Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Chapter Three: “The Will to Power and the Politics of Greatness” and Chapter Four: “The Distant Command of the Greeks: Heidegger and the Community of Destiny.”
Might a ‘philosophy of freedom’ eventuate in an attempt to free human beings from reason—that is, from the constraints of logic, indeed from human nature itself? Whereas Hegel esteems the Greeks of the classical age, Plato above all, “Nietzsche extolled the tragic age of Homeric heroism along with the pre-Socratics and Sophists”—aristocratic Callicles over vulgar Socrates, who smelled of the rabble. Although he shares Hegel’s conception of Being as self-originating, “like Marx,” he “believed that Hegel’s ‘absolute science’ of Spirit had robbed man of his creative powers and chained him in an iron cage of determinism,” the dialectical laws of ‘History’ leading inevitably to the telos, the ‘End of History’ understood as a constitutional monarchy buttressed by an administrative state; unlike Marx, he has no use for a ‘labor theory of value’ undergirding yet another rationalist-historical determinism, this one culminating in social, economic, and political equality. As Newell calmly understates the matter, with Nietzsche, “we are now in a very different atmosphere from that of Marx’s earnest activism.” Although, like Marx, Nietzsche is a communitarian, he is a ‘Right’ communitarian, lauding a community of ruling hierarchies, aristocratic rank, far from Marx’s egalitarianism. For Nietzsche, socialism “is every bit as much a symptom of base materialism and spiritual degradation as liberalism.” Unlike Marx, Nietzsche (in this, like Hegel) cares about liberal education, which differentiates and ranks students. But he despises the telos of Hegelian and Marxist ‘History’ alike as productive of the Last Man, that human nullity who mistakes his mediocrity for wise moderation.
What does Nietzsche’s historicism look like? History (and therefore the right kind of education) consists of the “symbiotic relationship” between the Apollonian or rational and the Dionysian or irrational. Homer exemplifies this relationship, his metrical verse being “the triumph of Apollonian form over the wordless ecstasy and violence of Dionysus,” yet “enlivened by the terrible passions it sublimates.” This removes Nietzsche not only from rationalist historicism, which seeks to dominate the passions altogether, but also from Rousseau, who dreams of natural harmony, not the “stupendous struggle” of the Homeric gods, heroes and the poetry evoking them. “There is no higher Platonic synthesis of mind and the affects,” only strife. In Greek tragedy, “Oedipus’ fury and lust are both blind,” taking him “down into the depths, not up toward the eternal good.” “By blinding himself, Oedipus symbolically finally achieves the wisdom of blind Tiresias, whose maxim was: Best not to know the truth. Blindness as a metaphor for wisdom is directly antithetical to Socrates’ likening of the intellect to the eye of the soul—it is impossible to know too much.” When Aristotle interprets the tragedies as conflicts about moral intention and responsibility, when Plato’s Socrates argues that such a thing as moral responsibility is possible or desirable, they overlook “the passions that express themselves through” this supposed “capacity for moral choice.” “If one assumes that the cosmos is rationally ordered, including the supremacy of the mind over the passions, you might judge Oedipus as responsible for murdering Laius in a fit of rage. but if life is at bottom hostile and dooms us through our passions, then we may be fated to carry out such crimes.” The world consists not of a rationally ordered cosmos or a rationally ordered course of events but of the will to power.
Nietzsche does not want merely to reestablish a balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian but to tear the Dionysian away from Apollonian ascetic rationality “in order to enable a new birth, the Overman.” In replacing the Absolute Spirit with the will to power, and as “perhaps the greatest philosophical critic of liberal democracy and modernity,” Nietzsche despises Hegel’s “benevolent flourishing of the modern nation-state as it finds a new sense of religious purpose through mutual forgiveness”; he is the John the Baptist not for a secularized and collectivized Christ but for “the new messianism of Zarathustra.” Zarathustra embraces the world of the will to power, a world “apparently devoid of permanent meaning.” Nietzsche is the philosopher not of rationalism classical or modern, but of “life,” by which he means “the passionate commitment humans experience when they are creating something altogether new in history.” To fail in this is to allow the triumph not of the Absolute Spirit or the long-oppressed proletariat but of the Last Man, the bourgeois man, absorbed in his own “survival and comfort.”
But how “can you worship a god which you know to be a human creation like all other past gods and values?” Do you not see that the knowledge that all gods are idols, human makings, leaves you as a spiritless, ignoble Last Man, incapable of creating any new gods? The historicism of ‘progressives’ “paralyzes our commitment to anything new, bold and dangerous.” This is the abuse of history, leading to the ruin of man, drowning in his attempt to ‘be objective,’ which is only “a retreat from deciding what we prefer, a disguise for indifference”—in reality not objective at all but the expression of “petty subjectivity,” making culture, which after all means cultivation, subject to our “pedestrian whims.” The dilemma is that “modern man has discovered the dread truth that values are indeed relative”; if he is to become a creator again, he must “do so in the knowledge that it is a value, rather than an absolute truth.” No less than the Christians, and no less than Descartes who in this respect imitates the Christians while doubting the existence of God, Nietzsche seeks certainty: but now, “the only way of being sure we are overcoming the present is through the depth, passion and intensity of our commitment.” Do not abandon history and the knowledge it provides; “reform it as the servant of commitment,” using it as a spur to enhance human beings “through a radical futurism.”
