No More Learning

Klostermann, 1950), p. 195.
248
THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
to Hyginus' fable of Cura in section 42. But for the most part literature and art appear as occasions where "they" come and go talking of Michelangelo. If enjoying works of art as "they" do is symptomatic of everydayness, we might well ask how art is to be properly encountered. Yet the fact remains that art is little discussed. The distance covered between the years 1927 and 1937 in Heidegger's career of thought is enormous: Steinbiichel's expectations are evidence enough of that.
From his earliest student days Heidegger had displayed an interest in literature and art: the novels of Dostoevsky and Adalbert Stifter, the poetry of Holderlin, Rilke, and Trakl (whose poems Heidegger read when they were first published prior to the war), and the Expressionist movement in painting and poetry. Such interest at that time did not and could not irradiate the sober, somber halls of Wissenschaft. But in the 1930s literature and art came to occupy the very center of Heidegger's project, for they became central to the question of truth as disclosure and unconcealment. A glance at Heidegger's lecture schedule during the decade of the 1930s suggests something of this development.
Schelling, for whose system art is of supreme importance, is taught many times, as are Hegel's Phenomenology and Kant's third critique. (Kant's importance for Heidegger in this respect, ignored in the litera- ture because of the overweening significance of Heidegger's publica- tions on the first critique, we may gauge from his stalwart defense of Kant in section 15 of The Will to Power as Art. ) Plato, the artist of dialogue, dominates all those courses where the essence of truth is the focus. It is unfortunate that we know nothing of Heidegger's 1935-36 colloquium with Kurt Bauch on "overcoming aesthetics in the question of art. " We might hazard a guess that the "six basic developments in the history of aesthetics" (section 13, above) mirror the outcome of that colloquium. It is also unfortunate that we do not know what transpires in Heidegger's seminar on "selected fragments from Schil- ler's philosophical writings on art," which runs parallel to these
Nietzsche lectures. Perhaps the references to Schiller (pp. 108 and 113) provide clues. But of all these lectures and seminars surely the most instructive would be the 1934-35 lectures on Holderlin's Hymns,
Analysis 249
"The Rhine" and "Germania. " From the single lecture "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (1936) we derive some "indirect light," as Heidegger says in his Foreword to the Nietzsche volumes, on the parallel rise of Nietzsche and of art in his thought on aletheia.
Perhaps further light will be shed if we consider three other works stemming from the same period. "The Anaximander Fragment" (com- posed in 1946 but drawing on a course taught during the summer semester of 1932), "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" (published in 1943 but based on courses held from 1930 on, especially that of the winter semester of 1931-32), and "The Origin of the Work of Art" (published in 1950 but composed in 1935-36 and revised while the first Nietzsche course was in session). But in examining these four essays I cease the work of background and try to limn the figures of the matter itself.
III. QUESTIONS
Why art, in the question of truth?
Why Nietzsche, in the question of art?
On the occasion of the publication of the fourth, expanded edition
of Erlauterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (1971) Heidegger remarked that those commentaries sprang from einer Notwendigkeit des Denk- ens, "a necessity of thought. "28 But the phrase is ambiguous. I take it to mean that Heidegger's thought turns to Holderlin out of need, Not-wendig, in much the same way as Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence is "a cry out of need," Aufschrei aus einer Not (NI, 310). If Holderlin's times are destitute, the epoch of Nietzsche and Heidegger is desperate. While Holderlin can aver, "Indeed, the gods live," Nietzsche must conclude, "God is dead. " The latter refrain dominates Heidegger's lectures and essays on Nietzsche; the phrase· appears in his Rektoratsrede as a signal of urgency; it is the key to
28Martin Heidegger, Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), p. 7. Cf. Beda Allemann, Holder/in und Heidegger (Zurich: Atlan- tis, 1956), parts II-IV.
250 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Nietzsche's precarious position at the end of metaphysics and to Heidegger's before the task of his thinking. 29
Two remarks in Heidegger's Holderlin essay are particularly reveal- ing with respect to Heidegger's turn to that poet. First, Heidegger insists that the being and essence of things, hence the naming of the gods, can never be derived from things that lie at hand. They must be "freely created. "30 As the motto for his lecture course on will to power as art Heidegger chooses a phrase from The Antichrist: "Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god! " Is it then a matter of concocting novel divinities? Or of lighting a lantern in broad daylight to search out old familiar ones? A second remark from the Holderlin essay silences these overhasty questions and redirects the inquiry. Man possesses language in order to say who he is and to give testimony. About what is he to testify? "His belonging to the earth. "31 All creation, poiesis, testifies to man's dwelling on the earth, remaining in Zarathustran fashion "true to the earth. " Yet it is an earth cut loose from her sun and deprived of her horizon and a dwelling that hovers in holy dread before the raging discordance of art and truth.
