"You are will to power and nothing besides": Nietzsche, Foucault, Yoga, and Feminist s/Self-Actualisation

Abstract

This thesis argues that Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of world and self as ‘will to power and nothing besides’ offers a highly productive interpretive lens or ‘grid of intelligibility’ for understanding the ethical implications of Michel Foucault’s middle and late works on power and subjectivity. For if the late modern era is marked by a sustained and pervasive incredulity toward metanarrative, it is also the historical site for the reappearance and widespread acceptance of a very ancient metanarrative – the Heraclitean view of material reality as continual flux. Inasmuch as Nietzsche’s will to power philosophy is grounded in this Pre-Socratic worldview, his works and those of his devotee Foucault may serve as a productive foundation for a late modern ethics. The scholarly implications of reading Foucault’s middle and late works through the interpretive lens of Nietzschean will to power in its two key manifestations, domination and dynamism, are multiple. In addition to providing new insights into the value of Nietzschean-Foucauldian philosophy for advancing a late modern ethics, such an analysis also illuminates important continuities in Foucault’s theory of power and how his works simultaneously extend and critique Nietzschean views on the role of asceticism in culture. The thesis then turns to a more futuristic exploration of how Foucault’s final texts, feminist critiques and extensions of these texts, and works from the separate discipline of feminist moral theory may advance a feminist form of will to power ethics. Feminist reflection upon the dualistic philosophical basis of modern androcentric power invites further speculation upon the utility of the nondual philosophies of yoga, including those found in Vedāntic texts like the Bhagavad Gītā, for such an endeavour. Because yoga utilises asceticism-based practices of the self as its primary means for moulding moral subjects, it is comparable to the Greco-Roman will to power ethics described in Foucault’s final works. On the other hand, yoga’s nondual telos may present certain ethical possibilities that dualistic constructs like the Greco-Roman model cannot. Indeed, by practicing nonduality through yoga, contemporary women and others may be engaging in a practice of freedom in the most essential sense.