[I wrote the following in 1999 in response to several people who wrote to me with objections to my and others’ use of The Will to Power in interpreting Nietzsche.]
Dear [ ]:
Every word in The Will to Power was written by Nietzsche in his notebooks of 1883-1888. Some of the notes were his working out various thoughts, and some were part of a work-in-progress he intended to entitle The Will to Power. Some are rough, some are polished; some are repetitive, some are brilliant and original. In many cases the notes contain new insights that are compatible with his published works, or they offer earlier formulations of themes in his published works, or they extend themes discussed in his published works. They are thus a must-read for a Nietzsche scholar.
Since they are notes in a notebook, however, one does have to be careful not to ascribe as much authority to them as to those works Nietzsche did publish, especially in cases where there is a tension between his notes and his publications. This does not mean that there is no value to reading the notes.
It is true that Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, was the first editor of The Will to Power, and that she and her proto-Nazi acquaintances offered interpretations of them that stressed their affinities with National Socialist views.
This, however, should not disqualify the content of Nietzsche’s notes either. Nazi intellectuals interpreted and quoted extensively from every single book Nietzsche published, but we shouldn’t simply dismiss Nietzsche’s published writings for that reason. Instead we read Nietzsche ourselves and make our own judgments about how accurate or inaccurate the Nazi interpretations are.
About the Jews, for example: We know that Frau Förster-Nietzsche removed material that showed the other side of Nietzsche’s thinking about the Jews. But Nietzsche did write the words she actually published. So she’s a bad editor, and she made it harder for readers to judge accurately Nietzsche’s full views on the Jews.
But it’s still each reader’s responsibility to form his or her own judgment, and part of that means assessing the possible biases of editors and translators. Also, readers did and do have access to the vast majority of Nietzsche’s writings, most of which were published in his lifetime and with his own careful editing. So they could do their homework; Nietzsche’s occasional positive statements about the Jews were available to them.
Also, one need not read Frau Förster-Nietzsche’s edition. We have available later scholarly editions of The Will to Power, e.g., Walter Kaufmann’s translation and edition. Those editions do not include the interpretive essays Nietzsche’s sister and her acquaintances appended to their editions, and they do not use the same headings or follow the same organizational schemes except where later, non-Nazi-biased scholarship thinks appropriate.
So in my judgment, The Will to Power is a legitimate Nietzschean text, and one that both illuminates and extends our understanding of his previous works.
Sincerely,
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Update May 22, 2015: R. Kevin Hill informs me that Kaufmann’s edition does use the same organizational scheme as the original edition.
Related:
A 22-point summary of themes from Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil.
My other posts and publications on Friedrich Nietzsche.