From: New Nietzsche Studies, 3:1/2 (Fall/Winter1999): 23-52
HEIDEGGER'S RELATION TO NIETZSCHE'S THINKING:
ON CONNIVANCE, NIHILISM, AND VALUE
Babette E. Babich
Heidegger's Nietzsche
In what follows, I seek to offer a Nietzschean complement to Jacques Taminiaux's reading of Heidegger's first lecture course on Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art. Because what Taminiaux calls Heidegger's "connivance" with Nietzsche reflects the engaged affinity of one thoughtstyle for another, from the explicit perspective of the first, Taminiaux's reading presumes without raising the question of relation between thinkers.(1)
Like the majority of scholars, Taminiaux does not invoke alternative or even background accounts of his reading. This is more problematic than the typical irrelevance of commentary for authors of the same, because Taminiaux's reading concerns Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche and judgments of Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation are famously negative. Heidegger's lecture courses on Nietzsche do not compare to the authoritative commentaries by Jaspers or Löwith, Andler or Janz, much less, particularly for American readers, Kaufmann or Danto. What is more, as we shall see, certain authors - notably Fink and Granier - offer useful insights into Taminiaux's own reading of both Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Overall, Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche inspires impatient, hostile, and sometimes thoughtless reactions, especially among those who take them-selves to know Nietzsche well. But why? Nietzsche has not only his share of critics but he is plainly provocative: what he writes should produce provocative readings. Yet in Heidegger's case, Nietzsche's readers seem uniquely anxious to play supercilious Socrates to Heidegger's Thrasymachus.(2) And like Thrasymachus, most Nietzscheans refuse to "hear" what Heidegger has to say about Nietzsche if only because they find themselves at sea in an utterly alien conceptual scheme: reading Heidegger on Nietzsche, one fails to recognize the Nietzsche one has long since come to know.
Like most readers proximally sympathetic to Heidegger, Taminiaux adverts to none of this alienated hostility. Consequently, his connivance with the "connivance" he uncovers in Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche is of the most neutral kind: a connivance that doesn't really "connive" but simply (merely) reflects Heidegger's explicit "acknowledgment of a kinship with Nietzsche," an admission corresponding to its "early and deep roots in Heidegger's fundamental ontology."(3) Thus Taminiaux hardly intends the (rather more Anglophone than French) implications entailed by the speci-fically negative sense of connivance.(4) Consequently, Taminiaux is able to sidestep the issue whereby Heidegger's connivance with Nietzsche could imply the presumption of Heidegger's (as the smaller OED has it:) "assistance in wrongdoing by conscious failure to forbid or condemn."(5) Instead, for Taminiaux, Heidegger subtly articulates a tacit (historico-cultural) complicity with Nietzsche, a connivance highlighting the affinity of Heidegger's thinking for Nietzsche's thinking.(6) And this is a perfectly justified (if especially Francophone), use of the term to capture a winking or arch connection between thinkers. In this way, between the consonances of English and French, Taminiaux connives against the more disreputable associations of Heidegger's connivance with Nietzsche.
Other readers (like Otto Pöggeler and, with far less restraint, like Victor Farías)(7) challenge the extent to which this same coordination with the tradi-tion ought to be reviewed as a self-overcoming (as has been argued in the East with reference to Nietzsche's connivance with his own predecessors since 1913, and which in Germany most recently has been directly applied to Heidegger's conflicted and not undisputed claim to have staged a specifically political resistance to a fascist regime [with which he has been judged complicit] beginning with his Nietzsche seminars).(8) In the same way, suggesting that "Heidegger's debate with Nietzsche about art is an intimate debate with himself" (HWP 17), Taminiaux follows a deeper and a higher line anticipating the contours of Heidegger's later thought.
It is important to add that yet other readers have focussed more generally on the specific terms of Heidegger's interpretive reading of Nietzsche. For these readers, what Heidegger claims to find in Nietzsche is what is relevant to assessing his interpretation.(9) In this context, the ambiguous advantage of Taminiaux's terminology means that Heidegger may simultaneously be seen to connive against Nietzsche.(10) Invoking Nietzsche as the prophet of nihilism, as advocate of human subjectivity or self-insurrection (as lord of the earth, seeking a destined technological dominion over the earth), and above all (perhaps most irritatingly for Nietzsche scholars) diagnosing Nietzsche as being himself embroiled in the same metaphysics he identifies and tracks, and to which he asserts his own thinking as perfected antipode, Heidegger seems less than nice to Nietzsche. This negativity is not usually expressed as antipathy (the recent century of philosophy has an abundant share of scholars who aver that they "are not Nietzscheans"); instead, Heidegger is criticised as having -- in the best politically defensive terms of the day -- misappropriated Nietzsche. Heidegger gets Nietzsche wrong, just as he culpably gets other philosophers (the whole history and project of philosophy before him) "wrong" and (more and more scholars have argued) he does so maliciously or self-servingly.(11)
The routine condemnation of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche assumed in contemporary American Nietzsche interpretation must be coupled with the superficially opposite conviction that Heidegger's influence represents the main problem with this same tradition of Nietzsche scholarship. Hence, Bernd Magnus manages to assess an impressive list of ranking (analytic) Nietzsche interpreters like Arthur Danto, Tracy B. Strong, Richard Schacht, Alexander Nehamas, Kathleen Higgins, and Gary Shapiro as scholars who "have been emancipated from Heidegger's Nietzsche."(12) Magnus's unusual description of these authors is what mystery writers call a problem of mis-taken identity. In "real life," one may read such studies in the Anglophone tradition of Nietzsche scholarship(13) until the Hegelian cows come home without uncovering a hint of the supposedly Heideggerian "shackles" from which these scholars putatively struggled to free themselves.(14)
With few qualifications, the philosophers Magnus lists are analytically formed -- and the beauty of being an American or British analytic philo-sopher is that nothing compels you to read Heidegger (or anyone else) to read Nietzsche.(15) Everyman his own Nietzsche. But even if such quintes-sentially American Nietzsche scholars are not well described as liberated Heideggerians,(16) Magnus's quandary remains. Nietzsche scholars of what-ever stripe who turn to Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche quickly find them-selves in need of something. They miss Nietzsche's "style." They are alarmed above all to see the focus of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche recall so many of the traditional issues of philosophy -- not only Heidegger's favourite idée-fixe, the Being-question, but also metaphysics and knowledge, truth and art, an account of the history of the philosophical notion of the death of God (not only in Hegel but also [God help us!] Pascal) displacing the familiar schema of the madman or Nietzsche's routine array of anti-moralising imprecations, personalising overtones, and colour (or colère).
Philosophers mean to be on holiday as they turn to Nietzsche -- that may be why so many non-specialists feel perfectly competent to talk or even write books about Nietzsche. On holiday, one seeks the liberating prospect of the open sea, the roar of the waves, or a sense of mountain air and clear light. But Heidegger confines Nietzsche to the dankness of his take on an all-too-tedious tradition and he does this in four volumes (in English translation), with a summary essay of the same for good measure. In retaliation, perhaps, Magnus describes Heidegger's work on Nietzsche with a left-handed (and second-hand)(17) compliment: "They may not be good Nietzsche but they are first-rate Heidegger."(18)
Like Magnus, most Nietzsche scholars assume that Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche is not "good Nietzsche" -- that is, that Heidegger's reading is wrong or least wrong-headed.(19) I will argue against this overall conviction and in favour of Taminiaux's claim to speak of Heidegger's connivance with Nietzsche. A signal characteristic of Nietzsche's style effectively requires something like connivance in order for a reading to engage his text at all.(20)
Connived Relation and Perspectivalist Concinnity: Will to Power as Artful Knowledge
Heidegger's connivance with Nietzsche reflects the professionally consum-mate or finished agonistic context that begins with Aristotle's subsequently canonic interpretation of philosophers other than himself. The resonant contest of contexts that is interpretation may also be heard in the self-same connivance considered with regard to the thinking that is the object for thinking thinking in the first place. Elsewhere I have analysed the specifi-cally musical exigence needed on the part of the reader to "hear" the "language of tones"(21) that is the voice of Nietzsche's text in terms of the requisite sacrifice and essential reciprocity of attuned reading as concinnity.(22) Such a perspectivalist concinnity, however, is manifestly different from Taminiaux's expression of Heidegger's connivance with Nietzsche. Concinnity between thinkers and indeed between readings is closer to Nietzsche's own dynamic program of interpreted reflection or perspectivalism, which has often been mistaken for relativism by opponents or presumed as license for mockery at the expense of all others by a number of Nietzsche's more youthful or (at the very least) more enthusiastic readers.
