c.1 Metaphysical & Antimetaphysical Readings

To many observers, it is one of the most important reasons for Nietzsche’s current status as both an indispensable thinker and highly controversial figure that Martin Heidegger, an indispensable and

controversial philosopher himself, should have spent an amazing amount of time and energy in coming to terms with his work. As one these observers writes, “Heidegger’s overall account of life in the present age depends essentially upon his reading of Nietzsche”⁶⁷⁷.

In his student years until the first world war, Heidegger is known to have read the 1906 edition of “Wille zur Macht”. In 1915, giving his venia legendi lecture on the concept of time, he spoke of a

“philosopher’s will to power” and pointed to the need to redirect thought from epistemology toward metaphysics where the goal of philosophy can be properly interrogated. Soon after this, Heidegger explicitly appreciated Nietzsche, while favorably using the concept of ’life’. During the 1920's, Heidegger distanced himself from these kinds of concerns expressing his opposition to the rise of philosophies of value and life. His Sein und Zeit and the other works from the Marburg period manifest little use of Nietzsche. Yet, it is said that even at this point, and quite evidently from the 1930's to the early 1950's, Nietzsche was Heidegger’s most important reference point.⁶⁷⁸

Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche begin with the announcement that was, in the years to come, to be repeated over and over again. He says that Nietzsche stands on the path of the Western philosophy, not only with his basic question, but also with the answer he gave to it. The question concerns the Seiende.

As Nietzsche adopts this problematic, he is, according to Heidegger, a part of the Western philosophy

“thought of as metaphysics”. Yet, he marks a transition and deserves the highest merit a thinker can earn.

In this context, Heidegger sharply opposes his reading to all lebensphilosophische treatments.⁶⁷⁹

In the summer of 1937, Heidegger introduces Nietzsche’s “metaphysical principles”. He advances the thesis that Nietzsche signifies “the end of metaphysics”, since he illustrates its entire historical chain to the very first rings. Heidegger uses Parmenides and Heraclitus to make his case: the two pre-Socratics

left but two alternatives: either the Seiende, in its entirety, “is” or it “becomes”. Heidegger claims that Nietzsche seconds to Heraclitus’s insistence on the essentiality of becoming, incessant creation and destruction, yet in Nietzsche even that very becoming “is”. What is most crucial, in Nietzsche’s principle of the ’eternal return’, in Heidegger’s view, is that it fuses being and becoming into one being-becoming.

This is what amounts to the closing of Western metaphysics.⁶⁸⁰

In 1939, Heidegger contends that “all Western thinking from the Greeks to Nietzsche is metaphysical thinking”. Nietzsche is “the last metaphysical thinker”. Again, Heidegger attacks interpretations advocating a philosophy of life. This line of reading, in his opinion, “wretches” (is beelend to)

Nietzsche’s thinking. He treats Lebensphilosophie as a device for certain Christian circles, to give false support to Nietzsche, while suppressing the dangerous acts of ’knowing’ and ’interrogating’.⁶⁸¹

In his lecture course of 1940, “Nietzsche: Der europäische Nihilismus”, Heidegger introduces Nietzsche’s “main rubrics” as internally interdependent building blocks of metaphysics. He says that nihilism is, for Nietzsche, “something more”, that is, the devaluation of the highest value and the subsequent sense of valuelessness. Heidegger speaks of nihilism, in a psychological sense, as “the metaphysics of the present day” and, conversely, metaphysics as “the proper [eigentlich] nihilism”. In these lectures, as in the others, Heidegger concentrates on the non-book “Wille zur Macht” holding it as

“the metaphysical major work that Nietzsche planned”. This is also the occasion for him to refine his view of Nietzsche as marking both the end (Ende) and the final fulfilment (Vollendung) of metaphysics.

What it boils down to is the “forgotten difference” between Seiende and Sein. This difference grounds all metaphysics, as Heidegger understands it, and he seeks to question that difference and that grounding. It is about posing the question about the verb “to be”, or more exactly, about the form “is” (ist). Heidegger says that Sein has been consistently ignored for more than two thousand years. As the most general and the most unique, Sein signifies being as separate from everything that “is”. It is the source from where all that “is”, in each and every form, is given.⁶⁸²

According to Heidegger, Nietzsche takes to the extreme metaphysical thinking where the meaning and essence of Seiende is tracked down. Nietzsche’s subjectivism involves the erecting of a peculiar world by a megalomanic subject whose will to power, or creative shaping as mastery, goes wholly unconstrained.

