A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!--one of which is the instinct of self-preservation.
It is clear from the above passage that Nietzsche sees this Will to Power as the cardinal instinct of the organic being. He does not say "of the human being" but "of the organic being" and so indicates that this is a natural force that persists in all living creatures capable of any degree of sentience. Indeed, Nietzsche goes beyond this to identify the Will to Power with existence itself, and he sees the Will to Power as the essence of life and the essence of the world. The Will to Power is therefore not merely a psychological manifestation but imbues not only the living organism but society as well. In the broadest sense, the Will to Power is every will, every force, every energy, all directed toward that insatiable demand for the demonstration of power. There is thus a movement of the will toward power in the phrase Will to Power, and the imperative to which it always responds is to be more than it is. The Will to Power is always overcoming itself and becoming something more, and in so doing it still is a force that wants only to become something more. For Nietzsche, the superior man admits that God is dead and takes responsibility for his own actions, and this is a key existential view found in Sartre and other existentialists as well.
For Sartre, God is not necessary and is in fact non-existent, and so man is free in a way that can be terrifying and that imposes responsibility. Jean-Paul Sartre was not only a leading philosopher of his generation but also a playwright, novelist, political theorist, and literary critic. Sartre in his writings in the 1940s and after was reacting to the horrors of war, in this ...