No one can surpass the
radicality
of that break.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
In order to defend that assertion Heidegger tries to sharpen the "basic philosophical intention" of his interpretation.
He reiterates that the guiding question of philosophy is "What is a being?
" That question inquires into the grounds of beings but seeks such grounds solely among other beings on the path of epistemology.
But the grounding question, "What is Being?
," which would inquire into the meaning of grounds as such and into its own historical grounds as a question, is not posed in the history of philosophy up to and including Nietzsche.
Both questions, the penultimate question of philosophy, and the ultimate question which Heidegger reserves for himself, are couched in the words "What is .
.
.
?
" The "is" of both questions seeks an ouverture upon beings as a whole by which we might determine what they in
truth, in essence, are. Both questions provoke thought on the matter of truth as unconcealment, aletheia; they are preliminaries to the ques- tion of the "essence of truth" and the "truth of essence. " Nietzsche's understanding of beings as a whole, of what is, is enunciated in the phrase "will to power. " But if the question of the essence of truth is already implied in the guiding question of philosophy, then we must ascertain the point where "will to power" and "truth" converge in Nietzsche's philosophy. They do so, astonishingly, not in knowledge (Erkenntnis) but in art (Kunst). The way Nietzsche completes and
Analysis 235
gathers philosophy hitherto has to do with that odd conjunction "truth and art" for which no tertium comparationis seems possible.
Heidegger now (section 12) begins to sketch out the central panel of the triptych. He turns to a passage in The Will to Power (WM, 797) that identifies the "artist phenomenon" as the most perspicuous form of will to power. Grasped in terms of the artist and expanded to the point where it becomes the basic occurrence of all beings, art is pro- claimed the most potent stimulant to life, hence the distinctive coun- termovement to nihilism. As the mightiest stimulans to life, art is
worth more than truth. Heidegger now tries to insert this notion of art into the context of the history of aesth~tics (section 13) with special reference to the problem of form-content. Nietzsche's attempt to de- velop a "physiology of art," which seems to militate against his celebra- tion of art as the countermovement to nihilism, focuses on the phenomenon of artistic Rausch (section 14). After an analysis of Kant's doctrine of the beautiful (section 15), Heidegger defines rapture as the force that engenders form and as the fundamental condition for the enhancement of life (section 16). Form constitutes the actuality of art in the "grand style" (section 17), where the apparent contradiction between physiological investigation and artistic celebration dissolves: Nietzsche's physiology is neither biologism nor positivism, however much it may appear to be. Even aesthetics it carries to an extreme which is no longer "aesthetics" in the traditional sense. At this point (section 18) Heidegger returns to the outset of his inquiry into Nietzsche's view of art and tries to provide a foundation for the five theses on art. Things go well until the third thesis: art in the expanded sense constitutes the "basic occurrence" (Grundgeschehen) of beings as such. A host of questions advances. What are beings as such in truth? Why is truth traditionally viewed as supersensuous? Why does. Nietzsche insist that art is worth more than truth? What does it mean to say that art is "more in being" (seiender) than are other beings? What is the "sensuous world" of art? These questions evoke another which "runs ahead" of both the guiding and grounding questions of philosophy and which therefore may be considered the "foremost"
236 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
question: truth as unconcealment, aletheia, the question broached in section 11.
Heidegger analyzes Nietzsche's anticipation of that question in sec- tion 19, "The Raging Discordance between Truth and Art," the second "hinge" of the course. Nietzsche stands "in holy dread" before the discordance. Why? To answer that we must inquire into the history of the Grundwort or fundamental word "truth. " The decisive develop- ment in that history, argues Heidegger, is that "truth" comes to possess a dual character quite similar to that of Being. Truth can mean a truth, "truths" of various kinds, such as historical judgments, mathematical equations, or logical propositions. Yet each of these can be called a truth only if it participates in a single essence, traditionally designated as "the universal," always valid, hence "immutable and eternal, tran- scending time. " According to Heidegger, Nietzsche's response to the question of truth holds to the route which deviates from the essential one:
It is of decisive importance to know that Nietzsche does not pose the question of truth proper, the question concerning the essence of the true and the truth of essence, and with it the question of the ineluctable possibility of its essential transformation. Nor does he ever stake out the domain of the question.
But if that is so, how can Nietzsche's philosophy gather and com- plete all philosophy hitherto? According to the tradition, "the true" is what is known to be: truth is knowledge. W e recall that this is not the answer for Nietzsche, whose notes on Erkenntnis in the first part of Book III Heidegger deliberately bypasses in order to find in those on Kunst the essential source of the philosophy of will to power. The implication is that, although Nietzsche does not formulate the question of the essence of truth, he removes "the true" from the realm of knowledge to the domain of art. Heidegger does not at this point draw out the consequences of such a removal, but initiates the final stage of the inquiry.
In order to elaborate the meaning of "the true" as an object of knowledge, Heidegger inquires into the doctrines of Platonism and
Analysis 237
positivism (section 20). For the former, the standard for knowledge is the supersensuous idea; for the latter, it is the sensible positum. Each doctrine understands itself as a way of attaining certain knowledge of beings, acquiring truths; the second is merely the inversion of the first. If Nietzsche describes his own philosophy as "inverted Platonism," is it then nothing other than positivism? Nietzsche's manner of overturn- ing, inspired by insight into the fundamental Ereignis of Western history (i. e. , nihilism) and by recognition of art as the essential counter- movement, distinguishes his thought from positivism. Nietzsche's phi- losophy is not merely upside-down Platonism.
Heidegger now (sections 21-23) turns to a number of Platonic texts where the supersensuous character of truth and the duplicitous nature of art become manifest. Art haunts the sensuous realm, the region of nonbeing, which nonetheless is permeated by beauty: because it shares in beauty, art is a way of letting beings appear. However fleeting its epiphanies may be, art is reminiscent of stable Being, the eternal, constant, permanent ideai. The upshot is that if there is a discordance between truth and art in Platonism it must be a felicitous one; by some sort of covert maneuver Platonism must efface the discordance as such. When Nietzsche overturns Platonism, removing "the true" from knowledge to art, he exposes the maneuver and lets the discord rage (section 24). Such exposure arouses dread. For it eradicates the horizon which during the long fable of Occidental thought has segregated the true from the apparent world. Although Nietzsche treads the inessen- tial path of "the true" and does not pose the question of the essence of truth, he pursues that path to the very end (section 25): "the true," "truth" in the traditional metaphysical sense, is fixation of an appari- tion; it clings to a perspective that is essential to life in a way that is ultimately destructive of life. Art, on the contrary, is transfiguration of appearances, the celebration of all perspectives, enhancing and height- ening life. Nietzsche's philosophy rescues the sensuous world. In so doing it compels a question that Nietzsche himself cannot formulate: since all appearance and all apparentness are possible "only if some- thing comes to the fore and shows itself at all," how may the thinker and artist address himself to the self-showing as such?
238 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
I have ignored the amplitude of each section in Heidegger's lecture course for much more than a moment. But certain questions have forced their way to the surface. Why art, in the question of truth? Why Nietzsche, in the question of art?
II. CONTEXTS
In the final hour of the lecture course Heidegger alludes to that generation-his own-which studied at German universities between 1909 and 1914. He complains that during those years Nietzsche's "perspectival optics" of creative art and life implied little more than an aesthetic "touch-up" of traditional academic disciplines and that Nietzsche's significance in and for the history of philosophy remained unrecognized.
Long before he was taken seriously as a thinker, Nietzsche achieved fame as an essayist and acerbic critic of culture. For the prewar genera- tion in all German-speaking countries Nietzsche reigned supreme as the definitive prose stylist and as a first-rate lyric poet. He was a literary "phenomenon" whose work and fate caused his name continually to be linked with that of Holderlin. It was the time when Georg Trakl could recite a number of verses to the aspiring poets of Salzburg's "Minerva Club" and after his confreres began to disparage the poems, believing they were his, could rise and sneer "That was Nietzsche! " and storm out of the place, abandoning them to their public confessions of incom- petence.
Writing in 1930 of the "transformation" taking place in Nietzsche interpretation, Friedrich Wiirzbach looked back to the earliest re- sponses to Nietzsche as a philosopher. 5 He described them as the plaints of wounded souls whose "holiest sentiments" Nietzsche had ravaged and who were now exercising vengeance. A second wave of books and articles endeavored to show that what Nietzsche had to say was already quite familiar and hence harmless; when that did not work a third wave advanced, stressing Nietzsche's utterly novel and peculiar
5Friedrich Wiirzbach, "Die Wandlung der Deutung Nietzsches," Blatter fiir deut- sche Philosophic, IV, 2 (Berlin, 1930), 202-11.
Analysis 239
character, as if to say that he was but a flaw on the fringes of culture which left the fabric of things intact.
