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Question from Quora




At Quora recently I found this question:

Is Nietzsche's will to power a historical precursor to William James' pragmatism?


I answered:

You probably have in mind James “will to believe” here, rather than pragmatism more generally. If so, the first necessary response is that the two speculations, about will to power and will to believe, were underway at about the same time, so neither can logically be said to be a precursor to the other. They may mirror one another, because they come from analogous circumstances.

Nietzsche was trying to survive a bout with Schopenhauerian pessimism by getting THROUGH it and coming out the other side.

James was trying to survive a bout with his own personalized pessimism, what he called the “religion of the sick soul,” also by passing through it and finding what he could on the other side.

So we get on the one hand Nietzsche’s will to power, where power (German “macht”) means something like self-actualization. And we get on the other hand James’ will to believe, where belief refers to a deliberately adopted stance toward the world, adopted not contrary to evidence but often beyond the evidential base, for the purpose, of, again, self-actualization.

Interesting mirror. Though the “will to believe” is not the whole or even I think the heart of “pragmatism.”


Let me add a couple of words now.  James first delivered his lecture on "The Will to Believe" to clubs at both Harvard and Brown.  I don't have dates for the occasions. But the lecture first found printed form, as an article, in THE NEW WORLD in 1896.


Nietzsche's "Will to Power." He may have used the expression earlier, but the phrase didn't find its way into the TITLE of any of his works until after his death in 1900. It was the title given by his sister to a book she molded out of the manuscripts he left at his death that year. The book itself was published in 1910 -- fittingly enough for our purposes, the year William James died. So the events invoked in this analogy unfolded with an odd symmetry. That of mirrors, as aforesaid.  


Interesting though not especially pertinent fact: the title of the book is referenced in the 1933 movie BABY FACE.  That gives me a chance to use the movie poster as an illustration for this otherwise quite abstract blog post. 

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