
4. Hedonic escalation: each satisfaction raises the threshold for the next. We crave stronger and stronger doses of intensity—more resistance, more challenge, even greater chances of failure, but that much more pleasure if we are successful.

Suffering, dissatisfaction, and disappointment are written-in then—there can be no true fulfilment without them. In WP.696, Nietzsche puts it this way, abridged slightly:

“It is not the satisfaction of the will that causes pleasure […], but rather the will’s for­ward thrust and again and again becoming master over that which stands in its way. The feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the dissatisfaction of the will, in the fact that the will is never satis­fied unless it has opponents and resistance.”.

So again, not the state of attainment, but as we explored in earlier shows, the transition from lack to satiation, that dynamic moment of overcoming, or as he puts it the: “for­ward thrust and again and again becoming master over that which stands in its way”

These dynamics are not flaws of human psychology but expressions of the underlying nature of becoming. Humans, as animals, desire the necessities of life that guarantee survival, nourishment, and reproduction. But humans also posses the independent, flexible, abstract meta-drive of overcoming just for the thrill of overcoming itself. 

Such an evolved, behavioural predisposition enables an organism to optimally tackle any challenge it might be faced with of whatever nature: the discontent moves it to action, and the pleasure is a reward for success. Just as your rational faculties are not a tool for any specific purpose, but can be applied to any number of life’s problems; so the psychological meta-drive of will to power provides the impetus to wrestle with any difficulty that might arise.

A nice vignette that kind of illustrates this is the original ancient Greek Olympic Games where the winner did not receive a gold medal, or any sports company endorsement contracts (as far as we are aware), but merely a simple laurel wreath, a modest crown of leaves. Because, of course, the feeling of victory was the real prize—the laurel wreath a mere token in recognition.

By the way, I must credit Bernard Reginster for being the first, as far as I am aware, to postulate the will to power meta-drive—a second order desire to overcome resistance purely for the satisfaction of overcoming, regardless of its first order practical objectives. That’s from his 2006 book: the affirmation of life. 

So see now how suffering is not the negation of joy, but its precondition. To keep life moving forward, no satisfaction can be final, no equilibrium permanent. Without lack, no satiation. And the greater the trial, the greater the triumph.

So towards a definition of will to power:

The will to power is the unending, inescapable striving of all existence—the tendency of every form, from atoms to organisms, from ideas to empires, to assert itself, endure, expand, multiply, overcome resistance, and transform itself, becoming ever more efficient in these strivings. It is not driven by conscious desire, purpose, or goal, but by the fundamental structural dynamic of our reality. In an objective sense, will to power is the harsh logic of differential survival: the flourishing of stronger forms at the expense of weaker ones that must perish and be repurposed.

Through this escalating process of selection, ever more intricate self-replicating forms emerge; genetic organisms whose structures embody power-seeking behaviour: instinct. In still higher iterations, forms evolve that are sentient and self-aware—us. Here the universal directedness toward power becomes subjective, interpretive, evaluative, calculating. Everything is power, but what counts as powerful depends on one’s own power interests; one’s own capacity to affect and resist being affected; one’s appraisal of potential threats and opportunities. Every perception, feeling, and thought is an interpretation of the world from the standpoint of one’s own quantum of power and the imperative to preserve, expand, and express it.

This imperative finds conscious, purposive expression in the proxy goals we set for ourselves. The pursuit and achievement of such goals momentarily satisfies the deeper compulsion for power, but only ever partially, for the drive has no final fulfilment. It seeks only to express itself: to overcome resistances, and thus resistances must continually be sought out. Every plan, belief, and purpose is merely a means for discharging this irrepressible compulsion, a way of scratching the itch that demands it be scratched.

The will to power is therefore the universal dynamic of becoming itself including its physio-psychological manifestations in higher forms of life. It is not a thing; it is a process. It is the way things work. It’s as tyrannical as gravity. Will to power isn’t in everything; it is everything. Things aren’t subject to will to power, there are no things, only will and its variegations, which are the power disparities we discern and conceptualise as “things”. 

Without end or final fulfilment, will to power is the unceasing, unquenchable universalised directededness towards becoming stronger and stronger forever. 

Will to power is the only will and it is every will.

Will to power wills only itself, its own expression. 

Will to power is will willing its own willing.

We might put it this way: will to power is willing willing willing. 

This willing willing willing—the ceaseless, substrate-neutral trajectory of all becoming—it finds its living image in the god Dionysus with whom we began. This god of contradiction and ecstasy embodies life’s most terrifying and beautiful truth: that creation and destruction are one and the same. Through him, Nietzsche reveals a world without metaphysical purpose, without moral design, yet overflowing with self-generating vitality. Dionysus is not a deity you pray too, he’s force already within that you mainline. He is a symbol of existence affirming itself through all becoming—joy, suffering, death, and renewal—as one eternal irrepressible process.

So, to sum up: we’ve descended through the layers of will—conscious and unconscious, organic and inorganic—until we saw that willing is not a possession of the human mind but the pulse of existence itself. From galaxies to viruses, from nations to thoughts, everything strives to persist, to expand, to overcome - because that’s how existence shapes that which exists and persists.

And then we reached power—the effect of that striving. To exist is already to exercise power; to live is to seek more of it. Power is a perspectival evaluation relative to a particular set of power interests—yours. Power is not only what acts upon the world, forms outcompeting other forms, but what impresses itself upon us, upon our form. And what can be appropriated by us to supplement our own power, the increase of which is joy itself. We surveyed Nietzschean hedonics and saw that suffering is part and parcel of the will to power dynamic. As Nietzsche puts it in JS.12: “suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of the one must also have as much as possible of the other?”

Next time, we’ll plunge deeper into this trip—into its existential and spiritual consequences. What does it mean to live as a conscious expression of this cosmic will? What does it mean to affirm it joyfully—to become Dionysian oneself?