It is not until the publication in 1918 of Ernst Bertram's Nietzsche: An Essay in Mythology that Wiirzbach sees a decisive transformation in Nietzsche interpretation. 6 For at least a decade afterward no book on Nietzsche could ignore Bertram's alternately fascinating and in- furiating but always dazzling essay. Bertram's Nietzsche is a legendary "personality" whose individuality transcends the customary confine-
ments of a single human life to ascend "through all the signs of the zodiac" and become a "fixed star" in the memory of man. Such legends rise of themselves in spite of all that scientific demythologizing can do, assuming for each succeeding generation a special meaning, represent- ing a particular "mask of the god. " Nietzsche, whose legend has only begun, is a mask of Dionysus crucified. He embodies "the incurability of his century. " Nietzsche is torn in two; his mythos is "duality. "
The style of Bertram's essay seems a German counterpart to the prose of Yeats' middle period. It is the "extravagant style" which the poet, according to Robartes, "had learnt from Pater. " Bertram's fasci- nation with myth and legend also is reminiscent of Yeats' A Vision. (Both Bertram's Versuch einer Mythologie and Yeats' "The Phases of the Moon" appeared in 1918. ) Yeats' poem contains the following lines, spoken by Robartes but expressing Ernst Bertram's principal theme:
. . . Eleven pass, and then Athene takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero's crescent is the twelfth.
And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must, Before the full moon, helpless as a worm. ?
6Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie {Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1918). For the quotations in the text see pp. 7-10, 12, and 361-62.
7William Butler Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon," The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Definitive Edition {New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 161. See also William Butler Yeats, A Vision {New York: Collier, 1966), p. 60; note the references to Nietzsche on
pp. 126 ff. and 299. Cf. Bertram, p. 10
240 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Unlike Yeats, however, Bertram dispenses with much of Nietzsche's thought. He derides eternal recurrence-which in Heidegger's view is Nietzsche's central thought-as a "fake revelation," the "deceptively aping, lunatic mysterium of the later Nietzsche. "
Wi. irzbach voices the complaint of all those who struggled to free themselves from Bertram's bewitchment: however convincing his in- sertion of Nietzsche into the tradition of Luther, Novalis, and Holder- lin, of Eleusis and Patmos may be, it manacles Nietzsche to a moribund tradition and lets him sink with it. Bertram's extravagant style therefore seems an elaborate Grabrede or obsequy, soothing, mystifying, mes- merizing, in a word, Wagnerian. Ernst Gundolf and Kurt Hildebrandt reject Bertram's "supratemporal" approach to Nietzsche. 8 They are writing (in 1922) at a time of "dire need" in Germany and see in Nietzsche not the stuff of myths but "the judge of our times" and "guide to our future. " For Nietzsche is the legislator of new values. His "office" is juridical. "His basic question was not 'What is? ' " writes Gundolf, in opposition to what Heidegger will later assert, "but the far more compelling question, 'What is to be done? ' " Yet for Kurt Hildebrandt, as for all members of the Stefan George circle, Nietzsche is ultimately a legend of the Bertramesque sort. He is a hero who wills to supply a "norm" to replace the dilapidated structures of Platonic ideality but whose role as opponent consumes him. He would be
Vollender, apotheosis, and is but Vorlaufer, precursor. Rejecting the Platonic idea, perhaps "out of envy toward Plato," Nietzsche does not achieve the heights to which Platonic eros alone could have conducted him; he remains foreign to the Phaedrus and is banned from the Symposium. Liberator he may be; creator he is not. "He was not Holderlin, who was able to mold a new world in poetry, but the hero who hurled himself upon a despicable age and so became its victim. "9 Neither is he Stefan George. "What Nietzsche frantically craved to be
8Ernst Cundolf and Kurt Hildebrandt, Nietzsche als Richter unsrer Zeit (Breslau: F. Hirt, 1922). For the quotations in the text, unless otherwise noted, see pp. 4, 89, 96, and 103.
9Ibid. , p. 92.
Analysis 241
George is. "10 Still, whatever the outcome of his contest with Plato and Socrates,11 and of his battle against the nineteenth century, which became a battle against Wagner,12 Nietzsche remains the "judge of our times" in search of values which will halt the degeneration of man and the decline of the state.
The outcome of preoccupations with Nietzsche as "judge" is of course hardly a fortunate one. Stefan George and his circle dream of a grandiose politeia, "a new 'Reich,' " as one writer puts it, created along the guidelines of "the Dionysian Deutsch"; they foresee the development of a supreme race combining elements of Greek and Nordic civilization, flourishing on German soii. n That same writer recognizes in Alfred Baeumler's Nietzsche: Philosopher and Politician a giant stride in the right direction. I4
To summarize: Nietzsche first gained notoriety as a literary phe- nomenon; his writings were exemplary for the generation that came to maturity during the Great War; by the end of that conflict Nietzsche was a legend, a Cassandra whose prophecy was fulfilled in Europe's ruin. Interest in Nietzsche as a philosopher remained over- shadowed by interest in his prophecy and personal fate. Symptomatic
10Ibid. , p. 102.
11Kurt Hildebrandt, Nietzsches Wettkampf mit Sokrates und Plato (Dresden: Sibyl- lenverlag, I922).
12Kurt Hildebr;~dt, Wagner und Nietzsche: lhr Kampf gegen das neunzehnte fahr- hundert (Breslau, 1924). Heidegger refers to the work in section 13 of The Will to Power as Art.
13Cf. Theodor Steinbiichel, "Die Philosophic Friedrich Nietzsches, ihre geistesge- schichtliche Situation, ihr Sinn und ihre Wirkung," Zeitschrift fiir deutsche Ceis- tesgeschichte, III (Salzburg, I937), 280-81.
14Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: P. Reclam, 1931 ). This is of course the work that Heidegger criticizes in section 4, above. Heidegger'. s opposition to the Nietzsche interpretation of Baeumler, professor of philosophy and a leading ideologue in Berlin from I933 to 1945, I will discuss in the Analysis of Nietzsche IV: Nihilism. Baeumler's arguments concerning the Nietzschean Nachlass, which ap- pear to have influenced Heidegger, I will take up in the Analysis of Nietzsche Ill: Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Baeumler's thesis on the contradiction between will to power and eternal recurrence I will consider in the Analysis of Nietzsche II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
242 THE \VJLL TO POWER AS ART
of that interest was the fascination exerted by his medical history, especially his insanity, and reflected in the studies by P. J. Mobius (1902), Kurt Hildebrandt (1926), Erich Podach (1930), and Karl Jaspers (1936). Only as a critic of culture, as the philosopher of cultural revaluation, was Nietzsche's voice heard.
But a second strain of interest in Nietzsche develops alongside that of Kulturphilosophie, mirrored in the title "Nietzsche and the philos- ophy of 'life. ' "15 Here Nietzsche is acclaimed as the passionate advocate of life and opponent of the "paralyzed, soulless formulas" of the contemporary "transcendental" philosophy. Nietzsche struggles to find a new scale of values, not in some schema imposed upon life by a transcendent world, but in life itself. He must define the quality of life that is desirable, yet must select criteria that are immanent in life. His physiology, rooted in a metaphysics of will to power, even though it fails to remain absolutely immanent in life, influences a large number of philosophers of vitalism and organism, such as Eduard von Hartmann, Henri Bergson, Hans Driesch, and Erich Becher. If Baeumler is the noxious blossom of the first strain, however, then Ludwig Klages' philosophy of "orgiastics" is the exotic bloom of Lebensphilosophie. ! 6 Klages exalts life with even wilder abandon than Zarathustra, recognizing in all forms of Geist (including the will) an enemy of man's embodied life or "soul. " Nietzsche's "psychological achievement," according to Klages' influential book, is to demarcate the "battleground" between the "ascetic priests" of Yahweh and the "orgiasts" of Dionysus. I? His psychological faux pas is that the doctrine of will remains ensnared in the machinations of those priests. Klages' final judgment is that Nietzsche's best consists of "fragments of a philosophy of orgiastics" and that everything else in his thought "is
15Cf. Theodor Litt, "Nietzsche und die Philosophie des 'Lebens,' " Handbuch der Philosophie, eds. A. Baeumler and M. Schriiter (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1931}, Abteilung III D, pp. 167-72:
16See especially Klages' three-volume work entitled Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929-1932}, available in Ludwig Klages, 5amtliche Werke (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964 ff. ).
17Ludwig Klages, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches (1926), p. 210. Cited by Theodor Steinbiichel, pp. 275-76.
Analysis 243
worthless. " 1s If Heidegger goes to great lengths to rescue Apollo, and Nietzsche too, by organizing his central discussion of art about the theme of form in the grand style, he does so against the din of the Dionysian Klage (= lament) whose bells and timbrels owe more to Bayreuth than to Thebes.
