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Timely Meditations
Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics
By Leslie Paul Thiele PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08659-0
CHAPTER 1
Nietzsche's Legacy
He who sees me, knows me,
he who knows me, names me
The homeless man.
* * *
No one may dare
Question me where
My home is.
I am simply not confined
To space and fleeting time.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, "Without a Home")
Nietzsche once said that he fought so fiercely with Socrates because the Greek philosopher always stood so close to him. I have come to form a similar relationship with Nietzsche. Consequently, this book was conceived with Nietzsche antagonistically in mind. During its gestation, Nietzsche prodded and poked and pried, like the mischief maker who tripped up the tightrope walker and cautioned Zarathustra. Heidegger also established this sort of relationship with Nietzsche. He was both excited and worried by Nietzsche's mischief. For this reason, Heidegger's characterizations and criticisms of Nietzsche are at times unfair. His accolades, at other times, seem exaggerated. In any case, Nietzsche serves as the subject of the greatest single share of Heidegger's published work. He is a crucial figure who receives the epithets, among others, of the "last German philosopher," the "only essential thinker after Schelling," and the "West's last thinker" (SAG 474; ST 3; WCT 46). Nietzsche, Heidegger states, was the first to recognize and the only philosopher to think through to its awesome conclusions the role of nihilism in the history of humankind (WCT 57). Heidegger also claimed that his lecture courses on Nietzsche, beginning in the mid-1930s, marked "for all who could hear at all" his initial "confrontation" with National Socialism (OGS 53). More generally, Nietzsche is held responsible (or coresponsible with Hölderlin) for the Kehre in Heidegger's thought. In short, Heidegger's struggle with Nietzsche largely defines the development of his thought. One must pass through Nietzsche, Heidegger insists, if one is to come to terms philosophically with modernity and its aftermath.
Many believe that coming to terms with the politics of postmodernity also requires a passage through Nietzsche. Yet if one sets out with a democratic destination in mind, the passage becomes an uneasy affair. Those who take on this challenge generally celebrate aspects of Nietzsche's iconoclasm while redirecting its ruthlessly aristocratic force to other purposes. Anyone so engaged, however, must worry about joining the ranks of those Nietzsche considered his "worst readers ... who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole." Indeed, those who once approached Nietzsche with a political purpose diametrically opposed to that which I have in mind—the Nazi sympathizers of the 1930s and 1940s—did plunder him unscrupulously. Today the political theorist's choice of Nietzsche as a mentor or companion is more honorably based on the importance of his philosophic deeds. Nietzsche is acknowledged as constituting a radical break in the history of thought, thereby opening new vistas in the realm of political life.
The results obtained so far in this area of philosophy have been strikingly limited. The reason has to do with a commonly held premise regarding the nature of Nietzsche's philosophic achievement. Nietzsche is generally understood as the destroyer of metaphysics and the saboteur of any ethics resting on metaphysical foundations. As a means of introducing Heidegger's thought, I shall argue that this position obscures as much as it reveals about Nietzsche and saddles one with what might be called the postmodern political dilemma.
Nietzsche's Rupture
Writing to his friend Paul Deussen on September 14, 1888, Nietzsche made the claim that his recent works had "split the history of mankind in two halves." A month later, shortly before his mental collapse, Nietzsche frenetically began to write his literary autobiography, Ecce Homo. Here the phrase describing his historically unique and cataclysmic role would again appear, among Nietzsche's many claims for himself, in the section "Why I Am a Destiny." An "event without parallel" that set its discoverer "apart from the whole rest of humanity" is announced. Specifically, Nietzsche claims that his "uncovering" of Christian morality has broken human history in two. Christian morality, Nietzsche accuses, evidences the enfeeblement of basic instincts to the point where worldly life becomes depreciated. It is a form of ressentiment. In an effort to take revenge for the pain and unpredictability of life, the Christian moralist indignantly strikes out against it, attempting to control life's fractious power and harness its mysteries by means of an ethical code. Appeal to this code both justifies and promises compensation for the moralist's worldly impotence and suffering.
The early Greeks, Nietzsche argues, had a much healthier, more worldly, and consequently less decadent culture. Yet we must surpass even the Greeks' tragic heroism, he believes, to survive the looming menace of modern nihilism. Nietzsche's promotion of the life-affirming god Dionysus, in lieu of "the Crucified," is meant to constitute the world-historic onset of a new age. It is to initiate the transformation of thought, such that great thought might grasp and overcome nihilism, as well as the transfiguration of culture, such that great culture might foster a breed of human beings capable of harboring such thought. The revived tragic and heroic affirmation of life, not its resentment-induced calumny and morality-ridden bureaucratization, would constitute the future of humanity—if humanity were to have a future.