How? First, narrow your horizons. The moral relativism ‘objective’ history supports can only yield utilitarian drabness. “Man needs narrow horizons in order to beautify life and make it more bearable through reverence before a higher authority and the striving for nobility.” Also, appreciate what Plato and Christianity did accomplish by claiming that the world we experience sensually isn’t the real world at all, that there exists “a higher, eternal, and invisible realm of higher truth.” This was “the greatest expression in history of the will to power,” the greatest beckoning to self-overcoming ever conceived by men for Man. It has now played itself out, devolving into the egalitarian lowlands of liberal democracy, because Socrates and Jesus both contended that men are “fundamentally equal,” each one “possess[ing] a soul linking us to the immortal truth. Although it ended in the wretched egalitarianism of today, this effort nonetheless shows that self-overcoming is possible. To resent such an achievement at its radical origin is to remain within the wide but low horizon of democracy, with its egalitarian resentment of all great achievements. At the same time, do recognize that Plato’s Idea of the Good and Christianity’s God, in “bring[ing] the rest of existence” under their rule, must eventually destroy what his ‘high’ in it, the Idea of the Good, the Christian God, because they impose equality on human beings. By Nietzsche’s time, the crisis of egalitarianism had become so acute that even the Biblical God, a person “capable of love, jealousy, and vengeance,” had been abandoned—’killed,’ replaced by “modern rationalism and science” aiming at happiness as conceived by the likes of a race so low as the English flat heads, tepid utilitarian pursuers of happiness now conceived as bodily satisfaction and mental peace. Thankfully, “a new supreme being, the Overman, will take God’s place as the horizon for mankind’s future reverence and self-overcoming”—the Overman, who offers us not peace but a renewal of noble striving.
Hitherto, philosophers have sought truth without wondering what truth is and why they seek it. Philosophers have failed to reflect upon their own motivation. Nietzsche calls this “the metaphysical prejudice,” and charges that “the principle of identity and contradiction” itself—logic, the core of reason—only registers this prejudice, produced by an unadmitted passion. Whatever philosophy will now become, it must become “aware that the value of truth is the enhancement of life,” that the fact of its passionate character alone makes it worth something to living human beings. Logic serves human life because it narrows human horizons. For example, Stoics hardly live according to nature, as they claim, since nature is chaotic—wasteful, purposeless, unmerciful, unjust. Rather, “Stoicism tyrannizes over the chaos of nature by imposing reason on it in order to make life bearable.” Hegel has done the same thing, only in accordance with an equally rationalized, hence equally false but initially vital, narrowing of human horizons. Hegel even improved upon “classical cosmology,” which posited “rational and benevolent orderliness” in nature, whereas Hegel did understand the importance of movement, dynamism. Nietzsche radicalizes this historicism, “arguing that what masquerades as objective reality is entirely created on impulse by the human will.” This, he maintains, “unlike all previous truths,” is no prejudice but “a genuine account of all existence.” And if what we know is willed, “psychology must replace philosophy.”
To prepare the way for the Overman, such psychologists as Nietzsche and his potential followers, the “Free Spirits,” reject “reification,” the “erection of…expressions [of the will to power] as final and unalterable truths” as against creativity, which is a “process” not a permanent condition. The will to power is “Nietzsche’s name for the whole, the matrix of self-origination out of which issue all of our individual acts of will, our instincts, even the organic processes of procreation and nourishment (non-human as well as human),” the source of “all force univocally,” as Nietzsche put it. “You yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing else!” he exclaims. The will to power replaces Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, the last philosophically interesting vestige of rationalism before English utilitarians and Marxian communists plunged reason into the mud of egalitarianism. The dead end of both the morality of consequences seen in classical Greece and the morality of intention inaugurated by Christians can only be escaped by going beyond good and evil as so conceived, to psychology, to the Overman’s combination the Roman Caesar, that consequentialist par excellence, and the soul of Christ, the God who judges men according to the inclinations of their souls, clearly visible to Himself alone. The Free Spirits who precede the Overman reject the supine softness of democracy; they are the hard men of “a coming new aristocracy.”
When Nietzsche says hard, he means it. He “envisions a process that could take place both inwardly and psychologically and simultaneously involve literally tyrannical, evil and terrible historical transformation involving entire peoples or even the entire world,” as indeed “every great historical transformation” has brought “enormous force and bloodshed.” “Deeply interested in politics and warfare as well as culture,” Nietzsche evidently shares Hegel’s sense of history as a slaughter-bench.
What new forms will get hacked into their shape on the slaughter-bench, refined in the souls of the Free Spirits and then beyond them, by the Overman? Having established that it is religion, not philosophy, which practices the “primordial phenomenon of sacrifice in which…morality is grounded,” Nietzsche wills a return to the primordial, now in “a new land” in which we must not sacrifice human beings in reverence to God but “to sacrifice God himself, to purge him of any remaining capacity for pity, consolation or love toward us,” enabling “the Overman to take the place of God.” While the Christian saint’s willingness to sacrifice his life to an invisible God has deepened human souls, his compassion for the weak has spawned the Last Man, the weak man. But “if modernity has shown that man is nothing but a system of matter in motion bent on self-preservation, and not uniquely loved by God, why does man deserve compassion?” To get rid of soul-slackening compassion, to deepen the human soul without the Christian God, Nietzsche’s new “philosopher” must merge “the philosopher as traditionally conceived”—that unwitting embodiment of the self-overcoming will to power—with “the legislator, the prophet, and the ‘breeder.'” This new philosopher will no longer pursue wisdom but constitute a new “master class,” a new aristocracy reminiscent of, but surpassing, the old Homeric heroes or Hindu Brahmins, the rulers of lesser rulers who obey their commands by commanding the ordinary men. The religion of the latter will make them content with their humble lot, as peasants were under the regime of Christian feudalism. Indeed, “Christianity’s particular concern with comforting the wretched masses might be an important means of ruling to supplement the Vedic or ‘Asiatic’ code of the higher castes.”
