Will to Power
Nietzsche's term for the fundamental drive that, on his account, underlies all of life — not only domination but the impulse toward mastery, growth, and self-overcoming.
The will to power (Wille zur Macht) is one of Friedrich Nietzsche's most influential and most misunderstood concepts. Nietzsche develops it across his mature works — Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra — and in extensive unpublished notes assembled posthumously under the title Will to Power. He uses it to name the fundamental drive he takes to underlie all of life: not merely the desire for political domination, but the broader impulse toward mastery, growth, self-overcoming, and the imposition of form.
Nietzsche develops the will to power against Schopenhauer's will to live: where Schopenhauer treats the underlying will as an indiscriminate striving that produces only suffering, Nietzsche reads it as a more differentiated drive that can issue in either creative affirmation or reactive ressentiment. The Nazi appropriation of the concept, mediated by Nietzsche's sister and her selective editing, distorted it beyond recognition; recent scholarship has worked to recover the original.