No More Learning

by Martin Heidegger Volu~sOneandTwo
J\lietzsche
VOLUMES I AND II
The Will to Power as Art
The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
HarperCollins Editions of MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Basic Writings
Being and Time
Discourse on Thinking
Early Greek Thinking
The End of Philosophy
Hegel's Concept ofExperience
Identity and Difference
Nietzsche: Volume I, The Will to Power as Art Nietzsche: Volume II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same Nietzsche: Volume III, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics
Nietzsche: Volume IV, Nihilism
On the Way to Language
On Time and Being
Poetry, Language, Thought
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays What Is Called Thinking?
MARTIN HEIDECCER
J\Jietzsche
Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
Translated from the German by DAVID FARRELL KRELL
•- HarperSanFrancisco
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Volume One of Martin Heidegger's text was originally published in Nietzsche, Erster Band,© Verlag Gunther Neske, Pfullingen, 1961.
NIETZSCHE. Volume I: The Will to Power as Art. Copyright © 1979 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Appendix and Analysis copyright© 1979 by David Farrell Krell. Intro- duction to the Paperback Edition, copyright© 1991 by David Farrell Krell.
Volume Two was originally published in Nietzsche, Erster Band, © Verlag Gunther Neske, Pfullingen, 1961, and in Vortriige und Aufsiitze, copyright © 1954 by Verlag Gunther Neske, Pfullingen.
NIETZSCHE. Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Copyright © 1984 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Analysis copyright© 1984 by David Farrell Krell.
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FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1991. Designed by Jim Mennick
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.
[Nietzsche. English]
Nietzsche I Martin Heidegger; edited by David Farrell Krell. - 1st
HarperCollins pbk. ed. p. em.
Translation of: Nietzsche.
Reprint. Originally published: San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979-1987. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: v. 1-2. The will to power as art; The eternal recurrence of the
sam e- v. 3-4. The will to power as knowledge and as metaphysics; Nihilism. ISBN 0-06-063841-9 (v. 1-2). - ISBN 0-06-063794-3 (v. 3-4) ! . Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1844-1900. I. Krell, David Farrell.
II. Title. B3279. H48N5413 1991 193-dc20
91 92 93 94 95 HAD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
90-49074 CIP
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
J\Jietzsche
Volume 1:
The Will to Power as Art
Translated from the German, with Notes and an Analysis, by DAVID FARRELL KRELL
With a Facsimile Page from the Original Manuscript
Contents
Introduction to the Paperback Edition IX Editor's Preface xxix Plan of the English Edition XXXV Author's Foreword to All Volumes XXXIX
THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
I.
2. 3. 4.
5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15.
16.
Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker 3 The Book, The Will to Power 7 Plans and Preliminary Drafts of the "Main Structure" 12 The Unity of Will to Power, Eternal Recurrence,
and Revaluation 18 The Structure of the "Major Work. " Nietzsche's
Manner of Thinking as Reversal 25 The Being of beings as Will in Traditional Metaphysics 34 Will as Will to Power 37 Will as Affect, Passion, and Feeling 44 The Idealistic Interpretation of Nietzsche's Doctrine
of Will 54 Will and Power. The Essence of Power 59 The Grounding Question and the Guiding Question
of Philosophy 67 Five Statements on Art 69 Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics 77 Rapture as Aesthetic State 92 Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful. Its Misinterpretation
by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche 107 Rapture as Form-engendering Force 115
Vlll CONTENTS
17. The Grand Style 124
18. Grounding the Five Statements on Art 138
19. The Raging Discordance between Truth and Art 142
20. Truth in Platonism and Positivism. Nietzsche's Attempt
to Overturn Platonism on the Basis of the Fundamental
Experience of Nihilism 151
21. The Scope and Context of Plato's Meditation on the
Relationship of Art and Truth 162
22. Plato's Republic: The Distance of Art (Mimesis) from
Truth (Idea) 171
23. Plato's Phaedrus: Beauty and Truth in Felicitous
Discordance 188
24. Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism 200
25. The New Interpretation of Sensuousness and the Raging
Discordance between Art and Truth 211
Appendix: A manuscript page from the lecture course
Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst [Nietzsche:
The Will to Power as Art], Winter Semester 1936-37 224
Analysis by David Farrell Krell 230 Glossary 258
Volume II begins following page 263.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition Heidegger Nietzsche Nazism
By David Farrell Krell
Take the thinker of the "blond beast. " Add another who is a card- carrying member of the Nazi Party. The result bodes ill for the matter of thinking that is Heidegger's Nietzsche. Even after Walter Kauf- mann's labors to defend Nietzsche against the charge of being the prototypical ideologue of National Socialism-a charge brought byvirtually all the Postwar literature on nazism and fascism- Nietzsche's virulence continues to eat away at today's reader. And now the "second wave" of the "Heidegger scandal" (the first came immediately after World War II, carried out in part in Les temps modernes) leaves in its wake the conviction that Heidegger the man and the thinker was embroiled in National Socialism to a far greater extent than we hitherto believed. Nevertheless, Heidegger himself insisted that it was precisely in his Nietzsche, in these volumes the reader now has in hand, that his resistance to National Socialism can most readily be seen. In the Spiegel interview of 1966, first published after his death on May 26, 1976, Heidegger asserts: "Everyone who had ears to hear was able to hear in these lectures [that is, the series of lectures on Nietzsche given from 1936 to 1940] a confrontation with National Socialism. "1
1"Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten [Only a God Can Save Us Now]," Der Spie- gel, vol. 30, no. 23 (May 31, 1976), p. 204; trans. by Maria P. Alter and John C. Caputo in Philosophy Today, vol. 20, no. 4 (Winter 1976), p. 274.
X THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Let us set aside the "Nietzsche case" for the moment, and, without attempting a thorough evaluation of Heidegger's claims concerning his Nietzsche as resistance, try to gain some perspective on two ques- tions. First, what was the nature of Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism? Second, what does Heidegger's Nietzsche tell us about that engagement?
HEIDEGGER'S INVOLVEMENT
The only detailed and reliable accounts of Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism are those by the Freiburg historians Hugo Ott and Bernd Martin. 2 Their research indicates that Heidegger's engage- ment in the university politics of National Socialism was far more intense, and his statements on his own behalf after the War far more unreliable and self-serving, than anyone has suspected. His role as Party member and rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933-1934 was not merely that of a reluctant fellow traveler caught up in a fleet- ing episode of political enthusiasm. Heidegger was not a dupe, not a victim of his own political naivete. The problem is not that Heidegger lacked a political theory and a political praxis but that at least for a time he had them. He devoted his rectorship to devising and carrying out plans for the full synchronization or consolidation (Gleichschal-
2Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1988), esp. pp. 131-246; and Bernd Martin, ed. , Freiburger Universitiitsbliitter, Heft 92, "Martin Heidegger: Ein Philosoph und die Politik" (June 1986), esp. pp. 49-69; now reprinted in Bernd Martin, ed. , Martin Heidegger und das dritte Reich (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989). Among the philosophical responses, see the excellent brief statement by Robert Bernasconi in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London, vol. 12, no. 1 (1990). For an extended, thought-provoking response, see Jacques Derrida, De /'esprit: Heidegger et Ia question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), translated as O f Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); see also my "Spiriting Heidegger," in Research in Phenomenology, vol. XVIII (1988), 205-30, for a brief discussion of Derrida's demanding text. Finally, see Otto Piiggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, 2nd ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1983), pp. 319-55; translated as Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, by Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1987).
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XI
tung) of the German university with the Third Reich. To this end he worked closely with the National-Socialist culture ministries in Karlsruhe and Berlin, that is to say, at both the state and national levels. His active support and leadership of the "reformed" (that is, Party-dominated) student government, his proselytizing on behalf of Hitler and National Socialism in those crucial early years, and, above all, his plan to cripple the university senate and to arrogate to himself as rector full administrative power, to serve as the Fiihrer-Rektor of the university and as the spiritual-intellectual guide of the Party as a whole, are the most damning consequences of that involvement. 3 Even more sinister are his denunciations of university students and colleagues who were recalcitrant to the "Movement," or who could be made to seem so. 4 Finally, Heidegger's efforts in his own defense after the War are, to say the least, less than candid. Both his statement to the denazification committee in 1945 and the Spiegel interview of 1966 distort the record on several important matters, including Heidegger's nomination to and resignation from the rectorship. 5
Yet what Heidegger said after the War pales in comparison with what he left unsaid. Whether for reasons of shame or feelings of help- lessness and hopelessness; whether in proud refusal of public apology or in avoidance of the almost universal sycophancy of those days, dur- ing which countless ex-nazis claimed to have seen, heard, said, done, and been nothing, nowhere, at no time whatsoever; or whether simply out of an incapacity to face the brutal facts, facts beyond wickedness and imagination-whatever the reasons, Heidegger never uttered a
3 See Krell, "Heidegger's Rectification of the German University," in Richard Rand, ed. , Our Academic Contract: "Mochlos" in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1990), forthcoming.
4See Hugo Ott on the Baumgarten and Staudinger cases, pp. 183-84, 201-13, 232-33, and 315-17.
5 See Ott, throughout, but esp. pp. 138-39 and 224-25. See also Franz Vanessen's review in the Badische Zeitungfor May 5, 1983 (no. 103, p. 6) of Hermann Heidegger's edition of the rectoral address and the 1945 statement, Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbe- hauptung der deutschen Universitat; Das Rektorat, 1933/34, Tatsachen und Gedan· ken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983); Karsten Harries has translated both documents in The Review o f Metaphysics, vol. 38, no. 3 (March 1985), 467-502.
xii THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
public word on the extermination of the Jews in the death camps of the Third Reich. While always ready to commiserate with the Ger- man soldiers and refugees in eastern Europe, and while always pre- pared to bemoan the plight of a divided Postwar Germany, Heidegger consigned the horrors of the Holocaust to total silence. A silence intensified by his acknowledgment of the sufferings of his country- men and his fatherland, a silence framed and set off by what he did lament. A silence, in short, that betrays and belittles the matter of his thinking, which he claimed to be his sole concern.
