‘The Last Metaphysician’: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Politics

Abstract

In his protracted study of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which extended from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, Heidegger considered Nietzsche’s political positions to be the inevitable consequence of modern metaphysics. The implication of his argument is that Nietzsche’s “overman” and the “last man,” though ideologically differentiated, are both captured by modern metaphysics in its orientation towards subjectivism and globalism. Heidegger classified Nietzsche’s politics under the headings of Machiavelli and Roman Culture (Caesar), technique and imperium. These terms illustrate how the overman, who represents subjectivism at its zenith, displaces the weaker subjectivism of the last man, who, nevertheless, also seeks dominion over the earth. This essay presents an analytic description of Heidegger’s definition of Nietzsche’s politics and vindicates its accuracy, along with his characterization of Nietzsche’s philosophy as fundamentally technological.

Keywords:

• Heidegger
• Nietzsche’s Politics
• technology 

Notes

1. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 51, 55.

2. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:8.

3. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:181, 234.

4. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 107.

5. See Nietzsche, GM III 28: “And to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.”

6. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:237.

7. Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 71.

8. See ibid., 102. See, also, Nietzsche TI Expeditions 33: “Every individual may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life.”

9. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:19. Regarding his principle of the will to power, Nietzsche writes: “The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to powerֹ’ and nothing else” (BGE 36).

10. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:134.

11. “Presumably,” since, according to Heidegger, both personae are vectors of pure power politics.

12. Heidegger, Nietzsche 3:217. Nietzsche clarifies the term ‘overman’ in Ecce Homo: “The word ‘overman’ [is] the designation of a type of supreme achievement as opposed to ‘modern’ men, to ‘good’ men, to Christians and other nihilists” (Good Books 1).

13. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 67.

14. Nietzsche formulates a complete statement in Twilight of the Idols: “For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forewards in infinitum. If this will is present, there is established something such as the Imperium Romanum: or such as Russia, the only power today which has durability in it, which can wait, which can still promise something—Russia, the antitheses of that pitiable European petty-state politics and nervousness which with the foundation of the German Reich has entered a critical phase” (Expeditions 39).

15. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 68.

16. Nietzsche’s desire was “to create a unity out of Europe, a... unity for the sake of world government” (EH Case of Wagner 2).

17. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 69.

18. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:243–44.

19. Ibid., 151. Heidegger would have in mind here political interpretations such as those advanced by Baeumler in Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker.

20. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 78.

21. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:144. The type of subjectivity described here is essentially encapsulated in Nietzsche GS 23: “the tyrant or Caesar understands the rights of the individual even in his excesses and has a personal interest in advocating… a bolder private morality.”

22. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:145.

23. Nietzsche articulates the ontological status of power as follows: “The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will to life” (GS 349).

24. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” 102.

25. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:191. Such an affirmation should put into question Heidegger’s earlier position that Nietzsche’s ‘grand politics’ should not be associated with “the exploitive power politics of imperialism.” Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:158.

26. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:251.

27. This is a position Heidegger adopted from Jünger: “the universal rule of the will to power within planetary history. Today everything is a part of this reality, whether it is called communism, or fascism, or world democracy.” See Heidegger and Jünger, Correspondence, xii.

28. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 394–96.

29. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 57. See Nietzsche WP 957 1885 KSA 11 37[8], the passage from Nietzsche’s notebooks to which Heidegger refers is: “Inexorably… the great task and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall ‘man’ as a whole… be raised and trained?” It is a question which concerns the problem of discipline and breeding.

30. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 65.

31. Regarding “life” and “living things,” Nietzsche writes: “life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation” (BGE 259); a “living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength” (BGE 13). On the nature of values, he states: “values are… the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain [preserve] and increase [enhance] human constructs of domination” (WP 12 1887–88 KSA 13 11[99]).

32. See Mann, The Magic Mountain, 394–95.

33. Nietzsche elaborates: “Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality—in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which... all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality resists such a ‘possibility’, such an ‘ought’ with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, ‘I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality’” (BGE 202). Elsewhere Nietzsche avows that the essential character of ressentiment lies in the demand “that no other kind of perspective shall be accorded any value after one has rendered one’s own sacrosanct” (AC 9).

34. Castigating the communist doctrine, Nietzsche describes the principle of equality as “a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness” (GM II 11). In Beyond Good and Evil he writes, “the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay... of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value” (BGE 203).

35. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:148.

36. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche provides various reasons for the death of God: Renaissance-style individualism (see 23 along with 362); the discovery that there are different types of morality and the desire for moral experimentation (117 and 143); Christianity’s own skepticism (122); Christianity’s gloomy worldview, its fixation on sin and pain (130); science or the emergence of naturalistic forms of explanation (134); the corrupt power structure of the Church (136); Christianity’s defamation of the passions (139); the Reformation (148); and the influence of ancient Greece and the exposure to the classical world in general (149). Of course, Nietzsche himself is an active agent and promoter of some of these trends.

37. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:177. I do not wish to elaborate any further except to note that the beginning of any inquiry should be Napoleon and Nietzsche’s esteem for him, which might be disentangled from Heidegger’s following observation:

Subhumanity and superhumanity are the same thing. They belong together, just as the “below” of animality and the “above” of the ratio are indissolubly coupled in correspondence in the metaphyical animal rationale. ... The consumption of beings is as such and in its course determined by armament in the metaphysical sense, through which man makes himself the “master” of what is “elemental”. The consumption includes the ordered use of beings which become the opportunity and the material for feats and their escalation. This use is employed for the utility of armaments... [such that world wars follow]. (“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 103–4)

See, also, Nietzsche GM I 16 where he refers to Napoleon as a “synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman.”

38. Or internalized in the “bad conscience” (see Nietzsche GM II 16). Thus the “curative power” of war, in Nietzschean terms, suggests a cultural therapy devoted to our naturalization, permitting us more than, simply, the “bestiality of thought” (GM II 22).

39. See, e.g., Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 172.

40. It is untenable to say that each time Nietzsche praises ‘war’ he means only ‘spiritual’ war. A case in point is his reference in Ecce Homo to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870: “Only the war ‘redeemed’ the spirit in France” (EH Clever 3).

41. For related remarks see, also, Nietzsche AC 61 and EH Good Books 1. Nietzsche’s figure of the beast of prey should not be minimized as it constitutes an important term in Nietzsche’s critique of civilization: “Struggling ‘civilizationֹ’ (taming) needs every kind of irons and torture to maintain itself against... beast-of-prey natures” (WP 871 1887–88 KSA 13 11[53]). Finally, Heidegger counsels: “We should not forget that Nietzsche gives the name beast of prey to the highest form of man” (Nietzsche, 3:39).

42. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche claims that “the theory of ‘equal rights’… belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—that which I call pathos of distance—characterizes every strong age” (Expeditions 37).

43. Burckhardt, The State as a Work of Art, 2, 7 and 19, 15, 21, 35.

44. Ruehl remarks that “the Renaissance... became a crystallization point, especially in the 1880s, for Nietzsche’s most radically anti-humanist, anti-liberal ideas about tyranny and individuality, war and culture, violence and health” (Italian Renaissance, 61). See ibid., 30.

45. See Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, 66.

46. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 88.

47. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:229.

48. With respect to such a selective, socially-engineered, breeding project, in support of which The Anti-Christ is the most salient expression, Nietzsche’s closest spiritual ally was Erdmann Gottreich Christaller (1857–1922), author of Die Aristokratie des Geistes als Lösung der sozialen Frage: ein Grundriss der natürlichen und der vernünftigen Zuchtwahl in der Menschheit [The Aristocracy of intellect as the solution to the social question: An outline for the natural and reasonable selective breeding of humanity] (1885). Notably, Christaller deploys a vocabulary reminiscent of Nietzsche’s, for example: “Herdenmenschen,” “Neuadelspartei,” “Neuadelsgedanken,” “geistigen Adel,” “geistigen Aristokratie.” On the relationship between Nietzsche and Christaller, see Krummel, Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist, 1:104; and Holub, “Dialectic of the Biological Enlightenment,” 179–85.

49. In his letter to Franz Overbeck in 1882, Nietzsche writes: “For me, the Renaissance remains the climax of this millennium; and what has happened since then is a grand reaction of all kinds of herd instincts against the ‘individualism’ of that epoch” (Selected Letters, 195).

50. As Heidegger summarizes: “It was this new will to the development of the personality that brought about the complete transformation according to which, from then on, everything was supposed to exist purely for the state of the great individual.” See Heidegger, Nature, History, State, sessions 6–7.

51. Nietzsche WP 866 1887–88 KSA 12 10[17].

52. Nietzsche WP 954 1885–86 KSA 12 2[13]. An exploration of Nietzsche’s Caesarism/Bonapartism may be found in Dombowsky, Nietzsche and Napoleon. For Heidegger-era commentary on Nietzsche and Napoleon, see Bertram, Nietzsche, 171–82.

53. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 59–60.

54. Ibid., 72–73.

55. It is the way Nietzsche wishes to “sway the imagination.” See Reed, ‘Nietzsche’s Animals,” 178.

56. In an age of propaganda “it is in itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent it is believed to be true” (Nietzsche, AC 23).

