This video is a deep-dive explanation of one of the most notorious concepts in Western philosophy: Nietzsche's Will to Power. What is the philosophical background, how did it evolve throughout Nietzsche's intellectual career, and how can we look at the concept today?

The first part serves as an introduction of sorts. We’ll go over Nietzsche’s intellectual background, most importantly the influence of Schopenhauer and Darwinism. We will also look at the question of interpretation: is the Will to Power a metaphysical principle or simply a human drive or emotion?

In the second part we go over Nietzsche's entire body of published work and trace how the concept of the Will to Power evolved throughout Nietzsche's intellectual career and philosophy.
We see how Nietzsche first thinks about power in The Joyful Science but how the term was first coined in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and how it gradually becomes an all-encompassing force by the time we get to works such as Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. We will see how the main question in this series, "is the Will to Power a metaphysical force or a materialist or psychological drive?" is not so simple to answer.

WATCH our in-depth video on the Will to Power in Beyond Good and Evil here:
https://youtu.be/2Ap9lkhHizU

In the third and final part of our series on Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power, we look at a modern interpretation (Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism from 2006) to finally settle the question of whether or not the Will to power is a metaphysical concept or not -- turns out we have to take a middle road and figure out what exactly Nietzsche means by "power"...

Timestamps:
00:00 Part 1
07:10 Part 2
20:14 Part 3