Finally, there is a nascent third strain of Nietzsche appreciation already stirring when Heidegger begins his lecture series on that philosopher, an "existentialist" appreciation. The publication of Karl Jaspers' Reason and Existence in 1935 and Nietzsche: Introduction to an Understanding of His Philosophizing in 1936 marks its advent. 19 Jaspers' work resists rapid depiction. Yet its main thrust may be felt in the third book, "Nietzsche's Mode of Thought in the Totality of Its Existence. " Jaspers measures Nietzsche's significance neither in terms of biography nor on the basis of doxography; neither the life nor the doctrines alone constitute the Ereignis which for subsequent thinkers
Nietzsche indisputably is. It is Nietzsche's dedication to the task of thought throughout the whole of his existence that elevates him to enormous heights-that dedication, plus his passion to communicate and his skill in devising masks for his passion. Ultimately it is the courage he displays in posing to Existenz the question of the meaning of the whole: warum? wozu? why? to what end? By asking about the worth of the whole Nietzsche executes a radical break with the past, past morality, past philosophy, past humanity.
No one can surpass the radicality of that break. Nietzsche, writes Jaspers, "thought it through to its ultimate consequences; it is scarcely possible to take a step farther along that route. " Yet what drives Nietzsche to that protracted and painful rupture with the past is something powerfully affirmative, the "yes" to life, overman, and eternal recurrence; it is in the formulation
l8Ibid. , p. 168. Cited by Steinbiichel, p. 276.
19'fheodor Steinbiichel's mammoth article provides a "Christian existentialist" view. of Nietzsche's "situation" in 1936-37. Karl Jaspers' Nietzsche: Einfiihrung in das Ver- stiindnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin: W. de Cruyter, 1936) serves as Steinbiichel's principal source, but his article refers to much of the literature. Especially valuable in the present context is part six of Steinbiichel's essay, "Current Interpretations of Exis- tence under the Influence of Nietzsche," pp. 270-81. For the quotations in the text see Jaspers' Nietzsche, pp. 393-94.
244 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
of the positive side of Nietzsche's philosophy that Jaspers foresees a successful career for subsequent philosophy. Thus he lauds Nietzsche's critique of morality as that which "cleared the path for the philosophy of existence. " Although Nietzsche denies transcendence with every fiber of his existence, Jaspers concludes that the fury of his denial testifies willy-nilly to the embrace of the encompassing.
Of course, Jaspers is not the only philosopher of Existenz. Stein- biichel mentions Jaspers only after he has discussed the writer he takes to be the chief representative of the new philosophy-Martin Heidegger. 20 The works by Heidegger which Steinbiichel was able to refer to, whether explicitly or implicitly, are Being and Time, What is Metaphysics? , On the Essence of Ground, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. What Heidegger was teaching in Freiburg as Stein- biichel composed his article Steinbiichel could not know. Hence what is fascinating about his remarks is that they betray what one might well have expected from a lecture course by Heidegger on Nietzsche. The gap between expectation and reality is considerable.
According to Steinbiichel, Heidegger's philosophy understands man, and Being itself, to be essentially finite; it is Nietzsche who has pointed to human finitude in an unforgettable way. That Heidegger radically extrudes man's "transcendent being toward God" is therefore due to Nietzsche. Nevertheless, Heidegger promulgates "a concealed ethics" according to which man must resolutely assume the burden of his own being. Steinbiichel sees here the "Nietzschean imperative" that man become who he most properly is, scorning the "last man" who remains steeped in "everydayness. " Yet Heidegger's secret ethics, his "yes" to the Self, does not preserve Nietzsche's "tremendous faith in life. " Nietzsche transfigures Dionysian insight into dithyramb, while Hei- degger, in the face of the "thrownness" and "fallenness" of Dasein, can only muster a "reticent resignation. "
Whatever value Steinbiichel's remarks on Nietzsche's role in Hei- degger's thought may have, what remains striking is the variance be- tween his and Heidegger's own accounts of that role. The former
2°Cf. T. Steinbiichel, pp. 271-73.
Analysis 245
mentions neither art nor truth; Nietzsche's importance for the history of metaphysics does not become conspicuous there; and that the telos of Heidegger's inquiry into Nietzsche should be Platonism and Plato seems on the basis of Steinbiichel's account altogether out of the question.
Yet it is only fair to say that even forty years later the context of Heidegger's inquiry into Nietzsche is not readily discernible. His inves- tigation has little or nothing to do with Nietzsche as litterateur, icono- clast, legend, legislator, judge, inmate, orgiast, or existentialist. My analysis must therefore turn to Heidegger's own writings which are contemporary with or prior to the Nietzsche lectures, in search of a more relevant context.
Heidegger first studied Nietzsche during his student years in Frei- burg between 1909 and 1914. He discovered the expanded 1906 edition of notes from the Nachlass selected and arranged by Heinrich Koselitz (pseud. Peter Cast) and Frau Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and given the title Der Wille zur Macht. That book, indispensable because of the quality of Nietzsche's unpublished notes, unreliable because of editori- al procedures and unscrupulous manipulations by Nietzsche's sister, eventually occupied a central place in Heidegger's developing compre- hension of Western metaphysics as the history of Being. Although he would refer to the whole range of Nietzsche's published writings dur- ing his lectures and essays two decades later, Der WJ1/e zur Macht is the text he was to assign his students and the source of his principal topics: will to power as art and knowledge (from Book Three, sections I and IV), the eternal recurrence of the same (Book Four, section III), and nihilism (Book One).
That volume's influence on Heidegger is visible already in his "early writings," not as an explicit theme for investigation but as an incentive to philosophical research in general. In his venia legendi lecture of 1915, "The Concept of Time in Historiography," Heidegger alludes to philosophy's proper "will to power. "ZI He means the urgent need for
21Martin Heidegger, Friihe Schriften (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1972), p. 357.
246
THF: WILL TO POWER AS ART
philosophy to advance beyond theory of knowledge to inquiry into the goal and purpose of philosophy as such, in other words, the need to advance in the direction of metaphysics. In the habilitation thesis which precedes the venia legendi lecture Heidegger wrestles with the problem· of the historical (as opposed to the systematic) approach to philosophy. 22 Here too Nietzsche's influence is unmistakable. Phi- losophy possesses a value for culture and exhibits a historical situation, as Dilthey saw; it also puts forward the claim of validity, as Husserl and the Neo-Kantians argued. But Heidegger stresses a third factor, namely, philosophy's "function as a value for life. " Philosophy itself exists "in tension with the living personality" of the philosopher, "drawing its content and value out of the depths and the abundance of life in that personality. " In this connection Heidegger refers to Nietzsche's formulation "the drive to philosophize," citing that philosopher's "relentlessly austere manner of thought," a manner enlivened, however, by a gift for "flexible and apt depiction. "
That Heidegger's own drive to philosophize receives much of its impulse from Nietzsche is not immediately obvious to the. reader of Being and Time (1927). During the intervening Marburg years Nietzsche was set aside in favor of Aristotle, Husserl, Kant, Aquinas, and Plato. Perhaps Heidegger now wished to distance himself from the Nietzsche adopted by Lebensphilosophie and philosophies of culture and value. His rejection of the category "life" for his own analyses of Dasein is clearly visible already in 1919-21, the years of his confron- tation with Karl Jaspers' Psychology of Weltanschauungen. 23 And although Nietzsche's shadow flits across the pages of the published Marburg lectures, Heidegger's vehement rejection of the value-
22Ibid. , pp. 137-38.
23See Martin Heidegger, "Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers' Psychologie der Weltan- schauungen," Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion, ed. Hans Saner (Munich: R. Piper, 1973), pp. 70-100, esp. pp. 78-79. (The essay now appears as the first chapter of Wegmarken in the new Gesamtausgabe edition, Frankfurt/Main, 1977. ) See also D. F. Krell, Inti· mations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), chapter one, "From Existence to Fundamental Ontology. "
Analysis 247
philosophy of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert un- doubtedly delayed his public confrontation with the philosopher who demanded the revaluation of all values. 24
In Being and Time itself only three references to Nietzsche's thought appear, only one of them an essential reference, so that it seems perverse to argue that Nietzsche lies concealed "on every printed page of Sein und Zeit. "25 Yet we ought to postpone discussion of Nietzsche's role in awakening the question of Being and Time until Heidegger's own Nietzsche lectures provide the proper occasion for it. Z6 By way of anticipation I may cite one introductory remark by Heidegger in "The Word of Nietzsche: 'Cod is Dead'": "The follow- ing commentary, with regard to its intention and according to its scope, keeps to that one experience on the basis of which Being and Time was thought. "27 If that one experience is the oblivion of Being, which implies forgottenness of the nothing in which Dasein is suspended, we may ask whether in Being and Time Heidegger tries to complete Nietzsche's task by bringing the question of the death of Cod home-inquiring into the death of Dasein and the demise of metaphysical logos, both inquiries being essential prerequisites for the remembrance of Being.
If Nietzsche's role in the question of Being and Time is not obvious, neither is the role played there by art. References in Heidegger's major work to works of art are rare, although we recall the extended reference
24See for example volume 21 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt/Main, 1976), which reprints Heidegger's course on "logic" delivered in 1925-26. By Nietzsche's "shadow" I mean such analyses as that of the development of psychology (p. 36) or that of the protective vanity of philosophers (p. 97). Heidegger's contempt for Wertphilosophie emerges throughout the course, but see esp. pp. 82-83 and 91-92.
