Nietzsche’s System

"The title is meant to be provocative, but Richardson’s central claim is that there is a kind of thematic coherence to all of Nietzsche’s work, and this coherence derives in part from the doctrine of the will to power. Well, this question of definition is part of the Clark-Richardson debate. The Clark side is that what Nietzsche means by the will to power is that people are often motivated to act because the action will give them a feeling of power. But Richardson’s view is closer to Heidegger’s, although he makes a more compelling and sophisticated case for it. Richardson’s view of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power is this: Every person is made up of a bundle of “drives” – sex drive, hunger drive, drive for knowledge, and so on. Every drive, according to Richardson’s reading of Nietzsche, is characterised by the will to power. Every drive has a tendency to want to enlist every other drive in its service. So if the sex drive is dominant in a person – think Hugh Hefner – then the sex drive tries to get every other drive enlisted in helping satisfy it. So knowledge or food would only be of interest to the extent that they facilitate gratification of the sex drive, and so on. Out of this basic picture of human psychology and the metaphysics of drives and their essential nature as will to power, Richardson thinks you can take this theme and see how it figures in everything else Nietzsche writes, whether it’s about truth, knowledge, morality and so on. In that sense he tells a very systematic story about Nietzsche’s thought. First of all, I think it’s a very well done and compelling interpretation. What’s particularly interesting is that Richardson , who is also a well-known Heidegger scholar, takes up a theme that was important to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche – the view that Nietzsche is the final point in the history of Western metaphysics. First there was Plato and at the very end was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s metaphysical doctrine is that everything is will to power. Richardson takes up that idea but gives it a very refined and nuanced elaboration that makes it much more plausible than it ever was in Heidegger. The other thing Richardson does is to take up Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche but, as with Richardson’s work on Heidegger, he again tells a more lucid story than Deleuze does. So Richardson gives you an angle into some of the dominant strands of European interpretations of Nietzsche, but he does so in a more philosophically interesting and certainly more accessible way. He’s a very clear and systematic writer."