To Live or Not to Live: a Comparison Between Nietzsche's Teaching of "Will to Power" and Hobbes's Concept of "Desire of Power"

Both Nietzsche and Hobbes understand human life as the continuous acquisition of power and maintain that such pursuit of power leads to competition and conflicts. Given the seeming similarities in their understandings of the consequences of pursuit of power, why does Nietzsche refuse Hobbes's solution - the modern state - to these consequences?

To answer the question, I compare the two thinkers' understandings of pursuit of power and of the types of human life driven by such pursuit. I first argue that Hobbes's concept of desire of power represents a particular interpretation of human life, so it can be seen as a specific expression of will to power in Nietzsche's philosophy. Then I compare the Hobbesian desire of power to other expressions of will to power illustrated Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, especially slave morality and master morality. I find that the Hobbesian desire of power is an expression of will to power similar to, but weaker than, the Nietzschean slaves' will to power, for although Hobbesian individuals and Nietzschean slaves share similar psychological conditions and psychological mechanism, the goals of their pursuit of power differ. The Hobbesian desire of power merely aims at preservation and well-being of individual physical life, whereas Nietzschean slaves, out of ressentiment, will to justify the superiority of their mode of existence, and their will has given birth to a value system. Because of its smaller goal, Nietzsche despises the Hobbesian desire of power, and sees that after self-preservation is made an equal right of all individuals and receives protection from the state power, the equality of right and its public guarantor, the modern state, will hinder the future expressions of human will to power greater than both slave morality and master morality. These future greater expressions of will to power would require enormous destruction and exploitation but are still desirable for Nietzsche, for they will enable humankind to reach unprecedented levels of greatness. Nietzsche opposes the modern state because it eliminates the possibilities of fulfilling such greatness.

I conclude that although the political implications of his teaching of will to power are terrible, Nietzsche's importance for students in political theory remains; for the teaching of will to power, which replaces being with becoming, shakes the metaphysical foundation of almost all preceding interpretations of human life, as well as the conceptions of politics that correspond to these interpretations. Thus political thinkers after Nietzsche are facing a tremendous challenge: developing conceptions of politics that can on one hand affirm the greater possibilities of human life revealed and released by Nietzsche's philosophy, while on the other acknowledge the security of individuals and the peace of society, the primary goals of politics that find systematic expression in Hobbes's political thought.