(EDIT: I find it somewhat ironic that I just wrote a 9-page post on Nietzsche while procrastinating writing a 10-page philosophy paper.)
Looks like I've chosen to return to the forums just in time.
(I haven't really proofread this post too much, so excuse me if I seem somewhat unfocused and incoherent. I wanted to provide as much info on Nietzsche as I could rather than write a polished article/essay on the subject.)
Keep in mind, the collected works of Nietzsche are even harder to interpret than the Bible, so I'm giving you my interpretation, which is in turn based partially on the interpretation of others who are more knowledgable on the subject than I. Speaking of which, a really good book to start on if you want some top-notch Nietzsche analysis and exegesis is
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann. My understanding of Nietzsche is influenced by Kafmann as well as to that as Friedrich Ulfers, a Professor at the NYU German Department whom I've been doing independent study with for the past two years.
Before I begin, I'd like you to keep in mind that Nietzsche wrote over a period of several decades, and the concepts you refer to developed and changed over time. The Will to Power, for example, was originally used by Nietzsche as a cynical sort of "might makes right" principle to explain human action, and only later developed into the form I discuss below.
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Will to Power
Okay, Nietzsche was essentially a monist (i.e. he believed that everything in the universe was the expression of the same force), and the Will to Power was his monistic principle, analagous in function (but not in details) to, say, the Tao in Taoism, God in Spinoza's philosophy, or the Will to Life (a.k.a. simply "Will") in Schoepenhauer's philosophy. This last one is probably the mosty important, and was a direct influence on Nietzsche's development of the Will to Power.
According to Bertrand Russell, in a book about the history of philosophy whose name escapes me but which should be relatively easy to find, Nietzsche's metaphysics wasn't all that different from Schoepenhauer's, but his ethics was basically the exact opposite. Schoepenhauer, highly influenced by Buddhism (or, I would contend, a Western misrepresentation of Buddhism), had this idea that everything in the world was ultimately an expression of Will or striving. The ultimate manifestation of Will was life, and humanity in particular. However, Schoepenhauer believed that Will, though the very force behind the universe, was ultimately negative and led to more suffering than pleasure. Therefore he believed that one should try to extinguish the Will, as manifested in the individual. This would be accomplished via asceticism and total destruction of all desires.
Nietzsche's Will to Power is very similar to Schoepenhauer's Will to Life; the main difference is that whereas Schoepenhauer believed that the psychological expression of this Will (and thus the ultimate psychological drive) was simply craving, Nietzsche believed that it was the desire to exert power. Also, unlike Schoepenhauer, Nietzsche did not believe that one should destroy this Will, but rather strengthen it and nurture it so that it could reach its highest expression.
So there are two "levels" to the Will to Power: the cosmological and the psychological. They're both ultimately different expressions of the same thing. The cosmological is basically the driving force behind the universe. The psychological is the driving force behind human action. Although I could certainly explain a bit more about the cosmological aspect, I'd rather spend time on the psychological one since it's a bit harder to really understand.
Now, Will to Power is the driving force behind all human action. The Christian ethical system, for example, emphasizes meekness and weakness, but a Christian only acts this way because he or she believes that by acting superficially meek, they are actually exerting spiritual power rather than superficial (and less important) material power. You turn the other cheek not for the sake of turning the other cheek, but because doing so gives you power over the person slapping you. Nietzsche calls this general system of ethics, in
The Geneology of Morals, "slave morality". "Slave morality" must ultimately depend on some sort of higher realm above the material, since without this realm it would not make sense to make oneself a subordinate in the material realm. Nietzsche believes slave morality was created by the lowly to justify their subservience. "Master morality", on the other hand, is rule by strength, the idea that might ultimately makes right, and the strongest are the best. This is the moral system developed by the rulers. Nietzsche is not advocating Master morality as many people believe; rather, he's advocating attempting to transcend these two systems and forge a way of displaying one's power that both does not rely on a made-up metaphysical realm, and also isn't simply "might-makes-right". As you can see, the psychological Will to Power is much more complicated than a simple drive for physical or political power, which would be a manifestation of master morality in particular rather than the Will to Power in general.
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Overman/Ubermensch
To understand what the ubermensch is, one must understand the Death of God and its consequences. When Nietzsche talks about the Death of God, he's referring to the collapse of centralized, inherent meaning which is an effect of the erosion of the epistemological authority of Christianity. In the Middle Ages, the only real source of Knowledge was the Catholic Church. With the Protestant Reformation, the Bible, rather than any particular institution, became the source of knowledge, but of course the bible can be interpreted many ways... This is essentially the beginning of the decay of centralized meaning. Then came the scientific revolution and the enlightenment; it was now reason, rather than revelation, that became the route to knowledge. However, though science and reason were quite good at "practical" things such as predicting the results of certain situations and thus allowing us to duplicate these situations in order to benefit from their effects (this is basically what "technology" is), it was a total failure when it came to trying to find some sort of ultimate meaning behind existence. And so, here we are, in a world that no longer has any unified meaning - "God is dead". However, as Nietzsche says in the parable of the madman (in
The Gay Science), the news of God's death hasn't really reached his murderers (i.e. Western civilization). In other words, the full consequences of our elimination of meaning are only beginning to show themselves. Our civilization is facing a choice right now, a choice that has resulted from the Death of God.