Heidegger's "turn out of need" to the poetry of Holderlin should not, however, be reduced to an incident of biography. It is not merely a necessity in Heidegger's intellectual life but a turning in the history of the question of Being. Heidegger speaks of that turning in many essays composed during the 1930s and 1940s. Of special consequence here are "The Anaximander Fragment" and "Plato's Doctrine of Truth. " To the situation of the former essay Heidegger gives the name "eschatology of Being. " By that he means the outermost point in the history of the Occident or evening-land from which he descries the dawn. (Whether it is the dawn of Anaximander's epoch or that of a new age is impossible to tell: Heidegger can only attempt to "ponder the
290tto Poggeler writes, "Ever since 1929-30, when Nietzsche became a matter of 'decision' for Heidegger, his new starting point for thinking the truth of Being was dominated by the all-determining presupposition that God is 'dead. '" Otto Poggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger {Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1972), p. 25.
30Martin Heidegger, Erliiuterungen, p. 41. l1Ibid. , p. 36.
Analysis 251
former dawn through what is imminent. "32) The name that recurs in the opening pages of the Anaximander essay, designating the eschaton of the history of Being, is "Nietzsche. "ll Even if we reduce matters to biography there is no obvious reason why the name "Nietzsche" and no other must appear here. Indeed the reason is highly complex. Heidegger attempts to uncover it during his protracted lecture series on Nietzsche.
A further hint of Nietzsche's significance as a figure of dusk and dawn, Abendland and MorgenrOte, and as our point of entry into the issue of Western history as a whole, emerges from the essay on "Plato's doctrine of Truth. " Here too Heidegger speaks of a turning and a need. 34 But it is not merely a turning or a need apropos of Heidegger himself. It is rather "a turning in the determination of the essence of truth" and a need for "not only beings but Being" to become "worthy of question. " Much later in his career Heidegger comes to doubt the validity of the thesis expounded in his Plato essay, to wit, that a transformation in the essence of truth from unconcealment to correctness occurs as such in Plato; yet his early inquiry into Plato's doctrine of truth as portrayed in the Allegory of the Cave remains a highly thought-provoking effort. J5 It is an effort to confront the
32Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 302. Cf. the English translation, Early Creek Thinking, tr. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 18. llSee Early Creek Thinking, pp. 13-14, 17, and 22-23. See also my remarks in the
Introduction to the volume, pp. 9-10.
l4See the first and last pages of the essay in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frank-
furt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1967). pp. 109 and 144.
l5(n "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" Heidegger explicitly rejects
the thesis of his earlier essay on Plato. (See Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens [Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1969], p. 78. ) The assertion that in Plato we find an "essential transformation of truth" from unconcealment to correctness is "untenable. " Heidegger apparently accedes to the arguments of Paul Friedlander and others that in Greek literature and philosophy alethes always modifies verbs of speech. Although aletheia may indeed derive from letha (lanthano) and the alpha-privative, the sense of "unconceal- ment" seems to have evanesced even before Homer sang. Hence there is no essential transformation of truth from unconcealment to correctness; at least, none that can be located in Plato. There is instead an essential continuity in the history of "truth," a tendency to regard the true as correctness of assertion or correspondence of statement and fact, without asking about the domain in which words and things so wondrously converge.
252 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
consequences of Plato's conjunction of aletheia, interpreted as orthotes or correctness of viewing, and paideia, education in the broadest possible sense. Essential to the allegory are the transformations or rites of passage undergone by the prisoners of the cave on their way to and from the Ideas, their liberation, conversion, ascent and descent, and the attendant bedazzlements, adjustments, and insights. Heidegger emphasizes that liberation is not simply an unshackling: the liberated prisoner does not run amok but confronts fire and sun, growing accustomed to "fixing his view upon the fixed boundaries of things affixed in their forms. "36 Those rites of passage, and the correctness of viewing that underlies them, determine the history of Being as truth from Aristotle to Neo-Kantian philosophies of value. Heidegger mentions three junctures of that history in which the correspondence of assertion and state of affairs progressively obscures the sense of truth as unconcealment. Thomas Aquinas locates truth "in the human or divine intellect"; Descartes adds his peculiar emphasis, asserting that "truth can be nowhere but in the mind"; and Nietzsche, "in the epoch of the incipient consummation of the modern age," intensifies to the explosion point the assertion concerning truth's place. H Heidegger now cites The Will to Power number 493, discussed often in the Nietzsche lectures (see section 25, above): "Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live. The value for life ultimately decides. " Nietzsche's interpretation of truth comprises "the last reflection of the uttermost consequences of that transformation of truth from the unconcealment of beings to correctness of viewing," a transformation which devolves from the interpretation of Being as idea. Nietzsche's "intensification" accordingly manifests both continuity and radical departure. To identify truth as error is to persist in the paideiogogical project of correctness; yet it also displays the vacuity of that project. Similarly, to attempt a revaluation of all values is to persist in pursuit of to agathon, it is to be "the most unbridled Platonist in the history of Occidental metaphysics"; yet to adopt the
36Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 128. 37Ibid. , pp. 138-39.
