No More Learning

2. Decisionism. Heidegger's view of the will and willing is far from straightforward, and it appears to undergo development during the years 1936-1940. That view becomes far more critical, betraying a waxing anxiety in the face of will and power. Yet the call for deci- sion, Entscheidung, is a constant in Heidegger's writings of the 1930s and 1940s. If his is not a voluntarism of the usual sort, it is decidedly a decisionism.
We find examples in all four volumes. In the first lecture course,
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XV
"The Will to Power as Art," decision derives from a transcendent will to power and is equated with self-assertion, Selbstbehauptung. Heidegger declares that "self-assertion is original assertion ofessence" (1, 61). The word and entire rhetoric of self-assertion are reminiscent of Heidegger's inaugural address as rector of Freiburg University in 1933, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," in which the language of academic freedom cloaks Heidegger's own plans for syn- chronization. Yet decision need not always be a matter of overt politi- cal or institutional action. Decision has to do preeminently with thinking:". . . in a time of decline, a time when all is counterfeit and pointless activity, thinking in the grand style is genuine action, indeed, action in its most powerful-though most silent-form" (II, lO-ll). Thus decision straddles the threshold of the Nietzschean gateway called "Moment" or "Flash of an Eye," Augenblick. All depends on whether one spectates from the sidelines or stands in the gateway of the two eternities, which is the gateway of time: "That which is to come is precisely a matter for decision, since the ring is not closed in some remote infinity but possesses its unbroken closure in the Moment, as the center of the striving; what recurs-if it is to recur-is decided by the Moment . . . " (II, 57). Crucial in Heidegger's view is whether or not the thought of return convinces us that deci- sion is useless, always already too late, so that it "deprives us of the bal- last and steadying weight of decision and action" (II, 132). Thus the entire eighteenth section of the second lecture course, "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same," takes up "the thought of return-and freedom. "
Heidegger argues that eternal recurrence is neither a scientific hypothesis to be tested nor a religious belief to be professed and pro- pounded. Rather, it is a possibility of thought and decision. The latter, Entscheidung, involves "an authentic appropriation of the self" b'ut also implies "the propriative event [Ereignis] for historical mankind as a whole. " Decision is therefore a bridge between Heidegger's thinking of the ecstatic temporality of Dasein and the historical unfolding of being as such; a bridge, in other words, connecting Heidegger's project of a fundamental ontology of human existence with his later
XVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
preoccupation with the truth and history of being as such. We should therefore pause a moment in order to examine those "supreme and ultimate decisions" (II, 133) that Heidegger sees as the proper horizon of eternal recurrence. For just as the supreme and ultimate decision to condemn Heidegger as a nazi is suspect, so is Heidegger's own pas- sion for apocalyptic decision suspect, decision as "the proper truth of the thought" (II, 133). It cannot be a matter of our reaffirming the sort of moral freedom that Kant is thought to have secured in his Critical project, inasmuch as Heidegger (together with Nietzsche) is confront- ing that project quite explicitly in these lectures (II, 134). Nor would it be a matter of hoping to find in some post-Kantian thinker-such as Schelling, for example-a justification of freedom that Heidegger might simply have "overlooked. " It would rather be a matter of analyz- ing more carefully Heidegger's hope that we can "shape something supreme out of the next moment, as out of every moment" (II, 136); his hope, in other words, that a decisive thinking can shape something momentous. "It will be decided on the basis of what you will of your- self, what you are able to will of yourself' (II, 136).
Is it such statements as these that Heidegger will rue later in his cri- tique of the will-to-will? And does even that critique go to the heart of Heidegger's own decisionism?
Perhaps the best critical tool we have at our disposal to counter such willfulness is Heidegger's and Nietzsche's discussion of the desire to "settle accounts" by means of"infinite calculation" (II, 137). Just as we mistrust the endeavor to "settle accounts" once and for all with Heidegger, Nietzsche, and nazism, so too we must suspect the deci- sionism that forgets the finitude of time. (Heidegger reminds us here of Aristotle's treatise on time in his Physics IV, chapters 10-14. ) We would have to ask whether Heidegger himself forgets the finitude of time when he tells his students that "the decisive condition is you yourself, that is to say, the manner in which you achieve your self by becoming your own master . . . " (II, 138).
Self? Mastery? What if, as Pierre Klossowski argues, the thinking of eternal recurrence as the finitude of time makes precisely such self- mastery impossible? What if the thinking of eternal return is
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XVll
catapulted outside and beyond every concept of self? 6 Mastery is the absorption of oneself into the will, says Heidegger:" . . . by seeing to it that when you engage your will essentially you take yourself up into that will and so attain freedom" (II, 138). Can what sounds like the most traditional of freedoms be so free? "We are free only when we become free, and we become free only by virtue of our wills" (II, 138). Does not Heidegger's decisionism at times seem a massive volun- tarism? However, when it comes to decisions about matters of thought, we would be hard-pressed to find better advice than the following-from the very section (no. 18) we have been reading: "Yet so much is clear: the doctrine of return should never be contorted in such a way that it fits into the readily available 'antinomy' of freedom and necessity. At the same time, this reminds us once again of our sole task-to think this most difficult thought as it demands to be thought, on its own terms, leaving aside all supports and makeshifts" (II, 139).
