Nietzsche and the Self-Revelations of a Martyr

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Destiny of the Soul

During the winter semester of 1944/1945, Martin Heidegger planned to offer a course at the University of Freiburg called “Introduction to Philosophy – Thinking and Poetizing.” The lectures, as a whole, were never delivered as intended. Historical circumstances forced their cancellation. The notes of the lectures were handed down for readers, giving all of us – those with fidelity to him, others unforgiving for his seeming indifferences to anything but the question of the meaning of Being – the opportunity to understand Heidegger and his defense of “genuine thinking” and, more urgent than the world-historical events around him, the nature of his engagement with Nietzsche and philosophy. The concise analysis comes to us as superlative: Nietzsche thinks, across epochs, with “unreachable strength,” forcing all approaches to him to consider the dynamic of his personal will to power and the consequences of his thinking. Not many can doubt its uniqueness, even less his impact and the asymmetry of our reception of him, adequate or lacking. Today, his cultural presence continues to demand our examination (of his thought, and of ourselves) more so with a millennial inauguration well on its way and perhaps with less attachments to the recent past and in the aftermath of ‘68 thought, in Paris and elsewhere. One attitude can be mentioned, to refute it for two reasons. In “Anorexic Ruins,” Jean Baudrillard writes: “even the great reflection of the 1960’s and 1970’s, observed from a little distance, will have been only an episode in the involuntary course of the century... Surprise could spring from a new event, but we know nothing of that, for the archive and the analysis of past events will never convey a future event to us.”¹ ←9 | 10→Nietzsche’s “analysis of past events” has not been completely assessed for us to decide if, indeed, any “future event” is foreseeable. His commitments are, in any case, stated without ambiguity. “He who has grown wise concerning old origins, behold, he will at last seek new springs of the future and new origins.” (Z 228)

Any authentic relationship to Nietzsche’s thinking has to consider many inter-related aspects – including (to highlight one of the most neglected) the concealed aspect of the Greek logos in the poetic myths singular to Hesiod and how “the destiny of the soul,” as Nietzsche understood and lived it himself on the most personal level imaginable, was almost beyond our reach: elusive, except with considerable effort and strain, Nietzsche’s consciousness, as revelatory, had to be conveyed and transferred for us to experience and infinitely discuss. To approximate a relationship with an individual soul emerging out of himself and then follow its self-development towards becoming a destiny requires a certain kind of attention. The master from Freiburg places Nietzsche firmly within the tradition of Western thinking, as he determines the whole from out of the original wonder and utterances of the pre-Socratics, Thales in particular, and from there takes him to a culmination. A disclosure has been circumscribed. A thought comes to a close with Nietzsche – apparently, “the end of metaphysics.” The announcement sound formidable, and perhaps, far too complete. The thought of the end and its event are two entirely different proposals. Alain Badiou can participate on this point and a few others for being someone who furthers essential metaphysical problems and without the slightest hesitation about his ideas about being, the subject, and truth. First, to admit to a relationship, he says: “it is for me a relative surprise to discover myself a Nietzschean.”2 Instead of the end, Badiou substitutes it with a typically Nietzschean word. “Enough! Let’s proclaim at a stroke an end to all ends, and the possible beginning of all that is, ←10 | 11→of all that was, and will be... What is at issue is affirmation.”3 The word, as an alternative to negation is not one among many in Nietzsche’s expansive vocabulary. It brings us to Robert Pippin’s notion of the “expressivist” Nietzsche, “a rare and difficult achievement – seeing oneself expressed in one’s deeds in a whole hearted affirmation,”⁴ an experience that is at once immediate and comprehensive. “The affirmative affects:... everything that is rich and desires to bestow and that replenishes and gilds and immortalizes and deifies life – the whole force of transfiguring virtues, everything that declares good and affirms in word and deed.” (WP 533) Expressiveness and affirmation, two of the many supports for Nietzsche’s endeavors. A note from a lecture by Eugen Fink could give us a sense of the difficulties involved when affirmation and metaphysics come into contact. The statement is not clear-cut. “Perhaps it will fully be established that his antimetaphysical polemic is based on a narrow concept of metaphysics.”⁵ Whose narrowness, we might ask? Ulrich Haase generously sums up the problem for us. We can be grateful for the opportunity, to do justice to Nietzsche’s orientation. “The question of metaphysics can be addressed only through the exhaustion of metaphysics in Nietzsche’s thought.”⁶ Whether the metaphysics in Nietzsche’s thought has been “exhausted” is an impression to be made, provisionally, at the outset: no such reality can be discerned, none firmly established despite our extravagant claims. On the contrary, given the argument to come, that has been the issue all along. Metaphysics has not come to an end at all – as Nietzsche constantly repeats with one fundamental argument among others: the persistence of sacrifice in the modern world is one crucial impediment to fulfilling a free destiny and achieving the sacred, for ourselves and for a renewed idea of terrestrial existence. The metaphysical bind of sacrifice to the modern world (if, indeed, the modern has ←11 | 12→been ever been achieved) makes any supersession of our contemporary situation nearly impossible. Nihilism, as he often reminded us, is not the belief in nothing. Nihilism is the perpetual bind of the finite as it instrumentally exploits a sacrificial ethos to maintain the conjunction between life and death and to secure the mere survival of the domesticated human animal. John Richardson has left us with an enduring responsibility. No Nietzsche scholar has done more to return us to a neglected relationship. Instead of an apologia for Nietzsche’s metaphysics, he has rightly held it in the highest esteem, for the commitment he makes to philosophy and its proximity to being. Metaphysics and ontology are unified once again and are essential in Nietzsche’s system. He describes Nietzsche’s thought “as a system of views organized around an ontology.”7 Nietzsche is thereby philosophically classical.