Neither a perspectivism (as Anglo-Saxon readers insist on reductively naming it) nor a relativism, Nietzsche's perspectivalist expression of resonant affinity brings perspective beyond a single perspective of one thought vis-à-vis all other viewpoints to a concinnous play. And it is only from the supposition of perspectivalism (as a concinnous range of perspectives proposed and poised together "from every point of view" -- that is, as a perspectival overview), that Nietzsche is ultimately able to propose that "the erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can get our eyes on..."(23) Nietzsche differs from the critical reduction to a basic dependency on the organon of reason as he does not make an exemption in the case of the mind (perspective) for the mind (perspective). This exigence is the cricial substance of his teasingly fond remark: "the innocence of thinkers has something touching and inspiring of reverence in it which permits them even today to go up to consciousness and ask it to give them honest answers" (BGE 34). The critical organon of reason must be turned on itself to see its own conditions apart from its own conditions as such, and that it cannot do.
Just as epistemic rigour and consequence compel him to argue that every physical eventuality is a singularity drawing its own fullest consequences, without the extra meed of "law," without the convention of natural "regular-ity," i.e., the laws of nature as physicists speak of them, Nietzsche takes his own ironic convictions to their fullest consequences in every case.(24) Hence the range of perspectivalism exceeds the laughably trivial "perspective" of received perspectivism because the perspective it proposes is poised against (without suspending) perspectives themselves. In this perspectival fashion, Nietzsche's position does not propound a "perspectivism" but (precisely: as it were) a meta-perspectivism. This weighty counter play of thinking against thinking corresponds to the related concession of the earnest implausibility of truth in every case. Only such a perspectival perspective on perspective could yield the seriousness required "to laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth."(25)
The complex perspectival move Nietzsche makes is notoriously conflated with -- although I am here arguing that it has nothing in common with -- the typically anti-philosophical campaign characterising philosophy from its (antagonistically) logical inception in Parmenides and in Aristotle: an opposition to alternative perspectives continuing in Descartes and in Kant and reaching an ultimate in Hegel with a post-Nietzschean reprise in Heidegger and culminating in the entire tradition and putative mandate of analytic philosophy and logical positivism. Against the habitus of this very (rechthaberische) tradition, Nietzsche dares the reader's reflection: "You know well enough that it cannot matter in the least whether precisely you are in the right, just as no philosopher hitherto has been in the right, and that a more praiseworthy veracity may lie in every little question-mark placed after your favourite words and favourite theories (and occasionally after yourselves)..." (BGE 25).
Thus although Nietzsche is hardly more likely to spare the preceding philosophic tradition before him than is Heidegger reading authors against themselves, Nietzsche presupposes the spirit of questioning Heidegger cele-brates while proposing at the same time that the thinker pay himself the same critical favour paid to the tradition in engagement with the mistaken achievements of past thought.
Forgetting Being and Reading Nietzsche
Heidegger himself observes that although "a right elucidation never under-stands the text better than the author understood it, it surely does under-stand it differently."(26) That this was not a key to a free appropriation is evi-dent where Heidegger emphasises, in good Heideggerian but otherwise dif-fuse language, that such a different understanding "must be of such a kind as to touch upon the Same toward which the elucidated text is thinking."(27)
Heidegger's own (or same) concern in his reading of Nietzsche is the thinking of Being. More than a mantra for the Heidegger who draws his philosophical capital from his work as the author of Being and Time, the grievous failure to think being characterizes the history of metaphysics.
Has the neglect of the question of Being anything to do with Nietzsche? Apart from the internal context of Heidegger's thought, the Being-question is a strange obsession and we might emphasize the oddity of the question as such. Never mind Nietzsche -- why should it matter to anyone that Being has been forgotten?
After all, other things fall from concern in the day to day: the fragility of the world, i.e., the world of animals and plants, earth, air and water, the so-called natural environment ceaselessly assaulted in the developed (and under-developed) world. All this -- all beings, not Being -- is forgotten and, it must be imagined, with more immediately pernicious consequences than the preoccupations of the tradition of Western philosophy. We can hardly worry about the neglect of the question of Being when we neglect beings themselves with numbing ease. Nor, if the point of the Being question is vague or obscure, is it easier by any stretch to raise such a concrete question as the fate of the earth. The point of a cliché is already taken: Heidegger's claim is that the point of the Being question is not.
Still: in a routinely inauthentic way we mindlessly overlook even beautiful things -- trees, a blade of grass, a sunrise, every physical thing about ourselves and the carved veins on the hands of a young stranger or a familiar friend, we fail to see. The reminder to celebrate thinking as a feast for the whole of our being can be overheard as poetry, just as the good advice to take time to smell the roses can hardly be heard otherwise than as a cliché -- a word, in other words, to take us down the garden path, Nietzsche's glattes Eis -- which tired familiarity proves that such good proverbs must surely be meant for those deader than ourselves. In the same sophisticatedly everyday way, we neglect the spiritual or psychic importance of our most intimate and familiar friendships. And so on and on to the forgetting of the holy and God himself.(28) A nihilistic better-knowing manifest in the late nineteenth century continues so undiminished in Husserl and Heidegger as well as the mainstream tradition of logical positivism and analytic philosophy that Levinas only quenches a need in a desert of atheism, but if we imagine that a newspaper pundit could remind us that we have forgotten God it is anything but hard to get the stereotypical point.(29) In the same way, we can rouse our ecological sensibilities from their over-kill induced slumber, we can make an obsession out of sniffing rosebuds or become aesthetes of our own lives and appraisers of all the beauty we can find. Thenceforth, what has been forgotten can be restored and if not in life, at least in literature, say, on the level of Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Illich, the matter can still be "set right."
But Being? What about it? Does it matter to anyone but Heidegger that the "history of Being begins, and indeed necessarily begins, with the forgetting of Being" (WN 109)? Can Being be recollected to thought and restitution made for the past thickness of philosophical sensitivity?
Being is not overlooked like a neglected plant so that one could, if one chose, simply resolve to keep it in mind. Much rather the question as such elides itself in its expression. This is Heidegger's insight into the dynamic intentionality of questioning in philosophy or science or everyday life.
The question of Being for Heidegger is the question of the history of the philosophic tradition in the West. Thus the Being question, much like the notion of Nietzsche's role as the last thinker of metaphysics in relation to the tradition of philosophy in the West, is a question that must be adumbrated in terms of Heidegger's reflections on philosophy in general. This in turn must be contextualised not only with regard to Heidegger's complex relation to metaphysics but our own animosity towards the concept itself. In the wake of the later Heidegger but also as a result of the scientistic positivism of the twentieth century (as well as structuralism, post-structuralism, de-construction, and postmodernism, not to mention Nietzsche himself), the word metaphysics has not merely become a term of malignment but also denied as the program of present philosophy. But thinking through the "History of an Error," i.e., reflecting the course of thinking directed beyond or meaning to overarch/overcome physis, meta-physical thinking is not an outdated mode of philosophy which contemporary thinking is too modern or too scientific (or else too postmodern) to engage but much rather represents our own still omni-present or highest values.
For the Heidegger who wrote an Introduction to Metaphysics as well as several essays where he invokes the history of philosophic conceptualization, including scientific theorizing in terms of metaphysics, metaphysics is a complex inveigling, the whole of our way of thinking in the West.(30)
In this way, for both Heidegger and Nietzsche, metaphysical thinking is the fundamental basis of Western thinking. Hence metaphysics represents both that from which Heidegger (and Nietzsche) wished to find some distance as well as the tradition which continues to dominate Western culture. The guiding question of metaphysics or philosophic inquiry, as Heidegger names it, is "What is being?" And the forgetting of being begins with the dynamic of this question just because to raise a question is likewise to project an answer. As Heidegger carefully explains, the tradition of metaphysical thinking "inquires so universally and so encompassingly that all the efforts incited by it at first and for quite some time afterwards strive after this one thing -- to find an answer to the question and to secure that answer" (N2 190). Seeking "to find an answer," the project of questioning loses -- and necessarily loses -- sight of the question with which it began. If the drive to answer, if the answer predominates, it eclipses the question and thereby destroys itself as such. In practice, for Heidegger, this is because philosophers have gotten ahead of themselves. Articulating the question, philosophical thinkers frame in advance a disposition with respect to what is as a whole. This is the result of the (intrinsically intentional) determina-tion of questioning as a project in terms of answers.(31)
As the prime philosopher of the question, Heidegger's philosophic project may be seen as an ongoing attempt to deflect the dynamic of question and answer (the intrinsic intentionality) endemic to traditional inquiry. Such a countering deflection against an oblique or pre-given understanding is essential both because of the important aim of the question and because it is the nature of questions to perish in the response given. Again: the annulation of questioning follows not because the question has been developed in itself and as that which is asked or sought. Rather seeking is terminated before it begins in the resolution anticipated as a reply. What Heidegger attempts is the question of the question: engaging, sustaining inquiry rather than the predetermined search for or expression of an answer. This means that Heidegger attempts to hold the question in questioning and that means to return (again and that is always to say otherwise) to inceptive philosophy. For Heidegger any "answer that bids adieu to the inquiry annihilates itself as an answer" (N2 192).(32)
Thus the question of Being and the reduplicative language of the question of the question -- both of which easily comprise the most generally alienating element in Heidegger's thought -- ground Heidegger's claim that he means "to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker" (WN 54-55). In the same way, Nietzsche's philosophy can be seen as the "end of metaphysics" because "Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring that is formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such and as a whole" (N2 200).(33)
To the question, 'what is?' or 'what is being?' pre-Socratic philosophy traditionally offers two resolutions. The one answer is given by Parmenides: that being is. Thus Parmenides thinks both Being and Time, that is, thinks being as presence as time.