That said, it remains troubling that Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same is persistently thought in the direction of "a historical decision-a crisis" (II, 154). It is as though Heidegger were seeking in history and in the life of the Volk that "final, total scission" of which Schelling dreamt. Heidegger resists the "politics" to which Alfred Baeumler would bend Nietzsche's thoughts (II, 164), yet him- self seeks the domain of Nietzsche's thought of return in the history of nihilism-more precisely, in the countermovement of that history. He condemns the automatic association of nihilism with Bolshevism (common in the Germany of his day, as in the America of ours) as "not merely superficial thinking but unconscionable demagogy" (II, 173).
However, when Heidegger's and Nietzsche's own ways of thinking nihilism are condemned as protofascist and totalitarian, are the sup~r­ ficiality and demagogy any less conspicuous? How are we to think in
6 See the references to Klossowski's Cerc/e vicieux and the discussion of its thesis in my Analysis in val. II, pp. 278-81; for further discussion, see chap. seven of Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 278-83.
XVIII THF. WILL TO POWF. R AS ART
a way that is serious and not simply journalistic the problematic character of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's desire to "confront" and "forthwith overcome" the history of nihilism (II, 182)? For this very desire is what we most have to ponder. The desire to overcome nihilism exhibits a craving for results in history, a craving that itself has a history, a history that is none other than the history of nihilism. 7
3. Nihilism. The entire fourth volume in this series focuses on the issue of nihilism, so that there is no way I can do justice to it here. Not only that. Each of the remaining volumes touches on this com- plex matter: will to power as art is proclaimed the countermovement to nihilism, a nihilism Nietzsche sees at work already in Platonism (1, 151); the thought of eternal return has as its domain the historical arena where nihilism is overcome (II, 170); in short, nihilism is an essential rubric of Nietzsche's metaphysics (III, 201-8); and as the fourth volume emphasizes throughout, nihilism is the name of our essential history, the history in which being comes to nothing.
If an introduction to all these facets of nihilism is virtually impossi- ble, let me at least try to state in a general way Heidegger's thesis con- cerning nihilism, and then move on to the question of the political context of that thesis. Heidegger is concerned to show that all the sun- dry diagnoses and proffered therapies of nihilism are bound to fail; no, not only bound to fail, but also likely to aggravate our situation by dan- gling hopes of facile solutions before our eyes. For Heidegger, nihilism results from our persistent failure to think the nothing, to confront in our thought the power of the nihil in human existence, which is mor- tal existence, and in history, which is the history of the oblivion of being and the abandonment by being. Such thinking requires a pro- tracted confrontation with the history of Western thought since Plato-which is what Heidegger's Nietzsche is all about-and un- flinching meditation on human mortality and the finitude of time,
7 See Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), chap. 9, esp. pp. 138-40.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition xix
being, and propriation. If dogged thought on human mortality seems unduly pessimistic, and if thought on the history of philosophy seems onerous, Heidegger replies that our optimism always underestimates the challenge of mortal thinking and that our reluctance to take the onus of history seriously reflects nothing if not the historical impact of nihilism itself.
No matter how brief my own analyses of the political "context" of nihilism in Heidegger's Nietzsche may be, I nevertheless want to direct readers of this new edition of Nietzsche to them (see III, 263-74, and IV, 262-76). The Analyses focus on two matters. First, Heidegger's indebtedness to Ernst Junger's books, Total Mobilization (1930) and The Worker (1932). Junger's influence on Heidegger's thought concerning planetary technology is profound. Technology constitutes the major political dilemma of our time, according to both Junger and Heidegger, a dilemma that no known political system is capable of discering, much less solving. Yet Heidegger resists Junger's "cultic" and "numinous" celebration of technology. He resists Junger's technophiliac "symbols," spurns his language. Heidegger's oppositic;m to Junger's notions of will and power translates eventually into a resistance-quite strong by 1939-to Nietzsche's notion of will to power. Will to power is will-to-will, and such redoubled willing is machination. Second, in both Analyses much is said about Heideg- ger's contemporary, Alfred Baeumler, who became professor of phi- losophy in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 after Heidegger elected to "stay in the provinces. " Baeumler's influential monograph, Nietzsche the Philosopher and Politician (1931) is important both for what Heideg- ger accepts from it and what he rejects. What he rejects is Baeumler's "politics. "
No doubt much remains to be said about the importance fo~ Heidegger of both Junger and Baeumler, as of Carl Schmitt, the jurist who supported National Socialism in both theory and practice. Yet no matter how much my remarks need fleshing out, I can largely affirm today what they say. Yet I would formulate differently the "wither- ing" of the attraction of National Socialism for Heidegger after 1934: the fact is that Heidegger's resignation from the rectorship was a symptom of his failed bid for Party leadership in the university, the
XX THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
state, and the country. His withdrawal from political life and internal emigration cannot be interpreted in terms of genuine resistance as easily as we once thought. Finally, I would alter altogether my account of Heidegger's accession to the rectorship (IV, 268-69), in order to bring that account into line with current research. 8
4. Biologism. For an audience that was receiving uninterrupted instruction in its racial superiority, indeed, its racial supremacy, the issue of Nietzsche's alleged biologism must have been of signal impor- tance. Here Heidegger's resistance to Party doctrine is most visible, especially in his sardonic remarks on poetry, digestion, and a healthy people in the Holderlin lectures (IV, 269). Yet Heidegger's sarcasm does not resolve all the problems or banish all our suspicions.
