Nietzsche on Leadership: The Power of the Will

by David L. Cawthon

      In reviewing his papers after his death we have gratefully discovered that David Cawthon had finished the final essay of his series on leadership and the "Coding of Our Souls." This essay on Nietzsche completes the series. The complete collection of his essays ( including those on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx) can be read at our website, www.stcroixreview.com. David Cawthon was T. K. Hendrick Professor of Management at Oklahoma City University.

I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality. Men are not equal. Nor shall they become equal! - Friedrich Nietzsche

      In stark contrast to leadership theories based on democratic egalitarianism, undercurrents of nihilism were beginning to emerge in Germany as history evolved toward the millennium of the twentieth century. Idealism. Realism. Rationalism. Romanticism. Nothing remained sacred. No previous attempt to understand the nature of the universe escaped attack by those philosophers who had rejected the validity of objective truth.
      Among the nihilists who would significantly alter our understanding of leadership in the twentieth century was Friedrich Nietzsche. Abandoning all philosophies that acknowledged the existence of transcendent principles as a means to explain man's position in the universe, Nietzsche insisted that man was alone. There were no unifying principles. There was no metaphysics. And whereas Marx had removed the concept of the divine from the dialectic of history, Nietzsche often eliminated God from the equation of existence. God is dead, he would proclaim, and upon that premise he would construct much of his philosophy.
      Without question, Nietzsche's denial of universal principles has altered our understanding of the leadership dyad, for, if man stands alone, if there are no unifying principles, then our current understanding of rights, equality, justice, and liberty loses its meaning. Before considering the implications of Nietzsche's thought, however, we must first examine the foundations from which his ideas regarding leadership emerged. We must review briefly his philosophy regarding the nature of man.
      Unlike those Western philosophers who perceived man as a part of a whole, whether that whole be defined as Form, the Ideal, the General Will, the Absolute, or the Species-Being, Nietzsche thought otherwise. For Nietzsche there is no unity, nothing gives meaning to one's life. There is no good. There is no evil. There is only nature, and nature is cruel. It is not concerned with the needs and desires of humans. It cares nothing about man's values and dreams. It is totally impersonal as its floods, tornados, fires, earthquakes, and other disasters wreak havoc on man's struggle to survive. And no matter how much man may resist its forces, his ultimate destiny is death. There are no rewards.
      There is nothing to console him. Man's struggle to live is the totality of his existence. As Nietzsche explains in his work, Twilight of the Idols, man is not the effect of some special purpose, of some special end. Man is not the crown of creation. Instead, he lives in a non-caring universe without values. He is alone.

What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives man his qualities-neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself . . . . No one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, and end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality, there is no end.

Christianity should not be beautified and embellished: it has waged deadly war against this higher type of man; it has placed all the basic instincts of this type under the ban; and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the "reprobate." Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit by teaching men to consider the supreme values of the spirit as something sinful, as something that leads into error-as temptations.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation; but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equals-it takes place in every healthy aristocracy-must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavor to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy-not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power.

      Deeply embedded within Nietzsche's thought regarding the Will to Power is the nature of inequality. As Nietzsche had observed, all within the universe strives toward inequality, not equality. The strong survive; the weak perish. The same is true, he believed, for mankind. Those with a strong Will to Power must curtail the fear and resentment of the weak who cry out for equality. "I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality," Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Men are not equal! Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke otherwise?

For Nietzsche the overman is the superman of human existence. He is the man with a strong Will to Power who will rise above the poverty and filth of the massive herd.
      He is the man who recognizes the virtue of inequality. He seeks to reverse a culture that has advocated compassion and pity for the weak. Nietzsche explains further:

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

No libertarian nonsense! No weakening of the physical and moral spine by independence and "freedom!"

Durant continues:

A man so born and bred would be beyond good and evil; he would not hesitate to be böse if his purpose should require it; he would be fearless rather than good. "What is good? . . . To be brave is good." "What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad? All that comes from weakness." Perhaps the dominant mark of the superman will be love of danger and strife, provided they have a purpose; he will not seek safety first; he will leave happiness to the greatest number . . .

Energy, intellect, and pride: these make the superman. But they must be harmonized: the passions will become powers only when they are selected and unified by some great purpose which moulds a chaos of desires into the power of a personality. "Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but the soil of his plants!" Who is it that follows his impulses? The weakling: he lacks the power to inhibit; he is not strong enough to say No; he is a discord, a decadent. To discipline one's self-that is the highest thing. "The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself." To have a purpose for which one can be hard upon others, but above all upon one's self; to have a purpose for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend, that is the final patent of nobility, the last formula of the superman.

I pursued the living; I walked the widest and the narrowest paths that I might know its nature. With a hundredfold mirror I still caught its glance when its mouth was closed, so that its eyes might speak to me. And its eyes spoke to me.