The second reply was given by Heraclitus in terms of becoming and flux (and Nietzsche routinely conceives this second reply as closest to his own). Heidegger claims that Nietzsche consummates (manifests the "end" of) metaphysics because Nietzsche does not think the alternatives: Being or Becoming, but literally converts the one into the other. Heidegger cites Nietzsche's early reflection on the thought of the eternal return: "Let us imprint the emblem of eternity on our life!" (N2 201) and reads a kind of anticipatory resolve into the passage from TheWill to Power that Heidegger regards as "recapitulatory" (it seems evident Heidegger chooses this term for the same editorial reason Köselitz employed it to underline the spirit of the developmental biological theorist, Ernst Haeckel, permeating the entire fragmentary note),(34) and cites again and again in this connection: "To imprint Becoming with the character of Being -- that is the supreme will to power" (WP 617). For Heidegger, this [pre-]formative orientation of the will to power orders or sets becoming as being: "one must shape Becoming as being in such a way that as becoming it is." Thus Heidegger paraphrases Nietzsche: "the recoining of Becoming as being, is the supreme will to power" (N2 202). This new coin effects the valuing of becoming and here Heidegger does part company with the broader developmental constellation of Nietzsche's own reflections on the epigenesis of being and becoming.
For Heidegger, "Recoining is a creating ... to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task." Accordingly, one becomes what one is, that is: Da-sein appropriates in anticipatory resolve what it is given to be. To explicate the heart of the phrase, amor fati, Heidegger explains amor as "... the will that wants whatever it loves to be what it is in its essence"(N2 207). In other words, love is a relation that lets what is be what it is: succouring (rather than securing) it in being, a respect and a solicitude possible only as "creative transfiguration" which the Heidegger of Being and Time understood as care and which he here interprets as art, rendered by way of what contemporary scholars regard as Nietzsche's aesthetic programme of life-artistry, whereby as one loves one's own destiny (this is not the love of any one other than the self), one becomes the artist of one's life.(35)
The problem with the self-invention of amor fati (even and especially as amour-propre) and a great deal of postmodern and general academic enthusiasm for the project is exactly the affect evident in what Heidegger interprets as (what for him is the ultimate danger of) humanism or subjectism. And the problem of humanism corresponds to the essence of what Heidegger calls the problem of value-thinking and it is also what Nietzsche names nihilism.(36)
We can see the working of this connivance where Heidegger reminds us that we are not yet able to raise "the question concerning the essence of nihilism" (WN 53). Prior to equating Nietzsche with the culmination of the project of Western metaphysics, Heidegger recalls that this culmination is itself a result of Nietzsche's own successful project of (on Nietzsche's own terms) "overcoming" metaphysics. For Heidegger, Nietzsche's subversion of the Western tradition of metaphysics necessarily deflects metaphysics as such against itself, that is, deflects it "into its own inessentiality and dis-array" (ibid.). This deflection is then the key condition of nihilism and it is the prime circumstance of the end of metaphysics as such. Thus Heidegger converts Nietzsche's already abbreviated staccato sentences tracing the Twilight history of philosophy-cum-metaphysics in half as many (if over-prosaicised) declarations of Heidegger's own coin as a reflection on the death of God and the Platonico-transcendental ideal: "The suprasensory is trans-formed into an unstable product of the sensory. And with such a debase-ment of its antithesis, the sensory denies its own essence. The deposing of the suprasensory does away with the merely sensory and thus with the difference between the two" (WN 53-54).
In this way, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche's attention to the nihilistic trajectory of the West is metaphysically poised as "the rise and develop-ment" of a nihilism. As Eugen Fink reminds us, it is Nietzsche's insight that every nihilism articulates an opposition to life -- no matter whether we are speaking of Platonism, or the Judaeo-Christian tradition, or the Enlightenment eclipse of religion and the rule of science.(37) Fink's recollection of the anti-life dynamic intrinsic to every nihilism will be the hardest to square with Heidegger's assessment of Nietzsche who, from his earliest to his latest works, reflected his Dionysian nihilism in the irreluctable service of life.
But for Heidegger, the nihilistic history of metaphysics "debasing the sensory in favour of the suprasensory" is the history of the subjugation of the earth, the domination of life (by means of illusion/art), culminating in Nietzsche as nihilism's avatar and prophet.(38)
Nietzsche's word in Heidegger's text as Heidegger represents it for us ("God is Dead") expresses "the destining of two millennia of Western history" (WN 58). Fink, likewise traces the significance of the assertion of the death of God not in terms of declamatory content but in terms of the history of metaphysics as the intrinsic consequence of metaphysical ideals. Nihilism is not the counterpoint to (or the simple antipode of) metaphysical idealism, the highest value, or God conceived as the highest good, but the implicit consequence or culminating expression and end of such thinking where metaphysical thinking is always a thinking directed against or beyond physis, that is, Greek nature, coming to presence out of itself, not through human and not via divine mediation, that is: life, here and now in the day to day world.(39)
It is exactly in Western culture, as the culture of metaphysical or rational thinking that "the realm of the suprasensory" is the "true and genuinely real world" (WN 61). Although Heidegger invokes the same Plato Nietzsche refers to at this point, he could also refer the theoretical substrate of contemporary science to this same nihilistic trajectory. Where Nietzsche opposes his thinking to this scheme as declared antipode, his thinking is inevitably caught up in the logic of opposition: "Nietzsche's countermove-ment against metaphysics is, as the mere turning upside down of meta-physics, an inextricable entanglement in metaphysics" (ibid.). Such an en-tanglement, however, cannot think its own essence and hence must remain, precisely "as metaphysics itself hidden by metaphysics and for metaphysics" (ibid.). In light of the consistency of Nietzsche's nihilism, as Fink argues,(40) Heidegger's claim above cannot be given a cogent interpretation except on the terms of Heidegger's own occlusive, aletheic logic. Because "every overturning of this kind remains no more than a self-deluding entanglement in the Same that has become unknowable" (WN 75), Heidegger's claim demands that exactly this (perspectival) perspective on overturning (and hence regarding self-overcoming) be excluded from Nietzsche's thinking.
This turns to a reflection upon the nothingness into which, bereft of the directionality of a God-ordered world, all contemporary intellectual peregrinations must stray: "Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power realm of the modern age" (62-63). This means, as Fink likewise sought to argue, that the essence of metaphysics/nihilism is not essentially bound to the historically factual transformation of the provenance and contemporary influence of the faith of Christendom. Nihilism thus has nothing to do with the decline of "religious values." Rather the reference to the power realm of the modern age invokes what is taken to have real power, or genuine value and today that is more than a matter of mere "values," be they religious, moral-political, family values, or what have you. Instead, in our contemporary, technologico-scientific age, the insurrection of subjective judgment or value thinking means that "the authority of conscience" has utterly assumed "the position of the vanished authority of God and of the teaching Office of the Church" (64). The idea of individual conscience refers to the metaphysical transformation of tradition into the transcendental realm of self-responsible reason or rational reflection. Thus it is plain that the realm of the social -- that is, Hegel or Marx (today Foucault or even Habermas) -- "rises" against the background of this originally Kantian move. Both rational reflection and historical or communicative discourse offer no more than palliative returns to the ideal of reason, a distracting reference because in such moves "the flight from the world into the suprasensory is replaced by historical progress" (64). Hence Nietzsche claims that Platonism is Christianity for the masses (which last position has been displaced in turn by science today),(41) and Heidegger coordinates this with Nietzsche's own equation of mass social-democracy and mass Christianity, including not only Marxism but utilitarianism and social political theory in general: "The otherwordly goal is transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number." This can, but need not, be given a Marxist interpretation. For it can also be interpreted -- in keeping with recent historical changes -- in more straightforwardly free-market terms. (What, as Nietzsche would say, do the names matter?) Thus Heidegger concludes Nietzsche's history of illusion as the history of nihilism: "Human creativity finally passes over into the business of enterprise" (64). We are not far from the Internet dream of universal communication as the inseparable ideal of infinite commercial expansion. As the "inner logic" of Western history, Heidegger defines nihilism using Nietzsche's own words with the claim "that the highest values devaluate themselves" (WP 2). For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, we see none of this precisely because it is the circuit within which we ourselves are bound. Moreover, "as long as we merely take the appearance of nihilism for nihilism itself, our taking of a position in relation to nihilism remains superficial" (WN 66).
This is the highpoint of nihilism and to explicate it, Heidegger turns to an examination of Nietzsche's own ultimate project, as the project of the "revaluation of all previous values" (WN 67). Heidegger reads this project itself in terms of Nietzsche's recidivist subjectism, whereby what Nietzsche names a pessimism of strength (in contrast with Schopenhauer's traditional, weak or "Eastern" pessimism), yields nothing less than the "rising up of modern humanity into unconditional dominion of subjectivity within the subjectness of what is" (68). This articulates the most damning words Heidegger can utter against Nietzsche's project, that is, against Heidegger's representation of the project within the dynamic scope of Heidegger's understanding of the tradition of Western metaphysics.