Did Heidegger fall for a temptation he did not consider impartially, so intent was he on introducing himself as the decisive individual who both announced the end and placed himself in first place of a different inauguration? Once the end was determined to be final, however, one phenomenological insight appeared to be enigmatic for Heidegger, and perhaps for a reason one of his former students would later define as the irresolvable problem between reason and revelation:⁸ Nietzsche’s apokalypsis, the revelations from out of his consciousness and made visible for others, as a witness, were not always visible; not everyone had sufficient awareness to properly see Nietzsche as a revelatory thinker who did not simply turn to the “things themselves,” the objects of the world in nature or culture, but to the depth of his own interiority and to once again perceive the truth of the subject. “In plain terms: the old truth is coming to an end,” (EH 86) Nietzsche announces in his autobiography with “ecce homo” as, noticeably, a greeting from ←12 | 13→a Roman official stationed in Judaea.9 Some old and worn-out truths had ended with Nietzsche, by being exposed and shown-up to be life-denying; other truths will, in principle, substitute everything of previous value, so as to expose how mendacious nihilism has actually been, and is. How does one go about reaching a consensus that the highest values have devalued themselves? For Heidegger, in the best sense of the word and one worth repeating, his interpretation is a “confrontation,” the classical agon or “contest.” The nature of competition (who is better – and that one idea cannot be reduced to the good, the moral, or the ethical, today among the most demanding of theological-political categories in liberal democracies) leads to a victor who will then determine, from a new beginning, what possibly will be. To enact the agon, Nietzsche has only one time to go to; or rather, a history he will interpret from a few decisive inter-relationships, often a Greek/Jewish one. A thinker who has been contributing some of the most unique insights about Nietzsche and, more directly, our contemporary situation, Peter Sloterdijk writes: “he who concerns himself with modernity as the period in which he exists will more than ever have to find his way back in complicated stories.”¹⁰ One has to first notice our present modernity; no post here. These “complicated stories,” ancient ones for Nietzsche, will soon be more precisely defined; one poet in particular will exemplify Nietzsche’s project and with a hermeneutics that extends beyond the pre-Socratics and towards Hesiod as a poet/thinker of the mythic.

To begin with, the Greek confrontation or contest is inseparable from Nietzsche’s life and consciousness as a philosopher and what he sets out to achieve, the total attempt to individually encounter the real as it has been conceived, organized, and perpetuated. The perceptions of the destiny of the soul are, for Nietzsche, to exceed everything handed down from posterity, the socially necessary – in short, the construction of the finite, with all its restrictive determinations. No representation of the totality of epochs can be adequately reflected in history. Historicism is not a summing-up but rather an obstruction. The individual soul, once the initial perception of difference between itself and the appearances of the made-up world is certain, has no choice but to commit its abilities to a long and protracted investigation and one exceeding the inquiry of ←13 | 14→istoria or “history,” which is the reason the individual will be proclaimed as the one who can best interpret being in a certain history.