Analysis 253
standard of "life" itself for the revaluation is to grasp to agathon in a way that is "less prejudicial" than the way taken by other philosophies of value. 38 The vacuity of Plato's educative project, and Nietzsche's "less prejudicial" understanding of the Good, are expressions of a crisis in the meaning of Being. Nietzsche's fundamental experience of the death of God implies the collapse of the ontotheological interpretation of Being, for which God was the cause of beings, the failure of metaphysics' envisionment of the divine ideai, and the evanescence of that domain of beings once thought to be most in being. It implies the disappearance of all that once was "viewed in a nonsenuous glance . . . beyond the grasp of the body's instruments. "39
Heidegger had long recognized that doubts surrounding the very meaning of "body" and "soul," "matter" and "spirit," "sensuous" and "supersensuous," "psychical" and "ideal" concealed in themselves the collapse of the meaning of Being. 40 In Nietzsche he found the keenest eyewitness to that collapse. Nietzsche's efforts to "rescue" the sensuous world, to reinterpret its reality outside the Platonic context, and to celebrate art as the fitting means of rescue exhibited most dramatically the critical pass-or impasse-to which the history of Being since Plato had come. "Art, and nothing but art! " Nietzsche had said. Perhaps that was the direction in which the question of the meaning of Being would have to go.
The last of Heidegger's three lectures on "The Origin of the Work of Art," delivered at Frankfurt on December 4, 1936, bears the title "Truth and Art. "41 After reading the text of his contemporaneous
38Ibid. , p. 133.
39Ibid. ' p. 141.
40See for example his remarks during the summer semester of 1927, in Martin Heideg-
ger, Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermam1, 1975), pp. 30-31. See also his discussion of truth, Being, and Time during the winter semester of 1925-26 (cited in note 24, above), esp. H 4, 8, and 9. Traces of such doubt appear even in the Habilitationsschrift of 1915-16 and the doctoral dissertation of 1914: cf. M. Heidegger, Friihe Schriften, pp. 348, 35, and 117-120. The key text of course is Being and Time: see esp. chap. 3.
41Published as Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: P. Re- clam, 1960). See pp. 63 H.
254 THE WILL TO POWER AS AR1
course on will to power as art we immediately want to add the words ". . . in raging discordance. " But in "The Origin of the Work of Art" it is not a question of discordance between truth and art; Heidegger uncovers discord or strife at the heart of both truth and art. For they share in the creative struggle for Being, presence, in the arena of disclosure and concealment. 42
Heidegger begins the final hour of his lectures on the origin of the artwork by citing "art itself" as the origin of both work and artist. Art is not a mere general concept under which objets d'art and artists are subsumed. It is the origin of the essential provenance of a work, which is neither a mere thing nor a piece of equipment but a place where truth occurs. Such occurrence Heidegger conceives as the instigation of strife between a historical world and the sustaining earth. Such strife is gathered in the work, which possesses a peculiar autochthony and calm, and which leads a life of its own. Only at the very end of his lecture cycle does Heidegger mention the obvious fact of the work's created- ness, its creation by an artist. That suggests the major difference be- tween the Nietzschean and Heideggerian approaches to art, a difference which the Nietzsche lectures explore thoroughly. Heidegger offers no physiology of the artist. He presents no account which could be rooted in subjectivistic metaphysics. Nietzsche's defenders-at least
the unliberated ones-might complain that by remaining an observer of the artwork Heidegger regresses to "feminine aesthetics. " Heidegger could only rejoin that his lectures try to leave aesthetics of both stereo- typed sexes behind-and that in so doing they merely elaborate Nietzsche's understanding of art in the grand style, where the artist himself becomes a work of art and where the distinction between subject and object, act. ive and passive, blurs. But what is entailed in the abandonment of aesthetics? Why must inquiry into art undergo radical change?
In his Frankfurt lectures Heidegger tries to distinguish between the kinds of production appropriate to handicraft and to art. His procedure
42See D. F. Krell, "Art and Truth in Raging Discord: Heidegger and Nietzsche on the Will to Power," boundary 2, IV, 2 (Winter 1976), 379-92.
Analysis 255
and insight are those exhibited in the Nietzsche lectures: the technites or craftsman brings beings forth into presence and so reveals them, his labors being a kind of aletheuein, bringing an entity to stand in the openness of its Being. Such openness quickly narrows when the thing produced is absorbed in sheer serviceability or usefulness as a piece of equipment. In the artwork, however, the fate of openness is different. Here openness itself achieves what Heidegger calls Stiindigkeit. Recall- ing that for Platonism the Being of beings is interpreted as "perma- nence," which is one way to translate Stiindigkeit, we must ask whether Heidegger's interpretation of art is not only female but also metaphysi- cal: if art brings a being to stand and lends it constancy, then is not Heidegger merely affirming the "transcendent value" of art, as aesthet- ics has always done? And if Nietzsche exposes Platonic "permanence" as the "permanentizing" of perspectival life, as an instinct that pre- serves life but at some critical point petrifies it, so that an appeal to Stiindigkeit is ultimately fixation on an apparition, there would be reason to ask whether in his lectures on the origin of the artwork Heidegger has at all learned from Nietzsche.