Though Nietzsche's world-historic aspirations proved overly ambitious, his crucial position within the history of thought remains intact. Yet for the most part, and increasingly so, the rupture Nietzsche is celebrated for occasioning is not that between Christian morality and its aftermath. This breach has been surpassed in significance by Nietzsche's detonation of metaphysics. Nietzsche originally viewed his attacks on the metaphysical foundations of modernity as skirmishes that prepared the ground and readied the warrior for the approaching war with Christian morality. Yet in the midst of contemporary cultural diversity and religious entropy, the significance of Nietzsche's holy war is lost on many of his readers. The more amorphous fissure between the modern and the postmodern has become his most celebrated handiwork.
The break between modernism and postmodernism, somewhat contrived in form but not without substance, is that which loosely marks off most of the twentieth century from its Cartesian (that is, rationalist and modernist) origins. The modern/postmodern dichotomy distinguishes the Western cultural regime of knowledge and power that lays claim to rationally accessible foundations, generally mediated through a metaphysically grounded ethics, from an emergent, disparate (anti)regime that admits no such pretensions. If postmodernity, in Jean-François Lyotard's popular definition, is chiefly constituted by an "incredulity toward metanarratives," then Nietzsche is held largely responsible for fostering this suspicion. Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for his announcement of the death of God. But Nietzsche recognized the chasing away of God's lingering shadows—the remnants of metaphysics—to be his more important feat. In this way he undermined any possible foundation for grandly constructed stories harboring the truth of humankind and dictating its ethics. Nietzsche's postmodern credentials are certified by his burning the bridge (while still standing on it) between the previous era of metaphysical belief and the present era of skeptical reserve. This is the major rupture for which Nietzsche, who announced himself not a man but dynamite, is held responsible. And it is from the dangerous crevices of this rupture that much of the cautious thinking about postmodern politics has emerged.
Nietzsche's substitute for rationally accessible metaphysical foundations is a Heraclitean world, stripped of stability, purpose, and predictability. Herein life becomes a terrifying and tragic experience amid the constant flux of becoming. But such a world also regains its lost innocence and resuscitates freedom. Indeed, though fearsome, it bestows the greatest liberty possible. In Nietzsche's world, humanity becomes free to create itself anew; it is constrained neither to a transcendent nature nor to a teleological program. Nietzsche espouses "the absolute necessity of a total liberation from ends: otherwise we should not be permitted to try to sacrifice ourselves and let ourselves go. Only the innocence of becoming gives us the greatest courage and the greatest freedom." Life, Nietzsche insists, is an awe-inspiring adventure. It is decidedly not a clearinghouse within which one may drive one's hardest ethical bargain, fulfilling present obligations and accumulating promissory notes to be redeemed in ideal, future worlds. The upshot of Nietzsche's attack on modern metaphysics is his subversion of modern ethics. In Nietzsche's Heraclitean world, human society becomes an exercise in creative freedom, "an experiment ... not a 'contract.'"
The irony is that Nietzsche, the severest critic of Western culture, would champion the West's most cherished value: freedom. Nietzsche's brilliance is most evident in his analysis of the constraint, sacrifice, and slavery elicited and maintained in the name of reason, morality, and their metaphysical truths. The task taken on by many of Nietzsche's postmodern readers is to demonstrate the liberating effects of his destruction of metaphysics. Applauding Nietzsche for this feat, however, leaves one rather disadvantaged in the effort to establish or renew social and political sensibilities. Nietzsche's brand of freedom is simply too powerful an elixir to be left unregulated within the polity. It serves, alternately, as an anesthetic or an intoxicant.
The difficulty, then, is twofold. First, Nietzschean freedom may prove a debilitating anesthetic. It comes at the expense of teleological justifications and moral applause. Precisely for this reason, it remains a heroic achievement. Those without the heroic capacities and tragic dispositions needed to celebrate an ultimately meaningless life will discover that Nietzschean freedom reduces them to a state of jaded skepticism, cultural despair, and political apathy. Indeed, defenders of Nietzsche who find postmodernism to inspire just such disintegration and passivity have for this reason sought to deny his paternity of it. Effectively they are critical of postmodernists who adopt a Nietzschean skepticism without also adopting his heroic demeanor. Too suspicious of involvement and action, these postmodernists escape to literary diversions. They end up fiddling with tropes while Rome burns.
When the "ceremony of innocence is drowned," W. B. Yeats foresaw in "The Second Coming," "things fall apart." Then "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Hence the second problem with the political inauguration of Nietzschean freedom: while some succumb to apathy and inaction, others engage in action without boundaries. While the best lack all conviction, the worst, drunk with freedom, lack all restraint. While the former fail to rise to heroic heights because of their skeptical reserve, the latter exercise their heroic natures unchecked by principle. When freedom becomes an intoxicant, liberty becomes license. Everything is permitted. Nihilism looms.