For this reason, Heidegger sees Nietzsche’s metaphysics as “but the extreme unfolding of that classical teaching of Descartes, according to which all truth comes down to the self-assurance of the human subject”. All this began in Protagoras’s doctrine of man as the measure of everything.⁶⁸³

During the third wartime winter, Heidegger teaches that Nietzsche is essentially a metaphysical thinker, just as every Western thinker has been, ever since Plato. Nietzsche’s metaphysics is one characteristic of

asserting values, of asking the question about the value of Seiende. Heidegger states that Nietzsche thinks from the standpoint of being human, “in the sense of subjectivity”, which leads him to induce the idea that all that “is” is brought before, and justified by, the subjectivity. In this way, Heidegger reasons, human subject becomes the basis for asserted truth and the measure over everything that “is” as such.⁶⁸⁴

Heidegger does give detailed accounts of many of Nietzsche’s problems and later on in this study I shall come back to some of them. It is important to acknowledge the richness of the treatment, since

Heidegger is sometimes reported to have been putting forth something that is quite removed from Nietzsche’s texts. This is clearly erroneous. He carries out painstaking close readings of the Nietzschean texts. But even the basic tenet of his confrontation is very complex.⁶⁸⁵ Nietzsche is to be hailed as one of those glorious thinkers of the West and not to be reduced to a witty aphoristic observer of life. Yet, the very tradition amounts to, as Heidegger repeats, an essential and fatal disremembering. Despite being the most full blown representative of this ultimately detrimental tradition, Nietzsche is best understood as the one who singlehandedly puts it to an end.

After decades of trying to digest Heidegger’s lectures, Nietzsche readers can hardly agree on much more than that they have become a part of reading Nietzsche. Will McNeill wrote recently that Heidegger’s effort just has to be “something else”, since it is “just as much about Heidegger as it is about Nietzsche.

And it is just as much about the tradition of philosophy as it is about either of these two figures. Or perhaps it is not really “about” any of these.”⁶⁸⁶ Nick Land is less tolerant: ”One of Cioran’s casual jokes is of inestimably greater value in making contact with Nietzsche than the whole of Heidegger’s

ponderously irrelevant Nietzsche”⁶⁸⁷. Elsewhere, it has been stressed that although Heidegger sentences Nietzsche for a life time in the prison of metaphysics, “he also feels that in Nietzsche’s works there are original and ontological insights which serve not only to isolate the notion of Being [Sein] but also to develop a methodology of how to think about what it means to be”⁶⁸⁸.

What counts the most, for the present purposes, is Heidegger’s nearly obsessive concentration on metaphysics. One must see how this obsessiveness does not vitiate sophisticated points. For instance, Heidegger once says that the metaphysics he is at pains to examine is one that “Nietzsche’s thought fulfills and supports, yet it does not ground it and never lays it down”⁶⁸⁹. Heidegger is, thus, aware of how forcefully he has to reconstruct the problematic, from bits and pieces.

What is most important, Heidegger is not blind to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. It is more in order to say that he is not blinded by its shine. In 1940, he makes the following remark: ”That Nietzsche is thinking about the highest values as categories shows him as remaining in the basic setting of

metaphysics. That he describes himself as anti-metaphysician merely says that he needs metaphysics, in a

precise form, namely, to be against it.” To have to pose as the one who opposes and refutes metaphysics is to be in a desperate need of metaphysics. Heidegger’s compares Nietzsche to an ardent enemy of alcohol who, should the liqueur disappear, “loses his substance”.⁶⁹⁰

One may say that Heidegger uses Nietzsche in the fear of losing his own substance but that would not help in grasping his point. Pierre Chassard says that, compared to Nietzsche, “Heidegger defined the essence of metaphysics quite differently”. The “two conceptions, that of Nietzsche and that of

Heidegger, radically oppose each other. The position of the latter, determined by his project, exacts this opposition unto the former.”⁶⁹¹ Yet, Heidegger writes, in an essay from 1943, that, “through Nietzsche, metaphysics is, in a certain way, robbed of its possibility of being [eigenen Wesensmöglichkeit]”.

