ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur has argued that Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche constitute the modern “school of suspicion” concerning illusions of consciousness. The intuition in Ricoeur’s argument is a fairly common one, namely, that Freud’s and Nietzsche’s suspicious approaches to consciousness might somehow be seen as growing out of the same soil as Marx’s concept of ideology. Interpreters such as Jurgen Habermas fail to understand Nietzsche’s approach to ideology, then, because they misunderstand his concept of power. Nietzsche’s view of the concept of ideology and his genealogical method of criticizing illusions of consciousness will make sense only if understand his global characterization of the world as will to power. Much of the seeming oddness and ambiguity of Nietzsche’s three-faceted concept of will to power disappears when we look at it from the further perspective of the historical problem he meant it to address.