The problem for Heidegger has to do with the impotence of the will to power, as self-overpowering will, which he expresses by contrasting complete nihilism with Nietzsche's incomplete nihilism. Incomplete nihilism, for example, the slave revolt in morality, installs itself in the place vacated by noble morality, simply inverting the value of high and low. Hence although it "does indeed replace the former values with others, it still posits the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory" (WN 69). By contrast, for Heidegger, a complete nihilism would have to "do away with even the place of value itself ...and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently" (ibid.).
Naturally the mischief here is that, for Heidegger if exactly not for Nietzsche, we are still valuing -- as it were --and thus we fail to descry the danger of value thinking precisely as the insurrection of the subject, that is, and in other words, humanism above all.
The popularity and today the inevitability of talking in terms of values is for Heidegger, a Nietzschean legacy:
Through scholarly preoccupation with philosophy and through the reconstructions of neo-Kantianism, we arrive at value philosophy. We build systems of values and pursue in ethics classifications of value. Even in Christian theology we define God, the summum ens qua summum bonum, as the highest value. We hold science to be value-free and relegate the making of value judgments to the sphere of world-views. (WN 70-71)
Value thinking (including scientific [or enlightenment or rationalistic] thinking as divided between objective facts and subjective value) reaches its culmination in Nietzsche. For Heidegger this culmination is the institution or imprinting of values themselves. In an age putatively opposed to the lan-guage--but not, of course, the "values"--of metaphysics, i.e., in an age of science, both value and "the valuable become the positivistic substitute for the metaphysical" (71). Value is what counts -- or can be calculated (72). This accounting of value takes Heidegger to what he obtusely regards as the inseparably coordinate conditions for power in the preservation/enhance-ment conditions for power, expressed as the will to power.
A review of metaphysical thinking, as the thought of Being as will to power, thinks or poses "what is" both as value and value positing. Because Nietzsche raises the question of value, or, because he proposes a "revalua-tion of all values hitherto," Nietzsche inevitably expresses the fulfilment of the Western project of metaphysics. The highest will to power counts as the highest value because for Nietzsche, what is is exactly will to power. Heidegger translates Wille not as dynamis or energeia but as voluntas: the source of error in Descartes (and Augustine). Will is not what is (contra Nietzsche, according to Heidegger): it is not being, it is not truth ("There is no truth") but value. Thus, and very neatly, the highest will to power is not an unqualified will to power [as such] but will to power as valuation.
Given the will to will as the highest value, Heidegger takes Nietzsche's musing to trace the nihilist trajectory of modern subjectivity: the highest values up till now devaluate themselves. The "highest values" thus far are revealed -- and this is the essence of the thought of nihilism -- as no more than mere values, i.e., not true -- qua values as such. In other words, in a modern, positivist era, value together with the entire metaphysical realm will lack Being (or truth). But truth (science) remains the highest value today. As the will to power posits the preservation or securing of its own constancy and stability as a supreme value it is not "true" but (this is where illusion and art enter the picture) much rather it "sets" or "holds to be true" (WN 83). The difference between "holding-to-be-true" and "truth" is ultimately either a merely metaphysical difference, or a subjectist non-aletheiological difference. With this observation regarding truth and what is (merely) held as true, Heidegger notes that "according to Nietzsche's judgment, certainty as the principle of modern metaphysics is grounded, as regards its truth, solely in the will to power, provided of course that truth is a necessary value and certainty the modern form of truth" (ibid.). In the contemporary techno-scientific era, the (metaphysical) ideal of truth is a necessary value and the (likewise metaphysical) ideal of certainty is the very enduring ideal of truth.
In this way Heidegger not only equates the subjectistic ideal of contemporary modern technological science with Descartes' modern ideal of the self-securing, thinking self, but orders Nietzsche's will to power within the same modern Cartesian quest for certainty, in terms of the kind of setting or institution of what is such that Being or what is is rendered or regarded (valued) as being at one's disposition. To speak this way is to speak of everything in Being (or in historical time) as standing reserve or Bestand. In this reading between Nietzsche and Descartes, the essence of truth is transformed from its essence as unconcealment (aletheia) to the value of scientific accord, fixing knowledge with its object.(42) Thus Heidegger parses what he calls the "power realm of the modern age" as a perfectly vulgar, fascistic, or violent expression of Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power.
It is imperative to ask whether Heidegger's reading is fair to Nietzsche, given Fink's and, later, Jean Granier's careful reflection on Heidegger's relation to Nietzsche. Granier finds Nietzsche's focus on truth less a sign of his residual (or recidivistic) Platonism than a decisive new turn internal to his philosophy.(43) For Granier, rather than merely reversing metaphysics, offering "une simple substitution de l'en-deçà sensible à l'au-delà supra-sensible," Nietzsche offers a decisive critique of metaphysics as it identifies Being with the ideal, the truth, the good and thereby reveals ontology's "connivance" with theology and morality alike. With this revelation, Nietzsche effectively articulates an "authentique révolution intellectuelle."(44) Heidegger misses this revolutionary intellectual turn, which Granier ties to what he (with Fink) regards as "the core" [noyau] of Nietzsche's philosophy: the cosmic Heraclitean "understanding of being as the play of finite truth and beautiful, salvific illusion" ["la comprehension de l'Être comme Jeu de la Vérité mortelle et de la belle apparence salvatrice"].(45)
Fink recalls that although the will to power is an absolute value, it not always valued in the same way. Power may be willed on the ground of either reactive impotence or creative abundance: the intensional value of willing in either opposed circumstance makes all the difference in what is willed in terms of "value." This is because, as Fink notes, a slave or reactive or negative will to power can only reiterate or rework value schemes. Thus the slave revolt in (Judaeo-Christian) moral values could only re-evaluate existing oppositions of value. The originally bad(ly off), incurably 'poor in spirit' thus become Good and the good of the originally noble (or pagan) valuation become spiritually, culpably: deliberately Evil. But this is plainly not the only dynamic of valuation in Nietzsche. For Fink, the higher modus of affirmative or positive will to power is able to posit, institute, or create new value, setting new ideals, valuing perhaps -- just as Heidegger's critique would require -- in an altogether unheard of fashion.
Both Granier and Fink offer their own discussion of value in Nietzsche's philosophy in the wake of Heidegger's original account. Ergo, these readings connive both with Nietzsche and with Heidegger. Both Fink and, to a lesser degree, Granier, turn to reflect on the importance of thinking between art and truth, where Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche has already cleared the way and already includes its own deconstructive subversion. We cannot correct Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power by showing that Nietzsche goes beyond the violence of a banal account because Heidegger already does this. Moreover, it is plain that reading Heidegger "against" -- "conniving against" -- Heidegger would seem to be presupposed from the start: "The creating of possibilities for the will on the basis of which the will to power first frees itself to itself is for Nietzsche the essence of art" (ibid.). Heidegger argues that art itself, exactly as Nietzsche understands it, namely,as the corrective opposition to truth (the saving power), is to be equated with the power realm of the modern age and is thus nothing less than the very essence of modern technology, as Heidegger understands it in his turn. Thus Heidegger reads Nietzsche's claim that "Art is worth more than truth" (WP 853) in terms of the insight setting art (regarded in the light of life) itself as "the highest value" (WN 86).
The art of living, as the illusion that we have -- that we are, that we live -- is the artful illusion necessary to endure the truth (as the truth, to be sure, that there is no truth). The illusion of art is an artistry that orders or values life above all. Heidegger handily reverses the Nietzschean ideal of active creation, that is the ideal of the "masculine" aesthetic as the aesthetic of wild, self-risking daring innovation (as opposed in Nietzsche's thinking to the merely reactive aesthetics of preservation and reception/reaction).
Valuing Value
In a scientific era, "truth" remains the highest value as the empirical (still metaphysical ideal of) truth or facts that "have" the value of truth. And if "the highest" values are values beyond measure (or "price," as Kant could say), none are or can be values in themselves without rank order or a market scale or an economic index. There is no such thing as a value as such: a value an sich, or indeed as Heidegger precises "an-und-für-sich,"(46) is an impossibility. This conviction is at the heart of the famous and trivial fact/value distinction: the ought one cannot logically draw from what is. And emphasising the twilight of the idols of Western sensibility, the highest values can be devalued, Nietzsche says, qua values as such.
Values are and must be valued in order to count as such. In Nietzsche's language this is also to say that values are and must be willed. It is because of the dependence of value upon will that "values do not fall away of themselves" (N4 41). Indeed, as Heidegger expresses it in tellingly economic terms, "we withdraw values -- first posited [and thus, it might be emphasised: first deposited] by us -- from the world" (N4 43).(47) Hence not only is there (es giebt keine) no truth as Nietzsche would say, but there is no goodness, there is no God, there is no real (or apparent) world. Values are not values as such but rather for Nietzsche, in a metaphysical perspective on metaphysical value, all values are values only to the degree that they are valued (high or low), exactly like the value of the yen, the Deutsche mark, the brand-new Euro, the stubborn British pound or the old-fashioned dollar. Among many other features, this century is the century of world-wide devaluations, revaluations, and currency institution/invention, that is positing values on the most literally economic index for the same.