His account of Nietzsche's physiology of artistic rapture (I, 126-31) suggests that Nietzsche himself overcomes both the physiological- biological and the aesthetic positions. Whether the Party's racist and biologistic dogmas cause Heidegger to overreact to the point where he is unable or unwilling to elaborate the "new interpretation of sensu- ousness," is an arresting question: readers of the first lecture course would do well to keep it in mind. Although Heidegger does stress that the human body is essential to existence, inasmuch as Dasein is some body who is alive (Heidegger plays with the words Ieben and Jeiben, living and "bodying forth"), his reluctance to confront the biological body is everywhere in evidence. Much of the third lecture course, "The Will to Power as Knowledge," takes up the question of Nietzsche's putative biologism (III, 39-47; 101-10). To be sure, Nietzsche's thinking seems to be biologistic, and to that extent Heidegger is highly critical of it. Yet the accusation of biologism in fact "presents the main obstacle to our penetrating to his fundamental thought" (III, 41). For even when Nietzsche invokes "life," he does so metaphysically, not biologically (III, 46). Even when Nietzsche dis- cusses the law of noncontradiction in terms of biology, the discussion remains at an ontological level (III, I03-4; 115-22). Heidegger empha-
8 Again, see my "Rectification of the German University," esp. Part II.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XXI
sizes by way of conclusion: "Nietzsche thinks the 'biological,' the essence o f what is alive, in the direction o f commanding and poetiz- ing, of the perspectival and horizonal: in the direction of freedom" (III, 122). A conclusion that would take us back to the question of freedom-and Heidegger's decisionism.
In the 1940 lectures on "European Nihilism" (IV, 147-49), Heideg- ger betrays how sensitive an issue biologism is for him. Here he con- traposes Nietzsche's metaphysics to that of Hegel: if Hegel's is a meta- physics of reason and spirit, as the culmination of Cartesian subjectivism, Nietzsche's is one of animality, yet still within that same Cartesian tradition. "The absolute essence of subjectivity necessarily develops as the brutalitas of bestialitas. At the end of metaphysics stands the statement Homo est brutum bestiale" (IV, 148). The end of metaphysics, one might say by way of pun or typo, is the beginning of meatphysics. Heidegger now claims that Nietzsche's avowal of the "blond beast" is "not a casual exaggeration, but the password and countersign" of Nietzsche's historical entanglements. How odd that Heidegger should cite (critically) the phrase with which this Introduc- tion began-the phrase that delineates in a straight line, without punctuation or deviation, the triad from which Heidegger would want to extricate himself: Heidegger Nietzsche Nazism. In "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" (III, 218), Heidegger argues that Nietzsche's "nihilistic negation of reason" does not so much exclude reason as place it in the service of animality. Or, more precisely, it subjects both spirit and body to a metaphysics of the will to power as command, calcula- tive thought, and the positing of values (III, 224). Yet even in his cen- sure of Nietzschean overman, or perhaps of a caricature of the
Obermensch, with the overman as a product of technological mechanization and machination, Heidegger avoids leveling the charge of biologism:
The breeding of human beings is not a taming in the sense of a suppres- sion and hobbling of sensuality; rather, breeding is the accumulation and purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable "automatism" of every activity. Only where the absolute subjectivity of will to power comes to be the truth of beings as a whole is the principle of
XXII THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
a program of racial breeding possible; possible, that is, not merely on the basis of naturally evolving races, but in terms of the self-conscious thought of race. That is to say, the principle is metaphysically necessary. Just as Nietzsche's thought of will to power was ontological rather than biological, even more was his racial thought metaphysical rather than biological in meaning. (III, 230-31)
Enough of meatphysics, then: neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger would be guilty of it. Yet is Heidegger writing here in his own voice, or is he trying, whether successfully or not, merely to report on Nietzsche's thought? No matter how we decide, and such decisions are always excruciating if not impossible to make, the thoughts expressed here give us pause. T o this ontological or metaphysical ele- vation of the thought of race, Jacques Derrida has posed the inevita- ble and painful question: When Heidegger or Nietzsche or Heideg- ger/Nietzsche appeals to a principle of a programmed racial breeding; when he subordinates biology to a metaphysics of will to power; when he abjures the contingency of "naturally evolving races" and adopts instead-as though suddenly ventriloquizing Hegel, speaking through the spiritual mouth of Hegelian spirit-"the self-conscious
thought of race"; when he does all these things, does he alleviate or aggravate the thought of race and racism, the Rassengedanke? Does metaphysics dissolve or confirm the rule of racism? "A metaphysics of race-is this more grave or less grave than a naturalism or a biologism of race? "9
By leaving the question in suspense, Derrida does not mean that we should suspend thought about it. Anything but that. The apparently academic question of"biologism" is an issue that every reader of these volumes will have to confront, finding his or her own way between Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the worst violence of the night.
