Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker
In The Will to Power, the "work" to be treated in this lecture course, Nietzsche says the following about philosophy (WM, 420):
I do not wish to persuade anyone to philosophy: it is inevitable and perhaps also desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant.
In The Will to Power, the "work" to be treated in this lecture course, Nietzsche says the following about philosophy (WM, 420):
I do not wish to persuade anyone to philosophy: it is inevitable and perhaps also desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
Heidegger's resistance to the crude biologism, racism, and anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party cannot, I believe, be doubted.
Yet his ardent nationalism and anti-liberalism, his intransigent conservatism in matters eco- nomic, social, and political, along with his passion for historic deci- sions at the national level, made him an easy prey to hopes of resurgence.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XXV
Was Heidegger a nazi? Yes, if carrying the membership card and paying the dues is our standard. No, not if we stress the most horrify- ing aspect of National Socialism, its vulgar racism and virulent anti- Semitism. Yes, if we stress the importance of Hitler himself and of his cult of nationalism, militarism, and anti-parliamentarian elitism. Indeed, when Heidegger conjoins liberalism and the dominant National Socialism, which has declined his spiritual leadership, there is reason to observe that if Heidegger was not a nazi it was only because the Party was too liberal for him. At the same time, we have to remember the Party's rejection of Heidegger's "private" version of National Socialism already in 1934 and the waxing intensity of the polemics against him by Party ideologues in the mid-1930s. Further- more, Heidegger's disaffection from the Party in the course of the 1930s has direct relevance for his work on Nietzsche: when Party cen- sorship of the Nietzsche edition that Heidegger was helping to pre- pare intensified in 1938, he stopped working with the Commission that was charged with the edition. Thus the year 1938 assumes sym- bolic importance for our theme: as the Party insists on sanitizing the Nietzsche edition, purging from it Nietzsche's anti-anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism, Heidegger opts for Nietzsche, and the triad of terms in our title falls apart. In a word, and to answer a complex question peremptorily: if we stress Heidegger's active and inventive support of the regime in 1933-34, the answer is a resounding, catastrophic yes; as the 1930s come to a close, opening onto an even more disastrous era, the answer is no. As for Heidegger's silence after the war, it responds to our own need to know why with-silence.
Is Heidegger's relation to National Socialism the sole important aspect of his lectures and essays on Nietzsche? Not at all. His reading of eternal recurrence of the same as mortal transition and downgoing; of the will to power as artistic creativity and the pursuit of knowledge· "in the grand style"; of the Nietzschean revaluation of all values as a remnant of metaphysical and calculative valuative thinking; and of nihilism as the history of being from Plato through Nietzsche-these issues await the reader and will challenge her or him to the full. No peremptory discussion can resolve them.
XXVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Perhaps what is most disturbing about the "Heidegger scandal" today is the avidity with which Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism has been taken up, a fervor that cannot be explained by reference to the usual dependable pleasures of righteous indignation. Academics and philosophers today seem to hope that if they can shift attention to a Heidegger-exposed-at-last they will be able to forget the vacuity and aimlessness of their own projects. That if their kind of philosophy has run out of problems, then the only way to keep the conversation going endlessly is to churn out endless scandals. The hope blossoms that a social-critical, emancipatory discourse will sud- denly make sense again if adherents can divert everyone's attention to another time and place, newsflash 1933, expatiating on a foreign yet ostensibly familiar situation, excoriating the same old set of villains. Villains safely past. Museum pieces of wickedness or credulity. Or, finally, that the American mind-modest generalization though it may be-will suddenly burst into bloom once again if only its captors (Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the rest of the French) can be expunged from the curriculum. With a sterilized Socrates or antiseptic Aristotle mounted in their place. How much more satisfying it is to scan accounts of scandals in the Sunday supplements than to wrestle with Sophist or Metaphysics or Being and Time. How much more satisfy- ing to settle once and for all questions of crime and punishment, to banish a thinker and renounce all his works, to burn all those difficult books.
Heidegger's Nietzsche is the easiest of those difficult books, the least painful to read. No doubt, these volumes need to be read closely and critically. For even more disturbing than the avidity of the Heidegger bashers is the business-as-usual attitude of the Heidegger acolytes. The crippling conservatism and militancy, the longing for mettle and metal, Harte und Schwere, the perfervid anti-Communism, and the endless fascination with and confidence in the German Volk-none of these traits can be forgotten or relegated to some safely "nonphilosophical" realm. In Heidegger himself these traits remain profoundly troubling; in Heidegger's followers, in his circles and societies, they are an abomination, if also a farce.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition xxvn
Heidegger's Nietzsche is one of those ventures and adventures that compels the reader again and again to scribble into the margins No! No! The yeses come slowly and painfully. When they do come, after all the necessary caution and resistance, the reader will discover that he or she does not need a book of matches for this book of powerfully formulated yet altogether tentative thoughts.
No doubt, other significant readings of Nietzsche will come along, or have already arrived on the scene, with Bataille, Deleuze, Klos- sowski, and Derrida. Yet none of these writers can readily separate the names Nietzsche/Heidegger. None can pry apart this laminate. As though one of the crucial confrontations for thinkers today were what one might call heidegger's nietzsche, nietzsche's heidegger.
Editor's Preface
From 1936 to 1940 Martin Heidegger offered four lecture courses at the University ofFreiburg-im-Breisgau on selected topics in Nietzsche's philosophy. During the decade 1936-1946 he composed a number of individual lectures and essays on that thinker. After lecturing again on Nietzsche during the early 1950s Heidegger determined to publish these and the earlier materials; in 1961 the Neske Verlag ofPfullingen released two large volumes of Heidegger's early lectures and essays on Nietzsche. A four-volume English version of Heidegger's two-volume Nietzsche (cited throughout these volumes as NI, Nil, with page number) appeared during the years 1979-1987.
The four hardbound volumes of Heidegger's Nietzsche are here reproduced in two paperback volumes, the first containing volumes I and II of the first English edition, the second uniting volumes III and IV. In order to keep the cost of the paperback edition as low as possi- ble, the volumes have been reprinted with a minimum of changes. Errors that came to my attention over the years have been corrected and a new Introduction added. The order of the essays in the hard- bound edition has been retained: it deviates from that of the hard- bound Neske edition, following the order of Neske's paperback ver- sion of Nihilismus, which is also the order Heidegger approved for the English translation.
In the intervening years, the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (cited throughout as MHG, with volume number in italic) has pro- duced a number of volumes relevant to the Nietzsche. Division I of the Gesamtausgabe reproduces the 1961 Neske volumes as volumes 6. 1 and 6. 2. These contain the lectures and essays in the form that Heidegger himself gave them in 1960 and 1961, reworking and con- densing the material. The Gesamtausgabe editors have also produced
XXX THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
a second set of versions of the lectures, based on the holographs plus student notes and transcriptions. These appear in Division II of the edition as volumes 43 (Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, win- ter semester 1936-1937), 44 (Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstel- lung im abendlandischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen, summer semester 1937), 47 (Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis, summer semester 1939), and 48 (Nietzsche: Der euro- paische NihiJismus, second trimester 1940). Two further volumes are in preparation: 46 (Nietzsches II. Unzeitgema/3e Betrachtung, winter semester 1938-1939), and 50 (Nietzsches Metaphysik, announced for the winter semester of 1941-1942 but not given). These versions of the lectures differ in several significant ways from the 1961 Neske edi- tion on which the translation was based: first, they include a number of "repetitions" or "summaries and transitions" that Heidegger cus- tomarily presented at the beginning of each lecture hour, materials that Heidegger himself eliminated when he edited the Nietzsche for publication; second, they also include a number of passages that he decided to strike, apparently because he felt they were too polemical, too repetitious, or of dubious relevance; third, they include a number of notes found on unattached sheets in the handwritten lectures.
Let a single example of such deleted material suffice, of the second type: when Heidegger edited the first lecture course he cut two para- graphs of material on Jaspers' treatment of Nietzschean eternal recur- rence of the same, paragraphs that "put quite sharply" why it is that philosophy is "altogether impossible" for Jaspers. (See NI, 31 and cf. MHG 43, 26. ) The substance of the critique remains in these pages (see, in this paperback edition, I, 23), but the remarks on Jaspers' "moralizing psychology" and his inability to ask genuinely philosophi- cal questions are deleted.
It therefore has to be said that scholars who feel the need to focus sharply on a particular passage in Heidegger's Nietzsche should refer to the corresponding volumes in MHG Division II. Yet we can be con- fident that with the Neske edition, prepared by Heidegger himself, we have the core of his confrontation with Nietzsche. It would not have been possible for me to "work into" this translation materials from the lectures as they appear in MHG Division II, precisely for the reasons
Editor's Preface XXXI
that it was impossible for the German editors to work them into the MHG reprint of the Neske edition. If only for reasons of bulk: the word count for the first three courses is 192,500 in Neske, 270,000 in MHG.