For now, the battle between the new nobility and the herd-men is on. In yet another reversal of his predecessor, Nietzsche inverts Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. This time, there will be no synthesis; “on the contrary, the tension between the master morality and the herd morality is escalating toward an unprecedented conflagration.” It is the role of the Free Spirits to educate this new ruling caste. But unlike the philosopher-kings of Plato’s ideal regime, “these educators are not shaping the souls of the future citizenry so as to wean them away from the temptation to tyranny, but on the contrary to hone and refine their tyrannical instincts for domination over both themselves and their subjects.” Dangerous? But of course. Yet the danger of the great effort is the only antidote to the torpor of the way of life of the Last Man. Will the Last Man be the final, low and boring, human type, or will he be the last man, the last human-all-too-human predecessor to the Overman? Nietzsche urges his noblest readers to take the risk, “rather than to submit to the unspeakably worse cataclysm of herd morality triumphing entirely and swallowing up any chance for renewed greatness on earth,” the death not only of God but of philosophy itself—of every thing and every one once exalted as above the herd. The twentieth century will bring “the fight for the domination of the earth.” Ready yourselves for it.
In calling the “genuine philosophers” of the future “commanders and legislators, not classifiers” of supposedly natural species, Nietzsche calls the new philosophers’ knowledge itself a willed creating, their creating legislation, their will to truth the will to power. Newell observes, “at this moment Nietzsche reveals how essentially and at bottom he is a modern,” equating knowing with creating as Machiavelli did when he called for the conquest of Fortuna in order to create ‘new modes and orders,’ a project refined as Bacon’s and Hobbes’s maxim that to know something is to be able to make it, thereby improving the human lot. This project was in turn “further radicalized as the Fichtean reading of Kant, whereby reason is entirely assimilated to our will to master and reshape nature, and Schiller’s and Hegel’s identification of modern reason with Verstand, the Baconian power to tear nature apart through analysis in order to improve upon it.” But unlike all of these political philosophers, Nietzsche abominates the modern nation-state as the coldest of all cold monsters, a bureaucratic monstrosity of ‘administrative science’ foisted upon Germany by the “bourgeois-imperialist nationalism associated with Bismarck” and perfected by the English flat-heads of womanish Victorianism. Instead of underwriting this project of a deformed and deforming mediocrity, “politics must vault over the nation-state altogether, even in its comparatively more authentic underlying Volkisch sediment”—perhaps Volkitsch would be the apter term?—and “seek the rebirth of the will to power on a global level” in “a new order that will span the planet,” ruled by a global aristocracy that shares Marx’s internationalism but at the service of anything but social democracy. This “new ruling caste will usher in mankind’s new supreme being, the Overman.” Only then can mankind recover the ennobling instincts of loyalty, honor, reverence, courage, rank. Religion will now return, no longer at the service of metaphysics, whether Platonic, Christian (“Platonism for the people”), or Hegelian, but as the perpetually self-originating, self-renewing will to power of the Overman. The current-day democratization of Europe serves one and only one useful purpose: it “goads into existence a new master class that will reign over the herd men, who in this sense are their own gravediggers,” even as Marx’s feudal lords and bourgeois masters have dug, are digging, their graves.
For Aristotle, magnanimity or greatness of soul is the pinnacle of moral virtue, while philosophy is the highest way of life. Nietzsche eschews this separation of theory and practice. In this, he again shows himself as a historicist, if not a Hegelian or Marxist historicist. For Nietzsche, “what matters ultimately is not wisdom…but rank.” “After the collapse of Platonism and all traditional philosophy through its exposure as a prejudice and as having culminated in nihilism” the only “remaining and enduring peaks of human greatness” are “faith and nobility.” Only these remain as possible “footholds in the abyss enabling us not to be overwhelmed and swept away by the chaos at the heart of all existence.” Only these might provide the “strength of soul” needed for that, to say nothing of the strength of soul needed to slog through the egalitarian mud.
“Nietzsche’s Zarathustra calls for salvation through a new order premised on the destruction of human equality” and the surpassing of the categories ‘good and evil’ posited by the original, Manichean, Zarathustra. He represents not the historicist teleology of Hegel but “an apocalyptic revolutionary break aimed at an as yet unspecifiable new order that will bear virtually no resemblance to the current epoch of ‘herd morality.'” “No final resolution of history’s contradictions” will result; even if this were possible, it would stagnate human being. “The world is a field of forces that radiate through human creativity and issue forth as great faiths, philosophies and civilizations,” but once established, these ossify or ‘reify’ into some “hardened distinction between the real and apparent world.” “What the Overman fully will be cannot as yet be known”; we cannot know the full meaning of the past until the overman comes and, even then, renewal will be possible, ad infinitum. For human creativity to endure it must now consciously found itself upon “the underlying ontological principle of the will to power,” now freed “as a process,” not as “a completed doctrine or dogma sub specie aeternitatis.” The will to power “expresses itself through the passions and the affects, resulting in a self and in individual action as the last stage of its emergence,” action resulting in a new regime, “an inegalitarian collectivism.” “The greatest creators fashion horizons for entire civilizations, uniting the individual with the community.”
Newell asks, “how can man experience reverence bowing to a god which he knows himself to have created?” This would be a decisive objection, if the will to power were only a creation of Nietzsche’s.
Newell well and brilliantly insists that the will to power alone won’t produce this revolution, however. It must be supplemented by the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. By this, Nietzsche does not mean a form of fatalism, which would be “paralyzing.” “The eternal recurrence is not an iron cage of determinism” but “an open circle,” in which actions and events occur unpredictably. The will to power alone would only destroy, like an anarchist’s bomb; it would be vengeful, a passion of ressentiment aimed at all that has happened, all that has been thought and felt hitherto. Life’s “colorful and invigorating chaos does not prompt tragic moaning about the loss of certainty, but laughter over its evanescence.” The cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships, and moralities that Nietzsche derides in The Use and Abuse of History becomes a source of merriment and creativity, once one understands that nothing can or should last forever. “The eternal recurrence will dissipate the spirit of gravity in an eros for all that can be”; “we have no need for permanence, which is the outcome of the spirit of gravity in its desire to put an end to new willing.” (On this ground, one might even take Isaac Newton to have been the author of a physics of English flat-headism.) Newell considers this “Nietzsche’s most profound truth, more profound even than the revelation of the Overman that it makes possible.” Abandoning “the Platonic eros through which beauty draws us on up toward the eternal truth,” Nietzschean eros loves “the unquenchable richness and variability of existence,” the “Pandora’s box of sheer becoming, possibility and spontaneity,” enabling “the mystery and wonder of life [to] flood back” into the turgid backwater modernity has become.