He has. For the "stand" to which the truth of beings comes in the work of art is by no means to be understood as permanence or con- stancy.
Only in the following way does truth happen: it installs itself within the strife and the free space which truth itself opens up. Because truth is the reciprocal relation [das Gegenwendige] of lighting and concealing, what we are here calling installation [Einrichtung] is proper to it. But truth does not exist ahead of time in itself somewhere among the stars, only subsequently to be brought down among beings, which are somewhere else. . . . Lighting of openness and installation in the open region belong together. They are one and the same essential unfolding of truth's occurrence [Geschehen]. Such occurrence is in manifold ways historical [geschichtlich]. 4l ·
Why art, in the question of truth? Truth happens in the work of art. Both truth and art are historical; they stand in time. The work of
4lMartin Heidegger, Der Ursprung, p. 68.
256 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
art brings forth a being "that never was before and never will come to be afterwards.
"44 Its "stand" is not only no guarantee against a fall, it marks the inception of the fall. Hence the need for preservation- which itself lapses into art appreciation and the art trade. If there is something that "stands" in a more perdurant sense it is the Heraclitean and Empedoclean strife, the Anaximandrian usage, which itself becomes present only through the being that rises and falls, emerges, lingers awhile, and disappears, in that way alone announcing what is. Thus the "workliness" of the work of art is not supratemporal Wirklichkeit but the "becoming and happening of truth. "45 Never renounced, always affirmed is the relation of workliness to the nothing, that is, to a source beyond all beings but achieved only in a being. To dwell in nearness to the source is to be mindful of the double shadow that each thing, in becoming, casts before and behind itself.
Why Nietzsche, in the question of art? When we speak of the rise of art in Heidegger's thought, citing Nietzsche, Holderlin, Schelling, Schiller, and others as the instigators of such a rise, we must be careful not to subordinate one thinker or poet to another, transforming con- texts into causes and questions into answers. W e simply cannot say who or what comes first, whether Nietzsche's decisive importance for Hei- degger-and the decisive importance of art for Nietzsche-induce Heidegger to turn to Holderlin and to the art of Greece or of Van Gogh, or whether the lyre of Holderlin or Trakl or Sophocles sets the tone for Heidegger's turn to Nietzsche. All of these themes reinforce and refine one another long before Heidegger speaks of them publicly. All betray the central tendency of Heidegger's thought on art: the painting, poem, statue, or symphony is not a decorative piece with an assignable cultural value but the major way in which truth, the unhid- denness of beings, transpires. Such truth is not normative but disclo- sive; not eternal but radically historical; not transcendent but immanent in the things wrought; not sheer light but chiaroscuro. Disclosure, historicity, immanence, and the play of light and shadow
44Ibid. , p. 69. 45Ibid. , p. 81.
Analysis 257
occur upon a new horizon that forms and dissolves and forms again where the epoch of metaphysics wanes and no other epoch is visible. Nietzsche-the matter of thought for which that name stands-is a giant on the horizon. His stature, always as incalculable as the horizon itself, remains monumental for the particular reason that his philos- ophy, more than that of anyone since Plato, is itself a work of art.
Heidegger therefore began his lecture series on Nietzsche by tracing the profile of will to power as art. His next step was to examine the work that displays the effulgence of Nietzsche's own art, Also sprach Zara- thustra. During the summer semester of 1937 he lectured on that book's fundamental teaching, the eternal recurrence of the same, there- by attaining the summit of his own lecture series.
Glossary
Translation should not and cannot be one-to-one substitution. If it is done that way it may be wortwortlich but can never be wortgetreu; although literal, it will not be faithful.
The following list of words gives the options most often taken in the translation of this volume. But the only way readers can be certain about the original of any given rendering is to check the German text.