It is plain that for Heidegger qua phenomenologist, human beings value pre-thetically: they find themselves amidst what values through them: that is life, better said: the life-world of their historical circumstance and concern. As Fink expresses this phenomenological convention: "Menschliches Leben ist Wertsetzung."(48) Conscious values are only the patent expressions of such valuing inclinations. This is the key to Nietzsche's programme of recalling humanity to its own artistry. It is what Fink named the most conflicted aspect of Nietzsche's thinking on the issue of truth, nihilism, life, value.(49) To say as the existential phenomenologist must that as the world worlds (Heidegger writes: "Welt ist nie, sondern weltet"),(50) it values through us does not abrogate the affective dynamic. The challenge that one "would rather will nothingness than not will" is the aphoristic key resonant at the beginning and the end of the third part of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's most sustained book on the origin of value and valuation. What crystallises as "value" in the "chamber" of consciousness must be appropriated (i.e., affirmed or negated) as valued (and not as being and not as truth). The apprised result, makes life bearable (the teaching of the eternal return as yes-saying, as affirmation) and it is the only truth there is (this is the truth of illusion). Nietzsche neither advocates perspectivism nor is his thinking (merely) value-thinking. Thus Nietzsche diagnoses the age of the loss of the highest values heretofore and teaches the possibility of the revaluation of values. Such a twice-turned thought of nihilism, as the decay of values and the institution of new values, corresponds to Nietzsche's tragic ideal of the destructive joy of the creator as the play of mortal truth and the saving illusion of art.
But, for Heidegger, because value-thinking is consummate humanism, it decimates everything: relegating not only becoming and fate but Being and even God to the level of values. Value thinking is the height of human-ism because to pose (to depose and to dispose over or of) values is to judge everything that is. The vulgar overman is thus the crown of subjectism for Heidegger. Because Heidegger's engagement with the problem of techno-logy is also the problem of Nietzsche's overman as Heidegger regards it,(51) Nietzsche is also regarded as the technological thinker par excellence in Heidegger's schematic question concerning technology. And in the wake of the same technological, calculating representation of Being, "the truth of being" for Heidegger, "remains denied as world."(52)
Denying truth, Nietzsche's lord of the earth, the universal overman, loses the world. For Heidegger the failure to think Being is egregious precisely because in this same failure "it is Being itself that is uttering itself to us" (T 48). The loss here can be shown to be the loss of what is most our own: the loss of Being itself and that means in turn, the loss of what is ours to be. For Heidegger, "so long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be" (49). For Heidegger -- the failure to think Being occludes the project Nietzsche calls amor fati (which he takes over from Pindar) as a task for humanity beyond human imagination, to become the one you are, to stamp becoming with being, understood now as the task of teaching the will to will backwards.
The opposition between Nietzsche and Heidegger is then an opposition not of substance but -- as always in a thinker of such subtlety as Nietzsche and of such obscurity as Heidegger -- style.(53) Heidegger finds the essential task for thought in Nietzsche's reflection on nihilism, as a task in time of need. This is different from the task of the poet in needful times, but it is by the same token a task that goes beyond calculative thought. This is a thinking that is only able to begin with the acknowledgement "that reason, glorified for centuries is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought" (WN 112). As "the piety of thought"(54) exceeds questioning "and becomes simply saying,"(55) Heidegger claims that the task of thinking can give "man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own" (T 49).
The last sentence, repeating the last words of the ranged endings Heidegger deployed for his essays on technology, science and reflection, and the Turn, may help to indicate the tonality of the question inserted at the end of his reflections on Nietzsche: "Has thinking man perhaps here really cried out de profundis?" (WN 112). For Heidegger, we need to hear, as Nietzsche could have emphasised: we need to learn to hear such an appeal from the depths of the soul, or from the darkness needing illumination even in the brightness of day.(56)
Taminiaux's Claims: On Art
Taminiaux argues the wide ranging and important insight that "Heidegger's essay The Origin of the Work of Art was conceived as an attempt to revive Nietzsche's notion of art" (HWP 1). Taminiaux's contention is corroborated by the title of Heidegger's first course on Nietzsche, where Heidegger emphasises that the project of his investigation firstly explicates "how Nietzsche comprehends art" and simultaneously reveals "why an inter-pretation of the nucleus of the will to power must begin precisely here, with art."(57) Taminiaux secures the relevance of Nietzsche for The Origin of the Work of Art by showing that Heidegger's history of metaphysics be understood as a "de-construction" from the basis of Heidegger's own project and his engagement with Aristotle's theory of art, techn, know-how, and above all form or morph, together with the creative artistry of Plato's philosophic revelation of truth (HWP 3) as the artistic, creative connivance between Plato and Nietzsche in Heidegger's thinking (HWP 19).
Thus, the relation between the thinkers I have been exploring is evident in Taminiaux's presumption of a very considerable kinship between Heidegger and Nietzsche -- the daring of philosophy as joyful science in connection with the thought of atheism, the importance of historicality (as opposed to historic theory or historiology), etc.. More critically, Taminiaux notes that the issue of art is exactly what links the project of fundamental ontology to Heidegger's challenging engagement (Auseinandersetzung) with Nietzsche. This connivance is striking in Heidegger's quintessentially Nietz-schean declaration (albeit in Heideggerian rather than recognizably Nietzschean syntax) that "Art is the will to semblance as the sensuous." This is the same will to illusion Nietzsche uses to define art, particularly in the context of his reflections on the history of "metaphysics" as the Conflict Between Art and Knowledge.(58)
For Nietzsche, a philosophic investigation into truth and the basis of knowledge as art is the highest, up till now utterly neglected, task for the philosopher of "the dangerous 'perhaps' in every sense," engaging a radically "scientific" effort to conduct an experiment with truth as such (this is why Nietzsche begins his Beyond Good and Evil with the reflection which supposes truth in advance not as a neutral ideal but as "a woman" in order to relate the desire for truth to every other desire, but also to ask into that same desirability, asking Why truth? by posing in its stead the question, "Why not rather untruth?" [BGE 1]). This intrinsically philosophical task involves the difficult reflection upon the difference between heights and excludes those (scientists) who make no distinction between high and low in their pursuit of value-neutral facts. Setting the value of art above truth, that is, restoring art to its original devalued ranking is the task of the philosopher of the most exigent rigour in Nietzsche's words.(59)
Where the regulation of the scientific knowledge ideal cannot be achieved on the ground of science, it cannot be effected by way of calculation although Nietzsche would argue that it is a matter of value or perspective weighting (i.e., valeur).(60) Instead, in just the kind of reciprocally dynamic connection that Taminiaux identifies as a "connivance" between Nietzsche and Heidegger -- so evident in the return to the Greeks in Heidegger's The Introduction to Metaphysics, Nietzsche proposes what he would not flinch at naming a foundational poetry. In other more recognizably Nietzschean terms, this calls for the mastery of art. This is a kind of political aesthetic adumbrated not in the ethical or moral institution of society by way of art/techn (this is the Platonic platform of Western civilization), but rather with recourse to the idea of consummate or tragic artistry possible in a society ordered to the foundational ground of art and life.
The advantage of such a connivance of Nietzsche with Heidegger for understanding Heidegger's thinking is once again evident at this juncture. "Art," Heidegger glosses, "is the will to semblance as the sensuous" (N1 74). The idea of the will to semblance qua sensuous does more for Heidegger's controversial elaboration of the relation between Schein (appearance) and scheinen (radiance), in the context of the Schön (beautiful) than his etymologies ever did or could do. In the same Nietzschean context of the will to illusion, Heidegger invokes Nietzsche's proclamation of the importance of art for life: "We have art in order not to perish from the truth" (WP 822).
Taminiaux's expression of a connivance between Heidegger and Nietz-sche shows that Heidegger does not interpret Nietzsche simply in terms of his guiding question (the dark night of Being), nor indeed in terms of the will to power as art read as the will to semblance as the sensuous. Rather, Heidegger takes Nietzsche's two most difficult thoughts, the will to power and the eternal return of the same and thinks them precisely together -- and thus thinks them beyond what is said in these concepts to what Heideggerians like to call the "unsaid" (HWP 17). Taminiaux suggests that Nietzsche's own answer to what Heidegger names the guiding question, "what is will to power itself, and how is it?" is precisely the eternal return of the same. Thus Taminiaux quotes Heidegger and it will do to quote it again here: "Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy means thinking Being as Time" (N1, 20/HWP 5). Thus Taminiaux recalls Fink's and Granier's account of the doctrine of the eternal return as it articulates the mortal rhythm of life for beings captive in the will that is desire in time, redeemed in the will to power as the saving illusion of beauty.