If politics is defined by the exercise of freedom and responsibility in tandem, then a freedom gained at the expense of responsibility is a freedom ill suited to political life. Yet this is the raw, unrestricted, and often debilitating freedom that Nietzsche delivers to us at the grave of metaphysics. Consequently, commentators on Nietzsche have been stymied by the challenge of describing how his writings might be viewed as the epitaph of metaphysics but not of responsible judgment and accountable action. But in Nietzsche's world of constant flux and absolute liberty, where are we to find the criteria and standards that would allow critical evaluation and social obligation? Certain postmodern Nietzscheans, following Michel Foucault, propose aesthetic criteria to regulate our freedom. Art is to substitute for the fallen idols of ethics and metaphysics. For modernists this is an unsatisfying gesture, impractical at best and dangerous at worst. The kind of judgment elicited by art, like judgments of taste, is held to be without the normative force required to stabilize political life.
The task of refitting Nietzsche with a political (and all-too-human) face, modern critics argue, has met with little success. Most efforts may be accused of wanting to eat their metaphysical and moral cakes and destroy them too. A satisfactory nonethical substitute for ethics, as the motivating and controlling element of politics, and a nonmetaphysical substitute for metaphysics, as the foundation for such an ethics, remains missing from postmodern recipes.9 To the extent that postmodern theorists are successful in defending Nietzsche's destruction of metaphysics, they disable themselves from producing a viable politics. Alternatively, if they are intent on promoting a democratic political vision, they are forced to call a halt to Nietzsche's assault on metaphysics and ethics. Either the promotion of Nietzschean freedom leaves one at a loss as to how a responsible politics might be fostered, or the extent of the adulteration of Nietzsche's thought found necessary for his domestication leaves us unconvinced that his philosophy constitutes a useful starting point for a political inquiry.
It is my conviction that such efforts will continue to be unsatisfactory, their increasing sophistication notwithstanding. The problem is not with the imaginative political uses to which Nietzsche is put, but with the traditional premises on which these efforts rest. In short, Nietzsche's role as a watershed in the history of thought is misunderstood. Nietzsche is not the destroyer of metaphysics. He is at once its fiercest rival and its unwitting spokesperson. My claim is that only when we see how and to what extent Nietzsche remains entangled in metaphysics may his efforts serve a promising political purpose. Nietzsche's lingering metaphysics has not been completely ignored by postmodernists. In attributing to Nietzsche an unconsummated victory over metaphysics, however, they tend to confront us with a spurious dilemma. We are forced to choose between saving metaphysics from Nietzsche and saving Nietzsche from metaphysics. The former is the modern mission, which postmodernists (and I) reject as vain. The postmodern alternative thus appears to win by default. But the project of blotting out Nietzsche's metaphysical residues is self-defeating. Any effort to give metaphysics the coup de grâce that uses a Nietzschean strategy for the attack will only iterate Nietzsche's own reinvestment in metaphysics. The appropriate task, I propose, is to understand Nietzsche as a prodigal son of the Western metaphysical tradition. His political significance is better illuminated if one outlines his affiliation with this tradition than if one celebrates his disjunction from it. To explore the potential of a postmodern politics we must first unlearn the lesson of Nietzsche's destruction of metaphysics, and subsequently reach beyond the homelessness of his position.
Nietzsche found humanity "sitting between two chairs." Here, as always, his investigation was characterized by an effort to push what was beginning to fall. Then the "diagnosis of the modern soul" would begin by way of a "vivisection of the most instructive case." Nietzsche was in this instance referring to his former friend, the composer Richard Wagner. But we might equally view Nietzsche in such a vulnerable position, and it will be instructive to turn our knives in his direction. Such delicate surgery, if it is to aid us in our political theorizing, demands focused vision. Heidegger provides the needed lens.
Heidegger's lens magnifies certain facets of Nietzsche's thought and obscures others. I propose its use, therefore, with a caveat. Nietzsche does not take easily to pigeonholes. He is a protean thinker, harboring profound ambiguities and ambivalences. When approaching Nietzsche we should recall his observation that intellectual sophistication and integrity are confirmed by the ability to forgo exclusive opposites and dichotomous categories. Heidegger indulged in categorical statements and oppositions. We should be wary of them. But the specific and elusive goal set by Heidegger remains, we must strive to "see beyond everything that is fatally contemporary in Nietzsche" (WPA 127). Nietzsche's tragic genius is evident in his capacity to demonstrate the maladies of the modern world by exhibiting his own contamination by it. The present effort largely ignores Nietzsche's inspiring struggle with this infection in order to concentrate on how and why he proved unable to overcome it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Timely Meditations by Leslie Paul Thiele. Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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