Restating the other half of his basic tenet, Heidegger goes on to explain how Nietzsche understands metaphysics as amounting to the dualism of the sensual and the supersensual and is unaware of the way his “counter-movement”, as all counter-movements, is held hostage by “that against which it goes”.⁶⁹²

In any case, Heidegger is not alone in speaking about “Nietzsche’s metaphysics”. Danto’s key idea, in his Nietzsche as Philosopher, was that, in “Nietzsche’s metaphysics”, there is nothing in the world to which the units of our language correspond⁶⁹³. Moreover, there is the almost humorous view, presented in a recent Handbook of Metaphysics, that Nietzsche was never quite able enough to finish his

metaphysics⁶⁹⁴. Among those who stress the novelties in Nietzsche’s stance, there are, say, Walter Schulz, Wilhelm Weischedel and Robert Legros offering ’life’ as the fundament of Nietzsche’s “new metaphysics”⁶⁹⁵. As such, this is close to Heidegger who says that “life”, in its deeper meaning, is just another word for Nietzsche’s metaphysical principle of the will to power⁶⁹⁶. What is a good deal further from him, yet still occupied by the metaphysical reading, is the way in which Jeffrey Minson speaks in favor of ’body’, or Mihailo Djuri… in favor of ’text’, as the key to the Nietzschean metaphysics⁶⁹⁷.

To explain the complicated setting, Hannah Arendt has said that Nietzsche heightened his rebuttle of old values to the status of the new value. This is where he forgot, says Arendt, “that a reversed Plato is still Plato”.⁶⁹⁸ Does Nietzsche’s case, then, corroborate the hypothesis that there is, among metaphysical systems, one that must be called, in Alfred Binet’s phrase, “metaphysics of those who refuse to be metaphysicians”⁶⁹⁹? Did Nietzsche hold on, as an early critic put it, “in this metaphysics-less time” to “a piece of metaphysics” in the form of an assent to the Heraclitian “flux of all things”⁷⁰⁰? Is his, as F. L.

Jackson calls it, “extrametaphysical critique of metaphysics” devised to accommodate “a metaphysics of the phenomenal world”⁷⁰¹? Can, as Wolfgang Stegmüller says, “metaphysics only be fought with another metaphysics”⁷⁰²? Is, to quote Peter Heller, Nietzsche’s an “antimetaphysical metaphysics”⁷⁰³?

Lars-Henrik Schmidt, has suppressed this problematic in two argumentative sequences. The first gives

the general structure of the critique of metaphysics: to remove metaphysics is to assert one; to criticize this procedure is to have to use the same instruments as metaphysicians; to assume the instrumentality, the mediateness, is to lose immediacy and construe the social reality as a surrogate one. The second sequence is specifically offered to articulate Nietzsche’s stance: positive, antimetaphysical science abandons ideals only to wind up asserting itself as ideal; the critique of the positive, antimetaphysical science is forced to use the instruments of metaphysics; the recognition of this produces the loss of immediacy and a perspective into its surmounting in the tragic reconciliation through suffering.⁷⁰⁴

To engage in the critique of metaphysics is to maintain, at least, the problematic of metaphysics. Yet, there are reasons to ask, whether one is doomed or not to stay in the confines of metaphysical thinking in every step of the way. August Vetter, for one, thought that (like Kant) Nietzsche first embraced

metaphysical absolutes, then attacked them and, finally, sought for “reconciliation” in the “middle zone”⁷⁰⁵. Michael Fleiter, for another, interprets Nietzsche as trying to steer between scientific

enlightenment and metaphysical remnants⁷⁰⁶. To Djuri…, in turn, Nietzsche’s liberation from metaphysics seems “”more essential”, more fundamental and more fatal” than his belonging to it⁷⁰⁷.

