Friedrich Nietzsche, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Life does not merely preserve itself — that is the Darwinian half-truth I found most tedious. What lives, reaches. Wille zur Macht (will to power) is not a psychology of ambition, not a doctrine for conquerors, not the brute desire to dominate other men.1 It is something far more fundamental: the innermost character of all becoming, organic and inorganic alike.
The protoplasm extending its pseudopodia, feeling about for what resists it — that is already will to power at work.2 Appropriation, assimilation, the overwhelming of what is encountered and the incorporation of it into one's own domain — these are not metaphors borrowed from politics; they are the basic organic functions from which politics later borrows its vocabulary.3
What makes the concept precise rather than merely grandiose is this: the will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; it therefore seeks what resists it.2 This is why the weaker presses toward the stronger — from need, from hunger for incorporation — while the stronger drives others away and, in growing, splits itself into new centers of organization.4
Struggle is not an accident that befalls life; it is the medium in which life thinks. Schopenhauer saw something here and named it badly. His "will" is an empty word, a will stripped of its whither, its direction, its content — a mere word.5 And the "will to live" is worse still: life is only a special case of will to power, not its goal or its definition.5
To say that everything strives to preserve itself is to mistake the exhaust for the engine. Life, as the form of being most familiar to us, strives after a maximal feeling of power — accumulation, not maintenance; excess, not equilibrium.6 The political consequence follows without requiring any political intention. When I wrote in Beyond Good and Evil — a book that examines the prejudices of philosophers and the hidden valuations beneath European morality — that life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, I was not prescribing cruelty.1
I was describing what every honest naturalist already knows and what every sentimental European conspires to forget. Exploitation does not belong to a corrupt or primitive society; it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function — a consequence of will to power, which is after all the will of life.1 The body of a healthy aristocracy does to other bodies what its members refrain from doing to one another: it grows, spreads, becomes predominant — not from any morality or immorality, but because it lives.1
The promise of a society from which the exploitative aspect has been removed sounds to me precisely like the promise of an organism that has dispensed with all organic functions.1 It is the reductio that the moralists never permit themselves to reach.
life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation... 'Exploitation' does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life.Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 203–204
The will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it—this is the primeval tendency of the protoplasm when it extends pseudopodia and feels about.The Will to Power, pp. 346–347
Appropriation and assimilation are above all a desire to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping, until at length that which has been overwhelmed has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased the same.The Will to Power, pp. 346–347
The weaker presses to the stronger from a need for nourishment; it wants to get under it, if possible to become one with it. The stronger, on the contrary, drives others away; it does not want to perish in this manner; it grows and in growing it splits itself into two or more parts.The Will to Power, pp. 346–347
My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all... what he calls 'will' is a mere empty word. It is even less a question of a 'will to live'; for life is merely a special case of the will to power.The Will to Power, pp. 368–369
Life, as the form of being most familiar to us, is specifically a will to the accumulation of force; all the processes of life depend on this: nothing wants to preserve itself, everything is to be added and accumulated... striving is nothing other than striving for power; the basic and innermost thing is still this will.The Will to Power, pp. 368–369