In terms of politics, to combine the will to power with the Eternal Recurrence issues in a Trotskyism of the ‘Right’ to complement Nietzsche’s ‘Right’ or hierarchical communitarianism. That is, Nietzsche anticipates Trotsky’s notion of the permanent revolution. Although Newell doesn’t mention Trotsky, he sees the principle clearly, writing that Nietzsche envisions the result of the masters’ victory over the slaves “not [as] a political state at all but more akin to an ongoing revolutionary transformation.” This is why Nietzsche proposes no ‘best regime’ or ‘political science.’ The outcome of the revolution cannot be predicted because it will be an act of freedom, of creativity. And it might fail. “Herd morality may triumph once and for all.” All Nietzsche knows is that if the Free Spirits do succeed in educating the “eventual master caste,” and if the master caste triumphs over the herd, and “once man has been ‘redeemed from revenge’ by the eternal recurrence, all we can glimpse is ‘the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms'”—a new Rainbow Covenant, this one for atheists. “No one can know what will happen when we cross that bridge.” Newell characterizes Nietzsche’s attitude: “Let’s roll the dice and see what comes of it.”
Looking back at Nietzsche’s immediate philosophic predecessors, “it is not the Hegelian or Marxist belief in the rational outcome of the struggle for historical progress in which we should invest our hopes, but the liberating creative and violent forces of that underlying strife itself.” Do not pity the victims of the coming mass slaughter. Pity instead “the inner toll this mission will take on the psyche of those who carry it out.” Newell remarks that Nietzsche is to the Nazis what Rousseau is to the French Revolution: his thoughts were distorted and vulgarized, but they were indeed his thoughts. “The heart of the matter is that Nietzsche rejects all forms of transhistorical ethics, from Aristotelian to Kantian, that would equip us to stand outside of events and make a moral judgment about such movements ahead of time.” Newell concurs with the judgment of Walter J. Dannhauser, who wrote, “A man who counsels men to live dangerously must expect to have dangerous men like Mussolini heed his counsel; a man who teaches that a good war justifies any cause must expect to have this teaching, which is presented half in jest but only half in jest to be abused.” [1] Newell simply suggests that Nietzsche would not have minded finding out.
In some respects, Martin Heidegger radicalizes Nietzsche. And there is no doubt that Heidegger did endorse Nazism, unrepentantly. “How did the arguably greatest thinker of the twentieth century find himself serving one of history’s most murderous regimes?” Heidegger follows Nietzsche in attacking Hegelian-Marxist teleological historicism. He also shares Nietzsche’s preference for the archaic Greeks against classical civilization. But he faults all of his predecessors, not only by “rejecting any conception of the rational progress of history,” but by rejecting genealogy of any kind. No historical phase since the archaic origins of civilizations has any real merit; on the contrary, all that has occurred subsequently has amounted to a departure from Being, not an unfolding or deepening of it. “Heidegger goes farther than any of them in summoning forth the originating matrix of history as an ‘overpowering power’ as pure unmediated strife,” a matrix that issues what he calls its “distant command” to modern Germans, and only to modern Germans, to tap into the reordering authority of that fertile chaos.
Like all historicists, Heidegger conceives of Being as a self-originating, self-transforming force. But unlike Hegel and Marx (or the non-historicist Aristotle), he rejects the idea that the end, the purpose of Being, whether historical or natural, is its summit. The tree should not be defined by its mature state but by its roots, its hidden origin. Whereas classical metaphysics takes the telos as an ideal, the realest reality of any thing, considering any feature short of that as a flaw to be remedied, Heidegger deprecates this as “the yoke of the Idea”—a burden, dully unfree, an invitation not to understand Being but to subjugate it in a radically misguided attempt to perfect it. Not realization or culmination but the moment of origin, when a thing or indeed Being itself begins as sheer possibility—that is the true being of a thing or the being of Being. In Heidegger’s words, “possibility stands higher than actuality.” Because Man, is open to doubt about his own purpose, he is closer to Being than any other being. Like Being, Man is open to possibilities in a way other beings are not. “Dasein, the distinctively human mode of Being, is the ‘there’ (Da) of Being (Sein), the place where the question of Being unfolds” in all its historicity, its impermanence, especially when we recognize our transitoriness, recognize that we will die. “The openness to change and doubt which constitutes man’s existence is directly conditioned by the mutability and impermanence of Being as such,” the human “awareness of death,” unique to human beings. We can understand the archaic, “sheer possibility” of Being by this observation. It, and not wonder or love of wisdom, initiate the philosophic quest.