In the same illuminating way, Taminiaux's reading focuses upon Heideg-ger's expression of the concept of art not in terms of traditional aesthetics, but rather in the anti-aesthetic (because anti-spectacular) terminology of the "point of view" of the Nietzschean artist. This refers us again to "the link between the question of truth and the question of art" (HWP 10), which already took us to Nietzsche's expression of the "conflict between art and truth," and which inevitably entails just what Taminiaux claims to be "an essential connotation with the deconstruction of the traditional notion of truth" (ibid.) -- an association foremost in Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, the third part of his Philosophenbuch.
The reference to the Greek understanding of art is key, not as an aesthetic understanding properly said, but as the understanding first made possible from the perspective of a creating, inventing, or founding art. In a note from The Gay Science, Nietzsche celebrates the saving power of such aesthetic institution or foundation as "Our ultimate gratitude to art. If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue ... the [scientific] realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation -- would be utterly unbearable" (GS 107). With art, life as such is possible. Much more and more accurately said: it is with the help of art, even in a modern, scientific era, that we are able to bear the truth of untruth, not as a distraction from the rigours of science or as an escape from the "truths" of science, but as insight into untruth itself, be it scientific or otherwise.
"To become," in Nietzsche's words, "the ones we are" (GS 335), we need to become the artists of our lives, we need to be creators. What is capital is that we have always been, that we are, and always will be artists anyway and in any case. This is the straitest meaning of Nietzsche's reflection on the necessity of art as a metaphysical balm or illusion treating the terrible "truth that we are eternally damned to untruth" [die Wahrheit, ewig zur Unwahr-heit verdammt zu sein] (KSA I, 760). We may view ourselves specularly, we may see art itself aesthetically -- as spectators. But that aesthetic or aes-theticising perspective is an illusion: "Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature -- nature is always valueless -- but it has been given value at some time as a gift -- and it was we who gave and bestowed that gift. Only we have created the world that concerns man" (GS 301). This is the poignant turn concluding Nietzsche's reflection on the unconscious, willy-nilly power that is not the Kantian constitution of the possibility of knowledge as such,(61) but the Nietzschean artistry of all human knowledge: "We are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be" (GS 301). And that pride, that happiness consists in the joyful science that belongs to the harder task of philosophy as art.
Taminiaux defends Heidegger's more disciplinary reading of the history of aesthetics whereby the subjective relevance of taste as what Heidegger calls "the court of judicature over beings" (N1 83/HWP 12) is to be contrasted with Heidegger's understanding of art as what allows an encounter beyond the subject-object relation with what appears as it is in itself such that the experience of art beyond any traditionally aesthetic or "subjective lived experience" for both Nietzsche and Heidegger can be seen in the light of philosophic wonder, thaumazein: "an openness to what in the appearing of beings deserves veneration, that is, Beauty" (HWP 16).
With this attunement to Beauty as opening up the limited sphere of both the subjective and objective encounter with art, Taminiaux offers an account of Kantian favouring (Gunst) in terms of Freigabe as an expression of affirmation, or as "the yes-saying dimension of the will to power." Such an affirmatively attuned or keyed openness to Beauty regarded as the self-showing of being in its own constellation presupposes the ideal of form or style in both Nietzsche and Heidegger. Heidegger claims form as what induces the sentiment of artful intoxication or Rausch: "Form ... allows that which we encounter to radiate in appearance ... [displaying] ... the relation itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open" (N1 119/HWP 16). Taminiaux emphasizes that what I above characterized as the element of thaumazein (which he speaks of as Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology) -- "purely to honor what is of worth in its appearance" (N1 111/HWP 18) -- is what is key for Heidegger beyond Nietzschean affirmation.
Rather than leading to an ecstatic orgy of sensation/perception as some notable American interpreters have argued, Taminiaux relates Heidegger's expression of Rausch, "as a form-engendering force," to what may be named Nietzsche's own ascetic ideal: i.e., the Sallustian severity or lapidary pre-cision of what Nietzsche describes as the grand style, a Nietzschean image and explication than which few less self-evidently Dionysian or orgiastic notions can be imagined -- despite the tendency towards such automatic association (cf. in this connection, TI, Ancients, 1 and EH, Clever, 1).
The hardest question in Taminiaux's reading is one of the thorniest altogether. Taminiaux offers an account of Heidegger's interpretation of Hölderlin's letter to Böhlendorf -- and this is the question, once again, of the relation of German thinking to the thinking or spirit of Greek antiquity. This is Nietzsche's Pindarian question, essentially expressed as the subtitle to Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Taminiaux emphasises, and it is a powerful and important emphasis, that where Heidegger renders the notion of the will to power in terms of his own fundamental question, he also and simultaneously claims that Nietzsche thereby revives the key Aristotelian question (once again the foundational question of metaphysics) of the unity of dynamis, energeia, and entelecheia taken as "the highest determinations of Being" (N1 64/HWP 8). Here Taminiaux repeats Heidegger's own corroborative citation of this reading from Nietzsche: "all German philosophy derives its real dignity from being a gradual reclamation of the soil of [Greek] antiquity" (WP 419). Taminiaux returns to this question with his reflection on the paradox of Nietzsche's own conception of "his antinihilistic meditation of art in terms of a physiology" (HWP 13), as it is resolved in the expression of physis as Rausch, or the point of intersection of physis-techn. For Taminiaux, this resolution works with recourse to philology, and, as further illuminated in Heidegger, shows the "ontological proximity between the discourse of the presocratic thinkers, called 'physiologists,' above all Heraclitus and Parmenides, and on the other hand, the poetic language of tragedy" (HWP 15). That is, of course, to see "art in terms of a physiology," or else, recalling Nietzsche's own language: to regard art in the optic of life.
Taminiaux returns Heidegger's express reference to biology to a more appropriate expression of Nietzsche's aesthetics by terming it a physiology, recalling Fink's earlier emphasis on the importance of physis in this connection, and which belongs most properly to Nietzsche's account of art and life before Socrates converted philosophy to a self-nursing humanism. Heidegger is able to resolve the seeming paradox of a physiology of art -- just as it is a reductive or scientific and nihilistic account -- as the "reversal" not the "culmination" of eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetics. "More precisely," for Taminiaux, "the aim is to show that, because of this reversal, ... Nietzsche ... is therefore the most Greek of the Germans, preceded only by Hölderlin" (HWP 14). The issue at stake in the contrast between what Heidegger recalls that Hölderlin named "'the holy pathos' and the 'Occidental Junonian sobriety of representational skill' in the essence of the Greeks" is not the raging concord between art and knowledge but the contrast between Nietzschean/Heideggerian Rausch and what Nietzsche named the grand style. But it is important to add Hölderlin's own reflective word to an account that is so dependent upon his dense and provocative claim: because for Hölderlin as much as for Pindar, one may not freely dispose of what is most one's own.
To articulate the relation between thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also Fink, Granier, and Taminiaux, we can take Hölderlin to mean that the disposition over one's own is unfree and hence we are to turn to what is foreign. But exactly for the Germans, according to Nietzsche, "all bridges are broken" (WP 419) and the same shattered prospect holds for the French, for Americans, and even for Belgians. The key might lie in the almost that must be counted in the place of so much in life. It is only after "we have almost lost our tongue in foreign lands" (Hölderlin, Mnemosyne), that we can begin to return to or read a sense back into Hölderlin's imperative suggestion that the "Greeks are not really master of the holy pathos, since it is innate in them," but are rather those who dispose magisterially over the "Junonian sobriety" to the very extent that they made it over or assumed it into their orbit. But to appropriate what Nietzsche called "the rainbow bridges of concepts" -- the foreign lands of thought -- one must also recognise not the daring or teasing account of the passion for thinking he also calls the will to a "ghostliness almost," but much rather the necessity that would also be the key to divine happiness: one must come to oneself, not as a homecoming but as a re-cognition of the foreign that inheres in one's own heart and history.
Where Nietzsche begins one of his most important Prefaces with the claim that we are strangers to ourselves, to conclude with the exigence of learning to read (as he elsewhere reminds us of the necessity to learn to think and to learn love) (GM Pref.), Hölderlin explains "... what is one's own must be learned as thoroughly as what is foreign. For that reason the Greeks are indispensable to us. But precisely in what is our own, in what is our national gift, we will not be able to keep pace with them, since, .. the free employment of what is one's own is most difficult" ("Letter to Böhlendorf"). Nietzsche's effort to approximate the problem of "the free employment of what is one's own" lies in his work, patently traced though the lines of the self-reflected lineage of an author's self-becoming in terms of his affects and effects, that is, his own auto-bibliography, his Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Heidegger's word is expressed in Being and Time as self-appropriation, whereby what Dasein recovers for the sake of authentic being itself is its own past for the sake of its own possibility. Heidegger's best Hölderlinian expression of the need for such a retrieve is his claim "That which is ontically closest and well known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all" (SZ 9) -- even if Heidegger is condemned to relate this insight to such a very anti-Hölderlinian, anti-Nietzschean thinker as Augustine but, as the question the self may become for the self beyond foundational mortality, Hannah Arendt returns reflection to questioning.(62)
Acknowledgments
A version of this essay served as commentary on Jacques Taminiaux's essay following its original presentation to the annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society in Louisville, Kentucky in October of 1997. Thanks for criticisms and helpful suggestions are due to David Allison, Richard Cobb-Stevens, and Holger Schmid.
