51. Will to power

 Plato said that reason must manage a team of wild horses: the horse of passion (eros) and the horse of self-manifestation (thymos). Now (as happened before in history) reason has let loose, the horses have bolted and the chariot bounces behind in shambles.

Many philosophers, Spinoza among them, claimed that the fundamental drive of nature is conatus, the drive to survive and manifest the self. 

Nietzsche argued that the fundamental drive of nature is will to power, not survival. People often risk survival in order to manifest their will to power. For him, Christian morality is perverse in overruling the flourishing of life, and the demand for self-sacrifice is a ruse of the weak to control the strong.

So let us see. Does a teacher exert power over a pupil? The developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed the notion of the Zone of proximal development. A teacher draws a pupil into the next (‘proximal’) stage of development, to which the pupil by itself would not be capable. That can be negative, in forcing a child in certain direction, but mostly it is beneficial.

In the preceding piece I distinguished between positive and negative power, but the line between them is not always easy to draw. Suppose one wants to criticize a friend, because it seems needed to draw him away from trouble. How can one be sure that one is genuinely helping the friend, rather than, as Nietzsche predicts, asserting oneself, competing, or trying to establish superiority? To begin with, one should ask oneself that question, but crucial is the opportunity for the friend to disagree and set one right.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her plea for A morality of ambiguity asked: should one try to restrain someone at the point of suicide, by force if needed? Her conclusion is positive, provided one then also shares responsibility in what happens next. One may not then just leave the other to itself. Negative power to restrain the other should be accompanied by positive power to help find a new perspective.

In markets there is both competition and collaboration. In competition there is negative power in constraining the other’s options, in collaboration there is positive power to develop new shared options. In collaboration there is power in creating mutual dependence, and even in the best of collaboration there seldom is a precise equilibrium of dependence, but there is a willingness to go far in a process of give and take, renouncing opportunities to exploit imbalance of power. I will come back to this in a later discussion of trust. 

Imperialism, the striving to apply over there what one has developed over here, can be a step on a path to transformation and learning, as I argued in item 31 in this blog, but it succeeds only when it fails, when it cannot impose itself on others and is forced to adapt or break through familiar structures and assumptions that were taken for granted. Imperialism triumphs only when it is defeated.