Ivan Soll

This article examines Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche’s work. It considers how Nietzsche adopted some of his central ideas from Schopenhauer, how he exploited some of Schopenhauer’s positions to suit his own purposes, and how he developed some of his ideas as alternatives to Schopenhauerian positions. Nietzsche’s first published book, The Birth of Tragedy, is based on a Schopenhauerian metaphysical framework. Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation applicable to the world of representations is the key element in Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and Schopenhauer’s principle of the undifferentiated nature of ultimate reality of the will is the key element in Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian.

ABSTRACT In this article I confront and criticize the widespread tendency to ignore, marginalize, or dismiss without serious consideration Nietzsche's psychological hypothesis that a “will to power” is the major motivator of human behavior. I begin by separating Nietzsche's psychological hypothesis from both his occasional cosmological extension of it into an account of all processes in the world and from his power-based theory of value. And I argue that, since the psychological thesis does not depend on the cosmological extension, is more fundamental to Nietzsche's overall project, and is much better supported by Nietzsche's argument, it deserves to be seriously considered on its own merits. Then, I critically consider Robert Solomon's attempts to deny any value at all to the will to power as a general motivational hypothesis and to reinterpret Nietzsche's theory of the will to power in a way that ignores what Nietzsche actually says about it and, moreover, radically undermines its significance.

While agreeing with Bernard Reginster that Nietzsche's advocacy of the will to power as a psychological thesis is much more fundamental than his extension of it as a cosmological or metaphysical thesis, I criticize him for failing to support this interpretation, and I attempt to supply an analysis that does support it. Then, I take issue with the common tendency to sanitize Nietzsche's theory of the will to power, to make it more palatable—and with Reginster's treatment of this issue. This leads me to an examination of Nietzsche's conception of power—and a critique of Reginster's account of it.