abscission absence
abyss
actual
advent, arrival affect
apparent world,
world of appearances apparition
at hand
attunement
basic experience basic occurrence basically
the beautiful beauty
Being
being(s)
being(s) as a whole
die Zerrissenheit die Abwesenheit der Abgrund wirklich
die Ankunft der Affekt
die scheinbare Welt der Anschein vorhanden
die Gestimmtheit
die Grunderfahrung das Grundgeschehen im Grunde
das SchOne
die SchOnheit
das Sein
das Seiende
das Seiende im Ganzen
care
cohere
conception concordance configuration confrontation continuance copying countermovement to create
creative
to define definitive
delight
destiny
to determine development discordance disinterestedness dread
duration
to be embodied embodying life emergence enhancement enigmatic envisionment
essence
essential determination to esteem
to estimate eternal recurrence
of the same eternal return event
die Sorge, he epimeleia zusammengehoren
die Auffassung
der Einklang
die Gestalt
die Aus-einander-setzung die Bestiindigung
das Nachmachen, mimesis die Gegenbewegung schaffen
schOpferisch
bestimmen
massgebend
das Wohlgefallen
das Geschick
bestimmen
die Entwicklung, die Tatsache der Zwiespalt
die lnteresselosigkeit
das Entsetzen
der Bestand
leiben
das leibende Leben
das Aufgehen, physis die Steigerung riitselhaft
das Sichtige
das Wesen
die Wesensbestimmung schiitzen
abschiitzen
die ewige Wiederkehr des GJeichen die ewige Wiederkunft
das Ereignis
Glossary 259
260
THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
eventuality to excel explicit expression expressly
feeling
felicitous
fixation
fleeting appearances force
form
frame
frenzy
fullness
fundament fundamental position
genuine
the grand style
to grasp
ground(s} grounding question guiding question
to heed hierarchy historicity
illusion imitation immutability inversion
jointure
know-how, knowledge
das Vorkommnis sich iiberhOhen ausdriicklich
der Ausdruck eigens
das Gefiihl begliickend
die Festmachung der Anschein
die Kraft
die Form
das Geste/1
der Rausch
die Fiille
der Grund
die Grundstellung
echt, eigentlich der grosse Stil fassen, begreifen der Grund
die Grundfrage die Leitfrage
achten, beachten
die Rangordnung die Geschichtlichkeit
der Anschein
das Nachahmen, mimesis die Unveriinderlichkeit die Umdrehung
der Fug
das Wissen, techne
law
lawfulness
to let-lie-before to light up lighting
to linger
lived experience lucid
main or major work, magnum opus
manifold validity
to manufacture matter (of thought) meditation metamorphosis mood
nondistortion
oblivion
openness, openedness opening up
original
outer, outward appearance overturning
particular, individual passion
perdurance permanence perspicuous plenitude
poetize, write creatively presence
presencing,
becoming present
das Cesetz
die Cesetzlichkeit vor-liegen-lassen aufleuchten
die Lichtung verweilen
das Erlebnis durchsichtig
das Hauptwerk
die Vielgiiltigkeit anfertigen
die Sache (des Denkens} die Besinnung
die Verwandlung
die Stimmung
die Unverstelltheit, aletheia
die Vergessenheit
die Offenheit, die Offenbarkeit die Offenbarung, Eroffnung urspriinglich
das Aussehen, eidos
die Umdrehung
einzeln
die Leidenschaft die Dauer
die Bestiindigkeit durchsichtig
die Fiille
dichten
die Anwesenheit
das Anwesen
Glossary 261
262
THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
what is present presentative prevail
to pro-duce proper
to be proper to psychical
radiance
the most radiant
rapture
reality
realm
to reign representation resolute openness to revere
reversal rule
to rule
the same
to scintillate
to seem self-assertion semblance
the sensuous severance
state
statement strength
the supersensuous to surpass
sway
to transfigure transformation
das Anwesende vorstellend herrschen, walten her-stel/en eigentlich gehiiren
seelisch
der Schein
das Hervorscheinendste, to
ekphanestaton
der Rausch die Rea/itiit der Bereich wa/ten
die Vorstellung
die Entschlossenheit verehren
das Umkehren
die Regel, das Gesetz wa/ten
das Selbe
aufscheinen, aufleuchten scheinen
die Selbstbehauptung der Schein
das Sinn/iche
die Entzweiung
der Zustand
der Satz
die Kraft
das Ubersinnliche sich iiberholen das Walten
verkliiren der Wandel
transparent the true truth
ultimately unconcealment unconstrained favoring the unsaid
valuation
valuative thinking the view upon Being
to will, want will to power
durchsichtig das Wahre die Wahrheit
im Grunde
die Unverborgenheit die freie Gunst
das Ungesagte
die Wertsetzung das Wertdenken der Seinsblick
wollen
der Wille zur Macht
Glossary 263
MARTIN HEIDECCER
J\Jietzsche
Volume II:
The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
Translated from the German, with Notes and an Analysis, by DAVID FARRELL KRELL
Contents
Editor's Preface v
PART ONE: THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
The Doctrine of Eternal Return as the Fundamental
Thought of Nietzsche's Metaphysics 5 The Genesis of the Doctrine of Return 9
Nietzsche's First Communication of the Doctrine of
Return 19 "Incipit tragoedia" 28
The Second Communication of the Doctrine of
Return 32 "On the Vision and the Riddle" 37 Zarathustra's Animals 45 "The Convalescent" 49 The Third Communication of the Doctrine of Return 63 The Thought of Return in the Suppressed Notes 70 The Four Notes Dated August 1881 74 Summary Presentation of the Thought: Being as a
Whole as Life and Force; the World as Chaos 82
Suspicions Concerning the "Humanization" of Beings 98 Nietzsche's Proof of the Doctrine of Return 106 The Ostensibly Scientific Procedure of Proof.