The Neske edition too ultimately derives from Heidegger's hand- written lectures. Heidegger collated these notes with the help of a number of assistants and approved the final typescript in spring of 1961. Since access to the original notes is restricted, and because the notes themselves are fascinating documents, I have prepared a description of one complete page of the notes and a comparison of it to the relevant pages of the Neske edition as an Appendix to the pres- ent volume. (See also a photographic facsimile of that page following p. 223. ) There is one serious error on this page as transcribed in the Neske edition, volume one, page 51, line 22. An examination of the holograph page (listed in the Marbach Archive as no. A 33/14) shows that line 22 ends one of Heidegger's long emendations designed for insertion into the body of the text. The line is difficult to read with certainty; it is easy to see how the error in the published text occurred. But the sense of the holograph page is clear, and with the aid of the only extant Abschrift or typescript (Archive no. II 19/27) an accurate reconstruction is possible. After having examined MHG 43, 48, 11. 5-6 f. b. , I propose the following reading:
strike line 22 of NI, 51, and insert: Streben auf. Wille dagegen, [als] Ent- schlossenheit zu sich, ist immer tiber sich etc.
I have adopted this reading for the translation, p. 41, lines 13-14. A more detailed discussion appears in the Appendix.
The only other serious error in the Neske edition of which I am aware is the duplication of the word nicht at NI, 189, line 5 from the bottom (cf. MHG 43, 199, 1. 11 f. b. ), which ought to read:
Sinnlichen, als ein Nichtseiendes und Nicht-sein-sol- etc.
Occasional typographical errors in the Neske edition and minor inaccuracies in the quotations I have corrected without drawing atten- tion to them.
I have translated all passages from Nietzsche's works in Heidegger's text, as well as the quotations from Hegel, Wagner, Dilthey, and
XXXII THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
others. But I am grateful to have had the translation of The Will to Power by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) for reference and comparision.
Heidegger's many references to Der Wille zur Macht are cited in these English volumes as WM, followed by aphorism-not page-- number, e. g. : (WM, 794). His references to all other Nietzschean texts are to the Grossoktavausgabe (Leipzig, 1905 ff. ); in the body of the text they are cited simply by volume and page, e. g. : (XIV, 413-67); in my own explanatory footnotes I cite the Grossoktavausgabe as GOA. In these notes the letters CM refer to the new Kritische Gesamtaus- gabe of Nietzsche's works and letters, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967 ff. ). I have checked as many of Heidegger's references to the GOA in CM as time, the incompleteness of CM, and its one-way concordances allowed. Where no major discrepancies emerged I let the GOA text stand. However, readers who wish to focus on a specific reference by Heidegger to the GOA should themselves check CM carefully before proceeding.
Heidegger's text contains no footnotes; all notes in the present vol- ume are my own. I have tried to keep them to a minimum, since it is hard to know when such notes are helpful and when they are a nui- sance. I hope that readers who have difficulties with the editorial mat- ter or any aspect of the translation will write me about them in care of the publisher. As for the translation itself, its apologist is Jerome, whose Preface to Eusebius' Chronicle William Arrowsmith has ren- dered (in Arion, New Series, 2/3, 1975, p. 359):
Jerome to Vincentius and Gallienus: Greetings
. . . It is difficult, when you are following in another man's footsteps, to
keep from going astray somewhere. And it is extremely difficult to pre- serve in translation the particular verbal felicities of a foreign language. The original meaning, for instance, may be conveyed in a single word- a word which has no single Latin equivalent. I f the translator tries to catch the full meaning, he must resort to lengthy paraphrase. To these difficul- ties must be added the problems of word-order, differences in case and rhetorical figures, and finally, the native genius of the language itself. If I
Editor's Preface XXXlll
translate word for word, the result is ludicrous; if I am forced to change the words or rearrange them, it will look as though I had failed in my duty as a translator.
So, my dear Vincentius and Gallienus, I beg of you, if you find signs of haste and confusion, to read this work rather as friends than critics.
I owe thanks to many generous people for help with this project over the past fifteen years: Jochen Barkhausen, Robert Bernasconi, Friederike Born, Helm Breinig, Frank Capuzzi, Chris Fynsk, Sherry Gray Martin, Ulrich Halfmann, Elfride Heidegger, Hermann Heideg- ger, F. -W. von Herrmann, Elisabeth Hoffmann, Eunice Farrell Krell, Marta Krell, Will McNeill, Sabine Modersheim, Thomas Muller, Ashraf Noor, Bruce Pye, John Sallis, Jupp Schopp, John Shopp, Joan Stambaugh, and Joachim W. Storck. And special debts of gratitude to Martin Heidegger and J. Glenn Gray.
Chicago D. F. K.
Plan of the English Edition
FIRST VOLUME OF PAPERBACK EDITION
Volume I: The Will to Power as Art
I. Author's Foreword to All Volumes [NI, 9-10].
2. "The Will to Power as Art," a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1936-37 [NI, 11-254].
Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
I. "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same," a lecture course deliv- ered at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1937 [NI, 255-472].
2. "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " a lecture to the Bremen Club on May 8, 1953, printed in Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1954), pp. 101-26, added here as a supplement to the Nietzsche material.
SECOND VOLUME OF PAPERBACK EDITION
Volume III: "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics
I. "The Will to Power as Knowledge," a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1939 [NI, 473-658].
2. "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power," the two concluding lectures to all three lecture courses, written in 1939 but not delivered [Nil, 7-29].
XXXVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
3. "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," a typescript dated August-Decem- ber 1940, apparently derived from an unscheduled and hereto- fore unlisted course on Nietzsche's philosophy [Nil, 257-333]. *
Volume IV: Nihilism
l. "European Nihilism," a lecture course delivered at the Univer- sity of Freiburg during the first trimester of 1940 [Nil, 31-256]. 2. "Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being," an essay com- posed during the years 1944-46 but not published until 1961
[Nil, 335-398].
The three remaining essays in volume two of the Neske edition, "Metaphysics as History of Being" [Nil, 399-457], "Sketches for a His- tory of Being as Metaphysics" [Nil, 458-80], and "Recollection of Metaphysics" [Nil, 481-90], all from the year 1941, appear in English
*"Nietzsche's Metaphysics" appears as the title of a lecture course for the winter semester of 1941-42 in all published lists of Heidegger's courses. The earliest prospec- tuses of the Klostermann firm cited such a lecture course as volume 52 of the Heidegger "Complete Edition" (Gesamtausgabe). But the Heidegger Archive of the Schiller- Nationalmuseum in Marbach contains no manuscript for such a course. It does contain the sixty-four-page typescript in question, with many handwritten alternations, composed in August I940 and revised during the months of September, October, and December of that year. One of the typescript's several title pages refers to the winter semester of 1938-39, in all probability not to any lecture or seminar in the published lists but to an unlisted Ubung [exercise] entitled "Toward an Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second 'Untimely Meditation,' On the Advantage and Disadvantage ofHistory for Life. " On Sep- tember 29, 1975, I asked Heidegger about the discrepancy of the dates for "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" in the Neske edition (1940) and in the published lists and catalogues of his courses (winter semester 1941-42). (At the time of our conversation on this matter the above information, supplied by the archive, was unknown to me. ) Heidegger reaffirmed the date 1940 as the time of composition. He explained that the material had been pre- pared during a seminar, title and date not specified, and conceded that he might have employed the same material for theWS 1941-42lecture course. The more recent prospec- tuses of the Gesamtausgabe list both the 1938-39 course ("Nietzsche's Second 'Untimely Meditation'") and the essay "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" as volumes 46 and 50, respectively. "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" is said to have been "announced, but not taught, in the win- ter semester of 1941-42. " In volume 50 it is coupled (for no apparent reason) with the 1944-45 course, "Thinking and Poetizing. "
The problem awaits the more patient scrutiny of the archive's curators. But this may suffice to explain why Heidegger cites 1940 (and not 1942, as the catalogues would lead us to expect) as the closing date for his early lectures on Nietzsche.
Plan ofthe English Edition xxxvii
translation in Martin Heidegger, The End ofPhilosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). The End ofPhilosophy also contains the essay "Overcoming Metaphysics" (1936-46), related thematically and chronologically to the Nietzsche material and origi· nally published in Vortrage und Aufsatze, pp. 71-99. The lecture in which Heidegger summarizes much of the material in volume II of Nietzsche, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead"' (1943), appears in English translation in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Other references to Nietzsche in Heidegger's works are listed in the second, revised edition of Hildegard Feick, Index zu Heideggers "Sein und Zeit" (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), p. 120.
Author's Foreword to All Volumes
Nietzsche himself identifies the experience that determines his thinking:
"Life . . . more mysterious since the day the great liberator came over me-the thought that life should be an experiment of knowers. "
The Cay Science 1882 (Book IV, no. 324)
"Nietzsche"- t h e name of the thinker stands as the title for the matter of his thinking.
The matter, the point in question, is in itself a confrontation. To let our thinking enter into the matter, to prepare our thinking for it- these goals determine the contents of the present publication.
It consists of lecture courses held at the University of Freiburg-im- Breisgau during the years 1936 to 1940. Adjoined to them are treatises which originated in the years 1940 to 1946. The treatises further extend the way by which the lecture courses-still at that time under way- paved the way for the confrontation.
The text of the lectures is divided according to content, not hours of presentation. Nevertheless, the lecture character has been retained, this necessitating an unavoidable breadth of presentation and a certain amount of repetition.
It is intentional that often the same text from Nietzsche's writings is discussed more than once, though each time in a different context. Much material has been presented that may be familiar and even well known to many readers, since in everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks. The repetitions are intended to provide occasions for thinking through, in ever renewed fashion, those several thoughts that determine the whole. Whether, and in what sense, with
xl THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
what sort of range, the thoughts remain worthy of thought becomes clear and is decided through the confrontation. In the text of the lectures unnecessary words and phrases have been deleted, involuted sentences simplified, obscure passages clarified, and oversights correct- ed.