Given this historicity, given the centrality of originating possibility, questions of ‘how’ take priority over the questions of ‘what’ that characterize classical philosophy. ‘What is’ questions take priority if you think you are looking at nature, at something that is stable, something that can be contemplated, as distinct from ever-shifting conventions and opinions. Socratic or political philosophy proceeds by interrogating one’s human interlocutors, asking them to define things and then showing that their opinions are self-contradictory, inadequate for understanding nature, including their own nature as human and their own natures as human ‘types.’ For Heidegger, not dialogue but observation (of mortality) opens the window to serious thought, leading to historical consciousness or awareness not to nature, which strictly speaking does not exist due to Being’s historicity or impermanence. That is, death should remind us of impermanence, of our own historicity. The everyday opinions of everyday life do not constitute a path to this consciousness; the attempt to transcend them, to ascend from them into a realm of Ideas (as in Plato), or a transcendent God (as in the Bible), or even to an understanding of the more concrete nature Aristotle investigates causes an “alienation” from Being. It is an attempt to impose an order, a stability, upon Being that Being does not in reality have. “Truth can in no way transcend ordinary experience but must somehow reside in it organically.” This isn’t Rousseau’s state of nature, for example, nor is it “a universal ideal yet to be achieved” like Kant’s Categorical Imperative,” nor Hegel’s “end of history.” Instead, there are only “the unique and independent worlds that have grown out of local encounters with Being,” which has been embodied in ever-changing customs that are rooted in the origins of those worlds. Thus, “Man has no pure freedom beyond the particular world to which he is committed, and his commitment takes place nowhere except in the midst of this world, its people and their heritage.” This makes ‘Man’ not a ‘what,’ a being with a nature, but a ‘who,’ a being with an origin, a history. This also makes Man a communal being, not an individual subject, “a complex of forces that is intersubjective and collective at the deepest level,” un-Cartesian and un-Rousseauian. As Newell well writes, Heidegger “reject[s] entirely the progressive notion of history without abandoning an entirely historical definition of man.” One might say that Heidegger offers a radicalized Burkeanism.
“When Being touches us through our finitude, making us aware of the primordial possibilities that the everyday world, in its anxious search for security and control, tries to ‘dim down’ and paper over, it acts as the spur to authenticity.” But a resolve “to recommit ourselves to the authenticity of the origins can fail“; “Dasein can ‘cut itself off from its ontic roots'” in an illusory attempt to recover its authenticity. That is what all previous philosophers and prophets have done when they try to find some comforting permanence, some intellectual or spiritual security in a realm imagined to transcend flux—what Heidegger calls “reification.” These efforts alienate us from ourselves and from others, since we are at core not permanent. We substitute for our true selves what Heidegger calls the “they-self,” the “public authority which orders our lives as fearful conformists or efficient managers of the surrounding environment.” This is pretense. There can be no “horizontal universality,” no “science of history or a genealogy of morals” of a human “type.” “We encounter only the vertical universality of irreducibly unique collectivist monads, of ‘peoples.'” There is “no exit from one’s world, its people and heritage.” We live authentically only in “seizing upon” the vital origins of that world, the struggle or strife “out of which the everyday world has issued, and reenacting those origins afresh.” “Confronting the finitude, arbitrariness and particularity of our world dispels the complacency of everyday life, enabling us to see ourselves for what we really are.”
And so, Germans must heed “the distant command” of the archaic Greeks if they are to recur to their own origins, dismantle the inauthentic world that men, including Germans, have constructed in their fearful retreat from the originating strife of primordial Being. “Being is Nothing”—that is, no-thing, no particular realized thing. As pure possibility, it beckons us to regenerate the world that has long since lapsed into inauthenticity. “Resolving upon its ‘finite freedom’ enables a people to shatter the dictatorship reared out of their own alienation,” to “give themselves over to their historical destiny,” to enable them “to vault into the future rooted in a past so primordial as to bear little if any relationship to the reified present.” The heroes of such a people will “rear up out of the deepest roots of the past, where they were trapped by the they-self’s official history of the past.” Newell calls this true radicalism, “both backward and forward-looking,” “atavistic futurism.” In returning to the radix, the root of human life, the moment of supreme freedom, it rejects “all existing political social, cultural and moral bonds in the name of a contentless communitarianism” of pure possibility, pure originalism, unique and arbitrary. To state the obvious, this cannot occur without “power, struggle, resolve, violence”—a “tremendous negative energy purging everyday life in the longing to reexperience what Heidegger calls the ‘ecstatic moment of vision’ when the community’s world sprang into being.” Such a (re)experience can “offer no guidance about concrete goals,” as befits an anti-teleological teaching. Heidegger altogether disdains “any compromise with the conditions of ordinary political dispute and party politics,” indeed of politics as Aristotle defines it of ruling and being ruled. This fits with his rejection of regard for the Socratic dialogue, with political philosophy. Heidegger resembles the pre-Socratic nature-philosophers Socrates criticized, except that he conceives of Being as historical, not natural-sempiternal. And of course, he rejects the theory of justice behind modern ‘social contracts,’ along with the throne-and-altar ‘conservatism’ social contract theory replaced. “Freedom is the return to a protean, indeterminate nothingness that overthrows all existing conditions without either developing them”—as per the early moderns—or “being developed by them”—as per all previous historicists—altogether “dispensing with precedent and prescription along with moderation”—now, in a very sharp departure from Burke.
It is easy to see why Heidegger would have been attracted to Nazism. Simultaneously atavistic and futuristic, gripped by the cult of the hero, rejecting liberalism, conservativism, and ‘Left’ or egalitarian communitarianism, Nazism addressed, or at least could be supposed to address, the acute danger of modern alienation in all its forms, whether ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian.’ “In order to recover its destiny, Germany must rethink [its] hidden history,” the “indeterminacy of Being” seen in the archaic Greeks but subsequently buried by the classical Greeks, the Romans, the feudalists, the early ‘natural-right’ moderns and late historical-progressive moderns. If Germany can do this, then act upon it, it can redeem itself and the West. It must therefore repudiate Hegel, the German philosopher par excellence, that teleologist of history, recognizing his Panglossian dialectic not as a force for progress but as “a steady, regressive development away from freedom,” an instrument of alienation. At the same time, without this “extremity of the alienation from Being” Hegelianism has imposed, Germans would continue to roll along, without self-knowledge, without consciousness of what they, and mankind generally, have lost.
