Will to Power

The Will to Power is a posthumous compilation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notebooks. Nietzsche’s sister, who was largely responsible for the publishing of the work, claimed that Will to Power represented a magnum opus, although Nietzsche was unable to finish it in his lifetime.The work develops Nietzsche’s theory of the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’. Taken literally, the theory suggest that the physical universe exists within a cycle of perpetual struggle, repeating itself over and over. Nietzsche’s work was heavily influenced by the contemporary debates surrounding the theory of evolution. To Nietzsche the most important factor in evolution is not an organisms struggle to survive, but rather the desire to expand one’s power, or the ‘Will to Power’.