Nietzsche's Philosophy of Culture: A Paradox in The Will to Power

Abstract

As one reads Nietzsche and especially The Will To Power, it is impossible not to notice how deeply concerned he is with the themes of and weakness. The forms of and weakness he deals with are typically not the ones with which we are most familiar: the and weakness of the body or even of personality and character, at least as these are ordinarily understood. This is not to say that Nietzsche abstracts altogether from familiar ideas of and weakness; and on occasion he even postulates a biological basis for the vigor or decadence of a people or an individual. For the most part, however, these excursions into the biological interpretation of moral phenomena seem ill-conceived and may even have the effect of blurring the insights his analyses otherwise achieve. In any case, it is the more interesting conception of the difference between and weakness that Nietzsche proposes that I will first take up in this paper. I will then point out a paradox that arises when one tries to make use of the concepts of and of weakness that Nietzsche offers us, and especially when this is done in the circumstances of a shared or common life. It turns out that in these circumstances what Nietzsche calls strength becomes, by his own criterion, a form of weakness and perhaps the other way around as well. As a result, it looks very much as though the distinction he draws between the two must be somehow incoherent since it fails to separate the cases of unambiguously from those of weakness.