This new consciousness must reject not only Hegel’s logic of history but logic itself, reason, as the defining characteristic of Man. It is the consciousness of his finitude, his mortality, that distinguishes Man from all other beings, not the capacity to reason. “The limitation of logic is that it cannot deal with the Nothing, with nonbeing, meaning origination.” Logic or the principle of non-contradiction can only operate when and where there is something, whether natural, divine, or historical. Since Being does produce beings, reason has a proper role, but only if thoroughly embedded within history, not as a ladder to any realm claiming to transcend history. But “Being understood as origination” is no-thing, perceived not by reason but by revelation alone. “Poetry and revelation may rank higher than science because they reveal Being more richly and primordially than analytical rationality.” [2] Germans should harken to “the surest historical precedent for understanding an authentic relation to Being,” the relation seen in “the great pre-Platonic poets, thinkers, and statesmen” of Greece. Today, Germans find themselves caught between two “pincers,” the modern-scientific, technological giants of Russia and America, regimes Heidegger classifies as “metaphysically the same,” despite their “superficially different ideologies.” What Heidegger calls the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism inheres in its opposition to those pincers. The Soviet Russians and the liberal Americans would conquer Being. What Heidegger wants Germans under Nazism to do is to act as “a conduit for Being’s revelation through assuming the role of ‘resolve'” against the care, the existential anxiety, that Being too often has induced Man to oppose because it imposes death, finitude, upon him. That is, against the resolve of the men who have met Being with “subjective willfulness,” Heidegger would have them willfully surrender to Being, let Being run through them, become open “to the overpowering power of Being,” a surrender “that empowers our choosing to recommit ourselves to the community’s destiny”—whatever that destiny may turn out to be, in terms of particular events and conditions. The genuine political founder, like the true artist, brings about the rule of Being, in his case “by interpreting it for his people as their norms—their laws and mores.” What Heidegger calls “the greatness” of a founding occurs only at its beginning, its free, originative act, just as Being as a whole reaches its greatness in its “creative origins”, the initial act of its history. All else is decline, a falling away from Being. “From Heidegger’s perspective, Homer was a legislator,” someone like T. S. Eliot “merely a diversion for the cultured,” the inauthentic ones. In his intention “to open the underlying Pandora’s box of creative chaos, dismantling the metaphysical edifice of Hegel’s Absolute Science of Spirit,” Heidegger looked to the Nazi revolution of 1933 as “the spark” to ignite the explosion, Germany’s answer to “the distant summons of the polis” for recovering “our destiny as a people,” freeing “logos from the chains of logic.”
This can be accomplished by recourse not to reason but to etymology. (In this, Heidegger is an anti-rationalist Vico.) That is, unlike the Socratic use of words to uncover the rational meaning of nature concealed by the verbiage of conventional opinion, etymology digs into the archaic origin of the words themselves to find their true meaning in their history. For example, when Aristotle defines Man as a zoon echon logon, that means literally an “animal having reason,” not an animal rationale, as Latinists would have it. Heidegger claims that the word “having” suggests temporality, historicity, “a fluid historical process,” whereas “rational animal” suggests confinement within a defined, permanent, ahistorical essence. The latter is reification, and Aristotle himself actually prefers it, especially when he speaks in his Metaphysics of Being as a substance instead of a process, as the Being—more noun than verb. But “when Aristotle tries to wrestle Greek into conveying this monistic entity, it wriggles and undulates at every turn to evade such exactitude,” being the language of Homer, of archaic Greece. Aristotle “would have preferred to express his metaphysics in Latin had it existed for him, because [Latin] lent itself readily to the kind of contraction of the meaning of Being to the one moment of metaphysical essence he and Plato were aiming for.” Heidegger links this feature of Greek to the German language. German is the only modern language that resembles Greek in its resistance to stasis, to reification. It is the only modern language in which one can truly philosophize, think in tune with Being. In this, Heidegger departs from the biological or ‘racist’ nationalism of Nazism, finding Germany’s true roots in its language. All too optimistically, he supposed that “the German people might, through National Socialism, pose the Question of Being on an active level, resolving upon their collective destiny, returning to the underlying potency of their historical possibilities so as to throw off the shackles of global technology pressing in on them in the shape of the two metaphysical superpowers.” He “saw in the Nazis a great national revival that rejected the selfish values of liberalism, bourgeois materialism and the Enlightenment for the sake of patriotism, courage, passion and daring.”
In his Rectoral Address of 1933, Heidegger therefore identified three “bonds” of Germany and its universities: labor service, armed service, and knowledge service. “Everyone…must serve the People,” not by bubbling together in an egalitarian stew, liberal or communist, but in accordance with these ranks, ranks obviously derived from the three classes Socrates enumerates in the Republic—the laborers, the guardians, and the philosopher-kings. Plato’s regime, established on a properly historical instead of a rational-natural basis, has or can become the reality of the Nazi regime. In addition, the myth of “the autochthony of the best regime” Socrates upholds in that dialogue now becomes the reality of Germany for Heidegger—the rootedness of Germans in their soil, their territory. What Socrates presents with irony and playfulness become German-all-too-German indeed—literally and humorlessly actual. “In Platonic terms, Heidegger employs philosophy to liberate thumotic boldness, aggression and zealotry from any boundaries whatever.” Having deprecated reason, Heidegger leaves “knowledge service” as a mere instrument of armed, self-exalting manliness and abandoning gentlemanliness. “By identifying the meaning of rationality with modern instrumental utilitarianism, and even tracing this back to classical metaphysics as its inevitable working out, Heidegger cuts himself off from the Platonic conception of manliness as an ordered harmony of reason over the passions sublimated as virtues like courage and honor-seeking.” This is no aristocracy, Newell remarks, “but something more akin to the Red Guards” of Maoist China. For Plato, all great things are precarious; for Heidegger, all great things partake of Being’s primordial storm, issuing in the rule of Storm Troopers. Being isn’t eidos but polemos, war. [3] This again recalls Heraclitus, but a Heraclitus who has seen the stultifying hazards of Being’s centuries-long reification.
