The Will to Might is a will to Truth

Nietzsche’s famous formula of the will to might is often social Darwinistically misunderstood as the Hobbesian will to brutal ruthless egoism; and Nietzsche accordingly as a pioneer of German National Socialism. But his thinking is much more like that of us Cynics than like that of Hobbes¹Hobbes was for Nietzsche an ” attack on the philosophical spirit in general … a degradation and diminution of the value of the term “philosopher” for more than a century.” [JGB 294]. Nietzsche is more a romantic than an enlightener. Hoobes gave birth to the modern state. The nihilistic Enlightenment gave birth to the guillotine, to nationalism, and to racism. For Nietzsche the Will to Might is a will to Truth. And behind the will to truth, the love of truth or the will to love is revealed.

Read more: Parrhesia as love for the truth

Nietzsche’s understanding of all life as will to might turns the proposition of the reason upside down. He romanticizes²Romanticization understood as the German resistance movement against the Enlightenment, not as “kitsch”, as sob-staff. Novalis said already before Nietzsche that a natural science without romantic finds only dirt. Later in this blog, I will go into the cynical core of the romantic epoch, as we also find it in Emerson natural science by claiming that not the will and the telos is an illusion, but on the contrary the mechanistic worldview and he sees “the creational in every organic being” and asks ” what is that?” And found,

that it is the will to might that also leads the inorganic world, or rather that there is no inorganic world. The “effect in the distance” cannot be eliminated: something draws something else, something feels drawn.

that, so that this will to might could express itself, it must perceive those things which it draws, that it feels when something approaches it which is assimilable to it. – The alleged “laws of nature” are the formulas for “power relations” of – – – The mechanistic way of thinking is a foreground philosophy.

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Nietzsche’s Superman

With this view of nature, Nietzsche is on the same wave as the German Romantics at the time of the French Revolution.

And Nietzsches super man is not a hating beast, not a world and human despiser, as he is misunderstood again and again.

The individual “is not a legislator and does not want to rule. His sense of power beats inward. The Socratic virtues!”

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Read more: Nietzsche’s Last Man

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The derivation of the cardinal virtues from Parrhesia

Plato, Aristotle and also the Stoics propagate four so-called cardinal virtues:

courage, moderation, justice and wisdom.

I will show here that these (and other) virtues are expressions and consequences of parrhesia, and that we Cynics therefore get along with this one:

Courage

After all, we derive our self from the nature understood as divine. If we say and live the truth about ourselves, then we always mean with this self-realization also a “becoming God”, a realization of the divine in us. In contrast to the existentialists, who first have to invent themselves and in doing so, as Sartre expressly emphasizes, constantly have to anxiously grope our way forward with the moral brakes on, our virtue consists in not still cultivating such hesitation, such timidity, but in learning to overcome it more and more.

Since we understand our self, our soul, not as something artificially created by us, but as something that connects us with all other people and the whole cosmos, self-love and love for other people is not a contradiction for us. Just as we stoically learn to see in the daughter not our daughter but a daughter, in the beloved not the one but a beloved, we also see in ourselves not the one human being but a human being. We do not, like Christians, timidly fearfully hope for a life after death, we find eternal life already in the here and now, in our self, in our soul, understood as “all-soul”. When Diogenes, when asked where he comes from, who he is, answers I am cosmopolitan, he means exactly this eternity.

Parrhesia overcomes fear of dying, fear of things we cannot control, and any form of cowardice and worry: so we become brave.

The fear of showing ourselves, as forced society has erected around us like a body armor, like a wall, has the opposite effect. We become increasingly alien to ourselves. We are afraid to die, because we will not be able to recognize any meaning in life or in death. Instead of the will to might, we live the will to unmight. We are becoming cowardly.

Moderation

“What does an oak tree care if a sow rubs against it?” is a German proverb..

Und it expresses exactly what I want to say here. From the virtue of parrhesia grows a self-confidence, a self-empowerment in which, as I wrote above, fear of death has been overcome. We do not ask God to grant us our desires. We ask that everything be done according to God’s will, as the Cynic Jesus formulated it in his Lord Prayer. Resistance, as Nietzsche formulated above, does not make us despair, does not frustrate us, but is rather a source of pleasure for us..

And we do not want to make it unnecessarily difficult for ourselves to achieve happiness, eudaimonia. This is where the prejudice that we preach poverty comes from. Rather, we want to satisfy our needs as simply as possible.

When Diogenes says about women that, after all, a beautiful statue of Aphrodite is always within easy reach as a jerk-off template, he is not only making himself independent of the depressive loser fantasy “She’s the one, otherwise I don’t want any,” but of dependence on the affection of women in general. We know that this is precisely what makes a man attractive. Diogenes might not have suffered from a lack of affection from women. And he said, “Oh, it could be just as easy to get full just by rubbing my stomach.”

So independence from wealth makes us more serene. I look forward to a simple meal in the evening, after I have fasted all day and hunger was a nice thrill for me during the day, more than if I went to a food temple, already full, and ordered the most precious food.

The opposite of moderation is debauchery, or waste, which we do not need, but which is needed by those who spend their days selflessly and need the artificial stimulus, where the daily adventure of living the truth is denied. Waste is losing oneself more and more, until disappearing in the wasteland. The more we disappear, the less we practice parrhesia, the more we need the excitement of the withering ego, the less we can practice moderation..

