Ethics. Karl Barth

of the general creaturely life around it. In the third subsection we shall have to talk about the way in which this gives a meaning to the command of life that basically transcends the concept of the will to live. It also gives rise to a problem, however, which still falls under this concept. This is the problem of power. To be powerful means to be successful in maintaining one’s life by using whatever help the creaturely life around us affords, and overcoming the obstacles it poses. This will for power is the will to succeed in this way. The simple affirmation of life, the will to satisfy natural needs, the will to be healthy, the will to be happy, and the will to be individual all mean that I also have the will for power, the will to be able to do what is necessary in all these matters, the will to achieve lordship over the possibilities that arise in all these areas. Conversely, in all these forms of the will to live I practice also and with its own value and weight the will for power. I will in all these forms because I will power. I live as I can live. To be able to live is itself life. In accordance with its radius of activity my life can concretely mean very little or very much without any difference at all in material significance. The serious grasping of a child for its bread and butter, Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the enterprise of teaching and learning in which we are involved here, the flight of a rocket to the stratosphere or the moon, what we hope is the gentle self-assertion which is not wholly dispensable in even the most affectionate marriage or friendship, and the powerful gesture of the dictator bringing a million people to order, are all phenomena which occur on the same plane in this respect. Precisely as we always will pleasure, so we will power. And as we know that our life-act is neither good nor bad in itself but reveals itself to be good or bad in the event of our encounter with God’s command, so it is with the will for power which is always implicated in this life-act.

      As is well known, F. Nietzsche14 thought and said that it is good as such, while J. Burckhardt15 in the same remarkable city of Basel thought and said that it is bad. Both statements must first be understood. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman, who like a “laughing lion” is simply happy in his power on the far side of all ethical commitments, cannot be dismissed with the charge that it glorifies brutality. If Nietzsche might have given some occasion for this charge with many of his words, he did not do so with his life. On the contrary, his concern was for the realization of man in a spirituality which is content with its inwardness and is not therefore serious. His concern was for the call to take seriously as a requirement of life the possibility of an optimum of human ability and of human vitality as these might be seen in certain great leader personalities. He hated the morality of Christianity as a slave morality because in it he seemed to recognize the epitome of the impotence or indolence of the far too many—something he had first hated in the by no means Christian morality of the German cultural philistine of the seventies. In Nietzsche—who admired the Latin, and especially the French, spirit as opposed to the German—the will for power was the will for form, i.e., for the aristeia of form. The aristos in relation to formation (power must also be beautiful) is the superman. It was thus one of the most malicious of misunderstandings, especially in French war propaganda, to point to Nietzsche as a typically German prophet of force. On the other hand, Germans needed to be reminded by Nietzsche that a phenomenon which did not arise on German soil—that of Roman imperialism with its reincarnations in certain popes, in Napoleon, and obviously at the present time in Benito Mussolini16—does not necessarily stand outside the light of the moral idea and that we should not too easily think we should see in such figures monsters from hell. |

      If, however, it cannot be denied that in Nietzsche’s naturalism, which reaches a climax in this doctrine, the positive side of the problem of power has been worked out in a creditable and unforgettable way, there is no evading the fact that careful consideration must be given to the relative antithesis of J. Burckhardt that power is intrinsically evil. One should call this only a relative antithesis even though it has the form of a contradiction. It is worth noting that the same historical survey, namely that of the powerful princely and papal figures of the Italian renaissance, led both men to their conclusions. The reality of human life is not so unequivocal that the development of its potential may not also mean and be the manifestation of the proponent of an empty abstraction or unreality of life which is grounded and exists only in the negation of real creaturely life and therefore only as a demonization of life. With the same naiveté with which other philosophical ethicists and even theological ethicists believe in their ideal pictures, Nietzsche believed in the possibility of an immanent actualization of that aristeia of power. In opposition, one must point out that the will for power, too, is never self-evidently the will for the good, or obedience to the life-requirement, and that even though it be understood as God’s will for power it can never be adequate as a standard for the transvaluation of all values, the radical crisis, in which all human willing and doing finds itself. If, e.g., it is true that knowledge is power,17 if, then, there is undoubtedly a power of knowledge and learning, this power cannot evade the question whether it is legitimate power in virtue of its actuality, the worth of its object, and the service it renders to life. Behind the unheard-of ability of modern technology there stands the threat of the question what can really be done. The war has opened our eyes to the fact that at every point the answer, so far as technological achievement is concerned, may just as well be murder and the destruction of life as its affirmation and upbuilding. We need not waste words on the ambivalence of the truth that money is power, though it is not perhaps superfluous to note, as George Bernard Shaw has clearly shown,18 that as Christianity, too, grasps at this power in order to put it in the service of the good, it is seizing an instrument to which tears and blood unavoidably cling, so that it might well ask itself whether in these circumstances (“Where would we be without money?”) its supposed building of the kingdom of God might not always ineluctably be the very opposite. The powerful apparatus of social and charitable care is undoubtedly another development of power and under the wheels of this machine many supporters and helpers of the enterprise are dragged along by its impetus, not to speak of its objects who often seem to feel more like its victims. And if we admire personalities like Napoleon, Bismarck, and Mussolini because of their unusual ability to serve the political power of their nations by awakening, uniting, and utilizing their resources, here particularly we are forced to ask whether the instrument that such leaders put in the hands of their peoples corresponds to their real situation, or whether the initial successes which seem to be allotted to them in this direction are not dubious from the very outset because a claim lies behind them which stands in no relation to the resources that are really available. This being so, was not their leadership a false one? Is not Burckhardt right? Can we want power, as we all do, without becoming guilty, guilty in relation to the very life for whose sake we grasp this instrument?19 Where the will for power is present, as it always is, there it is always questionable, and the likelihood is—this is the tragic mistake—that the relativity of creaturely power will be forgotten, and secretly or openly the battle [will be] joined for an absolute power—a battle in which man on a small scale or a great can only finally rush into disaster. |

      It seems to be a truism that God alone is absolutely powerful. This truism, however, is the dividing point of good and evil in the question of the will for power. We can also offer the counterproof here that if God alone is absolutely powerful then the relative power of the creature, its true vitality, will necessarily manifest and demonstrate itself just as much in what we call weakness, in being hampered and restricted by the world around us, as it will in what we call power. How our power will glorify his, as must be done by the will for power if it is good; whether it will be in our strength or in our weakness; what the aristeia of the form is for which he has determined us—this is according to his good pleasure and not ours. The real power of real life does not have to be bound up with our victory and triumph. The criterion of the true will for power in individuals and nations might be whether man is able to live with the breaking of his will for power, whether the breaking of this will means disaster for his life, whether the lion can just as well be a lamb. This is the possibility of the power of Jesus Christ [cf. Rev. 5:5f.]. Here, in fact, is the crisis of our will for power. The command of the Creator, which is also the command of Jesus Christ, is unequivocal in itself, but it can be a two-sided order for us and obedience to it means openness to all the possibilities that are included in the supremacy of God’s power over ours.

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      As I let myself be told that I