25I argued this way, correctly (as I believe) but perhaps unconvincingly, in my disserta- tion "Nietzsche and the Task of Thinking: Martin Heidegger's Reading of Nietzsche': (Duquesne University, 1971), but perhaps more convincingly in chapters six and eight of my Intimations ofMortality. The three references to Nietzsche in Being and Time appear (in Neimeyer's twelfth edition, 1972) on. p. 264, lines 15-16, p. 272 n. 1, and, the essential reference, to Nietzsche's "On the Usefulness and Disadvantages of History for Life," p. 396, lines 16 ff.
26See for example Nil, 194-95 and 260.
27Martin Heidegger, Ho/zwege (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1950), p. 195.
248
THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
to Hyginus' fable of Cura in section 42. But for the most part literature and art appear as occasions where "they" come and go talking of Michelangelo. If enjoying works of art as "they" do is symptomatic of everydayness, we might well ask how art is to be properly encountered. Yet the fact remains that art is little discussed. The distance covered between the years 1927 and 1937 in Heidegger's career of thought is enormous: Steinbiichel's expectations are evidence enough of that.
From his earliest student days Heidegger had displayed an interest in literature and art: the novels of Dostoevsky and Adalbert Stifter, the poetry of Holderlin, Rilke, and Trakl (whose poems Heidegger read when they were first published prior to the war), and the Expressionist movement in painting and poetry. Such interest at that time did not and could not irradiate the sober, somber halls of Wissenschaft. But in the 1930s literature and art came to occupy the very center of Heidegger's project, for they became central to the question of truth as disclosure and unconcealment. A glance at Heidegger's lecture schedule during the decade of the 1930s suggests something of this development.
Schelling, for whose system art is of supreme importance, is taught many times, as are Hegel's Phenomenology and Kant's third critique. (Kant's importance for Heidegger in this respect, ignored in the litera- ture because of the overweening significance of Heidegger's publica- tions on the first critique, we may gauge from his stalwart defense of Kant in section 15 of The Will to Power as Art. ) Plato, the artist of dialogue, dominates all those courses where the essence of truth is the focus. It is unfortunate that we know nothing of Heidegger's 1935-36 colloquium with Kurt Bauch on "overcoming aesthetics in the question of art. " We might hazard a guess that the "six basic developments in the history of aesthetics" (section 13, above) mirror the outcome of that colloquium. It is also unfortunate that we do not know what transpires in Heidegger's seminar on "selected fragments from Schil- ler's philosophical writings on art," which runs parallel to these
Nietzsche lectures. Perhaps the references to Schiller (pp. 108 and 113) provide clues. But of all these lectures and seminars surely the most instructive would be the 1934-35 lectures on Holderlin's Hymns,
Analysis 249
"The Rhine" and "Germania. " From the single lecture "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (1936) we derive some "indirect light," as Heidegger says in his Foreword to the Nietzsche volumes, on the parallel rise of Nietzsche and of art in his thought on aletheia.
Perhaps further light will be shed if we consider three other works stemming from the same period. "The Anaximander Fragment" (com- posed in 1946 but drawing on a course taught during the summer semester of 1932), "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (published in 1943 but based on courses held from 1930 on, especially that of the winter semester of 1931-32), and "The Origin of the Work of Art" (published in 1950 but composed in 1935-36 and revised while the first Nietzsche course was in session). But in examining these four essays I cease the work of background and try to limn the figures of the matter itself.
III. QUESTIONS
Why art, in the question of truth?
Why Nietzsche, in the question of art?
On the occasion of the publication of the fourth, expanded edition
of Erlauterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (1971) Heidegger remarked that those commentaries sprang from einer Notwendigkeit des Denk- ens, "a necessity of thought. "28 But the phrase is ambiguous. I take it to mean that Heidegger's thought turns to Holderlin out of need, Not-wendig, in much the same way as Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence is "a cry out of need," Aufschrei aus einer Not (NI, 310). If Holderlin's times are destitute, the epoch of Nietzsche and Heidegger is desperate. While Holderlin can aver, "Indeed, the gods live," Nietzsche must conclude, "God is dead. " The latter refrain dominates Heidegger's lectures and essays on Nietzsche; the phrase· appears in his Rektoratsrede as a signal of urgency; it is the key to
28Martin Heidegger, Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), p. 7. Cf. Beda Allemann, Holder/in und Heidegger (Zurich: Atlan- tis, 1956), parts II-IV.
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Nietzsche's precarious position at the end of metaphysics and to Heidegger's before the task of his thinking. 29
Two remarks in Heidegger's Holderlin essay are particularly reveal- ing with respect to Heidegger's turn to that poet. First, Heidegger insists that the being and essence of things, hence the naming of the gods, can never be derived from things that lie at hand. They must be "freely created. "30 As the motto for his lecture course on will to power as art Heidegger chooses a phrase from The Antichrist: "Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god! " Is it then a matter of concocting novel divinities? Or of lighting a lantern in broad daylight to search out old familiar ones? A second remark from the Holderlin essay silences these overhasty questions and redirects the inquiry. Man possesses language in order to say who he is and to give testimony. About what is he to testify? "His belonging to the earth. "31 All creation, poiesis, testifies to man's dwelling on the earth, remaining in Zarathustran fashion "true to the earth. " Yet it is an earth cut loose from her sun and deprived of her horizon and a dwelling that hovers in holy dread before the raging discordance of art and truth.
Heidegger's "turn out of need" to the poetry of Holderlin should not, however, be reduced to an incident of biography. It is not merely a necessity in Heidegger's intellectual life but a turning in the history of the question of Being. Heidegger speaks of that turning in many essays composed during the 1930s and 1940s. Of special consequence here are "The Anaximander Fragment" and "Plato's Doctrine of Truth. " To the situation of the former essay Heidegger gives the name "eschatology of Being. " By that he means the outermost point in the history of the Occident or evening-land from which he descries the dawn. (Whether it is the dawn of Anaximander's epoch or that of a new age is impossible to tell: Heidegger can only attempt to "ponder the
290tto Poggeler writes, "Ever since 1929-30, when Nietzsche became a matter of 'decision' for Heidegger, his new starting point for thinking the truth of Being was dominated by the all-determining presupposition that God is 'dead. '" Otto Poggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger {Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1972), p. 25.
30Martin Heidegger, Erliiuterungen, p. 41. l1Ibid. , p. 36.
Analysis 251
former dawn through what is imminent. "32) The name that recurs in the opening pages of the Anaximander essay, designating the eschaton of the history of Being, is "Nietzsche. "ll Even if we reduce matters to biography there is no obvious reason why the name "Nietzsche" and no other must appear here. Indeed the reason is highly complex. Heidegger attempts to uncover it during his protracted lecture series on Nietzsche.
A further hint of Nietzsche's significance as a figure of dusk and dawn, Abendland and MorgenrOte, and as our point of entry into the issue of Western history as a whole, emerges from the essay on "Plato's doctrine of Truth. " Here too Heidegger speaks of a turning and a need. 34 But it is not merely a turning or a need apropos of Heidegger himself. It is rather "a turning in the determination of the essence of truth" and a need for "not only beings but Being" to become "worthy of question. " Much later in his career Heidegger comes to doubt the validity of the thesis expounded in his Plato essay, to wit, that a transformation in the essence of truth from unconcealment to correctness occurs as such in Plato; yet his early inquiry into Plato's doctrine of truth as portrayed in the Allegory of the Cave remains a highly thought-provoking effort. J5 It is an effort to confront the
32Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 302. Cf. the English translation, Early Creek Thinking, tr. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 18. llSee Early Creek Thinking, pp. 13-14, 17, and 22-23. See also my remarks in the
Introduction to the volume, pp. 9-10.
l4See the first and last pages of the essay in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frank-
furt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1967). pp. 109 and 144.
l5(n "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" Heidegger explicitly rejects
the thesis of his earlier essay on Plato. (See Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens [Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1969], p. 78. ) The assertion that in Plato we find an "essential transformation of truth" from unconcealment to correctness is "untenable. " Heidegger apparently accedes to the arguments of Paul Friedlander and others that in Greek literature and philosophy alethes always modifies verbs of speech. Although aletheia may indeed derive from letha (lanthano) and the alpha-privative, the sense of "unconceal- ment" seems to have evanesced even before Homer sang. Hence there is no essential transformation of truth from unconcealment to correctness; at least, none that can be located in Plato. There is instead an essential continuity in the history of "truth," a tendency to regard the true as correctness of assertion or correspondence of statement and fact, without asking about the domain in which words and things so wondrously converge.
