The next aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the will to power.

The will to power is… well, a person’s will to have power. It describes a person’s ambitions, achievement, and the way they act to get there.

The will to power can both be good and bad.

When an individual has ambition and has goals from the standpoint of the “Ubermensch” (a concept we discussed earlier), it is a productive force. Their ambitions are driven by an appreciation for life and a love for living, meaning they are seeking to better themselves and capture self-fulfillment through their ambitions. In this form, Nietzsche thinks that the will to power can be constructive and beneficial to the world.

However, the will to power becomes insidious when ambitions for power are chased for power in and of itself. Nietzsche says:

“I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)”

Nietzsche feels that the blind ambition of the negative will to power is self defeating. The ultimate impact to this destructive power is “ressentiment”. Ressentiment, the French word for resentment, is a term Nietzsche uses frequently. Nietzsche’s philosophy posits that at it’s base, the world is unpredictable, illogical, and unknowable. Those who seek to control and rule over it will inevitably be sorely disappointing when they realize that their ambitions can never be met in a constantly shifting and convoluted world. The result is ressentiment towards the world, a hatred for life and living due to a person’s inability to come to terms with the futility of attempting to master the universe. The individual becomes dissatisfied with the world as is and continually (and uselessly) tries to change the universe that cannot be changed by him/her.

The examples of these two forms of the will to power in Pokemon are

a) Ash– the positive will to power. He seeks to be a “pokemon master” to achieve self-fulfillment and as such he is able to meet new people, make new friends, appreciate and enjoy his journeys, appreciate nature, and better himself as a person throughout the series.

b) Team Rocket– the negative will to power. They seek to capture and steal pokemon for money’s sake. They continually fail, both due to other people and due to unlucky events outside their control (the unpredictable universe!) and as a result hate their position in life, hate their jobs, and often times aren’t the greatest fans of each other, either.