HEIDEGGER'S CONTRIBUTIONS
The very issues we have been raising in an introductory fashion-
nationalism, decisionism, nihilism, and biologism-are by no means 9 Derrida, De J'esprit, pp. 118-19; Engl. trans. , p. 74.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XXlll.
reserved to the Nietzsche volumes. They might well lead us to Heidegger's second major work of the 1930s, his Contributions to Phi- losophy (Of Propriation), written between 1936 and 1938, that is to say, simultaneously with the first two parts of the Nietzsche, but pub- lished only recently. 10
Here Heidegger's nationalism and decisionism remain profoundly disconcerting. No matter how reassuring his polemics against "racism" and the "distorted animality" of technologized man may be, his scorn of "liberalism" and his fears of "Bolshevism" undermine the reader's confidence (see 65, 19, 25, 28, 53-54, 163, and elsewhere). He shares that scorn and those fears with every "young conservative" intellectual of the Weimar era. No matter how reassuring his mockery of the Stefan George Circle, with their adulation of Nietzsche and antiquity (65, 73), Heidegger himself equates philosophy with "the philosophy of a people," and the only two peoples he mentions are the ancient Greeks and contemporary Germans (65, 42, 319, 390, 399, 414). He shares the fascinations of the George-Kreis. No matter what justice there may be in his claim that ecclesiastical Christendom and the Third Reich both subscribe to the "totalizing worldview" (65, 40-41, 140), his desire to "grant historical mankind a goal once again" (65, 16) seems to be every bit as totalizing. And whatever "justice" there may be in such "judgments," the question of justice as the cul- mination of the history of truth as the correctness of propositions will have to be raised more perspicuously than Heidegger has raised it in the Nietzsche volumes (see III, 137-49 and 235-51; cf. IV, 139-46). His call for apocalyptic or at least eschatological "decision" (65, 87-103) is as unnerving in the Contributions as in the Nietzsche. His need to enkindle the "hearth fires" of philosophy and the nation is not exactly heart-warming, his willingness to bandy about the shib,
10 Martin Heidegger, Beitriige zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), vol. 65 of the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989). Throughout these Nietzsche volumes, the Gesamtausgabe volumes are cited as MHG, or simply by volume (in italic) and page, e. g. , 65, 54. See my Analysis to vol. II, pp. 269-81, which of course could only anticipate the contents of the Beitriige. And see the chapter entitled "Contributions to Life" in my forthcoming book, Daimon Life: Heidegger and "Lebensphilosophie. "
XXIV THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
boleths of his day-no matter what the "tendency" of his remarks, no matter how resistant to the slogans of National Socialism-is frightening:
. . . the final form of Marxism, which has essentially nothing to do with Jewry or even with the Russians; if an undeveloped spirituality slumbers anywhere today, then it is in the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally a Western, European possibility: the upsurgence of the masses, industry, technology, the withering of Christianity; yet insofar as the dominion of reason in the equality of all is merely a consequence of Christianity, which, at bottom, is ofJewish origin (cf. Nietzsche's thought on the slave-rebellion of morality), Bolshevism is indeed Jewish; but then Christianity is, at bot- tom, also Bolshevik! And what sorts of decisions would be necessary on this basis? . . . (65, 54; cf. 163)
One shudders at the sorts of decisions that might be made on such a basis, on the basis of those big words that make us so unhappy. Unless, of course, all this is a desperate attempt on Heidegger's part to carica- ture and to resist the very decisionism that he finds so tempting.
Finally, Heidegger's observation that it is not an essential index of nihilism "whether or not churches and monasteries [Kirchen und Kloster] are destroyed and human beings slaughtered [und Mensch en hingemordet]" (65, 139) is not so much callous as it is out of touch. If the year is 1936 or after, and the place is Germany, then the churches and cloisters are relatively secure, and murder is occurring at other sites.