And so, despite his rejection of racist nationalism for a linguistic nationalism, despite conceiving of Germans as a language group rooted in a specific “soil” or territory, Heidegger would never express any regret for his collaboration with Nazism. His claim of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness,” as supposed by himself, overrode all qualms about such enormities as the Holocaust and the World War. He did see, eventually, what is obvious to almost any other person who looks at the Nazis: they were as much enamored of modern science and technology as their enemies in Russia and America. Accordingly, he predicted that the world headed for an even more momentous cataclysm than the Nazis had wrought. His German contemporaries, having failed to live up to that inner truth and greatness, “have as yet no inkling of the catastrophe that has engulfed them,” he lamented, after the German surrender.
In his 1947 Letter on Humanism, Heidegger looks back on the German politics of the past two decades. He now distinguishes between “nationalism” and “homeland.” Nationalism is the twin of the modern state, aiming at the same thing: “domination of external reality.” The modern state is part of the modern project of scientistic reification, in this case the reification of a people’s “longing for a homeland,” a place where a people can live according to the particular being their founder derived from Being. The internationalism of such postwar entities as the United Nations merely yokes together “otherwise unrelated national subjects under a cosmopolitan veneer aiming for an ever more dreary, alienating and oppressive world-state”—Hegelianism triumphant. Given the Nazi catastrophe, Heidegger “turns away from any further explicitly political commitment” without rejecting his previous claim that Nazism’ “inner truth and greatness” justified Hitler’s founding.
In modernity, the technologist has triumphed over the craftsman. Technology has nearly completed its task of treating all reality external to Man as a “standing reserve” for human exploitation. Even human beings themselves “become part of the standing reserve” in the latest permutation of Being. Whereas technology seeks to dominate all things external to man, and even those things internal to him, “the craftsman does not so much produce things ex nihilo as he ‘lets be.'” He is open to Being, allowing it to run through him and into the things he makes. The things he makes themselves let Being run through them like the wind that causes the windmill to turn. Nonetheless, even in its triumph, technology does not really escape the Being it seeks to control. By turning Man against himself, by turning men themselves into part of its standing reserve, technology makes the crisis more and more acute. In this sense, “technology is the history of Being,” having “been the destiny of Being from the outset.” In its sheer oppressiveness, technology “might itself spark the return to Being” by intensifying Man’s anxiety; a “hitherto unprecedented degree of alienation and despair establishes the possibility of an unprecedented degree of freedom and fulfillment.” By “dissolving all fixity so that everything is converted into the energy of standing reserve, technology itself at length makes us challenge” the false metaphysics that has afflicted Man for millennia, finally “provid[ing] a liberating insight” into the impermanence of the everyday.” Newell suggests that this is why Heidegger refused to regret the Holocaust (“any more than the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Battle of Stalingrad and Hiroshima”). Such enormities must happen, if Man is to come to his senses and draw back from technology. “There are no enduring transtemporal standards by which to judge good and bad conduct.”
In this way, Heidegger on technology resembles Marx on capitalism; the worse it gets, the better, the more human consciousness may be raised. May: technology may defeat Man, reduce him “to pure energy for the endless transformation of existence.” But if humanity finally sees the full horror of technological oppression, we may pull back from our ambition to become “Lords of the Earth” (“a Nazi slogan taken from Nietzsche”), understand the full horror of technological oppression, open our eyes to the tyranny of the metaphysical dualism that threatens to reduce us to the condition of standing reserve. Man might then instead become the “Shepherd of Being”—tending to all beings, caring for them, letting them be themselves. If we do become shepherds, that will be “a millenarian deliverance in which nothing will be the same as before.” While this hope may resemble Hegel’s end of history, Marx’s communism, and Nietzsche’s Third Metamorphosis, “Heidegger goes much further than any of them in his repudiation of the present.” Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche all subsumed the history of being into the ends they envisioned; not so, Heidegger, who regarded all human history since the archaic age to have been an alienation from Being, a fall from Being’s true character as originator of all beings. His Third Age does not synthesize all that has come before, as in Hegel and Marx, nor does it esteem the successive deepening of “the type, Man” as Nietzsche does, the coming of the all-redeeming Overman. The Man of Heidegger’s Third Age, if it comes, will be “the Shepherd of Being, rejecting all of human history except its origin and letting things be instead of attempting to dominate and reshape them.” [4] “For Heidegger, reason’s insufficiency for explaining human existence can never be exposed by reason itself, but only by its dismantling and silencing, the ‘end of philosophy’ and its replacement by ‘thinking’ as ‘thanking,’ a silent act of piety for the ‘furrows’ of Being that cross into us.” In the famous dictum Heidegger offered near the end of his life, “Only a god can now save us.”
Newell criticizes Heidegger’s claim that technology lurks in the recesses of classical metaphysics. Aristotle’s elaboration of the four causes of beings doesn’t ‘privilege’ the efficient cause; the ‘final’ cause, the purpose of a being, “solicits and elicits” the other causes. There is no suggestion that nature can or should be conquered by technē. “Efficient cause is the least significant of the causes because it is merely the means by which reason brings about its purpose. The elevation of efficient cause over the other causes takes place only through the assimilation of efficient cause to the creative power of God over nature as chief artificer effected by Christian theology, later transferred…by Machiavelli and Hobbes to the secular human agency of the Prince or Sovereign.” Similarly, in his four-volume study of Nietzsche, Heidegger abstracts from the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, concentrating his attention solely on the Will to Power. As Newell has already shown, “Nietzsche did not conceive of willing to be its own ground, but understood it to be grounded in an interplay between man and Being in which Life solicits man to will her interpretation in order that Life can come to presence as the manifold values exhibited throughout history.” Newell doubts that Heidegger finally cares whether he has ‘gotten it right’ in his exegeses of his philosophic predecessors. If you are intent on allowing Being to speak through you, exegetical correctness is rather beside the point.
