Will to Power?

Are we living in a lie? I imagine myself looking out of the window and see 2 orange trees; one concept, two entities. In reality, they are not the same. One has 203 leaves and the other has 174. One has roots that run 6.7 metres deep, and the other 4.3 metres. One has many branches, and the other has a few. Yet we simply call them trees. We simplify the world into useful concepts and fictions. We live in a world of illusions that allow us to survive and thrive. Our family, friends and loved ones are illusions as well. Everyone I know is deeply complex. I say that person X is kind and intelligent. But person X is mostly kind; he’s unkind when he hadn’t eaten for a long time. He’s very skilled at mathematics, but a terrible writer. Yet I simplify him into the concept of kind and intelligent because that’s useful for me. To know person X better, I’d need way more concepts, but even then, it’s unlikely that I’d ever fully exhaust who he is.

The mind uses concepts to create a certain order. But such an order is just a useful fantasy, it’s a pretty lie. Whether we use science, philosophy, or art. The fantasies we construct help us create and interact with the world. In other words, they give us more power. Let’s go back and meditate on the orange trees. Let’s start thinking and experience them as the separate entities that they really are. Let’s notice how one smells better than the other, how the bulk of one is smoother, and how the fruits of one are larger. Reality seems more complex than our illusions. But even if we updated our illusions by for example increasing the words and concepts we could use to describe the tree, it still wouldn't help. But does being aware of the details matter? If you are a farmer, maybe. I think that’s what 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wanted us to think about when he said “suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth and uncertainty? Even ignorance?” (from Beyond Good and Evil). Sometimes ignorance is preferable to the detailed truth. But maybe we only care about truth in so far as it empowers us. Knowing and thinking about all of the details of every orange tree would just be a psychological burden for the most of us. Clearly, everyone would take illusions over the reality. 

But I can’t help but ask, is it possible that the mind is actually accessing a deeper kind of truth? Maybe the mind is separating the signal from the noise. But what constitutes the signal and what constitutes the noise? I do not necessarily agree but Nietzsche thinks its our values. A farmer that values knowing all the details of an orange tree will view it differently than a regular person. But where do our values come from? Here is Nietzsche’s view from Beyond Good and Evil: “behind all logic and it’s seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life”. For Nietzsche, our values come from our physiological demands. And what does our physiology demands? Power! It wants to survive and thrive. What does it mean to thrive? To imagine the world a certain way, and to be able to make that illusion a reality. Someone could try to contest this idea by saying that they don’t seek power or want to thrive. Hence they won’t eat or drink anything to prove this point. But Nietzsche thinks they would still be seeking a kind of power; they imagine a world in which they prove that idea wrong and they seek to bring that world into fruition, even at their own expense. For Nietzsche, everything we do is an expression of our will to power. 

We construct illusions to empower us - an advanced concept of what I imagined as a will to self-preservation during my late teens, before I even read Nietzsche. We only care about truth in so far as it helps us achieve that goal to the extent that if an idea doesn’t empower us, we should question the degree to which that idea is true. For Nietzsche, something isn’t simply true or false, truth contains multiple degrees and dimensions. Nietzsche is not saying truth doesn’t exist. But only that it’s complicated. We might say that the truth of gravity’s existence remains constant whether we believe it or not. But is that really true? Is there any reason that gravity couldn’t reverse in the next moment? We can predict that it’s unlikely to do so based on our past experience. But what’s really stopping it from happening in the end? And so we are brought back to a similar quote taken from Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in a Non-normal Sense; “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions”. Our understanding of trees, friends, gravity and the world, like all conscious understanding are illusions that we have created to give us power. And sometimes, they are illusions that hold up for long enough that we forget that they are illusions.