CONCLUSIONS
To summarize now, and to come to a close. No, not a close, but an opening-the reader's opening of Heidegger's Nietzsche. Heidegger's resistance to the crude biologism, racism, and anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party cannot, I believe, be doubted. Yet his ardent nationalism and anti-liberalism, his intransigent conservatism in matters eco- nomic, social, and political, along with his passion for historic deci- sions at the national level, made him an easy prey to hopes of resurgence.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XXV
Was Heidegger a nazi? Yes, if carrying the membership card and paying the dues is our standard. No, not if we stress the most horrify- ing aspect of National Socialism, its vulgar racism and virulent anti- Semitism. Yes, if we stress the importance of Hitler himself and of his cult of nationalism, militarism, and anti-parliamentarian elitism. Indeed, when Heidegger conjoins liberalism and the dominant National Socialism, which has declined his spiritual leadership, there is reason to observe that if Heidegger was not a nazi it was only because the Party was too liberal for him. At the same time, we have to remember the Party's rejection of Heidegger's "private" version of National Socialism already in 1934 and the waxing intensity of the polemics against him by Party ideologues in the mid-1930s. Further- more, Heidegger's disaffection from the Party in the course of the 1930s has direct relevance for his work on Nietzsche: when Party cen- sorship of the Nietzsche edition that Heidegger was helping to pre- pare intensified in 1938, he stopped working with the Commission that was charged with the edition. Thus the year 1938 assumes sym- bolic importance for our theme: as the Party insists on sanitizing the Nietzsche edition, purging from it Nietzsche's anti-anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism, Heidegger opts for Nietzsche, and the triad of terms in our title falls apart. In a word, and to answer a complex question peremptorily: if we stress Heidegger's active and inventive support of the regime in 1933-34, the answer is a resounding, catastrophic yes; as the 1930s come to a close, opening onto an even more disastrous era, the answer is no. As for Heidegger's silence after the war, it responds to our own need to know why with-silence.
Is Heidegger's relation to National Socialism the sole important aspect of his lectures and essays on Nietzsche? Not at all. His reading of eternal recurrence of the same as mortal transition and downgoing; of the will to power as artistic creativity and the pursuit of knowledge· "in the grand style"; of the Nietzschean revaluation of all values as a remnant of metaphysical and calculative valuative thinking; and of nihilism as the history of being from Plato through Nietzsche-these issues await the reader and will challenge her or him to the full. No peremptory discussion can resolve them.
XXVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Perhaps what is most disturbing about the "Heidegger scandal" today is the avidity with which Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism has been taken up, a fervor that cannot be explained by reference to the usual dependable pleasures of righteous indignation. Academics and philosophers today seem to hope that if they can shift attention to a Heidegger-exposed-at-last they will be able to forget the vacuity and aimlessness of their own projects.
That if their kind of philosophy has run out of problems, then the only way to keep the conversation going endlessly is to churn out endless scandals. The hope blossoms that a social-critical, emancipatory discourse will sud- denly make sense again if adherents can divert everyone's attention to another time and place, newsflash 1933, expatiating on a foreign yet ostensibly familiar situation, excoriating the same old set of villains. Villains safely past. Museum pieces of wickedness or credulity. Or, finally, that the American mind-modest generalization though it may be-will suddenly burst into bloom once again if only its captors (Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the rest of the French) can be expunged from the curriculum. With a sterilized Socrates or antiseptic Aristotle mounted in their place. How much more satisfying it is to scan accounts of scandals in the Sunday supplements than to wrestle with Sophist or Metaphysics or Being and Time. How much more satisfy- ing to settle once and for all questions of crime and punishment, to banish a thinker and renounce all his works, to burn all those difficult books.
Heidegger's Nietzsche is the easiest of those difficult books, the least painful to read. No doubt, these volumes need to be read closely and critically. For even more disturbing than the avidity of the Heidegger bashers is the business-as-usual attitude of the Heidegger acolytes. The crippling conservatism and militancy, the longing for mettle and metal, Harte und Schwere, the perfervid anti-Communism, and the endless fascination with and confidence in the German Volk-none of these traits can be forgotten or relegated to some safely "nonphilosophical" realm. In Heidegger himself these traits remain profoundly troubling; in Heidegger's followers, in his circles and societies, they are an abomination, if also a farce.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition xxvn
Heidegger's Nietzsche is one of those ventures and adventures that compels the reader again and again to scribble into the margins No! No! The yeses come slowly and painfully. When they do come, after all the necessary caution and resistance, the reader will discover that he or she does not need a book of matches for this book of powerfully formulated yet altogether tentative thoughts.
No doubt, other significant readings of Nietzsche will come along, or have already arrived on the scene, with Bataille, Deleuze, Klos- sowski, and Derrida. Yet none of these writers can readily separate the names Nietzsche/Heidegger. None can pry apart this laminate. As though one of the crucial confrontations for thinkers today were what one might call heidegger's nietzsche, nietzsche's heidegger.
Editor's Preface
From 1936 to 1940 Martin Heidegger offered four lecture courses at the University ofFreiburg-im-Breisgau on selected topics in Nietzsche's philosophy. During the decade 1936-1946 he composed a number of individual lectures and essays on that thinker. After lecturing again on Nietzsche during the early 1950s Heidegger determined to publish these and the earlier materials; in 1961 the Neske Verlag ofPfullingen released two large volumes of Heidegger's early lectures and essays on Nietzsche. A four-volume English version of Heidegger's two-volume Nietzsche (cited throughout these volumes as NI, Nil, with page number) appeared during the years 1979-1987.
The four hardbound volumes of Heidegger's Nietzsche are here reproduced in two paperback volumes, the first containing volumes I and II of the first English edition, the second uniting volumes III and IV. In order to keep the cost of the paperback edition as low as possi- ble, the volumes have been reprinted with a minimum of changes. Errors that came to my attention over the years have been corrected and a new Introduction added. The order of the essays in the hard- bound edition has been retained: it deviates from that of the hard- bound Neske edition, following the order of Neske's paperback ver- sion of Nihilismus, which is also the order Heidegger approved for the English translation.