Philosophy and Science 111 The Character of "Proof" for the Doctrine of Return 115 The Thought of Return as a Belief 121
I.
2. 3.
4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15.
16. 17.
CONTENTS
The Thought of Return-and Freedom 133
Retrospect on the Notes from the Period of The Gay
Science, 1881-82 141 Notes from the Zarathustra Period, 1883-84 144 Notes from the Period of "The Will to Power,"
1884-88 150 The Configuration of the Doctrine of Return 166 The Domain of the Thought of Return: The Doctrine
of Return as the Overcoming of Nihilism 170 Moment and Eternal Recurrence 176 The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position;
The Possibility of Such Positions in the History of
Western Philosophy 184 Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position 198
IV
18. 19.
20. 21.
22. 23.
24. 25.
Analysis by David Farrell Krell 237 Glossary 282
26.
PART TWO: WHO IS NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHUSTRA? 209
Editor's Preface
This second volume of Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche contains Heideg- ger's second lecture course on Nietzsche, presented at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau during the summer semester of 1937. Heideg- ger's handwritten notes for the course bear the title Nietzsches meta- physische Crundstellung im abendliindischen Denken ("Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position in Western Thought"). The 1961 Neske edition of the Nietzsche courses (referred to throughout as NI, Nil, with page number; here see NI, 255-472) alters the title in order to show the principal theme of the course: Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen ("The Eternal Recurrence of the Same"). The two titles express Heidegger's thesis that the thought of eternal return of the same constitutes Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western thought. "'
Appended to the 1937 lecture course as Part Two of the present volume is Heidegger's public lecture Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra? ("Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? "). This public lecture, delivered on May 8, 1953, to the Bremen Club and published in Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1954), pages 101-26, is thematically related to Heidegger's 1951-52 lecture course at Freiburg, Was heisst Denken? t
"'Volume 44 of the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (published in 1986) is entitled Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendliindischen Denken: Die Lehre von der ewigen Wiederkehr des GJeichen. This is also the title that appears in Richardson's list of courses. See William J. Richarson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought(The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963), p. 669.
t Published under that title in 1954 by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tiibingen. See the English translation by Fred. D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 48 ff. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to check my own translation of "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " against that of Bernd
VI
THE ETER:\"AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Neither of Heidegger's texts contains footnotes, and I have resisted the temptation to reduce any of the bibliographical remarks-for ex- ample, those on the Nietzschean Nachlass or literary remains-to that status. Thus all notes in the present book are my own.
I have corrected a number of typographical errors and oversights in the Neske edition without drawing attention to them. Only in the most serious cases did I consult the original manuscript.
A Glossary appears at the end of the volume for readers who wish to see how I have generally rendered some of Heidegger's key words. Yet, because English possesses and employs a far more extensive vocabulary than German does, students should always check the German text whenever their interpretation hinges on a particular passage or turn of phrase. As always, I am grateful for readers' corrections or suggestions for improvement.
I have translated afresh all passages from Nietzsche's works in Hei- degger's text. I am fortunate to have been able to compare my own renderings from Also sprach Zarathustra to those of the late Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pages 103-439. Heidegger himself refers to the Crossoktavausgabe of Nietzsche's works (Leipzig, 1905 ff. ) throughout, cited in the present book by volume and page number, e. g. : (XII, 51). My own references to that edition are indicated by the letters GOA. Heidegger's references to Der Wille zur Macht (second, expanded edition, 1906) appear by aphorism-not page-number, e. g. : (WM, 1057). Sections ll and 12 of the 1937 lecture course indicate that Heidegger was not wholly dependent on WM and GOA for his references to Nietzsche's posthu- mously published notes: he obviously had some access to the manu- scripts themselves. The Analysis at the end of the present volume (especially section II, "Contexts") discusses Heidegger's work on the
Nietzschean Nachlass. I have tried to compare Heidegger's criticisms of the GOA ordering of the notes with the information provided by the Kritische Cesamtausgabe of Nietzsche's works, edited by the late Gi- orgio Colli and by Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1967-
Magnus in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. XX (1967), 411-31, reprinted in David B. Allison, ed. , The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (New York: Delta Books, 1977), pp. 64-79.
Editor's Preface vii
79), now available in a fifteen-volume paperback Studienausgabe (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980). I have cited the latter through- out as CM and have listed the full manuscript designation with the fragment number in square brackets, e. g. : (CM, M XVII 16 [4]). Not a euphonious appellation, W. C. Fields would complain, but this long designation is the only one that readers of both editions of CM and of the earlier critical editions can use. Finally, I must warn readers that
not every reference has been checked; a truly critical edition would have taken years to prepare. Scholars who wish to focus on a particular Nietzschean fragment in Heidegger's text would therefore do well to search for it in CM. If they do take the trouble to search for only one or two such fragments, they will readily forgive me for not having searched out them all.
