Nietzsche's Will to Power as the Principle of Revaluation: Toward a Power-Centered Ethics

Abstract

This thesis investigates Nietzsche's concept of the will to power as the central principle of his naturalism and as the foundation of his project of revaluation of all values. While the will to power is often taken to be either an ontological thesis about reality as a whole or a psychological claim about human motivation, its precise status remains notoriously ambiguous. My study aims to clarify these ambiguities by situating the will to power in relation to Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will to life, from which Nietzsche both inherits and decisively departs. Whereas Schopenhauer conceives the will as a blind striving for preservation, Nietzsche reconceives willing as an intrinsically expansive and transformative force that manifests not in stasis or self-maintenance, but in the overcoming of resistance and the incorporation of new forces. On this basis, this study proposes a reconstruction of the will to power that avoids reducing it either to metaphysical speculation or to a single empirical drive. Instead, I interpret it as a dynamic principle of organization and hierarchy among drives, one that discloses the evaluative structure of life itself. By reframing these affective states, Nietzsche redefines the meaning of flourishing as active engagement in struggle, rather than hedonic satisfaction or mere survival. Furthermore, I analyze the relation of the will to power to other drives, showing how it operates as a first-order, organizing principle that governs their interplay, integration, and sublimation. This relational dynamic underpins Nietzsche's vision of revaluation: values are neither grounded in transcendental norms nor reducible to utilitarian criteria, but arise from the relative strength, ordering, and creative expression of power. Thus, the will to power provides not only a naturalistic explanatory framework for human motivation, but also a normative criterion for distinguishing life-affirming from life-denying modes of existence. In conclusion, I argue that Nietzsche's naturalism culminates in an ethics grounded in the will to powera conception of value rooted in the immanent dynamics of life rather than in transcendent standards. Such an ethics resists both Schopenhauerian resignation and Darwinian reductionism, emphasizing instead the cultivation of self-overcoming and the affirmation of struggle as the measure of worth. By grounding normativity in the dynamics of the will to power, Nietzsche provides a framework for rethinking agency, creativity, and evaluation beyond metaphysical or hedonistic foundations, offering a radically new orientation for philosophy after the 'death of God'.