“I had no father, I am like no father; / I have no brother, I am like no brother; / And this word ‘love,’ which graybeards call divine, / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me—I am myself alone.” –Richard, Duke of Gloucester
The Duke of Gloucester, the son of the late Richard, Duke of York, gunning for the English crown with the kind of psychopathic ruthlessness making him a fit rival of the other merciless Shakespearean villain—Iago—this Richard of 3HenryVI is more creature than creator, in the terms of Friedrich Nietzsche. By the end of the play, he is murdering the titular king and scheming for the crown, to be fought for in the next play. He exhibits a self-serving egotism of which his murder of the king, occurring moments before he utters the quote above, is a culmination—and a foretaste of what is to come.
This utterance crystallizes the brilliance of this Shakespearean character, serving as a nexus for a number of social-psychological phenomena discovered by the literary genius of Shakespeare long before the creation of modern academic psychology. Spurning familial ties and the royal lineage for which has fought throughout the play, Richard affirms himself “alone” with a chip on the shoulder, a rebellious and willful defiance of all that his family has given him; it is as though self-affirmation were his means of revenge, and his stalwart sovereignty the guarantee of his royal pedigree. From the utterance arises the apparent connection between egotism and power, between self-affirmation and self-generativity; the character of Richard, almost in proportion with the extremity of his willful power-seeking, exemplifies the life-giving essence of egotism and (in some aspect) the will to power.
A clue as to the ubiquity of this connection between egotism and power is the social-psychological phenomenon of “terror management theory,” which describes the human tendencies of those that affirm themselves to stave off a fear of death, and to emphasize the meaningfulness of their lives as opposed to the meaninglessness of a world threatening to them. In this case, greater egotism serves to bolster self-affirmation and manage the “terror” of death; it affirms life as against death by means of the self. Although it borders many other fallacious conceptions of the world, such as the “just-world hypothesis” whereby all consequences of life become morally justified and explicable, terror-management theory is nonetheless prominent as a widespread human tendency highlighting the connections between egotism and power, which feed off each other.
This “power” is of a piece with the Nietzschean “will to power,” which he never systematically defined but whose essence he approaches in On the Genealogy of Morals; in the third essay of this book, investigating the nature of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche writes: “That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui. it needs a goal—and it will rather will nothingness than not will.”[1] It is his contention that the ascetic ideal is the “will to power” turning against itself, so that even in the willing of self-negation one is still willing. This extreme of the ostensible disavowal of all human feeling and desire that still leave the will itself, the willfulness of a man, nonetheless intact and invigorated, serves as his proof of the essentiality of the will to power. It is ineradicable; human beings cannot avoid willing.
So while egotism feeds power, which feeds egotism, the “will to power” does not ostensibly presuppose egotism, as evidenced by the ascetic ideal that tries to negate the ego while nonetheless exhibiting the will to power. But does the ascetic ideal succeed at the negating of the ego? Can it negate the ego while exhibiting the will to power—can the will to power exist without presupposing a certain egotism? Friedrich Nietzsche argues that it cannot, using the “ascetic ideal in the case of a philosopher” (Schopenhauer) to demonstrate that even in this self-negation, the egotism is strong and undeniable. He writes of the ascetic ideal that “the philosopher sees in it an optimum condition for the highest and boldest spirituality and smiles—he does not deny ‘existence,’ he rather affirms his existence and only his existence,” offering a provocative interpretation of this aspect of human psychology suggestive of that motif of his tearing down the pretensions of humankind, of all moralism and hypocrisy and self-deception. Does he mean to say that, in the extremity of his intended self-negation, a man actually affirms as profoundly as he thinks he negates? He does, and not without a kind of roguish pleasure.
If one concedes the psychological accuracy of this insight of Nietzsche’s, then the will to power, like power itself (in its nonspecific, popular conception), becomes inseparable from egotism and an affirmation of the self. And if the will to power cannot be avoided—if the egoless state is not achievable even in those ascetics that have otherwise jettisoned all their human attachments—then egotism and power are the universal conditions of humankind, the ubiquitous phenomena of all individuals. This is not to say that Nietzsche has delimited the human capacity for the egoless state; but even these extremes presuppose the will to power as a means of achieving the egoless state, so that the rare “successful” ascetic (like the Buddha) has achieved “not willing” only by “willing” (a preposterous impossibility in any rational sense, but hey, what do I know?); these extremes notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of humankind exists under conditions of willing, of power and the will to power, so that this psychological insight of the inseparability of the ego and power is undiminished, brilliant, and telling of many modern illnesses. But I’ll leave off there.
