ABSTRACT
Nietzsche's phenomenology of will is important to Arendt's own reconstruction of being willing. This be overshadowed by his famous attacks on the Commanding Will as an inner theatre of self-aggrandisement. 'Freedom of will' is then the 'delight' of identifying oneself as triumphant executor. Nietzsche's words on 'asceticism' are a double gesture concerning the self that blocks the instinct to exercise its powers. Arendt reads The World as Will and Idea as leaving no place for the will, and Nietzsche, to state his position against Arthur Schopenhauer, had to find a more credible idea of it. Arendt declares that judgment frees us of the will's conflicts and dangers. In judgment one understand willing in relation to thinking, and to action. About eight years later, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche's formulation is more like our contemporary snapshot of his language and views on the Will. The 'cardinal instinct of an organic being is 'to discharge its strength, not to preserve itself'.