In the intervening years, the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (cited throughout as MHG, with volume number in italic) has pro- duced a number of volumes relevant to the Nietzsche. Division I of the Gesamtausgabe reproduces the 1961 Neske volumes as volumes 6. 1 and 6. 2. These contain the lectures and essays in the form that Heidegger himself gave them in 1960 and 1961, reworking and con- densing the material. The Gesamtausgabe editors have also produced
XXX THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
a second set of versions of the lectures, based on the holographs plus student notes and transcriptions. These appear in Division II of the edition as volumes 43 (Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, win- ter semester 1936-1937), 44 (Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstel- lung im abendlandischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen, summer semester 1937), 47 (Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis, summer semester 1939), and 48 (Nietzsche: Der euro- paische NihiJismus, second trimester 1940). Two further volumes are in preparation: 46 (Nietzsches II. Unzeitgema/3e Betrachtung, winter semester 1938-1939), and 50 (Nietzsches Metaphysik, announced for the winter semester of 1941-1942 but not given). These versions of the lectures differ in several significant ways from the 1961 Neske edi- tion on which the translation was based: first, they include a number of "repetitions" or "summaries and transitions" that Heidegger cus- tomarily presented at the beginning of each lecture hour, materials that Heidegger himself eliminated when he edited the Nietzsche for publication; second, they also include a number of passages that he decided to strike, apparently because he felt they were too polemical, too repetitious, or of dubious relevance; third, they include a number of notes found on unattached sheets in the handwritten lectures.
Let a single example of such deleted material suffice, of the second type: when Heidegger edited the first lecture course he cut two para- graphs of material on Jaspers' treatment of Nietzschean eternal recur- rence of the same, paragraphs that "put quite sharply" why it is that philosophy is "altogether impossible" for Jaspers. (See NI, 31 and cf. MHG 43, 26. ) The substance of the critique remains in these pages (see, in this paperback edition, I, 23), but the remarks on Jaspers' "moralizing psychology" and his inability to ask genuinely philosophi- cal questions are deleted.
It therefore has to be said that scholars who feel the need to focus sharply on a particular passage in Heidegger's Nietzsche should refer to the corresponding volumes in MHG Division II. Yet we can be con- fident that with the Neske edition, prepared by Heidegger himself, we have the core of his confrontation with Nietzsche. It would not have been possible for me to "work into" this translation materials from the lectures as they appear in MHG Division II, precisely for the reasons
Editor's Preface XXXI
that it was impossible for the German editors to work them into the MHG reprint of the Neske edition. If only for reasons of bulk: the word count for the first three courses is 192,500 in Neske, 270,000 in MHG.
The Neske edition too ultimately derives from Heidegger's hand- written lectures. Heidegger collated these notes with the help of a number of assistants and approved the final typescript in spring of 1961. Since access to the original notes is restricted, and because the notes themselves are fascinating documents, I have prepared a description of one complete page of the notes and a comparison of it to the relevant pages of the Neske edition as an Appendix to the pres- ent volume. (See also a photographic facsimile of that page following p. 223. ) There is one serious error on this page as transcribed in the Neske edition, volume one, page 51, line 22. An examination of the holograph page (listed in the Marbach Archive as no. A 33/14) shows that line 22 ends one of Heidegger's long emendations designed for insertion into the body of the text. The line is difficult to read with certainty; it is easy to see how the error in the published text occurred. But the sense of the holograph page is clear, and with the aid of the only extant Abschrift or typescript (Archive no. II 19/27) an accurate reconstruction is possible. After having examined MHG 43, 48, 11. 5-6 f. b. , I propose the following reading:
strike line 22 of NI, 51, and insert: Streben auf. Wille dagegen, [als] Ent- schlossenheit zu sich, ist immer tiber sich etc.
I have adopted this reading for the translation, p. 41, lines 13-14. A more detailed discussion appears in the Appendix.
The only other serious error in the Neske edition of which I am aware is the duplication of the word nicht at NI, 189, line 5 from the bottom (cf. MHG 43, 199, 1. 11 f. b. ), which ought to read:
Sinnlichen, als ein Nichtseiendes und Nicht-sein-sol- etc.
Occasional typographical errors in the Neske edition and minor inaccuracies in the quotations I have corrected without drawing atten- tion to them.
I have translated all passages from Nietzsche's works in Heidegger's text, as well as the quotations from Hegel, Wagner, Dilthey, and
XXXII THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
others. But I am grateful to have had the translation of The Will to Power by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) for reference and comparision.
Heidegger's many references to Der Wille zur Macht are cited in these English volumes as WM, followed by aphorism-not page-- number, e. g. : (WM, 794). His references to all other Nietzschean texts are to the Grossoktavausgabe (Leipzig, 1905 ff. ); in the body of the text they are cited simply by volume and page, e. g. : (XIV, 413-67); in my own explanatory footnotes I cite the Grossoktavausgabe as GOA. In these notes the letters CM refer to the new Kritische Gesamtaus- gabe of Nietzsche's works and letters, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967 ff. ). I have checked as many of Heidegger's references to the GOA in CM as time, the incompleteness of CM, and its one-way concordances allowed. Where no major discrepancies emerged I let the GOA text stand. However, readers who wish to focus on a specific reference by Heidegger to the GOA should themselves check CM carefully before proceeding.
