The Creative Will: Kant and Nietzsche on Moral World-Making

Abstract

This paper is a study in comparative philosophy that attempts to reveal the continuity in thinking about the will from Kant to Nietzsche by presenting an original interpretation of each regarding the agential role of the will in world making. In Kant, it is argued, the practical laws that the will legislates to itself as Willkür becomes themselves laws of synthesis that creates the phenomenal world, so that the moral agency of Willkür when acting autonomously creates the world as world for us in the sense that our rational ethical aspirations of the Kingdom of Ends are realized. While disagreeing most sharply with Kant, Nietzsche conceives of the will to power as world making, and again, along the same lines as a world for us but, as against Kant, in creating us into beings of ‘‘eines Mehr an Leben’’ as we knowingly think, feel and see ourselves to become. We are not meant to be born into the irrational or incomprehensible as selves of “limbs and fragments” merely that can do nothing, become nothing, and by the knowing agency of will to power ‘‘ein Zuviel des Lebens’’ will come to us. This is what he states as being the World of Truth because in it is unmasked the mendacity of the ill-will of the Spiritualization of Revenge that wills its own preservation as nihilism in lying, Nietzsche’s word, about the truth of will to power agency in the evolution of life in our species.