252 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
consequences of Plato's conjunction of aletheia, interpreted as orthotes or correctness of viewing, and paideia, education in the broadest possible sense. Essential to the allegory are the transformations or rites of passage undergone by the prisoners of the cave on their way to and from the Ideas, their liberation, conversion, ascent and descent, and the attendant bedazzlements, adjustments, and insights. Heidegger emphasizes that liberation is not simply an unshackling: the liberated prisoner does not run amok but confronts fire and sun, growing accustomed to "fixing his view upon the fixed boundaries of things affixed in their forms.
truth, in essence, are. Both questions provoke thought on the matter of truth as unconcealment, aletheia; they are preliminaries to the ques- tion of the "essence of truth" and the "truth of essence. " Nietzsche's understanding of beings as a whole, of what is, is enunciated in the phrase "will to power. " But if the question of the essence of truth is already implied in the guiding question of philosophy, then we must ascertain the point where "will to power" and "truth" converge in Nietzsche's philosophy. They do so, astonishingly, not in knowledge (Erkenntnis) but in art (Kunst). The way Nietzsche completes and
Analysis 235
gathers philosophy hitherto has to do with that odd conjunction "truth and art" for which no tertium comparationis seems possible.
Heidegger now (section 12) begins to sketch out the central panel of the triptych. He turns to a passage in The Will to Power (WM, 797) that identifies the "artist phenomenon" as the most perspicuous form of will to power. Grasped in terms of the artist and expanded to the point where it becomes the basic occurrence of all beings, art is pro- claimed the most potent stimulant to life, hence the distinctive coun- termovement to nihilism. As the mightiest stimulans to life, art is
worth more than truth. Heidegger now tries to insert this notion of art into the context of the history of aesth~tics (section 13) with special reference to the problem of form-content. Nietzsche's attempt to de- velop a "physiology of art," which seems to militate against his celebra- tion of art as the countermovement to nihilism, focuses on the phenomenon of artistic Rausch (section 14). After an analysis of Kant's doctrine of the beautiful (section 15), Heidegger defines rapture as the force that engenders form and as the fundamental condition for the enhancement of life (section 16). Form constitutes the actuality of art in the "grand style" (section 17), where the apparent contradiction between physiological investigation and artistic celebration dissolves: Nietzsche's physiology is neither biologism nor positivism, however much it may appear to be. Even aesthetics it carries to an extreme which is no longer "aesthetics" in the traditional sense. At this point (section 18) Heidegger returns to the outset of his inquiry into Nietzsche's view of art and tries to provide a foundation for the five theses on art. Things go well until the third thesis: art in the expanded sense constitutes the "basic occurrence" (Grundgeschehen) of beings as such. A host of questions advances. What are beings as such in truth? Why is truth traditionally viewed as supersensuous? Why does. Nietzsche insist that art is worth more than truth? What does it mean to say that art is "more in being" (seiender) than are other beings? What is the "sensuous world" of art? These questions evoke another which "runs ahead" of both the guiding and grounding questions of philosophy and which therefore may be considered the "foremost"
236 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
question: truth as unconcealment, aletheia, the question broached in section 11.
Heidegger analyzes Nietzsche's anticipation of that question in sec- tion 19, "The Raging Discordance between Truth and Art," the second "hinge" of the course. Nietzsche stands "in holy dread" before the discordance. Why? To answer that we must inquire into the history of the Grundwort or fundamental word "truth. " The decisive develop- ment in that history, argues Heidegger, is that "truth" comes to possess a dual character quite similar to that of Being. Truth can mean a truth, "truths" of various kinds, such as historical judgments, mathematical equations, or logical propositions. Yet each of these can be called a truth only if it participates in a single essence, traditionally designated as "the universal," always valid, hence "immutable and eternal, tran- scending time. " According to Heidegger, Nietzsche's response to the question of truth holds to the route which deviates from the essential one:
It is of decisive importance to know that Nietzsche does not pose the question of truth proper, the question concerning the essence of the true and the truth of essence, and with it the question of the ineluctable possibility of its essential transformation. Nor does he ever stake out the domain of the question.
But if that is so, how can Nietzsche's philosophy gather and com- plete all philosophy hitherto? According to the tradition, "the true" is what is known to be: truth is knowledge. W e recall that this is not the answer for Nietzsche, whose notes on Erkenntnis in the first part of Book III Heidegger deliberately bypasses in order to find in those on Kunst the essential source of the philosophy of will to power. The implication is that, although Nietzsche does not formulate the question of the essence of truth, he removes "the true" from the realm of knowledge to the domain of art. Heidegger does not at this point draw out the consequences of such a removal, but initiates the final stage of the inquiry.
In order to elaborate the meaning of "the true" as an object of knowledge, Heidegger inquires into the doctrines of Platonism and
Analysis 237
positivism (section 20). For the former, the standard for knowledge is the supersensuous idea; for the latter, it is the sensible positum. Each doctrine understands itself as a way of attaining certain knowledge of beings, acquiring truths; the second is merely the inversion of the first. If Nietzsche describes his own philosophy as "inverted Platonism," is it then nothing other than positivism? Nietzsche's manner of overturn- ing, inspired by insight into the fundamental Ereignis of Western history (i. e. , nihilism) and by recognition of art as the essential counter- movement, distinguishes his thought from positivism. Nietzsche's phi- losophy is not merely upside-down Platonism.
Heidegger now (sections 21-23) turns to a number of Platonic texts where the supersensuous character of truth and the duplicitous nature of art become manifest. Art haunts the sensuous realm, the region of nonbeing, which nonetheless is permeated by beauty: because it shares in beauty, art is a way of letting beings appear. However fleeting its epiphanies may be, art is reminiscent of stable Being, the eternal, constant, permanent ideai. The upshot is that if there is a discordance between truth and art in Platonism it must be a felicitous one; by some sort of covert maneuver Platonism must efface the discordance as such. When Nietzsche overturns Platonism, removing "the true" from knowledge to art, he exposes the maneuver and lets the discord rage (section 24). Such exposure arouses dread. For it eradicates the horizon which during the long fable of Occidental thought has segregated the true from the apparent world. Although Nietzsche treads the inessen- tial path of "the true" and does not pose the question of the essence of truth, he pursues that path to the very end (section 25): "the true," "truth" in the traditional metaphysical sense, is fixation of an appari- tion; it clings to a perspective that is essential to life in a way that is ultimately destructive of life. Art, on the contrary, is transfiguration of appearances, the celebration of all perspectives, enhancing and height- ening life. Nietzsche's philosophy rescues the sensuous world. In so doing it compels a question that Nietzsche himself cannot formulate: since all appearance and all apparentness are possible "only if some- thing comes to the fore and shows itself at all," how may the thinker and artist address himself to the self-showing as such?
238 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
I have ignored the amplitude of each section in Heidegger's lecture course for much more than a moment. But certain questions have forced their way to the surface. Why art, in the question of truth? Why Nietzsche, in the question of art?
II. CONTEXTS
In the final hour of the lecture course Heidegger alludes to that generation-his own-which studied at German universities between 1909 and 1914. He complains that during those years Nietzsche's "perspectival optics" of creative art and life implied little more than an aesthetic "touch-up" of traditional academic disciplines and that Nietzsche's significance in and for the history of philosophy remained unrecognized.
Long before he was taken seriously as a thinker, Nietzsche achieved fame as an essayist and acerbic critic of culture. For the prewar genera- tion in all German-speaking countries Nietzsche reigned supreme as the definitive prose stylist and as a first-rate lyric poet. He was a literary "phenomenon" whose work and fate caused his name continually to be linked with that of Holderlin. It was the time when Georg Trakl could recite a number of verses to the aspiring poets of Salzburg's "Minerva Club" and after his confreres began to disparage the poems, believing they were his, could rise and sneer "That was Nietzsche! " and storm out of the place, abandoning them to their public confessions of incom- petence.
Writing in 1930 of the "transformation" taking place in Nietzsche interpretation, Friedrich Wiirzbach looked back to the earliest re- sponses to Nietzsche as a philosopher. 5 He described them as the plaints of wounded souls whose "holiest sentiments" Nietzsche had ravaged and who were now exercising vengeance. A second wave of books and articles endeavored to show that what Nietzsche had to say was already quite familiar and hence harmless; when that did not work a third wave advanced, stressing Nietzsche's utterly novel and peculiar
5Friedrich Wiirzbach, "Die Wandlung der Deutung Nietzsches," Blatter fiir deut- sche Philosophic, IV, 2 (Berlin, 1930), 202-11.
Analysis 239
character, as if to say that he was but a flaw on the fringes of culture which left the fabric of things intact.