Heidegger's text contains no footnotes; all notes in the present vol- ume are my own. I have tried to keep them to a minimum, since it is hard to know when such notes are helpful and when they are a nui- sance. I hope that readers who have difficulties with the editorial mat- ter or any aspect of the translation will write me about them in care of the publisher. As for the translation itself, its apologist is Jerome, whose Preface to Eusebius' Chronicle William Arrowsmith has ren- dered (in Arion, New Series, 2/3, 1975, p. 359):
Jerome to Vincentius and Gallienus: Greetings
. . . It is difficult, when you are following in another man's footsteps, to
keep from going astray somewhere. And it is extremely difficult to pre- serve in translation the particular verbal felicities of a foreign language. The original meaning, for instance, may be conveyed in a single word- a word which has no single Latin equivalent. I f the translator tries to catch the full meaning, he must resort to lengthy paraphrase. To these difficul- ties must be added the problems of word-order, differences in case and rhetorical figures, and finally, the native genius of the language itself. If I
Editor's Preface XXXlll
translate word for word, the result is ludicrous; if I am forced to change the words or rearrange them, it will look as though I had failed in my duty as a translator.
So, my dear Vincentius and Gallienus, I beg of you, if you find signs of haste and confusion, to read this work rather as friends than critics.
I owe thanks to many generous people for help with this project over the past fifteen years: Jochen Barkhausen, Robert Bernasconi, Friederike Born, Helm Breinig, Frank Capuzzi, Chris Fynsk, Sherry Gray Martin, Ulrich Halfmann, Elfride Heidegger, Hermann Heideg- ger, F. -W. von Herrmann, Elisabeth Hoffmann, Eunice Farrell Krell, Marta Krell, Will McNeill, Sabine Modersheim, Thomas Muller, Ashraf Noor, Bruce Pye, John Sallis, Jupp Schopp, John Shopp, Joan Stambaugh, and Joachim W. Storck. And special debts of gratitude to Martin Heidegger and J. Glenn Gray.
Chicago D. F. K.
Plan of the English Edition
FIRST VOLUME OF PAPERBACK EDITION
Volume I: The Will to Power as Art
I. Author's Foreword to All Volumes [NI, 9-10].
2. "The Will to Power as Art," a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1936-37 [NI, 11-254].
Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
I. "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same," a lecture course deliv- ered at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1937 [NI, 255-472].
2. "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " a lecture to the Bremen Club on May 8, 1953, printed in Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1954), pp. 101-26, added here as a supplement to the Nietzsche material.
SECOND VOLUME OF PAPERBACK EDITION
Volume III: "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics
I. "The Will to Power as Knowledge," a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1939 [NI, 473-658].
2. "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power," the two concluding lectures to all three lecture courses, written in 1939 but not delivered [Nil, 7-29].
XXXVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
3. "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," a typescript dated August-Decem- ber 1940, apparently derived from an unscheduled and hereto- fore unlisted course on Nietzsche's philosophy [Nil, 257-333]. *
Volume IV: Nihilism
l. "European Nihilism," a lecture course delivered at the Univer- sity of Freiburg during the first trimester of 1940 [Nil, 31-256]. 2. "Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being," an essay com- posed during the years 1944-46 but not published until 1961
[Nil, 335-398].
The three remaining essays in volume two of the Neske edition, "Metaphysics as History of Being" [Nil, 399-457], "Sketches for a His- tory of Being as Metaphysics" [Nil, 458-80], and "Recollection of Metaphysics" [Nil, 481-90], all from the year 1941, appear in English
*"Nietzsche's Metaphysics" appears as the title of a lecture course for the winter semester of 1941-42 in all published lists of Heidegger's courses. The earliest prospec- tuses of the Klostermann firm cited such a lecture course as volume 52 of the Heidegger "Complete Edition" (Gesamtausgabe). But the Heidegger Archive of the Schiller- Nationalmuseum in Marbach contains no manuscript for such a course. It does contain the sixty-four-page typescript in question, with many handwritten alternations, composed in August I940 and revised during the months of September, October, and December of that year. One of the typescript's several title pages refers to the winter semester of 1938-39, in all probability not to any lecture or seminar in the published lists but to an unlisted Ubung [exercise] entitled "Toward an Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second 'Untimely Meditation,' On the Advantage and Disadvantage ofHistory for Life. " On Sep- tember 29, 1975, I asked Heidegger about the discrepancy of the dates for "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" in the Neske edition (1940) and in the published lists and catalogues of his courses (winter semester 1941-42). (At the time of our conversation on this matter the above information, supplied by the archive, was unknown to me. ) Heidegger reaffirmed the date 1940 as the time of composition. He explained that the material had been pre- pared during a seminar, title and date not specified, and conceded that he might have employed the same material for theWS 1941-42lecture course. The more recent prospec- tuses of the Gesamtausgabe list both the 1938-39 course ("Nietzsche's Second 'Untimely Meditation'") and the essay "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" as volumes 46 and 50, respectively. "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" is said to have been "announced, but not taught, in the win- ter semester of 1941-42. " In volume 50 it is coupled (for no apparent reason) with the 1944-45 course, "Thinking and Poetizing. "
The problem awaits the more patient scrutiny of the archive's curators. But this may suffice to explain why Heidegger cites 1940 (and not 1942, as the catalogues would lead us to expect) as the closing date for his early lectures on Nietzsche.