Part One
THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche's thought must first be brought before us if our confrontation with it is to bear fruit; our lecture course will take as its guiding thought the following words of that thinker:
Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy; everything in the demi- god's sphere turns to satyr-play; and everything in God's sphere turns to . . . to what? "world" perhaps?
Beyond Good and Evil, number 150; from the year 1886.
1. The Doctrine of Eternal Return as the Fundamental Thought of Nietzsche's Metaphysics
Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is captured in his doc- trine of the eternal return ofthe same. In Ecce Homo (XV, 65) Nietz- sche himself calls it the doctrine "of the unconditioned and infinitely reiterated circulation of all things. " The doctrine contains an assertion concerning beings as a whole. Its arid and oppressive quality leaps immediately to our eyes. We therefore reject it as soon as we hear it. We close ourselves off from it all the more when we learn that nobody can "prove" it in the way we generally like to have our "proofs" dem- onstrated. No wonder commentators have felt it to be an obstacle and have tried all sorts of maneuvers to get round it, only grudgingly mak- ing their peace with it. Either they strike it from Nietzsche's philos- ophy altogether or, compelled by the fact that it obtrudes there and seeing no way out, they list it as a component part of that philosophy. In the latter case they explain the doctrine as an impossible eccentricity of Nietzsche's, something that can count only as a personal confession of faith and does not pertain to the system of Nietzsche's philosophy proper. Or else they shrug it off as something quite evident-a treat- ment that is as arbitrary and superficial as eliminating the doctrine altogether, inasmuch as the teaching itself remains in essence exceed- ingly strange. It is highly questionable whether one can brush aside its strangeness in the way Ernst Bertram does in his widely read book on Nietzsche, when he calls the teaching of the eternal return of the same
6 THE ETER! \:AL RE. CURRE! \:CE OF THE SAME
"this deceptively aping, lunatic mysterium of the later Nietzsche. "* In opposition to all the disparate kinds of confusion and perplexity vis-a-vis Nietzsche's doctrine of return, we must say at the outset, and initially purely in the form ofan assertion, that the doctrine ofthe eternal return of the same is the fundamental doctrine in Nietzsche's philos- ophy. Bereft of this teaching as its ground, Nietzsche's philosophy is like a tree without roots. Yet we learn what a root is only when we pursue the question as to how the trunk stands upon its roots; in other words, when we ask in what and in what way the root itself is rooted. But if the doctrine of return is sundered and removed to one side as a "theory," is observed as a compilation of assertions, then the resulting product is like a deracinated root, torn from the soil and chopped from the trunk, so that it is no longer a root that roots, no longer a doctrine that serves as the fundamental teaching, but merely an eccentricity. Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same remains closed to us, and we attain no vantage-point on Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole and no view of its core, as long as we fail to question within a space of inquiry that grants to this philosophy the possibility of its unfolding before
us-or rather, within us-all its abysses, all its recesses.
The doctrine of the eternal return of the same contains an assertion concerning beings as a whole. It thus aligns itself with corresponding doctrines that have been quite common for a long time and that have helped to shape in essential ways our Western history-and not merely the history of philosophy. Consider for example Plato's teaching, that beings have their essence in the "Ideas," according to which they must be estimated: whatever is measures itself on what ought to be. Or, to take another example, consider the doctrine that has permeated West- ern thought through the Bible and through the teachings of the Chris- tian churches, the doctrine that a personal Spirit, as Creator, has brought forth all beings. The Platonic and the Christian doctrines con- cerning beings as a whole have in the course of Western history been smelted and alloyed in all sorts of combinations and thus have under-
• See Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1918), p. 12. The reference is discussed in the Analysis to Volume I in this series, pp. 239-40.
The Doctrine of Eternal Return 7
gone sundry transformations. Both doctrines assume preeminence, each considered alone and both taken together in their various mix- tures, because two thousand years' worth of tradition have made them habitual for our ways of representing things. Such habituation remains definitive even when we are far from thinking about Plato's original philosophy, and also when the Christian faith has expired, leaving in its place notions that are utterly conformable to reason, notions of an "almighty" ruler of the universe and a "providence. "
Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return of the same is not merely one doctrine among others that concern beings; it springs from the soil of the most stringent confrontation with Platonic-Christian modes of thought-from their impact on, and deterioration in, modern times. Nietzsche posits these modes of thought as the fundamental earmark of Western thinking as such and of the entire history of Western thought.