II
Another social-psychological phenomenon illuminates the human connection between egotism and power: depressive realism, which describes the tendencies of those in depressed states (clinical or nonclinical) to entertain sober worldviews and perceptions that are more accurate than those of the non-depressed. It is interesting to note the relation between the diminished willfulness of the depressed person, his dampened will to power, and the diminished egotism resulting in sounder judgments than those of the non-depressed, who have comparatively healthy egos and whose judgments tend to conduce to the growth of these egos—to the detriment of their sounder judgment. The ego wants to grow, to nourish itself, and power and the will to power are the means of its nourishment; but these, lacking in those that are depressed, tend to warp in the healthy those sober, impartial judgments that are more common in the depressed—this is what the phenomenon of “depressive realism” indicates.
But depressive realism is not a ubiquitous phenomenon, and it does not mean that sounder judgment and depressed states are inseparable or mutually inclusive; it only suggests the egotistical tendency to positive bias, and the counter-tendency of the non-egotistical to sounder judgment (and to negative bias, as a correlative of this state). The foremost concern of those desiring both healthy egos and sound judgment devoid of positive bias is thus: Can one maintain both a healthy ego and a sound judgment? If power and the will to power are inseparable from the ego, then to what degree can one exhibit sound, impartial judgment when all actions stem from the ego, the self, which tends to distort judgment? Is judgment compromised in all acts of healthy willing?
Tendencies and correlations are far from determining some kind of delusional egotism, and all individual variation is likely to be more determinative than the phenomenon of depressive realism. And against the ego’s continual tendency to distort judgment in favor of itself, one must set the power of rationality and the kind of objectivity counterbalancing the tendencies of the ego and the will to power.
All of this presupposes that the positive biases of a healthy ego are to be mitigated. But positive bias and healthy, strong egos relishing the will to power and all willing are often desirable, even integral to the fullest experience of life. What can positive biases offer but an enhancement of the self, a relishing of the expansion of this self, an honoring and delight in the actions and efforts stemming from it? The ideal balance integrating this understanding of positive biases is that of the will to power and egotism counterbalanced by rational and objective self-analysis (to whatever degree possible). This ideal is, in effect, an acknowledgment of the robustness and healthiness of positive bias whose worst consequences are offset by a non-depressive realism.
I suppose that I could call this framework generative, non-depressive realism. To become better, to develop, one must believe that one can become better—requiring the positive bias of a strong, healthy ego and the willfulness of the will to power—and one must be able to offset any distortions of judgment following from the positive biases by evaluating impartially, without any of the negative correlatives of the depressed state. This is my ideal combining the best of the depressed state and of the healthy, while mitigating the worst of each.
This has all been to emphasize the inseparability of the ego and the will to power, and that the robust healthiness of human nature—that it has to will, that it cannot avoid willing and that this willing nourishes the ego—is not to be discarded out of hand as being overweening or predatory. Excessive egotism is a problem (mitigable with rationality), but the ego itself is not, and the willfulness that wants power and thus more of itself is not only integral, but inescapable. It may even underpin the impetus of a latter-day heroism.
Modern moralism and the distorting illness of hypocrisy that espouses what it does not want, and suppresses what it does, are the mainsprings of strange and self-destructive mentalities. No one is in a position to determine the value and intentions of large swaths of humanity, and no one can acquire the vantage requisite to condemning it; for every judgment, every evaluation, come from individuals that are themselves implicated in the species. The final word should be that of the individual affirming, rather than negating and denying, the whole of which he is a part; for only then can he act with the lucidity of self-recognition, admitting to himself that this is what he is, this is what he has to work with—and his actions and their consequences will be more substantial and life-affirming the more that he recognizes this.
To effect anything at all, to affirm anything outside oneself, one must first recognize what one is. That might be the task of a lifetime. Those doing otherwise are acting under false pretenses, they will always be less effective than they could be, and they will always appear as more than they are. But to the sound, substantial human being, the human being in the fullest sense, just the reverse is the case—he should be more than he appears to be. Only then he can say, with Nietzsche, and without the slightest hint of a bad conscience: “The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”[2] And notice that the Yes comes first.
