- The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Nietzsche and the Family
- Nietzsche and Women
- Nietzsche’s Illness
- Nietzsche and the Greeks
- Nietzsche and Romanticism: Goethe, Hölderlin, and Wagner
- Nietzsche the Kantian?
- Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode”
- Influence on Analytic Philosophy
- The Themes of Affirmation and Illusion in <i>the Birth of Tragedy</i> and Beyond
- ‘Holding on to the Sublime’: On Nietzsche’s Early ‘Unfashionable’ Project
- The Gay Science
- Zarathustra: ‘that Malicious Dionysian’
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Nietzsche’s <i>Genealogy</i>
- Nietzsche’s <i>Antichrist</i>
- Beholding Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Fate, and Freedom
- Nietzsche’s Metaethical Stance
- Nietzsche and the Arts of Life
- Nietzsche on Autonomy
- The Overman
- Order of Rank
- ‘A Promise Made is a Debt Unpaid’: Nietzsche on the Morality of Commitment and the Commitments of Morality
- Will to Power: Does it Lead to the “Coldest of all Cold Monsters”?
- Life’s Perspectives
- Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Aestheticism
- Being, Becoming, and Time in Nietzsche
- Eternal Recurrence
- Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Sketches: Causality and will To Power
- The Psychology of Christian Morality: Will to Power as Will to Nothingness
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
- Nietzsche On Life’s Ends
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines Nietzsche’s moral psychology by focusing on his most important contribution to that form of inquiry, On the Genealogy of Morality. The will to power, understood as a self-standing desire for effective agency, emerges as a central concept. The Genealogy is an exploration of what happens to this desire under circumstances in which its satisfaction is severely restricted. In particular, phenomena playing a role in the development of morality such as ressentiment and self-denial are best understood as expressions of the “will to power of the weak.” And the moral outlook that grows out of them may be understood as a strategy to allow even the “weakest” a “feeling of power.” This moral outlook proves to be a kind of psychopathology insofar as it is an expression of the will to power that undermines the very conditions of its pursuit, satisfaction, and enjoyment—a “will to nothingness.”
Keywords: will to power, affective agency, morality, psychology
Bernard Reginster: Brown University
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Nietzsche and the Family
- Nietzsche and Women
- Nietzsche’s Illness
- Nietzsche and the Greeks
- Nietzsche and Romanticism: Goethe, Hölderlin, and Wagner
- Nietzsche the Kantian?
- Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode”
- Influence on Analytic Philosophy
- The Themes of Affirmation and Illusion in <i>the Birth of Tragedy</i> and Beyond
- ‘Holding on to the Sublime’: On Nietzsche’s Early ‘Unfashionable’ Project
- The Gay Science
- Zarathustra: ‘that Malicious Dionysian’
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Nietzsche’s <i>Genealogy</i>
- Nietzsche’s <i>Antichrist</i>
- Beholding Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Fate, and Freedom
- Nietzsche’s Metaethical Stance
- Nietzsche and the Arts of Life
- Nietzsche on Autonomy
- The Overman
- Order of Rank
- ‘A Promise Made is a Debt Unpaid’: Nietzsche on the Morality of Commitment and the Commitments of Morality
- Will to Power: Does it Lead to the “Coldest of all Cold Monsters”?
- Life’s Perspectives
- Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Aestheticism
- Being, Becoming, and Time in Nietzsche
- Eternal Recurrence
- Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Sketches: Causality and will To Power
- The Psychology of Christian Morality: Will to Power as Will to Nothingness
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
- Nietzsche On Life’s Ends
- Subject Index
- Name Index