Another misunderstanding is that because we live in such a way that we are relatively free from fears and worries, we would be forbidden to have fears. We would have to be strong. This is not the case at all. I managed to withdraw from nicotine, following the example of Alcoholics Anonymous “AA”, only because I admitted to myself that my will was too weak to manage it without God’s help. And I literally ran away in the beginning when I got into a situation where my addiction made itself felt. Now, years later, however, I can easily be around smokers, even enjoying the smell of fresh tobacco smoke.
We don’t have to stand up to every situation. We can also run away from time to time without having a guilty conscience about it. The famous stoic composure is not a compulsion not to get upset, but a consequence of parrhesia.

Justice

With what we mean by righteousness, I know, we will be most at odds with the last people of the slave morality.
We derive our right from the strongest, from God. So we propagate the “right” of the strongest.
Before you turn away, again, misunderstandings are the rule, not the exception:
When a baby cries and we obey him. so the baby was the stronger, to whom we gladly submitted. As, thanks to Parrhesia, our self-confidence grows more and more, we soon know no envy, no jealousy.

And we do not look for evil everywhere. For that is for us the evil itself. Just as Satan in the story of Job shows himself as the radical evil. He distrusts Job and wants to put him to the test. It is teh evil, who seeks evil everywhere and becomes evil himself. He is disturbed, with the cynic Jesus spoken, by the splinter in the eye of the neighbor, but the beam in his own eye he does not see. Those who do not realize their self often feel like the ones who fall short. They need rights and the welfare state. We live out our love and our strength. We do not shy away from war — if we think we can win it.

Nietzsche’s ideal of justice is also ours:

“What’s good? Everything that increases the feeling of power in man, the will to power, the power itself.

What’s bad? Everything born of weakness.What is happiness? The feeling that the strength is growing, that the resistance has been overcome.”

And we have no problem worshipping, surrendering to the stronger, the more beautiful.
This is also will to might, another misunderstanding. Because slave morality wants to tolerate neither masters, nor slaves. Everyone should be equal. We, on the other hand, celebrate hierarchy. We can be masters, but also slaves. Our justice is war, spoken with Heraclitus: War as the father of all things. It makes some kings, others slaves. This is our “master morality”. As I find, a somewhat unhappily chosen expression by Nietzsche.

Wisdom

“I know that I know nothing“

Sokrates, quoted by Plato

Most people will have heard this saying before. However, it might have been misunderstood by the braggart Plato. Because this statement would be a contradiction. And Socrates was not that stupid.

What we do know is that the Oracle of Delphi called him the wisest man in the world.

Socrates frowned: “How can that be? Many are so much more educated than I am, know so much more” And then the possible solution to the riddle came to him:

“Maybe that’s why the oracle calls me wise, because I think I have no idea what’s really going on, what’s really the truth?”

We cynics don’t think we’re particularly smart either. Nor do we need a good general education to compensate for our sense of inferiority.

During my first council meeting as a newly elected member of the Green Party, the head of the building department said something about a project that would cost many millions of DM. But what it was all about, why it had to be and why it was so expensive. Again and again I asked the head of the building department and did not understand him. The other council members were already moaning about how stupid one could be. So I gave up for the time being and abstained from voting. After the meeting, the Public Works Director came up to me, patted me on the back and bought me a beer. Finally, someone who wouldn’t just pretend to understand everything like everyone else on the council! He was pleased that I was now part of it. And soon we became friends.

I was 16 and had fallen in love with a mentally handicapped girl. The maybe 13-year-old didn’t say a word. But she was infinitely beautiful. And as soon as she saw me, she smiled at me from a spiritual depth that gave me goose bumps and warmed my heart.

It was my job at that time to accompany her and other mentally handicapped children and teenagers on the school bus. I was ashamed that I had fallen in love with her. But then I thought that if my higher intelligence were compared to hers, I would be much smarter. But if one were to put my intelligence in relation to the infinite universe, to the infinite ignorance that I would have, then the difference between the girl and me would hardly be worth mentioning. At that time, however, I still lacked the courage to ask her and her parents whether she could not be my girlfriend.

Are we Cynics wiser than others? I don’t know. We are certainly self-satisfied, proud and arrogant. But we are not Platonists or Aristotelians or Kantians. They all know much more than we do. But I admire most children more, think they are wiser, and prefer to talk to them than to most philosophy professors at universities I have met.

Danger / security, war / peace, garden / desert, people / state, love / contempt, closeness / distance are a few more pairs of opposites where we claim one side for ourselves. I could make lists like this all day. All kinds of virtues, but they don’t need to be mentioned separately because they are children of Parrhesia. And Parrhesia is the will to might, is the will to truth and the will to love. And it is of course the will to freedom, to be ourself.

Keep reading: On Our Will to Freedom

Coming soon: The will to might as the will to surrender.

• 1
  Hobbes was for Nietzsche an ” attack on the philosophical spirit in general … a degradation and diminution of the value of the term “philosopher” for more than a century.” [JGB 294]
• 2
  Romanticization understood as the German resistance movement against the Enlightenment, not as “kitsch”, as sob-staff. Novalis said already before Nietzsche that a natural science without romantic finds only dirt. Later in this blog, I will go into the cynical core of the romantic epoch, as we also find it in Emerson