For all that, the written and printed text lacks the advantages of oral presentation.
Considered as a whole, the publication aims to provide a view of the path of thought I followed from 1930 to the "Letter on Humanism" (1947). The two small lectures published just prior to the "Letter," "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (1942) and "On the Essence of Truth" (1943), originated back in the years 1930-31. The book Commentaries on Holder/in's Poetry (1951), which contains one essay and several lectures from the years between 1936 and 1943, sheds only indirect light on that path.
Whence the confrontation with the "Nietzsche matter" comes and whither it goes may become manifest to the reader when he himself sets off along the way the following texts have taken.
Freiburg-im-Breisgau May, 1961
M. H.
7'Jietzsche
VOLUME I
The Will to Power as Art
"Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god! "
The Antichrist 1888 (VIII, 235-36)
1.
Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker
In The Will to Power, the "work" to be treated in this lecture course, Nietzsche says the following about philosophy (WM, 420):
I do not wish to persuade anyone to philosophy: it is inevitable and perhaps also desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant. I find nothing more repugnant than didactic praise of philosophy as one finds it in Seneca, or worse, Cicero. Philosophy has little to do with virtue. Permit me to say also that the man of knowledge is fundamentally different from the philoso- pher. -What I desire is that the genuine concept of the philosopher not perish utterly in Germany. . . .
At the age of twenty-eight, as a professor in Basel, Nietzsche writes (X, ll2):
There are times of great danger in which philosophers appear-times when the wheel rolls ever faster-when philosophers and artists assume the place of the dwindling mythos. They are far ahead of their time, however, for the attention of contemporaries is only quite slowly drawn to them. A people which becomes aware of its dangers produces the genius.
The Will to Power-the expression plays a dual role in Nietzsche's thinking. First, it serves as the title of Nietzsche's chief philosophical work, planned and prepared over many years but never written. Second, it names what constitutes the basic character of all beings. "Will to power is the ultimate factum to which we come" {XVI, 415).
It is easy to see how both applications of the expression "will to power" belong together: only because the expression plays the second role can and must it also adopt the first. As the name for the basic
4 THE WILL TO PO\VER AS ART
character of all beings, the expression "will to power" provides an answer to the question "What is being? " Since antiquity that question has been the question of philosophy. The narrie "will to power" must therefore come to stand in the title of the chief philosophical work of a thinker who says that all being ultimately is will to power. If for Nietzsche the work of that title is to be the philosophical "main struc- ture," for which Zarathustra is but the "vestibule," the implication is that Nietzsche's thinking proceeds within the vast orbit of the ancient guiding question of philosophy, "What is being? "
Is Nietzsche then not at all so modern as the hubbub that has surrounded him makes it seem? Is Nietzsche not nearly so subversive as he himself was wont to pose? Dispelling such fears is not really necessary; we need not bother to do that. On the contrary, the refer- ence to the fact that Nietzsche moves in the orbit of the question of Western philosophy only serves to make clear that Nietzsche knew what philosophy is. Such knowledge is rare. Only great thinkers possess it. The greatest possess it most purely in the form of a persistent question. The genuinely grounding question, as the question of the essence of Being, does not unfold in the history of philosophy as such; Nietzsche too persists in the guiding question.
The task of our lecture course is to elucidate the fundamental posi- tion within which Nietzsche unfolds the guiding question of Western thought and responds to it. Such elucidation is needed in order to prepare a confrontation with Nietzsche. If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
The confrontation with Nietzsche has not yet begun, nor have the prerequisites for it been established. For a long time Nietzsche has been either celebrated and imitated or reviled and exploited. Nietz- sche's thought and speech are still too contemporary for us. He and we have not yet been sufficiently separated in history; we lack the distance necessary for a sound appreciation of the thinker's strength.
Confrontation is genuine criticism. It is the supreme way, the only way, to a true estimation of a thinker. In confrontation we undertake
Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker 5
to reflect on his thinking and to trace it in its effective force, not in its weaknesses. To what purpose? In order that through the confronta- tion we ourselves may become free for the supreme exertion of think- ing.
But for a long time it has been declaimed from chairs of philosophy in Germany that Nietzsche is not a rigorous thinker but a "poet- philosopher. " Nietzsche does not belong among the philosophers, who think only about abstract, shadowy affairs, far removed from life. If he is to be called a philosopher at all then he must be regarded as a "philosopher of life. " That rubric, a perennial favorite, serves at the same time to nourish the suspicion that any other kind of philosophy is something for the dead, and is therefore at bottom dispensable. Such a view wholly coincides with the opinion of those who welcome in Nietzsche the "philosopher of life" who has at long last quashed ab- stract thought. These common judgments about Nietzsche are in error. The error will be recognized only when a confrontation with him is at the same time conjoined to a confrontation in the realm of the ground- ing question of philosophy. At the outset, however, we ought to in- troduce some words of Nietzsche's that stem from the time of his work on "will to power": "For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy" (XIV, 24).
Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? Indeed. But at the same time we must observe how Nietzsche views the essence of the feast, in such a way that he can think of it only on the basis of his fundamental conception of all being, will to power. "The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnest- ness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection-all obvious states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence" (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add, the feast of thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself. For the same reason there is no pagan philos- ophy, inasmuch as anything "pagan" is always still something Christian -the counter-Christian. The Greek poets and thinkers can hardly be designated as "pagan. "
6 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Feasts require long and painstaking preparation. This semester we want to prepare ourselves for the feast, even if we do not make it as far as the celebration, even if we only catch a glimpse of the preliminary festivities at the feast of thinking-experiencing what meditative thought is and what it means to be at home in genuine questioning.
2. The Book, The Will to Power
The question as to what being is seeks the Being of beings. All Being is for Nietzsche a Becoming. Such Becoming, however, has the char- acter of action and the activity of willing. But in its essence will is will to power. That expression names what Nietzsche thinks when he asks the guiding question of philosophy. And for that reason the name obtrudes as the title for his planned magnum opus, which, as we know, was not brought to fruition. What lies before us today as a book with the title The Will to Power contains preliminary drafts and frag- mentary elaborations for that work. The outlined plan according to which these fragments are ordered, the division into four books, and the titles of those books also stem from Nietzsche himself.
At the outset we should mention briefly the most important aspects of Nietzsche's life, the origins of the plans and preliminary drafts, and the later publication of these materials after Nietzsche's death.
In a Protestant pastor's house in the year 1844 Nietzsche was born. As a student of classical philology in Leipzig in 1865 he came to know Schopenhauer's major work, The World as Will and Representation. During his last semester in Leipzig (1868-69), in November, he came into personal contact with Richard Wagner. Apart from the world of the Greeks, which remained decisive for the whole of Nietzsche's life, although in the last years of his wakeful thinking it had to yield som. e ground to the world of Rome, Schopenhauer and Wagner were the earliest intellectually determinative forces. In the spring of 1869, Nietz- sche, not yet twenty-five years of age and not yet finished with his doctoral studies, received an appointment at Basel as associate professor of classical philology. There he came into amicable contact with Jacob
8 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Burckhardt and with the Church historian Franz Overbeck. The ques- tion as to whether or not a real friendship evolved between Nietzsche and Burckhardt has a significance that exceeds the merely biographical sphere, but discussion of it does not belong here. He also met Bachofen,* but their dealings with one another never went beyond reserved collegiality. Ten years later, in 1879, Nietzsche resigned his professorship. Another ten years later, in January, 1889, he suffered a total mental collapse, and on August 25, 1900, he died.
During the Basel years Nietzsche's inner disengagement from Scho- penhauer and Wagner came to completion. But only in the years 1880 to 1883 did Nietzsche find himself, that is to say, find himself as a thinker: he found his fundamental position within the whole of beings, and thereby the determinative source of his thought. Between 1882 and 1885 the figure of "Zarathustra" swept over him like a storm. In those same years the plan for his main philosophical work originated. During the preparation of the planned work the preliminary sketches, plans, divisions, and the architectonic vision changed several times. No deci- sion was made in favor of any single alternative; nor did an image of the whole emerge that might project a definitive profile. In the last year before his collapse (I888) the initial plans were finally abandoned. A peculiar restlessness now possessed Nietzsche. He could no longer wait for the long gestation of a broadly conceived work which would be able to speak for itself, on its own, as a work. Nietzsche himself had to speak, he himself had to come forth and announce his basic position vis-a-vis the world, drawing the boundaries which were to prevent anyone's confusing that basic position with any other. Thus the smaller works originated: The Wagner Case, Nietzsche contra Wagner, TwJ1ight of
the Idols, Ecce Homo, and The Antichrist-which first appeared in 1890.
But Nietzsche's philosophy proper, the fundamental position on the basis of which he speaks in these and in all the writings he himself
*J. J. Bachofen (1815-1887), Swiss historian of law and religion, interested in myths and symbols in primitive folklore, today best known as the author of the classic work on matriarchy, Das Mutterrecht, published in 1861.
The Book, The Will to Power 9
published, did not assume a final form and was not itself published in any book, neither in the decade between 1879 and 1889 nor during the years preceding. What Nietzsche himself published during his creative life was always foreground. That is also true of his first treatise, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). His philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous, unpublished work.