It is not until the publication in 1918 of Ernst Bertram's Nietzsche: An Essay in Mythology that Wiirzbach sees a decisive transformation in Nietzsche interpretation. 6 For at least a decade afterward no book on Nietzsche could ignore Bertram's alternately fascinating and in- furiating but always dazzling essay. Bertram's Nietzsche is a legendary "personality" whose individuality transcends the customary confine-
ments of a single human life to ascend "through all the signs of the zodiac" and become a "fixed star" in the memory of man. Such legends rise of themselves in spite of all that scientific demythologizing can do, assuming for each succeeding generation a special meaning, represent- ing a particular "mask of the god. " Nietzsche, whose legend has only begun, is a mask of Dionysus crucified. He embodies "the incurability of his century. " Nietzsche is torn in two; his mythos is "duality. "
The style of Bertram's essay seems a German counterpart to the prose of Yeats' middle period. It is the "extravagant style" which the poet, according to Robartes, "had learnt from Pater. " Bertram's fasci- nation with myth and legend also is reminiscent of Yeats' A Vision. (Both Bertram's Versuch einer Mythologie and Yeats' "The Phases of the Moon" appeared in 1918. ) Yeats' poem contains the following lines, spoken by Robartes but expressing Ernst Bertram's principal theme:
. . . Eleven pass, and then Athene takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero's crescent is the twelfth.
And yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must, Before the full moon, helpless as a worm. ?
6Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie {Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1918). For the quotations in the text see pp. 7-10, 12, and 361-62.
7William Butler Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon," The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Definitive Edition {New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 161. See also William Butler Yeats, A Vision {New York: Collier, 1966), p. 60; note the references to Nietzsche on
pp. 126 ff. and 299. Cf. Bertram, p. 10
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Unlike Yeats, however, Bertram dispenses with much of Nietzsche's thought. He derides eternal recurrence-which in Heidegger's view is Nietzsche's central thought-as a "fake revelation," the "deceptively aping, lunatic mysterium of the later Nietzsche. "
Wi. irzbach voices the complaint of all those who struggled to free themselves from Bertram's bewitchment: however convincing his in- sertion of Nietzsche into the tradition of Luther, Novalis, and Holder- lin, of Eleusis and Patmos may be, it manacles Nietzsche to a moribund tradition and lets him sink with it. Bertram's extravagant style therefore seems an elaborate Grabrede or obsequy, soothing, mystifying, mes- merizing, in a word, Wagnerian. Ernst Gundolf and Kurt Hildebrandt reject Bertram's "supratemporal" approach to Nietzsche. 8 They are writing (in 1922) at a time of "dire need" in Germany and see in Nietzsche not the stuff of myths but "the judge of our times" and "guide to our future. " For Nietzsche is the legislator of new values. His "office" is juridical. "His basic question was not 'What is? ' " writes Gundolf, in opposition to what Heidegger will later assert, "but the far more compelling question, 'What is to be done? ' " Yet for Kurt Hildebrandt, as for all members of the Stefan George circle, Nietzsche is ultimately a legend of the Bertramesque sort. He is a hero who wills to supply a "norm" to replace the dilapidated structures of Platonic ideality but whose role as opponent consumes him. He would be
Vollender, apotheosis, and is but Vorlaufer, precursor. Rejecting the Platonic idea, perhaps "out of envy toward Plato," Nietzsche does not achieve the heights to which Platonic eros alone could have conducted him; he remains foreign to the Phaedrus and is banned from the Symposium. Liberator he may be; creator he is not. "He was not Holderlin, who was able to mold a new world in poetry, but the hero who hurled himself upon a despicable age and so became its victim. "9 Neither is he Stefan George. "What Nietzsche frantically craved to be
8Ernst Cundolf and Kurt Hildebrandt, Nietzsche als Richter unsrer Zeit (Breslau: F. Hirt, 1922). For the quotations in the text, unless otherwise noted, see pp. 4, 89, 96, and 103.
9Ibid. , p. 92.
Analysis 241
George is. "10 Still, whatever the outcome of his contest with Plato and Socrates,11 and of his battle against the nineteenth century, which became a battle against Wagner,12 Nietzsche remains the "judge of our times" in search of values which will halt the degeneration of man and the decline of the state.
The outcome of preoccupations with Nietzsche as "judge" is of course hardly a fortunate one. Stefan George and his circle dream of a grandiose politeia, "a new 'Reich,' " as one writer puts it, created along the guidelines of "the Dionysian Deutsch"; they foresee the development of a supreme race combining elements of Greek and Nordic civilization, flourishing on German soii. n That same writer recognizes in Alfred Baeumler's Nietzsche: Philosopher and Politician a giant stride in the right direction. I4
To summarize: Nietzsche first gained notoriety as a literary phe- nomenon; his writings were exemplary for the generation that came to maturity during the Great War; by the end of that conflict Nietzsche was a legend, a Cassandra whose prophecy was fulfilled in Europe's ruin. Interest in Nietzsche as a philosopher remained over- shadowed by interest in his prophecy and personal fate. Symptomatic
10Ibid. , p. 102.
11Kurt Hildebrandt, Nietzsches Wettkampf mit Sokrates und Plato (Dresden: Sibyl- lenverlag, I922).
12Kurt Hildebr;~dt, Wagner und Nietzsche: lhr Kampf gegen das neunzehnte fahr- hundert (Breslau, 1924). Heidegger refers to the work in section 13 of The Will to Power as Art.
13Cf. Theodor Steinbiichel, "Die Philosophic Friedrich Nietzsches, ihre geistesge- schichtliche Situation, ihr Sinn und ihre Wirkung," Zeitschrift fiir deutsche Ceis- tesgeschichte, III (Salzburg, I937), 280-81.
14Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: P. Reclam, 1931 ). This is of course the work that Heidegger criticizes in section 4, above. Heidegger'. s opposition to the Nietzsche interpretation of Baeumler, professor of philosophy and a leading ideologue in Berlin from I933 to 1945, I will discuss in the Analysis of Nietzsche IV: Nihilism. Baeumler's arguments concerning the Nietzschean Nachlass, which ap- pear to have influenced Heidegger, I will take up in the Analysis of Nietzsche Ill: Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Baeumler's thesis on the contradiction between will to power and eternal recurrence I will consider in the Analysis of Nietzsche II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
242 THE \VJLL TO POWER AS ART
of that interest was the fascination exerted by his medical history, especially his insanity, and reflected in the studies by P. J. Mobius (1902), Kurt Hildebrandt (1926), Erich Podach (1930), and Karl Jaspers (1936). Only as a critic of culture, as the philosopher of cultural revaluation, was Nietzsche's voice heard.
But a second strain of interest in Nietzsche develops alongside that of Kulturphilosophie, mirrored in the title "Nietzsche and the philos- ophy of 'life. ' "15 Here Nietzsche is acclaimed as the passionate advocate of life and opponent of the "paralyzed, soulless formulas" of the contemporary "transcendental" philosophy. Nietzsche struggles to find a new scale of values, not in some schema imposed upon life by a transcendent world, but in life itself. He must define the quality of life that is desirable, yet must select criteria that are immanent in life. His physiology, rooted in a metaphysics of will to power, even though it fails to remain absolutely immanent in life, influences a large number of philosophers of vitalism and organism, such as Eduard von Hartmann, Henri Bergson, Hans Driesch, and Erich Becher. If Baeumler is the noxious blossom of the first strain, however, then Ludwig Klages' philosophy of "orgiastics" is the exotic bloom of Lebensphilosophie. ! 6 Klages exalts life with even wilder abandon than Zarathustra, recognizing in all forms of Geist (including the will) an enemy of man's embodied life or "soul. " Nietzsche's "psychological achievement," according to Klages' influential book, is to demarcate the "battleground" between the "ascetic priests" of Yahweh and the "orgiasts" of Dionysus. I? His psychological faux pas is that the doctrine of will remains ensnared in the machinations of those priests. Klages' final judgment is that Nietzsche's best consists of "fragments of a philosophy of orgiastics" and that everything else in his thought "is
15Cf. Theodor Litt, "Nietzsche und die Philosophie des 'Lebens,' " Handbuch der Philosophie, eds. A. Baeumler and M. Schriiter (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1931}, Abteilung III D, pp. 167-72:
16See especially Klages' three-volume work entitled Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929-1932}, available in Ludwig Klages, 5amtliche Werke (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964 ff. ).
17Ludwig Klages, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches (1926), p. 210. Cited by Theodor Steinbiichel, pp. 275-76.
Analysis 243
worthless. " 1s If Heidegger goes to great lengths to rescue Apollo, and Nietzsche too, by organizing his central discussion of art about the theme of form in the grand style, he does so against the din of the Dionysian Klage (= lament) whose bells and timbrels owe more to Bayreuth than to Thebes.
Finally, there is a nascent third strain of Nietzsche appreciation already stirring when Heidegger begins his lecture series on that philosopher, an "existentialist" appreciation. The publication of Karl Jaspers' Reason and Existence in 1935 and Nietzsche: Introduction to an Understanding of His Philosophizing in 1936 marks its advent. 19 Jaspers' work resists rapid depiction. Yet its main thrust may be felt in the third book, "Nietzsche's Mode of Thought in the Totality of Its Existence. " Jaspers measures Nietzsche's significance neither in terms of biography nor on the basis of doxography; neither the life nor the doctrines alone constitute the Ereignis which for subsequent thinkers
Nietzsche indisputably is. It is Nietzsche's dedication to the task of thought throughout the whole of his existence that elevates him to enormous heights-that dedication, plus his passion to communicate and his skill in devising masks for his passion. Ultimately it is the courage he displays in posing to Existenz the question of the meaning of the whole: warum? wozu? why? to what end? By asking about the worth of the whole Nietzsche executes a radical break with the past, past morality, past philosophy, past humanity.