Plan ofthe English Edition xxxvii
translation in Martin Heidegger, The End ofPhilosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). The End ofPhilosophy also contains the essay "Overcoming Metaphysics" (1936-46), related thematically and chronologically to the Nietzsche material and origi· nally published in Vortrage und Aufsatze, pp. 71-99. The lecture in which Heidegger summarizes much of the material in volume II of Nietzsche, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead"' (1943), appears in English translation in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Other references to Nietzsche in Heidegger's works are listed in the second, revised edition of Hildegard Feick, Index zu Heideggers "Sein und Zeit" (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), p. 120.
Author's Foreword to All Volumes
Nietzsche himself identifies the experience that determines his thinking:
"Life . . . more mysterious since the day the great liberator came over me-the thought that life should be an experiment of knowers. "
The Cay Science 1882 (Book IV, no. 324)
"Nietzsche"- t h e name of the thinker stands as the title for the matter of his thinking.
The matter, the point in question, is in itself a confrontation. To let our thinking enter into the matter, to prepare our thinking for it- these goals determine the contents of the present publication.
It consists of lecture courses held at the University of Freiburg-im- Breisgau during the years 1936 to 1940. Adjoined to them are treatises which originated in the years 1940 to 1946. The treatises further extend the way by which the lecture courses-still at that time under way- paved the way for the confrontation.
The text of the lectures is divided according to content, not hours of presentation. Nevertheless, the lecture character has been retained, this necessitating an unavoidable breadth of presentation and a certain amount of repetition.
It is intentional that often the same text from Nietzsche's writings is discussed more than once, though each time in a different context. Much material has been presented that may be familiar and even well known to many readers, since in everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks. The repetitions are intended to provide occasions for thinking through, in ever renewed fashion, those several thoughts that determine the whole. Whether, and in what sense, with
xl THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
what sort of range, the thoughts remain worthy of thought becomes clear and is decided through the confrontation. In the text of the lectures unnecessary words and phrases have been deleted, involuted sentences simplified, obscure passages clarified, and oversights correct- ed.
For all that, the written and printed text lacks the advantages of oral presentation.
Considered as a whole, the publication aims to provide a view of the path of thought I followed from 1930 to the "Letter on Humanism" (1947). The two small lectures published just prior to the "Letter," "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (1942) and "On the Essence of Truth" (1943), originated back in the years 1930-31. The book Commentaries on Holder/in's Poetry (1951), which contains one essay and several lectures from the years between 1936 and 1943, sheds only indirect light on that path.
Whence the confrontation with the "Nietzsche matter" comes and whither it goes may become manifest to the reader when he himself sets off along the way the following texts have taken.
Freiburg-im-Breisgau May, 1961
M. H.
7'Jietzsche
VOLUME I
The Will to Power as Art
"Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god! "
The Antichrist 1888 (VIII, 235-36)
1. Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker
In The Will to Power, the "work" to be treated in this lecture course, Nietzsche says the following about philosophy (WM, 420):
I do not wish to persuade anyone to philosophy: it is inevitable and perhaps also desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant. I find nothing more repugnant than didactic praise of philosophy as one finds it in Seneca, or worse, Cicero. Philosophy has little to do with virtue. Permit me to say also that the man of knowledge is fundamentally different from the philoso- pher. -What I desire is that the genuine concept of the philosopher not perish utterly in Germany. . . .
At the age of twenty-eight, as a professor in Basel, Nietzsche writes (X, ll2):
There are times of great danger in which philosophers appear-times when the wheel rolls ever faster-when philosophers and artists assume the place of the dwindling mythos. They are far ahead of their time, however, for the attention of contemporaries is only quite slowly drawn to them. A people which becomes aware of its dangers produces the genius.
The Will to Power-the expression plays a dual role in Nietzsche's thinking. First, it serves as the title of Nietzsche's chief philosophical work, planned and prepared over many years but never written. Second, it names what constitutes the basic character of all beings. "Will to power is the ultimate factum to which we come" {XVI, 415).
It is easy to see how both applications of the expression "will to power" belong together: only because the expression plays the second role can and must it also adopt the first. As the name for the basic
4 THE WILL TO PO\VER AS ART
character of all beings, the expression "will to power" provides an answer to the question "What is being? " Since antiquity that question has been the question of philosophy. The narrie "will to power" must therefore come to stand in the title of the chief philosophical work of a thinker who says that all being ultimately is will to power.