Joseph Smith was a powerfully willed man of strength and resolve. He once said:
Never be discouraged. If I were sunk in the lowest pits of Nova Scotia, with the Rocky Mountains piled on me, I would hang on, exercise faith, and keep up good courage, and I would come out on top.
His life was the embodiment of Nietzsche's will to power. It is no surprise then that his athletic bodily physiology and personality would filter into new Mormon Scripture a life affirming theology of the body.
This short video presentation, Nietzsche and the Will to Power by Academy of Ideas (March 4, 2013), does a good job comparing the presocratic philosophers and atomism with Alfred Whitehead and Nietzsche combined. In this blog post I summarized a Mormon scholar comparing the Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt's theory of agential spirit atoms with Whitehead's ideas and processs theology.
The video above explains that Nietzsche ascribed an inner will to the ground of being which is the will to power. As the author of the video explains at the 11 minute mark, the will to power is the idea that the basic elements have an inner will and are alive in a sense. Nietzsche provided a naturalistic explanation for the emergence of life. Similarly, Mormonism posits a materialist/naturalistic explanation of the emergence of life as spirit-atoms/matter (D&C 131:7-8): as a single omnipresent independent supreme power (Lecture #2) seeking to expand in dominion and power in the form of earthy globes and personages (Lecture #5 and #7); as this all powerful Fluid Mind and omniprsent material energy field (akin to Nietzsche's Will to Power), seeks to grow and expand through exalted beings which further expand the First God (Supreme Governing Power) and all the forms and personages filled with the divine substance of spirit-atoms and glory (splendor). As Joseph Smith explains in the King Follett Discourse:
Here then is eternal life, to know the only wise and true God. You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves; to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done; by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you are able to sit in glory as doth those who sit enthroned in everlasting power;
This is Nietzsche’s will to power in theological language. I find a profound correlation between original Mormonism and in particular Orson Pratt's theology, and the philosophy of Nietzsche and Whitehead.
