Power

Without mixing in legitimacy, morality, law, authority, or social structure.

Power as the Ability to Determine Another Subject’s Action

The following initial definition can be given:

Power is the ability of one subject to make another subject act according to the first subject’s will, regardless of whether that action coincides with the subordinate subject’s own will.

Or, more sharply:

Power is the ability to impose the practical execution of one’s will upon another subject.

The word practical is crucial here.

Power is not manifested in another subject “truly agreeing,” “recognizing that something is correct,” “accepting values,” or “becoming internally loyal.” It is manifested in their action being brought into conformity with another’s will.

For example:

I do not want to do A, but another subject has such means of influence that I do A anyway.

At this point, power has been exercised.

There need not have been any love for the order.
There need not have been any recognition that the order is fair.
There need not have been any change of beliefs.
Even the intention to resist need not have disappeared.

Only one thing happened:

Another’s will became decisive for my external action.

Visible Obedience Is Not Internal Submission

This distinction must indeed be made central.

A subject may:

• carry out an order;
• comply with a law;
• utter the required words;
• participate in a prescribed ritual;
• refrain from a prohibited action;
• simulate loyalty;
• reproduce an official formula;

while internally:

• disagreeing;
• despising the order;
• preserving their own evaluation;
• waiting for a chance to escape submission;
• considering their action forced;
• not recognizing the power as rightful;
• not accepting the imposed form as their own.

Therefore:

Submission of an action does not prove submission of the subject.

Power may obtain the subject’s action without obtaining the subject themselves.

It may obtain their working hours, vote, signature, body at a particular location, performance of an operation, or public statement. But it does not follow that it has obtained their internal agreement, meaning, conviction, or self-determination.

This Is Where Power Truly Ends

In the strict sense, power ends where the possibility of compelling a subject to act in a particular way ends.

It can:

• restrict available actions;
• increase the cost of disobedience;
• threaten consequences;
• deprive a person of resources;
• apply physical coercion;
• create dependency;
• organize the environment so that certain behavior becomes almost inevitable.

But even the strongest power controls not the inner infinity of the subject as such, but the conditions of its manifestation.

A person can be placed in a cell, thereby almost completely eliminating their external actions. But the mere fact of imprisonment cannot establish that the jailer has gained power over what the person regards as true, what they hate, desire, remember, attribute meaning to, or consider themselves to be.

Even when power employs propaganda, isolation, upbringing, psychological pressure, or the long-term shaping of an environment, it does not obtain direct access to the inner subject. It influences the conditions under which distinctions are formed, but does not become the owner of distinction itself.

Thus one may say:

Power can restrict a subject’s space of action, but cannot turn the subject’s inner space into its own territory.

Power Is Not the Same as Changing Someone Else’s Will

Here an important boundary arises between power and influence.

If I explain my position to another person and they voluntarily acknowledge it as correct, my will has not been imposed upon them. Their action now coincides with my will, but that coincidence by itself is not power.

Otherwise, every agreement, persuasion, learning experience, piece of advice, or joint decision would have to be called power.

Power therefore exists not where two wills merely coincide, but where one will has obtained decisive superiority over the other’s action.

The distinction can be formulated as follows:

Influence changes another subject’s will. Power makes it possible to do without changing that will.

Power is not obliged to convince. Securing execution is enough.

That is why an order remains an order even when the person carrying it out considers it meaningless. An employer has power not because an employee internally shares every decision, but because the employer can link disobedience to dismissal, loss of income, or other consequences.

Power Exists Through a Means of Subordination

The desire of one subject alone is insufficient.

I may want another person to act according to my will, but this does not yet mean that I have power.

Power appears only when an effective mechanism exists that links the other’s disobedience to consequences or makes the required action inevitable.

Power always has a carrier:

• physical force;
• threat;
• weapons;
• control over resources;
• the right to impose sanctions;
• dependency;
• official hierarchy;
• control of access;
• the ability to exclude;
• informational asymmetry;
• the ability to determine the rules of the environment.

Consequently:

Will in itself is not power. Power is the secured ability to carry one’s will through the actions of another subject.

Power is therefore not a mystical quality of personality. It exists as a relationship supported by specific means.

The same person may possess enormous power within one system and have none outside it.

A judge has power within judicial procedure not because the judge’s will metaphysically outranks the defendant’s, but because the judge’s decision is backed by an enforcement apparatus.

A manager possesses power over the employee’s work-related actions for as long as the organizational dependency exists. Beyond that dependency, their instruction becomes merely another person’s wish once again.

Power Does Not Destroy Subjectivity

The mere fact of submission does not turn a subject into an object.

A subject remains a subject even when their actions are forcibly restricted. Moreover, the very possibility of speaking of submission arises only because the subject retains a will of their own, distinct from the will of the power holder.

If there is no will of one’s own at all, there is no submission either.

A stone does not submit to a person when the person moves it. The stone has no will of its own that must be overcome.

A mechanism is not under an operator’s power in the same sense that another subject is. A mechanism merely functions according to its design.

Power as a relation therefore presupposes:

1. the presence of at least two subjects;
2. the presence of different or potentially different wills;
3. one subject’s ability to make their own will decisive for the other’s action;
4. preservation of the subordinate subject’s subjectivity even when its external expression is restricted.

A paradox follows:

Power needs another subject’s subjectivity, but strives to treat it as though it did not exist.

Power treats the subject as a conductor of its own will. Yet the subject never becomes such a conductor completely, because execution still passes through a separate being capable of internally distinguishing the order from their own desire.

Absolute Power Over a Subject Does Not Exist

If absolute power means complete control not only over actions, but also over a subject’s inner content, such power cannot indeed be established.

Even if another subject:

• carries out every order;
• repeats every formula;
• displays complete loyalty;
• reports internal agreement;
• shows no resistance;

none of this permits a final inference that their inner subjectivity has completely merged with the will of the power holder.

External execution is observable. Complete internal coincidence is not observable.

Moreover, if the subject genuinely, voluntarily, and completely wants the same thing, the very element of imposition disappears. It is then no longer absolute power over another’s will, but a coincidence of wills.

A limit emerges:

As long as another’s will differs, power can subordinate its external manifestation but cannot eliminate the fact of its separateness.
If the other’s will has voluntarily ceased to differ, submission is no longer required.

Thus power cannot complete itself in absolute form.

It either encounters the subject’s persisting separateness or destroys the very distinction relative to which it could be called power.

Possible Final Definition

I would record the foundation as follows:

Power is the secured ability of one subject to determine another subject’s external actions according to their own will, including without the other’s internal agreement.

And a separate principle:

Power over action is not power over inner subjectivity. Visible obedience establishes the correspondence of behavior to the demands of power, but does not prove internal acceptance, agreement, or the disappearance of one’s own will.

The limiting conclusion can be formulated as follows:

Power may subordinate the manifestation of a subject, but cannot ontologically appropriate the subject themselves.

It can erect walls around the subject’s actions. But walls around inner infinity are no longer an extension of power. They are a claim by power over territory it never possessed.