We can choose to accept this utter lack of meaning, in which case Western civilization will collapse, either into total anarchy and "might-makes-right" chaos (Nietzsche would call this "active nihilism"), or simply turn into
Brave New World-esque land where pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is our only concern, and we don't seek anything higher (Nietzsche calls this "passive nihilism", and describes this in chapter 5 of the prologue to
Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he discusses "the last man"). In either case, Western civilization is ultimately over with. This is the path of the nihilist.
There is another option however. We can choose to create a
new meaning, not dependent upon some sort of illusory "higher plane" as Christianity was, but not arbitrary or wholly materialistic either. In one passage, Nietzsche compares the environment created after the Death of God to an open sea, and claims that the Death of God is, in a way, a blessing, for now a man is free to sail out into this vast open ocean and discover a new meaning. The man who does this is the ubermensch.
Perhaps the best example of these two types I can think of is in
The Matrix: Revolutions, where Smith is an (active) nihilist, and Neo is an ubermensch. (It could also be argued that the Merovingian is a passive nihilist.)
Agent Smith wrote:
Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you´re fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception. The temporary abstracts of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can´t win. It´s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo wrote:
Because I choose to.
Note that Neo never really contests what Smith is saying; I would say that Neo and Smith agree with each other about the facts, they just choose to act upon those facts in different ways. Smith chooses the path of the nihilist, Neo the path of the ubermensch.
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Christianity
As I said above, Christian morality ultimately derives from slave morality, and is perhaps the most developed and refined expression of it. But what about Christian metaphysics? Nietzsche contends that Christianity stole its metaphysics from Plato; in fact, he calls Christianity "Plato for the people", i.e. dumbed-down Platonism. Nietzsche's problem with Christian ethics is apparent - slave morality and master morality must both be overcome by the ubermensch. His problem with Christian metaphysics, however, can only be understood in terms of his attack upon Platonism.
Plato, Nietzsche would claim, was really the first philosopher to posit a "higher" realm above the material world, and claim that this realm was inherently superior, and that our material world is simply a degraded "fallen" copy of it. This realm was the realm of Forms - the realm of Being (perfection, stasis), to which the material world of Becoming (change, birth and decay) was subordinate to and dependent upon.
Nietzsche believes this rejection of the real in favor of the ideal (which is supposed "more real" than the real) to be
the worst mistake in the history of Western philosophy. Plato basically led every philosopher after him down the wrong path by privileging this perfect world of being to the imperfect world of becoming.(*1)
Christianity, which Nietzsche believes is ultimately a creation of St. Paul rather than the historical figure of Jesus, functions by the same basic system as platonism. Heaven is the ideal, unchanging realm of forms, with God serving as the Platonic form of the Good. The material world is fallen, an imperfect imitation of heaven as well as the paradise that it once was before Original Sin, and will be again after the Apocalypse. This heavenly/pre-lapsarian/post-apocalyptic world is, of course, ultimately immaterial, in that it displays none of the properties of our material world: most importantly, it does not change - it neither decays nor grows.
Thus, in Christianity and Platonism, all meaning is derived from outside the world, from a realm which the world is perceived as being subordinate to. God (Christianity) or the Good (Platonism) creates our meaning for us.
There's one problem with all this, however, and that is that no ideal realm exists. There is no perfect, unchanging plane of existence upon which this one is dependent. The material realm, with all its change, is all there is.(*2) Therefore, we must embrace the real, material world, with all its change. We must live our lives
as our lives, rather than as preludes to our entrance into an ideal, unchanging realm (the afterlife).
Note that Nietzsche would not consider Christianity the only modern form of Platonism. Platonism pretty much infects every pre-Nietzschean post-Platonic philosophy. Humanism, for example, uses reason and logic as its ideal realm. The main character in the movie
Pi is a good example of this; he thinks of everything in the world as simply an expression of unchanging and constant mathematical laws. Nietzsche would contend that reason/mathematics/science, far from being the groundwork upon which our universe operates, are simply tools that human beings use to deal with reality. Nietzsche calls these tools "useful fictions". A good thing to read if you want to understand Nietzsche's position on logic and reason is an unpublished essay of his entitled
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. (Incidentally, this is one of my favorite essays ever.) Humanists also tend to believe that we are progressing towards some sort of logically-ordered, perfect, unchanging Utopia, e.g. communism for Marxists or capitalism for libertarians. This is just a thinly-disguised version of the same Christian Millenarianism that privileges the future, ideal world to the present, "fallen" one.
(*1) N.B. "Perfect" is from the Latin
perfectus, meaning finished, and originally meant just that in English. "Imperfect" =
imperfectus = unfinished = process. The material realm is characterized by its processual nature, whereas the ideal realm is characterized by stasis.
(*2) It's easy to see why Nietzsche was such a big fan of Heraclitus.