Who or what, then, is this god Heidegger hopes will save us? And if the Shepherd of Being is a “quietistic” being, one must still “wonder what transitional means this god…might have to employ in order to bring about” what Heidegger calls the “astounding” transformation he will effect. The Shepherd will (or won’t) reveal himself. God is “radically apart,” approached through “a mystical experience” not rational prediction. No theology, whether Thomistic or Hegelian, can anticipate such a return of Being.
Very well then, can Heidegger’s “ontology of Being” be questioned within the field of its own assumptions? This is what Leo Strauss did, asking (in Newell’s paraphrase), “What justifies Heidegger in the first place in identifying anxiety as the fundamental human relationship to the whole? Why could it not at least as justifiably be love, whether of God or of wisdom,” Platonic eros or Christian agape? (Indeed, the Old Testament itself maintains that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom but not its culmination.) We should ask ourselves, “what moves us more profoundly: Anxiety or Love?” It may be recalled that one of Strauss’s earliest books was a study of Hobbes, who makes much of the fear of violent death; Strauss is known for his critique of ‘the moderns’ on this and many other points.
Heidegger shares with his historicist predecessors the claim that Being is immanent in the course of events. Within a century of its inception, however, Hegelian historicist rationalism “had been displaced in the academic world” Hegel himself inhabited and animated for several generations by “the comeback of modern dualism and its separation of rationality from experience,” as seen in neo-Kantianism, “which located reason in a contentless ethical and analytical formalism standing outside of history,” and in the form of Weber’s distinction between facts and values (itself a reprise of Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’), leading to the moral relativism of ‘social science.’ What Hegel had sought to synthesize his academic successors sought to separate. “Heidegger aimed to salvage the traditional role of reason in the West as guiding our choices by completely historicizing it” or, as “a critic might argue, by destroying it altogether.” He folded reason into history, making it “entirely historical, temporal and immanent.” This does not descend into relativism because “not every historical setting or people was suitable for posing the question of being.” Archaic Greeks and modern Germans were the suitable ones, thanks not to their biological race but to their language, which opened their consciousness to the flow of Being.
“Heidegger is the last of the group who, like Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, offered a complete and absolutely comprehensive teaching providing a unified account of life on every level—individual, communal, political, psychological, moral and aesthetic—within an overarching ontological framework claiming to possess the absolute truth about the whole (Spirit, scientific socialism, the Will to Power, the ontology of Being).” Because the politics issuing from all of these comprehensive historicisms issued in political ‘totalitarianism’ or modern tyranny, and because the doctrines themselves have seemed finally too ambitious, too sweeping, too riddled with dubious assumptions and claims, later historicists have pulled back from them. “No one aims for this kind of comprehensiveness again.” Newell turns to a consideration of Habermas’s critical theory (which leans toward Hegelianism), Foucault’s postmodernism (which leans toward Nietzsche), and Gadamer’s hermeneutics (positioned between Hegel and Nietzsche)—all fragments of the Philosophy of Freedom.
Newell offers some cogent summary remarks on the Philosophy of Freedom. “Rousseau initiated the great countermovement against bourgeois materialism and the smallness and venality of modern political life, but because he did not reject the modern account of nature and reason, these aggressive passions could only be defended because they were irrational.” Only the passions seemed ‘free.’ That is, he associated reason precisely with bourgeois materialism and modernity’s political pettiness and so could not elevate calculation to the level of prudence. “After Rousseau’s bifurcation between freedom and reason the only hope for moderating these aggressive passions lay in a belief in the rationality of the progress of history,” whereby the mediation of the Spirit’s dialectic replaced moderation, the classical virtue reason made possible. That is, reason animated by what Hegelians eventually called ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ dialectic, held to be immanent in the course of events, replaced natural, prudential reason or statesmanship. “But the underlying historicist ontology of existence as spontaneous ‘self-origination,’ of (to cite Heidegger) existence as Heraclitean strife or war, upon which the Hegelian dialectic had been erected, eventually blew up and swept away the simulacrum of moderation that Hegel believed was provided by the teleological progress of history, a belief systematically dismantled by the critiques of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that culminated in philosophy standing aside and letting youthful passion roar out of its box. The central liability of historicism as regards the progress of history, is that in order to rescue honor-seeking from the psychological reductionism of liberal materialism, it could not avoid defending it as irrational.” Although the Philosophy of Freedom stands as a reminder of what merely utilitarian rationalism costs the human soul, the dilemma it causes in its way of redressing that cost remains with us today, albeit in less philosophically interesting but perhaps as morally and politically injurious forms seen in critical theory and postmodernism.
Notes
- Werner J. Dannhauser: “Friedrich Nietzsche.” In Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds.: History of Political Philosophy, Third edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
- In his post-World War II book, Origin of Artwork, Heidegger “attempts to render a poetic, noncausal account of art—that is, an account of art showing that making, poesis, comes at least as close to conveying the self-origination of Being as metaphysics. Plato’s Socrates argues that a poem or other work of art is imitative, something twice removed from the real thing. A drawing of a boot imitates the real boot, which imitates the idea of the boot in the mind of the bootmaker. Heidegger demurs, contending that Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant boots reveals more than a display of actual boots or even a photograph of them, “connect[ing] us” as it does “to the peasant’s enveloping environment of soil, wind and labor.” The painting brings us what Heidegger calls the “presence” of the boots; “the painting is as close as can be to their source in being as origination, closer than the actual boots themselves.”
- This is very reminiscent of Heraclitus. But Heidegger suggests that even “the Pre-Socratics themselves…may have already harbored the seed of metaphysics” in “their evanescent distinctions between being, becoming and appearance, and in any event, they were not strong enough to resist” the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle.
- The poet Ezra Pound, who had much the same experience with Italian Fascism as Heidegger had with Nazism, concluded his Cantos by writing, “I have tried to write Paradise. Let the wind speak. That is Paradise.” In popular culture, looking at things from the egalitarian Left, John Lennon famously sang, “Let it be.”
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