In 1901, a year after Nietzsche's death, the first collection of his preliminary drafts for a magnum opus appeared. It was based on Nietzsche's plan dated March 17, 1887; in addition, the collection referred to notes in which Nietzsche himself arranged particular frag- ments into groups.
In the first and in later editions the particular fragments selected from the handwritten Nachlass were numbered sequentially. The first edition of The Will to Power included 483 selections.
It soon became clear that this edition was quite incomplete when compared to the available handwritten material. In 1906 a new and significantly expanded edition appeared, retaining the same plan. It included 1,067 selections, more than double the number in the first edition. The second edition appeared in 1911 as volumes XV and XVI of the Grossoktav edition of Nietzsche's works. But even these volumes did not contain the amassed material; whatever was not subsumed under the plan appeared as two Nachlass volumes, numbered XIII and XIV in the Collected Works.
Not long ago the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar undertook to publish a historical-critical complete edition of Nietzsche's works and letters in chronological order. It should become the ultimate, definitive edition. * It no longer separates the writings Nietzsche himself published and the Nachlass, as the earlier complete editions do, but collates for each period both published and unpublished materials. The extensive
*The Historisch-kritische Cesamtausgabe der Werke und Briefe (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1933-42), edited by a group of scholars including H. J. Mette, W. Hoppe, and K. Schlechta, under the direction of Carl August Emge, published fewer than a dozen of the many volumes of works and letters planned. For an account of the "principles" of the edition-with which Heidegger takes issue below-see the Foreword to the Nietzsche Cesamtausgabe, I, x-xv.
10 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
collection of letters, which thanks to new and rich finds is growing steadily, is also to be published in chronological sequence. The historical-critical complete edition, which has now begun, remains in its foundations ambiguous. First of all, as a historical-critical "complete edition" which brings out every single thing it can find, guided by the fundamental principle of completeness, it belongs among the undertakings of nineteenth-century publication. Second, by the manner of its biographical, psychological commentary and its similarly thorough research of all "data" on Nietzsche's "life," and of the views of his contemporaries as well, it is a product of the psychological- biological addiction of our times.
Only in the actual presentation of the authentic "Works" (1881-89) will this edition have an impact on the future, granted the editors succeed in their task. That task and its fulfillment are not a part of what we have just criticized; moreover, the task can be carried out without all that. But we can never succeed in arriving at Nietzsche's philosophy proper if we have not in our questioning conceived of Nietzsche as the end of Western metaphysics and proceeded to the entirely different question of the truth of Being.
The text recommended for this course is the edition of The Will to Power prepared by A. Baeumler for the Kroner pocket edition series. It is a faithful reprint of volumes XV and XVI of the Grossoktavaus- gabe, with a sensible Afterword and a good, brief outline of Nietzsche's life history. In addition, Baeumler has edited for the same series a volume entitled Nietzsche in His Letters and in Reports by Contempo- raries. For a first introduction the book is useful. For a knowledge of Nietzsche's biography the presentation by his sister, Elisabeth Forster- Nietzsche, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (published between 1895 and 1904), remains important. As with all biographical works, however, use of this publication requires great caution.
W e will refrain from further suggestions and from discussion of the enormous and varied secondary literature surrounding Nietzsche, since none of it can aid the endeavor of this lecture course. Whoever does not have the courage and perseverance of thought required to become
The Book, The Will to Power II
involved in Nietzsche's own writings need not read anything about him either.
Citation of passages from Nietzsche's works will be by volume and page number of the Grossoktav edition. Passages from The Will to Power employed in the lecture course will not be cited by the page number of any particular edition but by the fragment number which is standard in all editions. These passages are for the most part not simple, incomplete fragments and fleeting observations; rather, they are carefully worked out "aphorisms," as Nietzsche's individual nota- tions are customarily called. But not every brief notation is automat- ically an aphorism, that is, an expression or saying which absolutely closes its borders to everything inessential and admits only what is essential. Nietzsche observes somewhere that it is his ambition to say in a brief aphorism what others in an entire book . . . do not say.
3. Plans and Preliminary Drafts of the "Main Structure"
Before we characterize more minutely the plan on which the presently available edition of The Will to Power is based, and before we indicate those passages with which our inquiry shall begin, let us introduce testimony from several of Nietzsche's letters. Such testimony sheds light on the origin of the preliminary drafts for the planned chief work and suggests the fundamental mood from which the work derives.
On April 7, 1884, Nietzsche writes to his friend Overbeck in Basel:
For the past few months I've been preoccupied with "world history," en- chanted by it, in spite of many hair-raising results. Did I ever show you Jacob Burckhardt's letter, the one which led me by the nose to "world history"? If I get to Sils Maria this summer I want to undertake a revision of my metaphysica and my epistemological views. Now I must work through a whole series of disciplines step by step, for I am resolved to devote the next five years to the construction of my "philosophy," for which I have in my Zarathustra constructed a vestibule.
We should take this opportunity to observe that the common as- sumption that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra was to present his philosophy in poetic form, and that, since Zarathustra did not achieve this goal, Nietzsche wanted to transcribe his philosophy into prose for purposes of greater intelligibility, is an error. The planned major work,
The WJ11 to Power, is in truth as much a poetic work as Zarathustra is a work of thought. The relationship between the two works remains one of vestibule and main structure. Nevertheless, between 1882 and 1888 several essential steps were taken which remain wholly concealed
Plans and Preliminary Drafts l3
in prior collections of the Nachlass fragments, such concealment pre- venting a glimpse into the essential structure of Nietzsche's metaphy- sics.
In mid-June, 1884, Nietzsche writes to his sister:
So, the scaffolding for the main structure ought to be erected this summer; or, to put it differently, during the next few months I want to draw up the schema for my philosophy and my plan for the next six years. May my health hold out for this purpose! *
From Sils Maria on September 2, 1884, to his friend and assistant Peter Cast:
In addition, I have completely finished the major task I set myself for this summer-the next six years belong to the elaboration of a schema in which I have outlined my "philosophy. " The prospects for this look good and promising. Meanwhile, Zarathustra retains only its entirely personal mean- ing, being my "book of edification and consolation"--otherwise, for Every- man, it is obscure and riddlesome and ridiculous.
To Overbeck, July 2, 1885:
I have dictated for two or three hours practically every day, but my "philos- ophy"-if I have the right to call it by the name of something that has maltreated me down to the very roots of my being-is no longer communi- cable, at least not in print.
Here doubts about the possibility of a presentation of his philosophy
*According to Karl Schlechta's "Philologischer Nachbericht," in Friedrich Nietzsche Werke in drei Biinden (Munich: C. Hanser, 6th ed. , 1969), III, 1411, 1417, and 1420-22, this letter, number 379 in the edition by Frau Fiirster-Nietzsche, is a forgery. More
specifically, it appears that Nietzsche's sister altered the addressee (the letter was sent not to her but to Malwida von Meysenbug) and enlarged upon the original contents of the letter. Because she managed to destroy all but a fragment of the original, it is virtually impossible to determine whether or not the words Heidegger cites are Nietzsche's. Nevertheless, the fragment does contain the following lines, relevant to the present issue: " . . . nachdem ich mir diese V orhalle meiner Philosophie gebaut habe, muss ich die Hand wieder anlegen und nicht miide werden, his auch der Haupt-Bau fertig vor mir steht. " In translation: ". . . now that I have built this vestibule for my philosophy, I must get busy once again and not grow weary until the main structure too stands finished before me. "
14 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
in book form are already stirring. But a year later Nietzsche is again confident.
To his mother and sister, September 2, 1886:
For the next four years the creation of a four-volume magnum opus is proposed. The very title is fearsome: "The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. " For it I have everything that is necessary, health, solitude, good mood, and maybe a wife. *
With this mention of his major work Nietzsche refers to the fact that on the cover of the book that had appeared during that year, Beyond Good and Evil, a work with the above-mentioned title was cited as the volume to appear next. In addition, Nietzsche writes in his Toward a Genealogy of Morals, which appeared in 1887 (See Division Three, no. 27):
. . . with respect to which [i. e. , the question of the meaning of the ascetic ideal] I refer to a work I am now preparing: The Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values.
Nietzsche himself emphasized the title of his planned work by means of special, heavy print.
To Peter Cast, September 15, 1887:
I vacillated, to be honest, between Venice and-Leipzig: the latter for learned purposes, since in reference to the major pensum of my life, which is presently to be resolved, I still have much to learn, to question, and to read. But for that I would need, not an "autumn," but an entire winter in Germany: and, all things considered, my health forcefully discourages such a dangerous experiment for this year. Therefore it has turned out to be a matter of Venice and Nice: -and also, as you yourself may judge to be true, I now need the profound isolation which in my case is even more compelling than further study and exploration into five thousand particular problems.
To Carl von Gersdorff, December 20, 1887:
In a significant sense my life stands right now at high noon: one door is closing, another opening. All I have done in the last few years has been a
*Schlechta (ibid. ) does not cite this letter as a forgery.
Plans and Preliminary Drafts 15
settling of accounts, a conclusion of negotiations, an adding up of things past; by now I have finished with men and things and have drawn a line under it all. Who and what remain for me, whither I must now go, toward the really most important matter of my existence (a transition to which I have been condemned), are now capital questions. For, between you and me, the tension in which I live, the pressure of a great task and passion, is now too great for me to allow still more people to approach me. The desert that surrounds me is vast indeed. I really can bear only complete strangers or passers-by, or, on the other hand, people who have been a part of me for a long time, even from childhood. Everyone else has drifted away or has been repulsed (there was much violence and much pain in that-).
