The Will To Power Manuscript

Emily Johnson

-Mar 15, 2026, 3:27 AM

The Will to Power (German: Der Wille zur Macht) is a book of notes drawn from the literary remains (or Nachlass) of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast... The title derived from a work that Nietzsche himself had considered writing. The work was first translated into English by Anthony M. Ludovici in 1910, and it has since seen several other translations and publications. After Nietzsche's breakdown in 1889, and the passing of control over his literary estate to his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche's friend Heinrich Köselitz, also known as Peter Gast, conceived the notion of publishing selections... As he explained to Elisabeth on November 8, 1893:

Between 1894 and 1926, Elisabeth arranged the publication of the twenty volume Großoktavausgabe edition of Nietzsche's writings by C. G. Naumann. In it, following Köselitz's suggestion she included a selection from Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, which was gathered together and entitled The Will To Power. She claimed that this text was substantially the magnum opus, which Nietzsche had hoped to write and name "The Will to Power, An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". The first German edition, containing 483 sections, published in 1901, was edited by Köselitz, Ernst Horneffer, and August Horneffer, under Elisabeth's direction.

This version was superseded in 1906 by an expanded second edition containing 1067 sections. This later compilation is what has come to be commonly known as The Will to Power. While researching materials for the Italian translation of Nietzsche's complete works in the 1960s, the philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari decided to go to the Archives in Leipzig to work with the original... From their work emerged the first complete and chronological edition of Nietzsche's writings, including the posthumous fragments from which Förster-Nietzsche had assembled The Will To Power. The complete works comprise 5,000 pages, compared to the 3,500 pages of the Großoktavausgabe. In 1964, during the International Colloquium on Nietzsche in Paris, Colli and Montinari met Karl Löwith, who would put them in contact with Heinz Wenzel, editor for Walter de Gruyter's publishing house.

Heinz Wenzel would buy the rights of the complete works of Colli and Montinari (33 volumes in German) after the French Gallimard edition and the Italian Adelphi editions. Before Colli and Montinari's philological work, the previous editions led readers to believe that Nietzsche had organized all his work toward a final structured opus called The Will to Power. In fact, if Nietzsche did consider producing such a book, he had abandoned such plans in the months before his collapse. The title of The Will to Power, which appears for the first time at the end of the summer of 1885, was replaced by another plan at the end of August 1888. This new plan was titled "Attempt at a revaluation of all values" [Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe],[2] and ordered the multiple fragments in a completely different way than the one chosen by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Uploaded by whatwillittake on November 19, 2016

PREFACE 1 FIRST BOOK. EUROPEAN NIHILISM. A Plan 5 I. Nihilism— 1. Nihilism as an Outcome of the Valuations and Interpretations of Existence which have prevailed hitherto 8 2. Further Causes of Nihilism 23 3.

The Nihilistic Movement as an Expression of Decadence 31 4. The Crisis: Nihilism and the Idea of Recurrence 47 II. Concerning the History of European Nihilism— (a) Modern Gloominess 55 (b) The Last Centuries 73 (c) Signs of Increasing Strength 91 SECOND BOOK. A CRITICISM OF THE HIGHEST VALUES THAT HAVE PREVAILED HITHERTO. I. Criticism of Religion— 1.

Concerning the Origin of Religions 113 2. Concerning the History of Christianity 132 3. Christian Ideals 179 II. A Criticism of Morality— 1. The Origin of Moral Valuations 210 2. The Herd 226 3.

General Observations concerning Morality 237 4. How Virtue is made to Dominate 248 5. The Moral Ideal— A. A Criticism of Ideals 264 B. A Criticism of the "Good Man," of the Saint, etc. 282 C.

Concerning the Slander of the so-called Evil Qualities 291 D. A Criticism of the Words: Improving, Perfecting, Elevating 312 6. Concluding Remarks concerning the Criticism of Morality 320 III. Criticism of Philosophy— 1. General Remarks 327 2. A Criticism of Greek Philosophy 345 3.

The Truths and Errors of Philosophers 369 4. Concluding Remarks in the Criticism of Philosophy 378 In the volume before us we have the first two books of what was to be Nietzsche's greatest theoretical and philosophical prose work. The reception given to Thus Spake Zarathustra had been so unsatisfactory, and misunderstandings relative to its teaching had become so general, that, within a year of the publication of the first part of that... During the years that followed—that is to say, between 1883 and 1886—this plan was matured, and although we have no warrant, save his sister's own word and the internal evidence at our disposal, for... Beyond Good and Evil, then, together with its sequel, The Genealogy of Morals, and the two little volumes, The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist (published in 1889 and 1894 respectively), must be...

Unfortunately, The Will to Power was never completed by its author. The text from which this translation was made is a posthumous publication, and it suffers from all the disadvantages that a book must suffer from which has been arranged and ordered by foster hands. When those who were responsible for its publication undertook the task of preparing it for the press, it was very little more than a vast collection of notes and rough drafts, set down by... In these cases the translation follows the German as closely as possible, and the free use even of a conjunction has in certain cases been avoided, for fear lest the meaning might be in... It were well, therefore, if the reader could bear these facts in mind whenever he is struck by a certain clumsiness, either of expression or disposition, in the course of reading this translation. It may be said that, from the day when Nietzsche first recognised the necessity of making a more unequivocal appeal to his public than the Zarathustra had been, that is to say, from the...

The Will To Power Manuscript

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PREFACE 1 FIRST BOOK. EUROPEAN NIHILISM. A Plan 5 I.