57. Heidegger, Nietzsche 3:132–33. Heidegger is commenting on Nietzsche, WP 749 1887–88 KSA 12 10[94] where Nietzsche notes: “The spell that fights on our behalf… is the magic of the extreme. … We immoralists—we are the most extreme.’ And what is the ‘extreme’, if not the immoral itself or the monstrous? See, also, William Butler Yeats, who referred to Nietzsche as “that strong enchanter.” Bridgwater, “English Writers and Nietzsche,” 225.

58. This view is comprehensively exposed in Nietzsche’s 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy: “art… as the truly metaphysical activity of man. … The existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon... for all life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error” (BT Attempt at a Self-Criticism 5).

59. Nietzsche WP 985 1885 KSA 11 38[11].

60. Nietzsche WP 544 1885–87; 1888 KSA 12 10[159].

61. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:165.

62. See Nietzsche TI Ancients 2: “[The Greeks] cannot be to us what the Romans are, and further, Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to deceive themselves and to see reason in reality—not in ‘reason’, still less in morality…” Nietzsche also praises Thucydides in this context, perhaps the only Greek from whom we can learn. Realists tend to subscribe to the centrality of war and the primacy of state interests in international relations.

63. See Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 18.

64. Nietzsche WP 862 1884 KSA 11 25[211].

65. See Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, 94.

66. Heidegger argues that “Nietzsche’s passion for creators betrays the fact that he thinks of the genius... only in the modern way, and at the same time technologically from the viewpoint of accomplishment. The two constitutive values (truth and art) in the concept of the will to power are only circumscriptions for ‘technology’, in the essential sense of a planning and calculating stabilization as accomplishment, and for the creating of the ‘creators’ who bring a new stimulus to life over and above life as it is, and guarantee the business of culture” (“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 94–95).

67. Ibid., 37, 25.

68. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:236.

69. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:180–82.

70. See ibid., 175.

71. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 74.

72. Nietzsche WP 861 1884 KSA 11 25[174].

73. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:175.

74. Nietzsche WP 660 1885–86 KSA 12 2[76].

75. Ibid., 1885–86 KSA 12 2[57]. See, also, AC 57.

76. Heidegger is likely referring to these passages in The Anti-Christ when he states: “The conditions of [dominion over the earth], namely, all values, are... realized through a total ‘mechanization’ of things and the breeding of human beings. ... Breeding is the... purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable ‘automatism’ of every activity.” Heidegger, Nietzsche, 3:230–31. But see, also, Nietzsche WP 866 1887–88 KSA 12 10[17] where Nietzsche refers to “the production of a... justifying man for whose existence this transformation of mankind into a machine is a precondition, as a base on which he can invent his higher form of being.” For further discussion regarding the Law of Manu and its significant place in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Dombowsky, “A Response,” 387–93.

77. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 153.

78. See Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” 131–32.

79. See Nietzsche TI “Improvers” 5. See, also, AC 56: “Ultimately the point is to what end a lie is told. That ‘holy’ ends are lacking in Christianity is my objection to its means”; and AC 58: “It does indeed make a difference for which purpose one lies: whether one preserves with a lie or destroys with it.”

80. Nietzsche WP 343 1883–88 KSA 12 7[6].

81. As Drochon argues; oddly it might be said since Drochon converts Nietzsche’s means of fighting a war of spirits with “images and ghosts” (Z Tarantulas) into intellectual “theories and arguments”: as if “theories” were “images” and “arguments” were “ghosts.” See Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 174.

82. See, also, e.g., Nietzsche AC 23, 38 and 42.

83. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:117.

84. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” 105.

85. Ibid., 94. In support of Heidegger’s view, see Nietzsche BGE 23.

86. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 72–73.

87. Ibid., 69. This passage does not conform with the note culminating in this expression in KSA. See Nietzsche WP 983 1884 KSA 11 27[60]: “Education in those rulers’ virtues that master even one’s benevolence and pity: the great cultivator’s virtues (‘forgiving one’s enemies’” is child’s play by comparison), the affect of the creator must be elevated—no longer to work on marble!—The exceptional situation and powerful position of those beings (compared with any prince hitherto): the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.” See, also, Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 88, where the overman’s “essential nature” is viewed by Heidegger as “freedom from revenge.”

88. See Nietzsche WP 776 1887 KSA 12 9[145].

89. See, e.g., various essays on “Nietzsche’s Ecology,” New Nietzsche Studies 5, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2002).

90. Benn’s rueful remark is quoted in Reed, “Nietzsche’s Animals,” 201.