Here it is no longer simply the matter of a magnum opus.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition XXV
Was Heidegger a nazi? Yes, if carrying the membership card and paying the dues is our standard. No, not if we stress the most horrify- ing aspect of National Socialism, its vulgar racism and virulent anti- Semitism. Yes, if we stress the importance of Hitler himself and of his cult of nationalism, militarism, and anti-parliamentarian elitism. Indeed, when Heidegger conjoins liberalism and the dominant National Socialism, which has declined his spiritual leadership, there is reason to observe that if Heidegger was not a nazi it was only because the Party was too liberal for him. At the same time, we have to remember the Party's rejection of Heidegger's "private" version of National Socialism already in 1934 and the waxing intensity of the polemics against him by Party ideologues in the mid-1930s. Further- more, Heidegger's disaffection from the Party in the course of the 1930s has direct relevance for his work on Nietzsche: when Party cen- sorship of the Nietzsche edition that Heidegger was helping to pre- pare intensified in 1938, he stopped working with the Commission that was charged with the edition. Thus the year 1938 assumes sym- bolic importance for our theme: as the Party insists on sanitizing the Nietzsche edition, purging from it Nietzsche's anti-anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism, Heidegger opts for Nietzsche, and the triad of terms in our title falls apart. In a word, and to answer a complex question peremptorily: if we stress Heidegger's active and inventive support of the regime in 1933-34, the answer is a resounding, catastrophic yes; as the 1930s come to a close, opening onto an even more disastrous era, the answer is no. As for Heidegger's silence after the war, it responds to our own need to know why with-silence.
Is Heidegger's relation to National Socialism the sole important aspect of his lectures and essays on Nietzsche? Not at all. His reading of eternal recurrence of the same as mortal transition and downgoing; of the will to power as artistic creativity and the pursuit of knowledge· "in the grand style"; of the Nietzschean revaluation of all values as a remnant of metaphysical and calculative valuative thinking; and of nihilism as the history of being from Plato through Nietzsche-these issues await the reader and will challenge her or him to the full. No peremptory discussion can resolve them.
XXVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Perhaps what is most disturbing about the "Heidegger scandal" today is the avidity with which Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism has been taken up, a fervor that cannot be explained by reference to the usual dependable pleasures of righteous indignation. Academics and philosophers today seem to hope that if they can shift attention to a Heidegger-exposed-at-last they will be able to forget the vacuity and aimlessness of their own projects. That if their kind of philosophy has run out of problems, then the only way to keep the conversation going endlessly is to churn out endless scandals. The hope blossoms that a social-critical, emancipatory discourse will sud- denly make sense again if adherents can divert everyone's attention to another time and place, newsflash 1933, expatiating on a foreign yet ostensibly familiar situation, excoriating the same old set of villains. Villains safely past. Museum pieces of wickedness or credulity. Or, finally, that the American mind-modest generalization though it may be-will suddenly burst into bloom once again if only its captors (Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the rest of the French) can be expunged from the curriculum. With a sterilized Socrates or antiseptic Aristotle mounted in their place. How much more satisfying it is to scan accounts of scandals in the Sunday supplements than to wrestle with Sophist or Metaphysics or Being and Time. How much more satisfy- ing to settle once and for all questions of crime and punishment, to banish a thinker and renounce all his works, to burn all those difficult books.
Heidegger's Nietzsche is the easiest of those difficult books, the least painful to read. No doubt, these volumes need to be read closely and critically. For even more disturbing than the avidity of the Heidegger bashers is the business-as-usual attitude of the Heidegger acolytes. The crippling conservatism and militancy, the longing for mettle and metal, Harte und Schwere, the perfervid anti-Communism, and the endless fascination with and confidence in the German Volk-none of these traits can be forgotten or relegated to some safely "nonphilosophical" realm. In Heidegger himself these traits remain profoundly troubling; in Heidegger's followers, in his circles and societies, they are an abomination, if also a farce.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition xxvn
Heidegger's Nietzsche is one of those ventures and adventures that compels the reader again and again to scribble into the margins No! No! The yeses come slowly and painfully. When they do come, after all the necessary caution and resistance, the reader will discover that he or she does not need a book of matches for this book of powerfully formulated yet altogether tentative thoughts.
No doubt, other significant readings of Nietzsche will come along, or have already arrived on the scene, with Bataille, Deleuze, Klos- sowski, and Derrida. Yet none of these writers can readily separate the names Nietzsche/Heidegger. None can pry apart this laminate. As though one of the crucial confrontations for thinkers today were what one might call heidegger's nietzsche, nietzsche's heidegger.
Editor's Preface
From 1936 to 1940 Martin Heidegger offered four lecture courses at the University ofFreiburg-im-Breisgau on selected topics in Nietzsche's philosophy. During the decade 1936-1946 he composed a number of individual lectures and essays on that thinker. After lecturing again on Nietzsche during the early 1950s Heidegger determined to publish these and the earlier materials; in 1961 the Neske Verlag ofPfullingen released two large volumes of Heidegger's early lectures and essays on Nietzsche. A four-volume English version of Heidegger's two-volume Nietzsche (cited throughout these volumes as NI, Nil, with page number) appeared during the years 1979-1987.
The four hardbound volumes of Heidegger's Nietzsche are here reproduced in two paperback volumes, the first containing volumes I and II of the first English edition, the second uniting volumes III and IV. In order to keep the cost of the paperback edition as low as possi- ble, the volumes have been reprinted with a minimum of changes. Errors that came to my attention over the years have been corrected and a new Introduction added. The order of the essays in the hard- bound edition has been retained: it deviates from that of the hard- bound Neske edition, following the order of Neske's paperback ver- sion of Nihilismus, which is also the order Heidegger approved for the English translation.
In the intervening years, the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (cited throughout as MHG, with volume number in italic) has pro- duced a number of volumes relevant to the Nietzsche. Division I of the Gesamtausgabe reproduces the 1961 Neske volumes as volumes 6. 1 and 6. 2. These contain the lectures and essays in the form that Heidegger himself gave them in 1960 and 1961, reworking and con- densing the material. The Gesamtausgabe editors have also produced
XXX THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
a second set of versions of the lectures, based on the holographs plus student notes and transcriptions. These appear in Division II of the edition as volumes 43 (Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, win- ter semester 1936-1937), 44 (Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstel- lung im abendlandischen Denken: Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen, summer semester 1937), 47 (Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis, summer semester 1939), and 48 (Nietzsche: Der euro- paische NihiJismus, second trimester 1940). Two further volumes are in preparation: 46 (Nietzsches II. Unzeitgema/3e Betrachtung, winter semester 1938-1939), and 50 (Nietzsches Metaphysik, announced for the winter semester of 1941-1942 but not given). These versions of the lectures differ in several significant ways from the 1961 Neske edi- tion on which the translation was based: first, they include a number of "repetitions" or "summaries and transitions" that Heidegger cus- tomarily presented at the beginning of each lecture hour, materials that Heidegger himself eliminated when he edited the Nietzsche for publication; second, they also include a number of passages that he decided to strike, apparently because he felt they were too polemical, too repetitious, or of dubious relevance; third, they include a number of notes found on unattached sheets in the handwritten lectures.
Let a single example of such deleted material suffice, of the second type: when Heidegger edited the first lecture course he cut two para- graphs of material on Jaspers' treatment of Nietzschean eternal recur- rence of the same, paragraphs that "put quite sharply" why it is that philosophy is "altogether impossible" for Jaspers. (See NI, 31 and cf. MHG 43, 26. ) The substance of the critique remains in these pages (see, in this paperback edition, I, 23), but the remarks on Jaspers' "moralizing psychology" and his inability to ask genuinely philosophi- cal questions are deleted.
It therefore has to be said that scholars who feel the need to focus sharply on a particular passage in Heidegger's Nietzsche should refer to the corresponding volumes in MHG Division II. Yet we can be con- fident that with the Neske edition, prepared by Heidegger himself, we have the core of his confrontation with Nietzsche. It would not have been possible for me to "work into" this translation materials from the lectures as they appear in MHG Division II, precisely for the reasons
Editor's Preface XXXI
that it was impossible for the German editors to work them into the MHG reprint of the Neske edition. If only for reasons of bulk: the word count for the first three courses is 192,500 in Neske, 270,000 in MHG.
The Neske edition too ultimately derives from Heidegger's hand- written lectures. Heidegger collated these notes with the help of a number of assistants and approved the final typescript in spring of 1961. Since access to the original notes is restricted, and because the notes themselves are fascinating documents, I have prepared a description of one complete page of the notes and a comparison of it to the relevant pages of the Neske edition as an Appendix to the pres- ent volume. (See also a photographic facsimile of that page following p. 223. ) There is one serious error on this page as transcribed in the Neske edition, volume one, page 51, line 22. An examination of the holograph page (listed in the Marbach Archive as no. A 33/14) shows that line 22 ends one of Heidegger's long emendations designed for insertion into the body of the text. The line is difficult to read with certainty; it is easy to see how the error in the published text occurred. But the sense of the holograph page is clear, and with the aid of the only extant Abschrift or typescript (Archive no. II 19/27) an accurate reconstruction is possible. After having examined MHG 43, 48, 11. 5-6 f. b. , I propose the following reading:
strike line 22 of NI, 51, and insert: Streben auf. Wille dagegen, [als] Ent- schlossenheit zu sich, ist immer tiber sich etc.