Endnotes
1. Jacques Taminiaux, "On Heidegger's Interpretation of the Will to Power as Art," New Nietzsche Studies, 3:1/2 (1999):1-22. Taminiaux does not begin by speaking of connivance as such but recalls the evidence of Heidegger's expression of "affinity with Nietzsche in 1925" (p. 1) and in Being and Time and so on (p. 2). Nor is it lost on me that Taminiaux limits his claims regarding this affinity or connivance to the specific time frame of Heidegger's first university course on Nietzsche and essay on The Origin of the Work of Art. Thus Taminiaux restricts himself to claims regarding "the initial stage" of Heidegger's long engagement with Nietzsche. My comments with regard to such a complex connivance are likewise limited to this stage although I have recourse to Heidegger's later lectures and essays on technology and the turn, etc., because one may not plot an "initial stage" without anticipating a transformative development or reversal.
2. Exactly unlike Heidegger, Nietzsche's many critics rarely upset or annoy Nietzscheans in the same preemptive and totalising way. Hence Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's recent, passionately nationalistic French collection, Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), -- is received as a book less about Nietzsche's philosophic relevance than a political manifesto proposing to distance the authors from a host of unpalatable suspicions (including Heidegger) in the irrecusably postmodern waking of the postmodern condition.
3. Taminiaux, p. 2. Henceforth cited as HWP.
4. This obliquity is intensified by the direction of Taminiaux's resolution of Nietzsche's problematic status as philosopher of art. See Taminiaux's conclusion and again below.
5. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). This same connivance can be read as granting a sort of "tacit permission" in Nietzsche's case to every fascist underpinning a Hitler or indeed a Lukács could read into his thought.
6. For Taminiaux, Heidegger regards his own fundamental questions as inherent to his specific approach to Nietzsche, p. 3. See also p. 17, where Taminiaux affirms a "strong and intimate ..." connivance as a complex notion opposed to the straightforward contrast of "fundamental disagreement."
7. Otto Pöggeler in Neue wege mit Heidegger, (München: Alber, 1992) repeats his earlier claim that the Beiträge represents Heidegger's second major work in specific coordination with the influence of Nietzsche on Heidegger, pp. 228 ff. Victor Farías' specific words on this association are not included in the original (1987) French edition of his book but may be found in its revised version in English, Heidegger and Nazism, ed., with a Foreword by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, trans. Paul Burrell with the advice of Dominic Di Bernardi (Philadelphia: Temple University,1989), pp. 250 ff. See also Holger Schmid's essay below, New Nietzsche Studies, 3:1/2 (1999):53-.
8. For the philosophically political question of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche in his lecture courses as self-critique, see Tadashi Otsuru, Gerechtigkeit und : Der Denkweg als Selbstkritik in Heideggers Nietzsche-Auslegung, (Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 1992). Otsuru develops a theme already in use with regard to Nietzsche in the Japanese context of reflection on thinking in relation to Heidegger's articulation of his own lectures on Nietzsche as the course of his own self-overcoming. For the original context of self-overcoming and tradition, see Watsuji Tetsuro, A Study of Nietzsche, discussed in David Baruch Gordon's recent dissertation, Self-overcoming as the Overcoming of Modernity: Watsuji Tetsuro's "A Study of Nietzsche" (1913) and its Place in the Development of His Thought, (University of Hawaii, 1997).
9. Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche engages familiar themes if only because the greater part of Heidegger's work on Nietzsche is based on lecture notes for introductory university seminars Thus Heidegger discusses the familiar prejudices available to a student antecedent to any study of Nietzsche's philosophy. These conventions include nihilism, the death of god, the eternal return, the value of art and truth, and, in particular, the will to power and the overman. In addition to converting these notions not only and variously one with another, Heidegger also reads them overtly on the terms of his own history of the occidental oblivion of the Being question, exemplifying -- exactly as Taminiaux has it -- Heidegger's patent connivance with Nietzsche.
10. To be sure, a similar ambiguity characterises Heidegger's own Auseinandersetzung with or conscientiously interpretive hermeneutic of Nietzsche's works.
11. The entire Farías project up to and including Richard Wolin and Tom Rockmore may be seen in this light. For a different approach to the otherwise standard account of these complexities, see the present author's "Heidegger's Silence," in Charles Scott and Arleen Dallery, eds., Ethics and Danger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 83-106 and "From the Ethical Alpha to the Linguistic Omega: Heidegger's Anti-Semitism and the Question of the Affinity Between Ancient Greek and German." Joyful Wisdom: A Journal of Postmodern Ethics. I (Fall 1994): 3-25. See also the contributions of Robert Bernasconi, Reiner Schürmann, and Dominique Janicaud among others who have sought to raise the tone of analysis on this troublesome question.
12. Bernd Magnus. "Foreword to the English Translation," Karl Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. xvii.
13. Alexander Nehamas is much closer to Montaigne (or more popularly: to Foucault) than he could ever be to Heidegger. See his recent book, The Art of Living, California University Press, 1998). And although the best case may be made for Heidegger's influence on Tracy Strong, the resolute exotericism of his approach to Heidegger (and his refusal to see any difference between Heidegger and, say, Cavell) means that he remains closer to Weber or, if less critically, to Rousseau. See for the broader connection, Strong's impeccable Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) as well as his The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997) and Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage, 1994).
14. There are many reasons for this (varying with these very different authors) but the most fundamental is that these readers, with the special exception of Shapiro and to a lesser degree Strong and Nehamas, are readers who come to Nietzsche stubbornly innocent of the tradition of philosophy that is not the potted tradition of analytic "history" of philosophy. These are readers who are utterly uncontaminated by the influences of contemporary European philosophy apart from the Wittgenstein served up in Cambridge (English and American) skits.
15. You need not read much Nietzsche to read Nietzsche: you can begin and end with Zarathustra -- realising the nightmarish augury Nietzsche imagined in Ecce homo.
16. Although to be sure the profile of a "liberated Heideggerian" describes Magnus himself as an analytic exemplification of -- and not an exception to -- this same rule.
17. To explain what he has called the drive for liberation as a sign of so much Heidegger-anxiety, Magnus fixes his own imprimatur to an antique piece of Heidegger apocrypha which the present author for her own part originally heard from Bill Richardson. With regard to Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Magnus adds the concluding footnote: "Many decades after its publication, after all of its deficiencies had been discussed to death, Heidegger told a friend of mine: 'It may not be good Kant, but it is awfully good Heidegger'" (p. xvii). Unremarkably, then, Magnus proposes the same critique of Heidegger's Nietzsche studies.
19. Heidegger scholars, for their part, rarely address the issue of the rightness or wrongness of Heidegger's reading, if only because Heidegger scholars tend to take Heidegger at his word and they very rarely get past that to the kind of critical reading that both Heidegger and Nietzsche notoriously engaged in and recommended.
20. Assuming one wishes (in other than the reigning analytic fashion) to do more than correct Nietzsche's emphases or his arguments or his general understanding of the project of philosophy, this effective stylistic constraint is what makes Nietzsche unique: it is not a deconstructionist given applicable to any text.
21. This expression from Nietzsche's "Music and Words," (KSA VII, 360) is Schopenhauer's: manifesting the Will "im Tone des Sprechenden" whereby the Tonuntergrund is the universal commonality beyond all difference (361). This claim elaborates the origin of word from the essence of music, see pp. 47-48, especially: "Musik wird zum Wort" (KSA VII, 70) whereby tone "ist die Sprache als Genius der Gattung" (ibid.). Only because of this shared foundation in tone is music language's "supplement" not as addition but alternate consummation ("Die Musik als Supplement der Sprache" 465). For this same tonal emphasis, see Nietzsche's early lectures on the art of speaking as the culture of listening: "Darstellung der Antiken Rhetorik 1872-73" in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. and trans. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, David J. Parent, (Oxford University Press, 1989), expressing rhetoric as an art "which appeals chiefly to the ear, in order to bribe it" (21). Nietzsche's parenthesis "(In our time the reader is almost no longer a listener ...)" (24) will become the more strident expression heard at the end of his preface to Beyond Good and Evil (one must learn to read) and so on. See page 40 above and note 53.
22. See my discussion of Nietzsche's style in "The Musical Style of Philosophy: From Socrates' Practice to Heidegger's Parataxis" in Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch, eds., Gesture and Word: Thinking Between Philosophy and Poetry, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). See more broadly, the first chapter on concinnity in my Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
23. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), section 34. Subsequently cited as BGE followed by section number.