No one can surpass the radicality of that break. Nietzsche, writes Jaspers, "thought it through to its ultimate consequences; it is scarcely possible to take a step farther along that route. " Yet what drives Nietzsche to that protracted and painful rupture with the past is something powerfully affirmative, the "yes" to life, overman, and eternal recurrence; it is in the formulation
l8Ibid. , p. 168. Cited by Steinbiichel, p. 276.
19'fheodor Steinbiichel's mammoth article provides a "Christian existentialist" view. of Nietzsche's "situation" in 1936-37. Karl Jaspers' Nietzsche: Einfiihrung in das Ver- stiindnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin: W. de Cruyter, 1936) serves as Steinbiichel's principal source, but his article refers to much of the literature. Especially valuable in the present context is part six of Steinbiichel's essay, "Current Interpretations of Exis- tence under the Influence of Nietzsche," pp. 270-81. For the quotations in the text see Jaspers' Nietzsche, pp. 393-94.
244 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
of the positive side of Nietzsche's philosophy that Jaspers foresees a successful career for subsequent philosophy. Thus he lauds Nietzsche's critique of morality as that which "cleared the path for the philosophy of existence. " Although Nietzsche denies transcendence with every fiber of his existence, Jaspers concludes that the fury of his denial testifies willy-nilly to the embrace of the encompassing.
Of course, Jaspers is not the only philosopher of Existenz. Stein- biichel mentions Jaspers only after he has discussed the writer he takes to be the chief representative of the new philosophy-Martin Heidegger. 20 The works by Heidegger which Steinbiichel was able to refer to, whether explicitly or implicitly, are Being and Time, What is Metaphysics? , On the Essence of Ground, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. What Heidegger was teaching in Freiburg as Stein- biichel composed his article Steinbiichel could not know. Hence what is fascinating about his remarks is that they betray what one might well have expected from a lecture course by Heidegger on Nietzsche. The gap between expectation and reality is considerable.
According to Steinbiichel, Heidegger's philosophy understands man, and Being itself, to be essentially finite; it is Nietzsche who has pointed to human finitude in an unforgettable way. That Heidegger radically extrudes man's "transcendent being toward God" is therefore due to Nietzsche. Nevertheless, Heidegger promulgates "a concealed ethics" according to which man must resolutely assume the burden of his own being. Steinbiichel sees here the "Nietzschean imperative" that man become who he most properly is, scorning the "last man" who remains steeped in "everydayness. " Yet Heidegger's secret ethics, his "yes" to the Self, does not preserve Nietzsche's "tremendous faith in life. " Nietzsche transfigures Dionysian insight into dithyramb, while Hei- degger, in the face of the "thrownness" and "fallenness" of Dasein, can only muster a "reticent resignation. "
Whatever value Steinbiichel's remarks on Nietzsche's role in Hei- degger's thought may have, what remains striking is the variance be- tween his and Heidegger's own accounts of that role. The former
2°Cf. T. Steinbiichel, pp. 271-73.
Analysis 245
mentions neither art nor truth; Nietzsche's importance for the history of metaphysics does not become conspicuous there; and that the telos of Heidegger's inquiry into Nietzsche should be Platonism and Plato seems on the basis of Steinbiichel's account altogether out of the question.
Yet it is only fair to say that even forty years later the context of Heidegger's inquiry into Nietzsche is not readily discernible. His inves- tigation has little or nothing to do with Nietzsche as litterateur, icono- clast, legend, legislator, judge, inmate, orgiast, or existentialist. My analysis must therefore turn to Heidegger's own writings which are contemporary with or prior to the Nietzsche lectures, in search of a more relevant context.
Heidegger first studied Nietzsche during his student years in Frei- burg between 1909 and 1914. He discovered the expanded 1906 edition of notes from the Nachlass selected and arranged by Heinrich Koselitz (pseud. Peter Cast) and Frau Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and given the title Der Wille zur Macht. That book, indispensable because of the quality of Nietzsche's unpublished notes, unreliable because of editori- al procedures and unscrupulous manipulations by Nietzsche's sister, eventually occupied a central place in Heidegger's developing compre- hension of Western metaphysics as the history of Being. Although he would refer to the whole range of Nietzsche's published writings dur- ing his lectures and essays two decades later, Der WJ1/e zur Macht is the text he was to assign his students and the source of his principal topics: will to power as art and knowledge (from Book Three, sections I and IV), the eternal recurrence of the same (Book Four, section III), and nihilism (Book One).
That volume's influence on Heidegger is visible already in his "early writings," not as an explicit theme for investigation but as an incentive to philosophical research in general. In his venia legendi lecture of 1915, "The Concept of Time in Historiography," Heidegger alludes to philosophy's proper "will to power. "ZI He means the urgent need for
21Martin Heidegger, Friihe Schriften (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1972), p. 357.
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THF: WILL TO POWER AS ART
philosophy to advance beyond theory of knowledge to inquiry into the goal and purpose of philosophy as such, in other words, the need to advance in the direction of metaphysics. In the habilitation thesis which precedes the venia legendi lecture Heidegger wrestles with the problem· of the historical (as opposed to the systematic) approach to philosophy. 22 Here too Nietzsche's influence is unmistakable. Phi- losophy possesses a value for culture and exhibits a historical situation, as Dilthey saw; it also puts forward the claim of validity, as Husserl and the Neo-Kantians argued. But Heidegger stresses a third factor, namely, philosophy's "function as a value for life. " Philosophy itself exists "in tension with the living personality" of the philosopher, "drawing its content and value out of the depths and the abundance of life in that personality. " In this connection Heidegger refers to Nietzsche's formulation "the drive to philosophize," citing that philosopher's "relentlessly austere manner of thought," a manner enlivened, however, by a gift for "flexible and apt depiction. "
That Heidegger's own drive to philosophize receives much of its impulse from Nietzsche is not immediately obvious to the. reader of Being and Time (1927). During the intervening Marburg years Nietzsche was set aside in favor of Aristotle, Husserl, Kant, Aquinas, and Plato. Perhaps Heidegger now wished to distance himself from the Nietzsche adopted by Lebensphilosophie and philosophies of culture and value. His rejection of the category "life" for his own analyses of Dasein is clearly visible already in 1919-21, the years of his confron- tation with Karl Jaspers' Psychology of Weltanschauungen. 23 And although Nietzsche's shadow flits across the pages of the published Marburg lectures, Heidegger's vehement rejection of the value-
22Ibid. , pp. 137-38.
23See Martin Heidegger, "Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers' Psychologie der Weltan- schauungen," Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion, ed. Hans Saner (Munich: R. Piper, 1973), pp. 70-100, esp. pp. 78-79. (The essay now appears as the first chapter of Wegmarken in the new Gesamtausgabe edition, Frankfurt/Main, 1977. ) See also D. F. Krell, Inti· mations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), chapter one, "From Existence to Fundamental Ontology. "
Analysis 247
philosophy of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert un- doubtedly delayed his public confrontation with the philosopher who demanded the revaluation of all values. 24
In Being and Time itself only three references to Nietzsche's thought appear, only one of them an essential reference, so that it seems perverse to argue that Nietzsche lies concealed "on every printed page of Sein und Zeit. "25 Yet we ought to postpone discussion of Nietzsche's role in awakening the question of Being and Time until Heidegger's own Nietzsche lectures provide the proper occasion for it. Z6 By way of anticipation I may cite one introductory remark by Heidegger in "The Word of Nietzsche: 'Cod is Dead'": "The follow- ing commentary, with regard to its intention and according to its scope, keeps to that one experience on the basis of which Being and Time was thought. "27 If that one experience is the oblivion of Being, which implies forgottenness of the nothing in which Dasein is suspended, we may ask whether in Being and Time Heidegger tries to complete Nietzsche's task by bringing the question of the death of Cod home-inquiring into the death of Dasein and the demise of metaphysical logos, both inquiries being essential prerequisites for the remembrance of Being.
If Nietzsche's role in the question of Being and Time is not obvious, neither is the role played there by art. References in Heidegger's major work to works of art are rare, although we recall the extended reference
24See for example volume 21 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt/Main, 1976), which reprints Heidegger's course on "logic" delivered in 1925-26. By Nietzsche's "shadow" I mean such analyses as that of the development of psychology (p. 36) or that of the protective vanity of philosophers (p. 97). Heidegger's contempt for Wertphilosophie emerges throughout the course, but see esp. pp. 82-83 and 91-92.