I have adopted this reading for the translation, p. 41, lines 13-14. A more detailed discussion appears in the Appendix.
The only other serious error in the Neske edition of which I am aware is the duplication of the word nicht at NI, 189, line 5 from the bottom (cf. MHG 43, 199, 1. 11 f. b. ), which ought to read:
Sinnlichen, als ein Nichtseiendes und Nicht-sein-sol- etc.
Occasional typographical errors in the Neske edition and minor inaccuracies in the quotations I have corrected without drawing atten- tion to them.
I have translated all passages from Nietzsche's works in Heidegger's text, as well as the quotations from Hegel, Wagner, Dilthey, and
XXXII THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
others. But I am grateful to have had the translation of The Will to Power by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) for reference and comparision.
Heidegger's many references to Der Wille zur Macht are cited in these English volumes as WM, followed by aphorism-not page-- number, e. g. : (WM, 794). His references to all other Nietzschean texts are to the Grossoktavausgabe (Leipzig, 1905 ff. ); in the body of the text they are cited simply by volume and page, e. g. : (XIV, 413-67); in my own explanatory footnotes I cite the Grossoktavausgabe as GOA. In these notes the letters CM refer to the new Kritische Gesamtaus- gabe of Nietzsche's works and letters, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967 ff. ). I have checked as many of Heidegger's references to the GOA in CM as time, the incompleteness of CM, and its one-way concordances allowed. Where no major discrepancies emerged I let the GOA text stand. However, readers who wish to focus on a specific reference by Heidegger to the GOA should themselves check CM carefully before proceeding.
Heidegger's text contains no footnotes; all notes in the present vol- ume are my own. I have tried to keep them to a minimum, since it is hard to know when such notes are helpful and when they are a nui- sance. I hope that readers who have difficulties with the editorial mat- ter or any aspect of the translation will write me about them in care of the publisher. As for the translation itself, its apologist is Jerome, whose Preface to Eusebius' Chronicle William Arrowsmith has ren- dered (in Arion, New Series, 2/3, 1975, p. 359):
Jerome to Vincentius and Gallienus: Greetings
. . . It is difficult, when you are following in another man's footsteps, to
keep from going astray somewhere. And it is extremely difficult to pre- serve in translation the particular verbal felicities of a foreign language. The original meaning, for instance, may be conveyed in a single word- a word which has no single Latin equivalent. I f the translator tries to catch the full meaning, he must resort to lengthy paraphrase. To these difficul- ties must be added the problems of word-order, differences in case and rhetorical figures, and finally, the native genius of the language itself. If I
Editor's Preface XXXlll
translate word for word, the result is ludicrous; if I am forced to change the words or rearrange them, it will look as though I had failed in my duty as a translator.
So, my dear Vincentius and Gallienus, I beg of you, if you find signs of haste and confusion, to read this work rather as friends than critics.
I owe thanks to many generous people for help with this project over the past fifteen years: Jochen Barkhausen, Robert Bernasconi, Friederike Born, Helm Breinig, Frank Capuzzi, Chris Fynsk, Sherry Gray Martin, Ulrich Halfmann, Elfride Heidegger, Hermann Heideg- ger, F. -W. von Herrmann, Elisabeth Hoffmann, Eunice Farrell Krell, Marta Krell, Will McNeill, Sabine Modersheim, Thomas Muller, Ashraf Noor, Bruce Pye, John Sallis, Jupp Schopp, John Shopp, Joan Stambaugh, and Joachim W. Storck. And special debts of gratitude to Martin Heidegger and J. Glenn Gray.
Chicago D. F. K.
Plan of the English Edition
FIRST VOLUME OF PAPERBACK EDITION
Volume I: The Will to Power as Art
I. Author's Foreword to All Volumes [NI, 9-10].
2. "The Will to Power as Art," a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1936-37 [NI, 11-254].
Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
I. "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same," a lecture course deliv- ered at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1937 [NI, 255-472].
2. "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " a lecture to the Bremen Club on May 8, 1953, printed in Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1954), pp. 101-26, added here as a supplement to the Nietzsche material.
SECOND VOLUME OF PAPERBACK EDITION
Volume III: "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics
I. "The Will to Power as Knowledge," a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1939 [NI, 473-658].
2. "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power," the two concluding lectures to all three lecture courses, written in 1939 but not delivered [Nil, 7-29].
XXXVI THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
3. "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," a typescript dated August-Decem- ber 1940, apparently derived from an unscheduled and hereto- fore unlisted course on Nietzsche's philosophy [Nil, 257-333]. *
Volume IV: Nihilism
l. "European Nihilism," a lecture course delivered at the Univer- sity of Freiburg during the first trimester of 1940 [Nil, 31-256]. 2. "Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being," an essay com- posed during the years 1944-46 but not published until 1961
[Nil, 335-398].
The three remaining essays in volume two of the Neske edition, "Metaphysics as History of Being" [Nil, 399-457], "Sketches for a His- tory of Being as Metaphysics" [Nil, 458-80], and "Recollection of Metaphysics" [Nil, 481-90], all from the year 1941, appear in English
*"Nietzsche's Metaphysics" appears as the title of a lecture course for the winter semester of 1941-42 in all published lists of Heidegger's courses. The earliest prospec- tuses of the Klostermann firm cited such a lecture course as volume 52 of the Heidegger "Complete Edition" (Gesamtausgabe). But the Heidegger Archive of the Schiller- Nationalmuseum in Marbach contains no manuscript for such a course. It does contain the sixty-four-page typescript in question, with many handwritten alternations, composed in August I940 and revised during the months of September, October, and December of that year. One of the typescript's several title pages refers to the winter semester of 1938-39, in all probability not to any lecture or seminar in the published lists but to an unlisted Ubung [exercise] entitled "Toward an Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second 'Untimely Meditation,' On the Advantage and Disadvantage ofHistory for Life. " On Sep- tember 29, 1975, I asked Heidegger about the discrepancy of the dates for "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" in the Neske edition (1940) and in the published lists and catalogues of his courses (winter semester 1941-42). (At the time of our conversation on this matter the above information, supplied by the archive, was unknown to me. ) Heidegger reaffirmed the date 1940 as the time of composition. He explained that the material had been pre- pared during a seminar, title and date not specified, and conceded that he might have employed the same material for theWS 1941-42lecture course. The more recent prospec- tuses of the Gesamtausgabe list both the 1938-39 course ("Nietzsche's Second 'Untimely Meditation'") and the essay "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" as volumes 46 and 50, respectively. "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" is said to have been "announced, but not taught, in the win- ter semester of 1941-42. " In volume 50 it is coupled (for no apparent reason) with the 1944-45 course, "Thinking and Poetizing. "
The problem awaits the more patient scrutiny of the archive's curators. But this may suffice to explain why Heidegger cites 1940 (and not 1942, as the catalogues would lead us to expect) as the closing date for his early lectures on Nietzsche.
Plan ofthe English Edition xxxvii
translation in Martin Heidegger, The End ofPhilosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). The End ofPhilosophy also contains the essay "Overcoming Metaphysics" (1936-46), related thematically and chronologically to the Nietzsche material and origi· nally published in Vortrage und Aufsatze, pp. 71-99. The lecture in which Heidegger summarizes much of the material in volume II of Nietzsche, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead"' (1943), appears in English translation in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Other references to Nietzsche in Heidegger's works are listed in the second, revised edition of Hildegard Feick, Index zu Heideggers "Sein und Zeit" (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), p. 120.
Author's Foreword to All Volumes
Nietzsche himself identifies the experience that determines his thinking:
"Life . . . more mysterious since the day the great liberator came over me-the thought that life should be an experiment of knowers. "
The Cay Science 1882 (Book IV, no. 324)
"Nietzsche"- t h e name of the thinker stands as the title for the matter of his thinking.
The matter, the point in question, is in itself a confrontation. To let our thinking enter into the matter, to prepare our thinking for it- these goals determine the contents of the present publication.
It consists of lecture courses held at the University of Freiburg-im- Breisgau during the years 1936 to 1940. Adjoined to them are treatises which originated in the years 1940 to 1946. The treatises further extend the way by which the lecture courses-still at that time under way- paved the way for the confrontation.
The text of the lectures is divided according to content, not hours of presentation. Nevertheless, the lecture character has been retained, this necessitating an unavoidable breadth of presentation and a certain amount of repetition.
It is intentional that often the same text from Nietzsche's writings is discussed more than once, though each time in a different context. Much material has been presented that may be familiar and even well known to many readers, since in everything well known something worthy of thought still lurks. The repetitions are intended to provide occasions for thinking through, in ever renewed fashion, those several thoughts that determine the whole. Whether, and in what sense, with
xl THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
what sort of range, the thoughts remain worthy of thought becomes clear and is decided through the confrontation. In the text of the lectures unnecessary words and phrases have been deleted, involuted sentences simplified, obscure passages clarified, and oversights correct- ed.
For all that, the written and printed text lacks the advantages of oral presentation.
Considered as a whole, the publication aims to provide a view of the path of thought I followed from 1930 to the "Letter on Humanism" (1947). The two small lectures published just prior to the "Letter," "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (1942) and "On the Essence of Truth" (1943), originated back in the years 1930-31. The book Commentaries on Holder/in's Poetry (1951), which contains one essay and several lectures from the years between 1936 and 1943, sheds only indirect light on that path.