But wherever I found the living, there I heard also the speech on obedience. Whatever lives, obeys.

And this is the second point: he who cannot obey himself is commanded. That is the nature of the living.

This, however, is the third point that I heard: that commanding is harder than obeying; and not only because he who commands must carry the burden of all who obey, and because this burden may easily crush him . . .

Hear, then, my word, you who are wisest. Test in all seriousness whether I have crawled into the very heart of life and into the very roots of its heart.

Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of those who serve I found the will to be master.

That the weaker should serve the stronger, to that it is persuaded by its own will, which would be master over what is weaker still: this is the one pleasure it does not want to renounce. And as the smaller yields to the greater that it may have pleasure and power over the smallest, thus even the greatest still yields, and for the sake of power risks life. That is the yielding of the greatest: it is hazard and danger and casting dice for death.

      At the lowest level of Nietzsche's natural hierarchy of inequality are women. "What is womanish, what derives from the servile, and especially the mob hodgepodge: . . . " he writes in Zarathustra. "O my brothers, these small people, they are the overman's greatest danger," he states.

A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man should be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.

      Nietzsche's most blatant indictment of women, however, is noted in his work Beyond Good and Evil as he declares that woman is man's greatest shame, especially as she makes demands for equality with men:

Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten men about "women as she is"-this is one of the worst developments of the general uglifying of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and self-exposure bring to light! Woman has so much cause for shame; in women there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed . . .

To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of "man and woman," to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness; . . . . On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein-he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did formerly; those best heirs and scholars of Asia-who, as is well known, with their increasing culture and amplitude of power, from Homer to the time of Pericles, became gradually stricter towards woman, in short, more oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanely desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves!

The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present-this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy. . . . She is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who "unlearns to fear" sacrifices her most womanly instincts. . . . While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be "master," and inscribes "progress" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades.

      At the top of Nietzsche's hierarchy of inequality, of course, are the overmen, the supermen, those with a strong will to power. In his discussion of freedom as noted in Twilight of the Idols, he explains the ultimate greatness of man as follows:

For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free-and how much more the spirit who has become free-spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.

      Indeed, in Nietzsche's world, only the strong are free, and in accordance with his hierarchy of inequality, it is the strong who should lead. Leadership is not a right assigned by others. It has nothing to do with social contracts as had been proposed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. ". . . they designate themselves," Nietzsche notes in his work, Genealogy of Morals, ". . . or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as the "rich," the "possessors." Throughout the history of evolution, the superior have dominated and exploited the inferior, and through fear and violence, they have shaped the world to their own advantage.       In his discussion of the origin of the first state, for example, he explains that it appeared as

. . . a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine, and went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals was at last not only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed.

Nietzsche continues:

I employed the word "state:" it is obvious what is meant-some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad. That is after all how the "state" began on earth: I think that sentimentalism which would have it begin with a "contract" has been disposed of. He who can command, he who is by nature "master," he who is violent in act and bearing-what has he to do with contracts! One does not reckon with such natures; they come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too "different" even to be hated.

      With leadership based on one's Will to Power, it is understandable that Nietzsche would have little regard for democracy. Rule by the consent of the governed could only lead to mediocrity. The have-nots would constantly seek to take from those who have. The inferior would demand equality with the superior. Eventually, society would deteriorate into oblivion.       Instead, Nietzsche proposed an order of castes within society that would allow individual rights in accordance with individual abilities, for, as he notes in The Antichrist,

In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery.

      The highest level of status within Nietzsche's order of castes were those elite few who find their happiness where others find destruction:

. . . in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments; their joy is self-conquest; asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens which crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man; that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second.

      The second level of his order of castes consisted of those who are preeminently strong in muscle and temperament. He explains:

. . . they are the guardians of the law, those who see to order and security, the noble warriors, and above all the king as the highest formula of warrior, judge, and upholder of the law. The second are the executive arm of the most spiritual, that which is closest to them and belongs to them, that which does everything gross in the work of ruling for them-their retinue, their right hand, their best pupils.

      The third level included those who excel neither in spirit or physical strength, the workers, the drones of society, those, he explains, who find happiness in mediocrity:

A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its first presupposition is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. Handicraft, trade, agriculture, science, the greatest part of art, the whole quintessence of professional activity, to sum it up, is compatible only with a mediocre amount of ability and ambition; that sort of thing would be out of place among exceptions; the instinct here required would contradict both aristocratism and anarchism. To be a public utility, a wheel, a function, for that one must be destined by nature: it is not society, it is the only kind of happiness of which the great majority are capable that makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre, to be mediocre is their happiness; mastery of one thing, specialization-a natural instinct.

      As we review this framework, it is important to understand that to Nietzsche, there was nothing unfair about this order of castes. To him it was

. . . merely the sanction of a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no "modern idea" has any power.