Eugen Fink’s treatment of Nietzsche is a fine example of the complexities in mediating between the metaphysical and the antimetaphysical. Fink’s question is, if Nietzsche is or if he is not “one thinker figure among others” in the “long succession of interpretation conceptualizing and explicating the being [seinsbegrifflicher und seinsdeutender Auslegung]”. In agreement with Heidegger, Fink holds that Nietzsche “stands on the basis of the tradition he wishes to overcome”, he “moves within the

metaphysical “horizons of being”“. Furthermore, Fink subscribes to the Heideggerian insistence on the point that it is thinking in terms of value that proves Nietzsche’s “captivity in metaphysics”.⁷⁰⁸

But Fink stresses, after all, Nietzsche’s success. He endorses the policy of open question against Heidegger’s reading of the will to power as marking the subjective metaphysics that has dominated the tradition since Descartes. Fink finds that it is the Heraclitian vision of a playing child that becomes Nietzsche’s “key concept for the universe” or his “cosmic metaphor”. He is cautious enough to remark that this is not an anthropomorphic gimmick. It is about a kind of proto-phenomenological “ecstatic openness” towards the world. To take part in the world is, in this setting, to accept a part in the play, to play one’s instrument with one’s Mitspieler. Fink concludes: what can be found in Nietzsche’s “thoughts concerning the play” is “[t]he non-metaphysical originality in the cosmological philosophy”.⁷⁰⁹

Charles E. Scott has recently proposed, in a Finkian tone, that there is, in Nietzsche, a complex play of the metaphysical and the antimetaphysical asserting, while the play itself remains non-metaphysical⁷¹⁰. Scott has also argued, against Heidegger, for the non-metaphysical freedom embodied in Nietzsche⁷¹¹.

The direction that Scott points to is the one important for all those who appreciate Nietzsche’s struggle with metaphysics “not only on the level of argument but on that of the text, writing”⁷¹².

Jacques Derrida has been an unavoidable figure behind many contemporary antimetaphysical readings. In La voix et le phénomène, he refers to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics as reminiscent of

phenomenology seeking to reduce naïve ontology to a “return to an active constitution of meaning and value, an activity of a life producing the truth and the value”. In De la grammatologie, he writes that any effort to develop a less naïve metaphysics, however, is to misunderstand the “virulence” of Nietzsche’s thought. One can tactically subscribe to the Heideggerian reading and wait until the ““naivety” of breakthrough” in utilizing metaphysics finally conveys its “absolute strangeness”. In Écriture et la différence, Derrida says that both Nietzsche and Heidegger operate with metaphysical concepts, which makes their destruction of metaphysics an autodestructive enterprise. The lucidity of Heidegger’s

treatment of the ’last metaphysician’ coincides with its bad faith. What is more important than any of this is that, for Derrida, “Nietzsche has indicated a way” to an “interpretation of interpretation” that is active, affirmative and playful, non-structuralist and non-humanistic.⁷¹³

According to Gianni Vattimo, Heidegger’s “Nietzsche the metaphysician” interpretation is “much more convincing and philosophically much more lively” than Derrida’s “Nietzsche of the difference” reading.

Heidegger’s perceptions cannot be “liquidated by a simple aesthetical reprise of the notion of play”. They should be seen “as a rigorous expression of the ultimate absence of the foundation”. In Vattimo’s view, it has to be admitted, however, that “Heidegger’s conclusions are baffling and unsatisfactory”.⁷¹⁴

Michel Haar, for his part, says that what Nietzsche does to the Platonic two-world metaphysics is that he

“abolishes” it rather than to merely “turns it upside down”. Haar considers the more Heideggerian definition, where metaphysics is mainly about “discovering the unique and ultimate word assigning to everything present the trait of presence”. Is Nietzsche, with his “will to power”, a metaphysician in this sense? Haar’s answer is on the negative. Will to power, “as all the great Nietzschean themes”, sends one back “to the broken, disfigured identities forever dispersed and untraceable”.⁷¹⁵

Heidegger met resistance not only within the grand tradition of phenomenology, which could be seen to have expanded, transformed, divided and partly vanished in the course of his production and its reception up until Derrida. Yet, although many readers of Nietzsche have been inclined to agree with H. A.

Reyburn’s interpretation of Nietzsche as the very thinker to have “abandoned the theory of

metaphysics”⁷¹⁶, Heidegger’s insistence on the continued hold of a metaphysical way of thinking, even in this exceptional thinker, has not lost its force. It is safe to say that the axis of metaphysical /

antimetaphysical is one of the most prominent ones in the contemporary discussion on Nietzsche.