Whence the confrontation with the "Nietzsche matter" comes and whither it goes may become manifest to the reader when he himself sets off along the way the following texts have taken.
Freiburg-im-Breisgau May, 1961
M. H.
7'Jietzsche
VOLUME I
The Will to Power as Art
"Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god! "
The Antichrist 1888 (VIII, 235-36)
1.
Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker
In The Will to Power, the "work" to be treated in this lecture course, Nietzsche says the following about philosophy (WM, 420):
I do not wish to persuade anyone to philosophy: it is inevitable and perhaps also desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant. I find nothing more repugnant than didactic praise of philosophy as one finds it in Seneca, or worse, Cicero. Philosophy has little to do with virtue. Permit me to say also that the man of knowledge is fundamentally different from the philoso- pher. -What I desire is that the genuine concept of the philosopher not perish utterly in Germany. . . .
At the age of twenty-eight, as a professor in Basel, Nietzsche writes (X, ll2):
There are times of great danger in which philosophers appear-times when the wheel rolls ever faster-when philosophers and artists assume the place of the dwindling mythos. They are far ahead of their time, however, for the attention of contemporaries is only quite slowly drawn to them. A people which becomes aware of its dangers produces the genius.
The Will to Power-the expression plays a dual role in Nietzsche's thinking. First, it serves as the title of Nietzsche's chief philosophical work, planned and prepared over many years but never written. Second, it names what constitutes the basic character of all beings. "Will to power is the ultimate factum to which we come" {XVI, 415).
It is easy to see how both applications of the expression "will to power" belong together: only because the expression plays the second role can and must it also adopt the first. As the name for the basic
4 THE WILL TO PO\VER AS ART
character of all beings, the expression "will to power" provides an answer to the question "What is being? " Since antiquity that question has been the question of philosophy. The narrie "will to power" must therefore come to stand in the title of the chief philosophical work of a thinker who says that all being ultimately is will to power. If for Nietzsche the work of that title is to be the philosophical "main struc- ture," for which Zarathustra is but the "vestibule," the implication is that Nietzsche's thinking proceeds within the vast orbit of the ancient guiding question of philosophy, "What is being? "
Is Nietzsche then not at all so modern as the hubbub that has surrounded him makes it seem? Is Nietzsche not nearly so subversive as he himself was wont to pose? Dispelling such fears is not really necessary; we need not bother to do that. On the contrary, the refer- ence to the fact that Nietzsche moves in the orbit of the question of Western philosophy only serves to make clear that Nietzsche knew what philosophy is. Such knowledge is rare. Only great thinkers possess it. The greatest possess it most purely in the form of a persistent question. The genuinely grounding question, as the question of the essence of Being, does not unfold in the history of philosophy as such; Nietzsche too persists in the guiding question.
The task of our lecture course is to elucidate the fundamental posi- tion within which Nietzsche unfolds the guiding question of Western thought and responds to it. Such elucidation is needed in order to prepare a confrontation with Nietzsche. If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
The confrontation with Nietzsche has not yet begun, nor have the prerequisites for it been established. For a long time Nietzsche has been either celebrated and imitated or reviled and exploited. Nietz- sche's thought and speech are still too contemporary for us. He and we have not yet been sufficiently separated in history; we lack the distance necessary for a sound appreciation of the thinker's strength.
Confrontation is genuine criticism. It is the supreme way, the only way, to a true estimation of a thinker. In confrontation we undertake
Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker 5
to reflect on his thinking and to trace it in its effective force, not in its weaknesses. To what purpose? In order that through the confronta- tion we ourselves may become free for the supreme exertion of think- ing.
But for a long time it has been declaimed from chairs of philosophy in Germany that Nietzsche is not a rigorous thinker but a "poet- philosopher. " Nietzsche does not belong among the philosophers, who think only about abstract, shadowy affairs, far removed from life. If he is to be called a philosopher at all then he must be regarded as a "philosopher of life. " That rubric, a perennial favorite, serves at the same time to nourish the suspicion that any other kind of philosophy is something for the dead, and is therefore at bottom dispensable. Such a view wholly coincides with the opinion of those who welcome in Nietzsche the "philosopher of life" who has at long last quashed ab- stract thought. These common judgments about Nietzsche are in error. The error will be recognized only when a confrontation with him is at the same time conjoined to a confrontation in the realm of the ground- ing question of philosophy. At the outset, however, we ought to in- troduce some words of Nietzsche's that stem from the time of his work on "will to power": "For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy" (XIV, 24).
Abstract thinking a feast? The highest form of human existence? Indeed. But at the same time we must observe how Nietzsche views the essence of the feast, in such a way that he can think of it only on the basis of his fundamental conception of all being, will to power. "The feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnest- ness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection-all obvious states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes. The feast is paganism par excellence" (WM, 916). For that reason, we might add, the feast of thinking never takes place in Christianity. That is to say, there is no Christian philosophy. There is no true philosophy that could be determined anywhere else than from within itself. For the same reason there is no pagan philos- ophy, inasmuch as anything "pagan" is always still something Christian -the counter-Christian. The Greek poets and thinkers can hardly be designated as "pagan. "
6 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Feasts require long and painstaking preparation. This semester we want to prepare ourselves for the feast, even if we do not make it as far as the celebration, even if we only catch a glimpse of the preliminary festivities at the feast of thinking-experiencing what meditative thought is and what it means to be at home in genuine questioning.
2. The Book, The Will to Power
The question as to what being is seeks the Being of beings. All Being is for Nietzsche a Becoming. Such Becoming, however, has the char- acter of action and the activity of willing. But in its essence will is will to power. That expression names what Nietzsche thinks when he asks the guiding question of philosophy. And for that reason the name obtrudes as the title for his planned magnum opus, which, as we know, was not brought to fruition. What lies before us today as a book with the title The Will to Power contains preliminary drafts and frag- mentary elaborations for that work. The outlined plan according to which these fragments are ordered, the division into four books, and the titles of those books also stem from Nietzsche himself.
At the outset we should mention briefly the most important aspects of Nietzsche's life, the origins of the plans and preliminary drafts, and the later publication of these materials after Nietzsche's death.
In a Protestant pastor's house in the year 1844 Nietzsche was born. As a student of classical philology in Leipzig in 1865 he came to know Schopenhauer's major work, The World as Will and Representation. During his last semester in Leipzig (1868-69), in November, he came into personal contact with Richard Wagner. Apart from the world of the Greeks, which remained decisive for the whole of Nietzsche's life, although in the last years of his wakeful thinking it had to yield som. e ground to the world of Rome, Schopenhauer and Wagner were the earliest intellectually determinative forces. In the spring of 1869, Nietz- sche, not yet twenty-five years of age and not yet finished with his doctoral studies, received an appointment at Basel as associate professor of classical philology. There he came into amicable contact with Jacob
8 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Burckhardt and with the Church historian Franz Overbeck. The ques- tion as to whether or not a real friendship evolved between Nietzsche and Burckhardt has a significance that exceeds the merely biographical sphere, but discussion of it does not belong here. He also met Bachofen,* but their dealings with one another never went beyond reserved collegiality. Ten years later, in 1879, Nietzsche resigned his professorship. Another ten years later, in January, 1889, he suffered a total mental collapse, and on August 25, 1900, he died.
During the Basel years Nietzsche's inner disengagement from Scho- penhauer and Wagner came to completion. But only in the years 1880 to 1883 did Nietzsche find himself, that is to say, find himself as a thinker: he found his fundamental position within the whole of beings, and thereby the determinative source of his thought. Between 1882 and 1885 the figure of "Zarathustra" swept over him like a storm. In those same years the plan for his main philosophical work originated. During the preparation of the planned work the preliminary sketches, plans, divisions, and the architectonic vision changed several times. No deci- sion was made in favor of any single alternative; nor did an image of the whole emerge that might project a definitive profile. In the last year before his collapse (I888) the initial plans were finally abandoned. A peculiar restlessness now possessed Nietzsche. He could no longer wait for the long gestation of a broadly conceived work which would be able to speak for itself, on its own, as a work. Nietzsche himself had to speak, he himself had to come forth and announce his basic position vis-a-vis the world, drawing the boundaries which were to prevent anyone's confusing that basic position with any other. Thus the smaller works originated: The Wagner Case, Nietzsche contra Wagner, TwJ1ight of
the Idols, Ecce Homo, and The Antichrist-which first appeared in 1890.
But Nietzsche's philosophy proper, the fundamental position on the basis of which he speaks in these and in all the writings he himself
*J. J. Bachofen (1815-1887), Swiss historian of law and religion, interested in myths and symbols in primitive folklore, today best known as the author of the classic work on matriarchy, Das Mutterrecht, published in 1861.
The Book, The Will to Power 9
published, did not assume a final form and was not itself published in any book, neither in the decade between 1879 and 1889 nor during the years preceding. What Nietzsche himself published during his creative life was always foreground. That is also true of his first treatise, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). His philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous, unpublished work.
In 1901, a year after Nietzsche's death, the first collection of his preliminary drafts for a magnum opus appeared. It was based on Nietzsche's plan dated March 17, 1887; in addition, the collection referred to notes in which Nietzsche himself arranged particular frag- ments into groups.