For certain issues in his thinking cry for an end to the silence. His meditations on the technological reduction of human beings to mere stockpiles, on the upsurgence of evil and malignancy in the wake of the departed gods, and on the limitations of contemporary ethical and political thinking remain fundamentally incomplete if they fail to con- front the Extermination. The death camps cry for painstaking think- ing and writing, though not overhasty speech. And Heidegger's silence is more deafening than all the noise of his rectorship.
HEIDEGGER'S NIETZSCHE
Precisely because of that silence, the words of Heidegger's Nietzsche, first published in 1961, are terribly important. They reveal a thinker who is repelled by the racism and biologism of his Party, yet one whose nationalism almost always gets the better of him. It is not yet a chauvinism, not yet a xenophobia, but a nationalism that conforms to the nation of thinkers and poets, a nationalism of the German aca- demic aristocracy of which Heidegger yearned to be a part. National- ism and a certain militancy and even militarism, or at least an admira- tion of things military, of World War I heroes, of striving and struggle, reticence and resoluteness, "the hard and the heavy. "
Let me now, by way of introduction, indicate some of those places in the four volumes reprinted in this two-volume paperback edition of Nietzsche where Heidegger's involvement in or resistance to National Socialism comes to the fore. It seems to me that there are four recur- rent themes in these volumes that are particularly relevant to the question of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and National Socialism: Heideg-
Introduction to the Paperback Edition Xlll
ger's nationalism, his call for decision, what we might call his deci- sionism, his protracted and difficult discussion of nihilism, and his ambivalent position vis-a-vis Nietzsche's alleged biologism.
l. Nationalism. Heidegger's nationalism is not of the flag-waving variety. It is a nationalism of high cultural expectations and intellec- tual demands, shaped by Holderlin's and Nietzsche's challenges to the German people. In Heidegger's view, the matter of thinking as such has to do principally with ancient Greece and contemporary Ger- many, along something like an Athens-Freiburg Axis. Holderlin's and Nietzsche's responses to early Greek thinking and poetry compel nothing less than a historic decision that the German people must confront. There are moments when a crasser form of nationalism obtrudes, as when Heidegger refers to the British destruction of the French fleet at Oran, Algeria, on July 3, 1940 (IV, 144-45); or a more critical form, as when de decries the situation of scientific research in the mobilized and subservient German university that he helped to create (II, 102-4). However, the issue of nationalism is usually far more subtle, as when Heidegger criticizes Nietzsche by suggesting that his primary motivation in metaphysical matters was Latin, Roman, or Italianate, rather than pristinely Greek (IV, 165). Every bit as subtle, yet far more worrying, is Heidegger's suppression of Nietzsche's acerbic anti-Germanism and his positive pan-Europeanism. The latter does emerge occasionally in Heidegger's account, as in the passage we are about to cite, but Heidegger's more persistent atti- tude is betrayed in a note jotted down in 1939: he calls Nietzsche undeutsch-taking that to be a criticism! More troubling still is the pervasive tendency of his lectures and essays to take nihilism and the collapse of values as a matter of the Volk, a matter that calls for bold deeds and interminable struggle:
There is no longer any goal in and through which all the forces of the his- torical existence of peoples can cohere and in the direction of which they can develop; no goal of such a kind, which means at the same time and above all else no goal of such power that it can by virtue of its power con- duct Dasein to its realm in a unified way and bring it to creative evolu- tion. . . . To ground the goal means to awaken and liberate those powers
XIV THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
which lend the newly established goal its surpassing and pervasive energy to inspire commitment. . . . Here, finally, and that means primordially, belongs the growth of forces . . . which induce it to undertake bold deeds. (1, 157-58)
Heidegger emphasizes that such bold deeds cannot be the property of "individual groups, classes, and sects," nor even "individual states and nations," that such deeds must be "European at least. " Yet European is to be taken, not "internationally," but nationally, as though someone were dreaming of reducing all Europe to a single national or imperial power:
That does not mean to say that it should be "international. " For implied in the essence of a creative establishment of goals . . . is that it comes to exist and swings into action, as historical, only in the unity of the fully historical Dasein of men in the form of particular nations. That means neither isola- tion from other nations nor hegemony over them. Establishment of goals is in itself confrontation, the initiation of struggle [Kampf]. But the genu- ine struggle is the one in which those who struggle excel, first the one then the other, and in which the power for such excelling unfolds within them. (1, 158)
Nietzsche's "grand politics," according to Heidegger, rejects the "exploitative power politics of imperialism. " Yet Heidegger's own grand politics retains sufficient emphasis on struggle and boldness to trouble us: the agon between historical peoples, who for reasons Heidegger neglects to provide can swing into action only as nations, will allow no alternation of excellence.
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 .
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. "
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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.
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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.