25I argued this way, correctly (as I believe) but perhaps unconvincingly, in my disserta- tion "Nietzsche and the Task of Thinking: Martin Heidegger's Reading of Nietzsche': (Duquesne University, 1971), but perhaps more convincingly in chapters six and eight of my Intimations ofMortality. The three references to Nietzsche in Being and Time appear (in Neimeyer's twelfth edition, 1972) on. p. 264, lines 15-16, p. 272 n. 1, and, the essential reference, to Nietzsche's "On the Usefulness and Disadvantages of History for Life," p. 396, lines 16 ff.
26See for example Nil, 194-95 and 260.
27Martin Heidegger, Ho/zwege (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1950), p. 195.
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to Hyginus' fable of Cura in section 42. But for the most part literature and art appear as occasions where "they" come and go talking of Michelangelo. If enjoying works of art as "they" do is symptomatic of everydayness, we might well ask how art is to be properly encountered. Yet the fact remains that art is little discussed. The distance covered between the years 1927 and 1937 in Heidegger's career of thought is enormous: Steinbiichel's expectations are evidence enough of that.
From his earliest student days Heidegger had displayed an interest in literature and art: the novels of Dostoevsky and Adalbert Stifter, the poetry of Holderlin, Rilke, and Trakl (whose poems Heidegger read when they were first published prior to the war), and the Expressionist movement in painting and poetry. Such interest at that time did not and could not irradiate the sober, somber halls of Wissenschaft. But in the 1930s literature and art came to occupy the very center of Heidegger's project, for they became central to the question of truth as disclosure and unconcealment. A glance at Heidegger's lecture schedule during the decade of the 1930s suggests something of this development.
Schelling, for whose system art is of supreme importance, is taught many times, as are Hegel's Phenomenology and Kant's third critique. (Kant's importance for Heidegger in this respect, ignored in the litera- ture because of the overweening significance of Heidegger's publica- tions on the first critique, we may gauge from his stalwart defense of Kant in section 15 of The Will to Power as Art. ) Plato, the artist of dialogue, dominates all those courses where the essence of truth is the focus. It is unfortunate that we know nothing of Heidegger's 1935-36 colloquium with Kurt Bauch on "overcoming aesthetics in the question of art. " We might hazard a guess that the "six basic developments in the history of aesthetics" (section 13, above) mirror the outcome of that colloquium. It is also unfortunate that we do not know what transpires in Heidegger's seminar on "selected fragments from Schil- ler's philosophical writings on art," which runs parallel to these
Nietzsche lectures. Perhaps the references to Schiller (pp. 108 and 113) provide clues. But of all these lectures and seminars surely the most instructive would be the 1934-35 lectures on Holderlin's Hymns,
Analysis 249
"The Rhine" and "Germania. " From the single lecture "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (1936) we derive some "indirect light," as Heidegger says in his Foreword to the Nietzsche volumes, on the parallel rise of Nietzsche and of art in his thought on aletheia.
Perhaps further light will be shed if we consider three other works stemming from the same period. "The Anaximander Fragment" (com- posed in 1946 but drawing on a course taught during the summer semester of 1932), "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (published in 1943 but based on courses held from 1930 on, especially that of the winter semester of 1931-32), and "The Origin of the Work of Art" (published in 1950 but composed in 1935-36 and revised while the first Nietzsche course was in session). But in examining these four essays I cease the work of background and try to limn the figures of the matter itself.
III. QUESTIONS
Why art, in the question of truth?
Why Nietzsche, in the question of art?
On the occasion of the publication of the fourth, expanded edition
of Erlauterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (1971) Heidegger remarked that those commentaries sprang from einer Notwendigkeit des Denk- ens, "a necessity of thought. "28 But the phrase is ambiguous. I take it to mean that Heidegger's thought turns to Holderlin out of need, Not-wendig, in much the same way as Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence is "a cry out of need," Aufschrei aus einer Not (NI, 310). If Holderlin's times are destitute, the epoch of Nietzsche and Heidegger is desperate. While Holderlin can aver, "Indeed, the gods live," Nietzsche must conclude, "God is dead. " The latter refrain dominates Heidegger's lectures and essays on Nietzsche; the phrase· appears in his Rektoratsrede as a signal of urgency; it is the key to
28Martin Heidegger, Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), p. 7. Cf. Beda Allemann, Holder/in und Heidegger (Zurich: Atlan- tis, 1956), parts II-IV.
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Nietzsche's precarious position at the end of metaphysics and to Heidegger's before the task of his thinking. 29
Two remarks in Heidegger's Holderlin essay are particularly reveal- ing with respect to Heidegger's turn to that poet. First, Heidegger insists that the being and essence of things, hence the naming of the gods, can never be derived from things that lie at hand. They must be "freely created. "30 As the motto for his lecture course on will to power as art Heidegger chooses a phrase from The Antichrist: "Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god! " Is it then a matter of concocting novel divinities? Or of lighting a lantern in broad daylight to search out old familiar ones? A second remark from the Holderlin essay silences these overhasty questions and redirects the inquiry. Man possesses language in order to say who he is and to give testimony. About what is he to testify? "His belonging to the earth. "31 All creation, poiesis, testifies to man's dwelling on the earth, remaining in Zarathustran fashion "true to the earth. " Yet it is an earth cut loose from her sun and deprived of her horizon and a dwelling that hovers in holy dread before the raging discordance of art and truth.
Heidegger's "turn out of need" to the poetry of Holderlin should not, however, be reduced to an incident of biography. It is not merely a necessity in Heidegger's intellectual life but a turning in the history of the question of Being. Heidegger speaks of that turning in many essays composed during the 1930s and 1940s. Of special consequence here are "The Anaximander Fragment" and "Plato's Doctrine of Truth. " To the situation of the former essay Heidegger gives the name "eschatology of Being. " By that he means the outermost point in the history of the Occident or evening-land from which he descries the dawn. (Whether it is the dawn of Anaximander's epoch or that of a new age is impossible to tell: Heidegger can only attempt to "ponder the
290tto Poggeler writes, "Ever since 1929-30, when Nietzsche became a matter of 'decision' for Heidegger, his new starting point for thinking the truth of Being was dominated by the all-determining presupposition that God is 'dead. '" Otto Poggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger {Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1972), p. 25.
30Martin Heidegger, Erliiuterungen, p. 41. l1Ibid. , p. 36.
Analysis 251
former dawn through what is imminent. "32) The name that recurs in the opening pages of the Anaximander essay, designating the eschaton of the history of Being, is "Nietzsche. "ll Even if we reduce matters to biography there is no obvious reason why the name "Nietzsche" and no other must appear here. Indeed the reason is highly complex. Heidegger attempts to uncover it during his protracted lecture series on Nietzsche.
A further hint of Nietzsche's significance as a figure of dusk and dawn, Abendland and MorgenrOte, and as our point of entry into the issue of Western history as a whole, emerges from the essay on "Plato's doctrine of Truth. " Here too Heidegger speaks of a turning and a need. 34 But it is not merely a turning or a need apropos of Heidegger himself. It is rather "a turning in the determination of the essence of truth" and a need for "not only beings but Being" to become "worthy of question. " Much later in his career Heidegger comes to doubt the validity of the thesis expounded in his Plato essay, to wit, that a transformation in the essence of truth from unconcealment to correctness occurs as such in Plato; yet his early inquiry into Plato's doctrine of truth as portrayed in the Allegory of the Cave remains a highly thought-provoking effort. J5 It is an effort to confront the
32Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 302. Cf. the English translation, Early Creek Thinking, tr. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 18. llSee Early Creek Thinking, pp. 13-14, 17, and 22-23. See also my remarks in the
Introduction to the volume, pp. 9-10.
l4See the first and last pages of the essay in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frank-
furt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1967). pp. 109 and 144.
l5(n "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" Heidegger explicitly rejects
the thesis of his earlier essay on Plato. (See Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens [Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1969], p. 78. ) The assertion that in Plato we find an "essential transformation of truth" from unconcealment to correctness is "untenable. " Heidegger apparently accedes to the arguments of Paul Friedlander and others that in Greek literature and philosophy alethes always modifies verbs of speech. Although aletheia may indeed derive from letha (lanthano) and the alpha-privative, the sense of "unconceal- ment" seems to have evanesced even before Homer sang. Hence there is no essential transformation of truth from unconcealment to correctness; at least, none that can be located in Plato. There is instead an essential continuity in the history of "truth," a tendency to regard the true as correctness of assertion or correspondence of statement and fact, without asking about the domain in which words and things so wondrously converge.
252 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
consequences of Plato's conjunction of aletheia, interpreted as orthotes or correctness of viewing, and paideia, education in the broadest possible sense. Essential to the allegory are the transformations or rites of passage undergone by the prisoners of the cave on their way to and from the Ideas, their liberation, conversion, ascent and descent, and the attendant bedazzlements, adjustments, and insights. Heidegger emphasizes that liberation is not simply an unshackling: the liberated prisoner does not run amok but confronts fire and sun, growing accustomed to "fixing his view upon the fixed boundaries of things affixed in their forms.