If we ponder all this, even if only cursorily, we understand more clearly what we still have to do if we are to question in the direction of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position within Western thought. But our first task is a preliminary report on the genesis of the doctrine of return in Nietzsche's thought, a designation of the domain of thought from which the teaching springs, and a description of the "configuration" that the teaching proffers. We then ought to inquire into the extent to which a fundamental metaphysical position is bound up with the doctrine, our purpose being to make out what comprises the essence of such a position. Only on that basis can we try to expli- cate the essential import of the doctrine in such a way that it becomes clear how the major components of Nietzsche's entire philosophy have in that doctrine their ground and their very domain. Finally, in view of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position as the last position Western thought has achieved, we must ask whether and in what way the proper question of philosophy is asked or remains unposed ther~; and if that question is in fact not posed, then we must ask why this is so.
The procedure our lecture course will adopt may therefore be clar- ified with the help of four major divisions, characterized briefly in the following four points:
8 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
A. The preliminary presentation of the doctrine of the eternal re- turn of the same in terms of its genesis, its configurations, and its domain.
B. The essence of a fundamental metaphysical position. The possi- bility of such positions heretofore, throughout the history of Western philosophy.
C. The interpretation of the doctrine of return as the last funda- mental "metaphysical" position in Western thought.
D. The end of Western philosophy, and its other commencement. *
After what we have said, we no longer require elaborate assurances that we can succeed in really grasping Nietzsche's fundamental meta- physical position only after we have worked through the fourth stage. Whatever must remain obscure in the first stage of our presentation of the doctrine emerges into the daylight of the fully developed question only at this fourth stage. There the rank and the necessity alike of philosophy are justified by philosophy itself
• Heidegger added the following sentence in 1961, placing it in square brackets in the Neske edition:
The discussion of "C' forms the conclusion of the lecture course "Will to Power as Knowledge" [see Volume Ill of the English edition]; the discussion of "D" is at- tempted under the title "Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being" [see Volume IV of the English edition, pp. 197-250].
Hence the present volume includes discussions of only "A" and "B," and predominantly "A," on the genesis, configurations, and domain of "eternal recurrence. " Note that the "conclusion" to "Will to Power as Knowledge," which Heidegger here cites as the place where "C" is discussed, is not the essay that concludes all three lecture courses, "The Eternal Return of the Same and Will to Power," but the single concluding section of the 1939 course entitled "The Essence of Will to Power; the Pennanentizing of Becoming into Presence. " For further discussion of Points "A" and "B," see the Analysis of this volume, pp. 241-53.
2. The Genesis of the Doctrine of Return
Nietzsche has bequeathed us his own account of the genesis of the thought of eternal return of the same. The reason nearest at hand for this fact is that Nietzsche attributed exceptional significance to the doctrine. The deeper reason is to be sought in Nietzsche's habit- exercised since his youth-of having an explicit and dogged self-reflec- tion accompany his labors in thought. We might be tempted to make light of the way Nietzsche speaks of himself in his writings, thinking that an exaggerated tendency to self-observation and self-exhibition un- derlay his work. If we add to that the happenstance that Nietzsche's life ended in insanity, then we can readily close the case: the proclivity to take his own person so seriously we may consider the herald of his later madness. The extent to which this view is mistaken will have become obvious by the time our lecture course has come to a close. Even his final autobiographical work, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, written in the autumn of 1888, on the very eve of his collapse, a work that does not appear to be lacking in extreme self-inflation, may not be judged in terms of the insanity that follows it. That book too must attain its significance from the context in which all of Nietzsche's autobiographical observations belong; that is to say, from the task of his thought and the historical moment of that task. If Nietzsche always and again meditates on himself, it is nonetheless the very opposite of~ vain self-mirroring. It is in fact Nietzsche's perpetually renewed readi- ness for the sacrifice that his task demanded of him; it is a necessity that Nietzsche had sensed ever since the days of his wakeful youth. How else can we account for the fact that on September 18, 1863, as a nineteen-year-old secondary school pupil, Nietzsche writes a sketch of his life that contains sentences like these: "As a plant I was born close
10 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
to God's green acres,* as a human being in a pastor's house. " The conclusion of this text, tracing the path of his life up to that moment, reads as follows:
And so the human being outgrows everything that once surrounded him. He does not need to break the fetters; unexpectedly, when a god beckons, they fall away. And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him? Is it the world? Is it God? t
This autobiographical sketch was first discovered in 1936 among the papers that were in the possession of Nietzsche's sister. Upon my recommendation the Nietzsche Archive published it in a special edi- tion. My intention in making the recommendation was to provide contemporary and future German nineteen-year-olds with some essen- tial food for thought.
Nietzsche's retrospective and circumspective glances at his life are never anything else than prospective glances into his task. For him that task alone is reality proper. Within it all relationships hang suspended -those he has to himself, to the friends who are closest to him, and to those strangers he would win over. This fact accounts for Nietzsche's remarkable habit of writing drafts of his letters directly into his manu- scripts. He does that, not because he wants to economize on paper, but because his letters pertain to his oeuvres. Letters too are meditations.