He explains further:

In all this, to repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing contrived; whatever is different is contrived-contrived for the ruin of nature. The order of castes, the order of rank, merely formulates the highest law of life; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, to make possible the higher and the highest types. The inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all.

Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence-who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of "equal" rights.

What is bad? But I have said this already all that is born of weakness, of envy, of revenge. The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin.

      It becomes apparent, then, that in Nietzsche's philosophy those with a strong Will to Power should rule over the masses, the herd. The elite should lead, the aristocratic few who possess the genius necessary to exact obedience from others. And, as Nietzsche explains, they do not lead because they choose to or because they want to. They lead because they are. They lead because they were born to lead. Leadership exists within their souls.
      Certainly, Nietzsche is not the first to align himself with the Great Man Theory. His great men, however, differ from those of Plato, or Hobbes, or Hegel, for in no manner are his leaders connected to external superior forces. The emergence is unrelated to an Ideal, or Divine Right, or the march of God in the world, or economic determinism. As he explains in Twilight of the Idols, such milieu theories are the theories of lunatics. For Nietzsche, great men are the end result of historical and physiological conditioning. Their leadership roles are unrelated to the age in which they live:

Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become masters over their age is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time much was gathered for them. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that between the strong and the weak, or between the old and the young: the age is relatively always much younger, thinner, more immature, less assured, more childish.

That in France today they think quite differently on this subject . . . that the milieu theory, which is truly a neurotic's theory, has become sacrosanct and almost scientific and has found adherents even among physiologists-that "smells bad" and arouses sad reflections.

      As we review Nietzsche's philosophy regarding the concept of leadership it becomes readily discernible that many of his ideas represent a dramatic departure from those of the philosophers we have previously discussed. He is the first, for example, to isolate men from one another. He is the first to abandon universal principles that unify man's existence. He is the first to define liberty and justice exclusively in terms of power and dominance rather than right and responsibility. For Nietzsche, the terms power and right are synonymous.
      He is not the first, however, to acknowledge an inequality among men. He is not the first to relegate the role of women to one of subservience. Although the premise from which he constructs his philosophy is markedly different from those of his predecessors, many of his conclusions bear a strong resemblance to those philosophies he sought to decry.
      Consequently, leaders who contend that they were born to lead can identify with the writings of Nietzsche. Likewise, those who believe that women are, by nature, inferior to men can find support for their beliefs in his teachings. Both ideas are rooted in his perceptions of inequality within the nature of man.
      Nietzsche's belief in genetic evolution, however, distinguishes him from Plato and Aristotle, from Augustine and Aquinas, from Hobbes and Hegel in their attempts to delineate the concept of inequality among humans. Whereas they sought to buttress their arguments within a context of metaphysical principles, Nietzsche supported his proposals within a context of eugenics. He had read his Darwin. Survival of the fittest. Men are unequal because of "all that time had gathered for them."
      It is understandable, then, that some of his critics find the undercurrents of Nazism to be linked directly to the teachings of Nietzsche. Certainly, there is legitimate basis for their argument. Master race. Triumph of the Will. Superman. All evoke similarities between the teachings of Nietzsche and the rise of the Third Reich. Further similarities might be found within the political movements of the late twentieth century. Racial superiority. Ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, other more sympathetic critics effectively argue that there is little in Nietzsche's writings that would indicate his support of such concepts.
      Such ideas, however, are not peculiar to the realm of politics. Although more obscure, perhaps, similar influences may be found in the corporate world. Thus, it is not unusual to find that those who have been well-bred are frequently assigned to leadership positions in Western culture. As Jeffrey Pfeffer explains in his article, The Ambiguity of Leadership, leadership positions are often filled on the basis of heredity. Consequently, in many corporate boardrooms, being of good stock serves as the measurement of one's ability. Glass ceilings and invisible caste structures often inhibit upward mobility. What one can do is often determined by who one is. Race horses, they claim, are not bred by mules.
      Certainly, there are other examples of the influence of Nietzsche within our organizations. Leaders who view the humanistic practices of modern management to be futile attempts to coddle the weak can also find support in the works of Nietzsche. It's a dog eat dog world, they exclaim. Concern and compassion have no place in the arena of competition. The weak are a burden to the strong; they have no claim to the trappings of the superior few. Indeed, unbridled capitalism has been constructed on this foundation. The strong should survive; the weak should perish. These are the teachings of Nietzsche. Likewise, these are the beliefs of many who lead within the corporate world of Western culture.
      The same is true for leaders who define their superiority in terms of the strength of their wills. The Will to Power. The will to control and dominate. The will to gain ascendancy within their organizations. Self-reliant and self-contained, such leaders pay no heed to the contributions of others. They refuse to acknowledge a system in which they are simply a part. Highly disciplined, they are the self-made men of our society, responsible to no one, responsible for no one. They are free of compassion; they are free of concern.