In the first and in later editions the particular fragments selected from the handwritten Nachlass were numbered sequentially. The first edition of The Will to Power included 483 selections.
It soon became clear that this edition was quite incomplete when compared to the available handwritten material. In 1906 a new and significantly expanded edition appeared, retaining the same plan. It included 1,067 selections, more than double the number in the first edition. The second edition appeared in 1911 as volumes XV and XVI of the Grossoktav edition of Nietzsche's works. But even these volumes did not contain the amassed material; whatever was not subsumed under the plan appeared as two Nachlass volumes, numbered XIII and XIV in the Collected Works.
Not long ago the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar undertook to publish a historical-critical complete edition of Nietzsche's works and letters in chronological order. It should become the ultimate, definitive edition. * It no longer separates the writings Nietzsche himself published and the Nachlass, as the earlier complete editions do, but collates for each period both published and unpublished materials. The extensive
*The Historisch-kritische Cesamtausgabe der Werke und Briefe (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1933-42), edited by a group of scholars including H. J. Mette, W. Hoppe, and K. Schlechta, under the direction of Carl August Emge, published fewer than a dozen of the many volumes of works and letters planned. For an account of the "principles" of the edition-with which Heidegger takes issue below-see the Foreword to the Nietzsche Cesamtausgabe, I, x-xv.
10 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
collection of letters, which thanks to new and rich finds is growing steadily, is also to be published in chronological sequence. The historical-critical complete edition, which has now begun, remains in its foundations ambiguous. First of all, as a historical-critical "complete edition" which brings out every single thing it can find, guided by the fundamental principle of completeness, it belongs among the undertakings of nineteenth-century publication. Second, by the manner of its biographical, psychological commentary and its similarly thorough research of all "data" on Nietzsche's "life," and of the views of his contemporaries as well, it is a product of the psychological- biological addiction of our times.
Only in the actual presentation of the authentic "Works" (1881-89) will this edition have an impact on the future, granted the editors succeed in their task. That task and its fulfillment are not a part of what we have just criticized; moreover, the task can be carried out without all that. But we can never succeed in arriving at Nietzsche's philosophy proper if we have not in our questioning conceived of Nietzsche as the end of Western metaphysics and proceeded to the entirely different question of the truth of Being.
The text recommended for this course is the edition of The Will to Power prepared by A. Baeumler for the Kroner pocket edition series. It is a faithful reprint of volumes XV and XVI of the Grossoktavaus- gabe, with a sensible Afterword and a good, brief outline of Nietzsche's life history. In addition, Baeumler has edited for the same series a volume entitled Nietzsche in His Letters and in Reports by Contempo- raries. For a first introduction the book is useful. For a knowledge of Nietzsche's biography the presentation by his sister, Elisabeth Forster- Nietzsche, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (published between 1895 and 1904), remains important. As with all biographical works, however, use of this publication requires great caution.
W e will refrain from further suggestions and from discussion of the enormous and varied secondary literature surrounding Nietzsche, since none of it can aid the endeavor of this lecture course. Whoever does not have the courage and perseverance of thought required to become
The Book, The Will to Power II
involved in Nietzsche's own writings need not read anything about him either.
Citation of passages from Nietzsche's works will be by volume and page number of the Grossoktav edition. Passages from The Will to Power employed in the lecture course will not be cited by the page number of any particular edition but by the fragment number which is standard in all editions. These passages are for the most part not simple, incomplete fragments and fleeting observations; rather, they are carefully worked out "aphorisms," as Nietzsche's individual nota- tions are customarily called. But not every brief notation is automat- ically an aphorism, that is, an expression or saying which absolutely closes its borders to everything inessential and admits only what is essential. Nietzsche observes somewhere that it is his ambition to say in a brief aphorism what others in an entire book . . . do not say.
3. Plans and Preliminary Drafts of the "Main Structure"
Before we characterize more minutely the plan on which the presently available edition of The Will to Power is based, and before we indicate those passages with which our inquiry shall begin, let us introduce testimony from several of Nietzsche's letters. Such testimony sheds light on the origin of the preliminary drafts for the planned chief work and suggests the fundamental mood from which the work derives.
On April 7, 1884, Nietzsche writes to his friend Overbeck in Basel:
For the past few months I've been preoccupied with "world history," en- chanted by it, in spite of many hair-raising results. Did I ever show you Jacob Burckhardt's letter, the one which led me by the nose to "world history"? If I get to Sils Maria this summer I want to undertake a revision of my metaphysica and my epistemological views. Now I must work through a whole series of disciplines step by step, for I am resolved to devote the next five years to the construction of my "philosophy," for which I have in my Zarathustra constructed a vestibule.
We should take this opportunity to observe that the common as- sumption that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra was to present his philosophy in poetic form, and that, since Zarathustra did not achieve this goal, Nietzsche wanted to transcribe his philosophy into prose for purposes of greater intelligibility, is an error. The planned major work,
The WJ11 to Power, is in truth as much a poetic work as Zarathustra is a work of thought. The relationship between the two works remains one of vestibule and main structure. Nevertheless, between 1882 and 1888 several essential steps were taken which remain wholly concealed
Plans and Preliminary Drafts l3
in prior collections of the Nachlass fragments, such concealment pre- venting a glimpse into the essential structure of Nietzsche's metaphy- sics.
In mid-June, 1884, Nietzsche writes to his sister:
So, the scaffolding for the main structure ought to be erected this summer; or, to put it differently, during the next few months I want to draw up the schema for my philosophy and my plan for the next six years. May my health hold out for this purpose! *
From Sils Maria on September 2, 1884, to his friend and assistant Peter Cast:
In addition, I have completely finished the major task I set myself for this summer-the next six years belong to the elaboration of a schema in which I have outlined my "philosophy. " The prospects for this look good and promising. Meanwhile, Zarathustra retains only its entirely personal mean- ing, being my "book of edification and consolation"--otherwise, for Every- man, it is obscure and riddlesome and ridiculous.
To Overbeck, July 2, 1885:
I have dictated for two or three hours practically every day, but my "philos- ophy"-if I have the right to call it by the name of something that has maltreated me down to the very roots of my being-is no longer communi- cable, at least not in print.
Here doubts about the possibility of a presentation of his philosophy
*According to Karl Schlechta's "Philologischer Nachbericht," in Friedrich Nietzsche Werke in drei Biinden (Munich: C. Hanser, 6th ed. , 1969), III, 1411, 1417, and 1420-22, this letter, number 379 in the edition by Frau Fiirster-Nietzsche, is a forgery. More
specifically, it appears that Nietzsche's sister altered the addressee (the letter was sent not to her but to Malwida von Meysenbug) and enlarged upon the original contents of the letter. Because she managed to destroy all but a fragment of the original, it is virtually impossible to determine whether or not the words Heidegger cites are Nietzsche's. Nevertheless, the fragment does contain the following lines, relevant to the present issue: " . . . nachdem ich mir diese V orhalle meiner Philosophie gebaut habe, muss ich die Hand wieder anlegen und nicht miide werden, his auch der Haupt-Bau fertig vor mir steht. " In translation: ". . . now that I have built this vestibule for my philosophy, I must get busy once again and not grow weary until the main structure too stands finished before me. "
14 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
in book form are already stirring. But a year later Nietzsche is again confident.
To his mother and sister, September 2, 1886:
For the next four years the creation of a four-volume magnum opus is proposed. The very title is fearsome: "The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. " For it I have everything that is necessary, health, solitude, good mood, and maybe a wife. *
With this mention of his major work Nietzsche refers to the fact that on the cover of the book that had appeared during that year, Beyond Good and Evil, a work with the above-mentioned title was cited as the volume to appear next. In addition, Nietzsche writes in his Toward a Genealogy of Morals, which appeared in 1887 (See Division Three, no. 27):
. . . with respect to which [i. e. , the question of the meaning of the ascetic ideal] I refer to a work I am now preparing: The Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values.
Nietzsche himself emphasized the title of his planned work by means of special, heavy print.
To Peter Cast, September 15, 1887:
I vacillated, to be honest, between Venice and-Leipzig: the latter for learned purposes, since in reference to the major pensum of my life, which is presently to be resolved, I still have much to learn, to question, and to read. But for that I would need, not an "autumn," but an entire winter in Germany: and, all things considered, my health forcefully discourages such a dangerous experiment for this year. Therefore it has turned out to be a matter of Venice and Nice: -and also, as you yourself may judge to be true, I now need the profound isolation which in my case is even more compelling than further study and exploration into five thousand particular problems.
To Carl von Gersdorff, December 20, 1887:
In a significant sense my life stands right now at high noon: one door is closing, another opening. All I have done in the last few years has been a
*Schlechta (ibid. ) does not cite this letter as a forgery.
Plans and Preliminary Drafts 15
settling of accounts, a conclusion of negotiations, an adding up of things past; by now I have finished with men and things and have drawn a line under it all. Who and what remain for me, whither I must now go, toward the really most important matter of my existence (a transition to which I have been condemned), are now capital questions. For, between you and me, the tension in which I live, the pressure of a great task and passion, is now too great for me to allow still more people to approach me. The desert that surrounds me is vast indeed. I really can bear only complete strangers or passers-by, or, on the other hand, people who have been a part of me for a long time, even from childhood. Everyone else has drifted away or has been repulsed (there was much violence and much pain in that-).
Here it is no longer simply the matter of a magnum opus.
