The Will to Power as Nietzsche's Central Concept

Nietzsche first gives the phrase 'will to power' (Wille zur Macht) sustained philosophical prominence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part II, 'On Self-Overcoming,' 1883) and develops it further in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and the Genealogy (1887), proposing it as a fundamental drive underlying not only human motivation but organic life generally — a drive not simply toward self-preservation, which Nietzsche criticizes as an impoverished, merely reactive reading of life he associates with Darwinian and Spencerian biology, but toward growth, expansion, mastery, and the overcoming of resistance. In Beyond Good and Evil §13, Nietzsche writes that 'a living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power,' explicitly positioning the concept as a corrective to what he saw as the English biologists' overemphasis on bare survival, since in conditions of abundance rather than scarcity, Nietzsche argues, organisms characteristically expend energy and take risks well beyond what mere self-preservation would require.