24. Truth might not be worth more than appearance (Nietzsche contends that this is no more than a "moral prejudice"), but the whole of life nevertheless depends upon "perspective evaluations and appearances." Thus Nietzsche speaks of the "strange simplification and falsification" in which humankind lives, offering an ironic, self-teasing reminder that for "men of knowledge," such as he presupposes as his own readers, and especially those who supposes themselves to be "free spirits," it is "the best knowledge that wants most to hold us in this simplified, altogether artificial, fabricated, falsified world, how it is willy-nilly in love with illusion because, as a living being, it is -- in love with life" (BGE 24). But although this affection for illusion, sounds like the cult of the artist of life (GS 107), the illusion we are asked to embrace is not the invented scheme we propose for ourselves, relative to whoever we might be and whatever we please. The illusion is life -- life is a woman, as Zarathustra reminds us, and Eugen Fink emphasises in connection with the claim that truth is a woman -- that is, the illusion wills through us, as the world-will (life) values in us, as the life-saving illusions of logic, of physical engineering, the illusions of the machinists of the future, for the sake of the future.
25. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) section 1. Cited henceforth as GS. And a bit later in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche offers an aphoristic counterintuitive reflection on "Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play" (BGE 94).
26. Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p 58. Cited as WN.
28. For God, as we all know without needing to hear it from Nietzsche, has gone beyond talk of his death, or the audacious and fearful reflection that "gods too die," to complete irrelevance. God-talk in general makes modern, contemporary philosophers such as ourselves rightly cautious: it is only as postmodern (that is, without really meaning it), that we are at all prepared or warned enough to engage in God-talk.
29. And, given a personal religiosity, the tendency to neglect the presence of the divine in our daily lives might be considered culpable, but this is a personal value, as we say. If we are not religious, forgetting the God in things is only an absurdity. But we can concede the charge.
30. "Metaphysics is the name for the full range of philosophy's proper questions." Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 187. Henceforth N2.
31. For Heidegger, "the one who poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the questioner comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings" (N2 191).
32. Heidegger is aware that reflections such as "questioning questioning" cannot be regarded as ordinary, but rather as "noxious and self-lacerating" (N2 193). But that is the commonsense response to the manifest nonsense involved in multiplying participles: "questioning questioning" sounds like double talk because it is.
33. And Heidegger's contentious appellation of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West derives as we have already seen from Nietzsche himself.
34. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), henceforth cited as WP. From Krell's translation. Nietzsche scholars have rightly emphasised that the title phrase was affixed by his editors, not Nietzsche. Nevertheless such audacious editorial intervention has not worked to prevent most scholars from completely missing Nietzsche's keynote in WP 617 -- sounding the recurrent ideal of a life as a repetition of an entire process of instantiation. This is Haeckel contra Darwin.
35. As Alexander Nehamas suggests via Montaigne/Foucault as a becoming already presaged at the dawn of the Western tradition of philosophy in the ironic challenge of Socrates.
36. The question of the meaning of nihilism in Heidegger is poised against his consciousness of the very different meaning of the question of nihilism for Nietzsche. This same juxtaposition illuminates Taminiaux's sense of Heidegger's connivance as an insight into the essence of nihilism as Nietzsche expresses it and as Heidegger reviews Nietzsche's "History of an Error" in Twilight of the Idols.
37. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), p. 130 and pp. 133-134.
38. The effort to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker turns directly into a reflection on thinking as such and in connection with philosophy at this stage in Heidegger's own thinking, this is what he calls "essential" or preparatory thinking -- i.e., a thinking that is essentially underway. Thus Heidegger speaks of a "sharing" in thinking and uses the metaphor of a "sowing": the notion of a preparatory project retrieves the attention the early Heidegger already pays to the constellation of prerequisite needs. In such a preparatory mode "It is the matter of first having a presentiment of, then of finding, then of cultivating, the field in question" (WN 55). Reflecting on the ways and contours of provisional thinking, Heidegger can also write that a thinker amidst so many levels and approaches, nonetheless follows only one way.
41. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967) Part III, sections 23-25.
42. Whereby, as Heidegger writes, "truth is now, and indeed through an essentially historical origin, out of the modes of its essence -- making stably constant -- makes secure the constant reserve" and thus "belongs to the sphere from out of which the will to power rules itself" (WN 85).
43. Jean Granier, Le problème de la Verité dans le philosophie de Nietszsche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 625 ff.
46. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA 56/57 (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1987), p. 46. See Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Phil-osophical Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995) for a background discussion of value philosophy via "the mentality of the Weimar republic" in a chapter on Lebensphilosophie and the Triumph of Phenomenology" p. 211 ff. See also Parvis Emad, Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Values (Glen Ellyn: Torrey Press, 1981) and Ingo Farin's flawed but still informative discussion of "Heidegger and Value Philosophy" (quite apart from Farin's mysterious silence on Emad's book, Farin refers the discussion to the question/danger of humanism while refusing the distinction between early and later Heidegger) Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 29/3 (1998): 268-280.
47. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume Four: Nihilism, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 43. Cited as N4. Beyond Rickert and Windelband's value philosophy, Farin also notes Max Scheler's discussion of value with reference to both Nietzsche and Heidegger. Farin asserts that Heidegger fails to refer to Scheler (p. 277) but this is inexact. Beyond Heidegger's tendency to elliptical characterisation of his contemporaries (e.g., Jaspers is not always invoked by name), see Emad.
48. "Human life is value positing." Fink, p.121.
50. Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), p. 44.
51. Heidegger, "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" trans. Bernd Magnus in David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 64-79.
52. Heidegger, "The Turning" in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 48. Cited as T.
53. The issue of style is also a matter of what Nietzsche names the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric. In the notes for this early book, Nietzsche clarifies the esoteric context as the perspective of transfiguring distance: "From the right height, everything comes together -- the thoughts of the philosopher, the work of the artist, and good actions" (KSA 7, 417). This same perspective recurs in the idea of the noble and again in the key convention of the pathos of distance (GM 2). He also uses the same words in Beyond Good and Evil where he repeats the esoteric/exoteric distinction (justifying the constellation in which Heidegger reads almost all philosophy before him from Heraclitus to Kant and beyond) as the background context for Nietzsche's own relation to the philosophers before him and especially as Nietzsche invokes the possibility of future philosophers.
54. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 35.
55. Heidegger, "Science and Reflection" in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 182.
56. But the "ear of our thinking" does not hear -- nor indeed can it learn to hear unless it learns to recognise the glorification of reason, not as its ideal but as its stupidly rigid adversary, Nietszsche notes that the modern height of reason, "a scientific interpretation of the world could yet be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world "(GS 373), whereby he suggests the intrinsic limitation or poverty of this most resourceful of all human inventive schemes. (Cf. WP 618.)
57. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume One: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell, (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 67. [Hereafter, N1.]
58. The Kroner edition of Das Philosophenbuch featured the subtitle, The Last Philosopher: Meditations on the Conflict between Art and Knowledge. See the bilingual edition by Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Le livre du philosophe/Das Philosophenbuch (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1969). The bulk of these notes are in English as Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed., and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979).
59. Sensitive to the "tragic" loss of the "ground of metaphysics" but impatient with the petty illusions of science, the "philosopher of tragic knowledge [...] bridles the unrestrained knowledge drive but not with a new metaphysics [,...h]e institutes a new life; he restores art again to its rights" (KSA 7, 427-28). By contrast, "The philosopher of desperate knowledge will be caught up in blind science: knowledge at any price" (KSA 7, 427-28). Although the unlimited, untrammelled drive to know is a danger and must be regulated or measured, Nietzsche has no ambition to oppose knowledge or to annihilate science. Instead Nietzsche means to argue the part of the philosopher of tragic (as opposed to desperate) knowledge. Thus, and it is no accident that the Nachlaß notes from the period include a poem to melancholy, Nietzsche means to distinguish between tragedy and desolation/desperation. "Because," he repeats "skepticism is not the goal," the task will be to create a concept not yet envisioned: "The knowledge drive at its limit turns against itself, now in order to advance to the critique of knowing." In opposition to the ideal of knowledge as an end in itself, Nietzsche asserts the conditional value of science -- "Knowledge in the service of the best life" (ibid.).
60. The kind of control or politics of knowledge science that Nietzsche advocates, indeed the only kind of stewardship he thinks possible, has nothing in common with politics as usual -- and this is said against the recent trend to read Nietzsche as a political thinker, democratic or otherwise, from Connolly to Pippin, Ansell-Pearson to Conway.
61. Kant explains the conditions for the possibility of Newtonian physics where Nietzsche outdoes Kant in accounting for the possibility not only of Newton but Empedocles, not only of the world view of an eighteenth and nineteenth century European but also a Hopi Indian, a Tasmanian, and any other knower.
62. Heidegger quotes Augustine's query, "Quid autem propinquius meipso mihi" in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York Harper & Row, 1964), Section 9, p. 69. Hannah Arendt quotes Augustine's reflective return as the ineluctable "problem of human nature, the Augustinian quaestio mihi factus sum" in The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 10. For Arendt, the problem of human nature is, like the God problem, inherently open: resolv-able only "within the framework of a divinely revealed answer" (footnote: pp. 10-11).