Heidegger's Interpretation of Nietzsche's ‘The Will to Power as Art’

References

• Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D. Krell (Harper & Row, 1979) Vol. One: The Will to Power as Art. The abbreviations used in this review are as follows: HN—Heidegger's Nietzsche; GS—Nietzsche's The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (Vintage, 1974): BGE—Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (Vintage, 1966); GM—Nietzsche's Towards a Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann (Vintage, 1967); WP—Nietzsche's Nachlass, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann (Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). With the exception of HN where following arabic numerals refer to page numbers, in all other references Latin figures refer to the part of the cited text and arabic numerals to section numbers.
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• Karl Jasper's book Nietzsche: Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens was first published in 1935 and has been recently reprinted by Walter de Gruyter (1974). In 1965, a translation by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz appeared under the title Nietzsche: An introduction to the Understanding of his philosophical activity (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1965). Heidegger's various lectures were first compiled and published in 1961 under the title Nietzsche by Neske Verlag.
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• Howey, R. Heidegger and Jaspers on Nietzsche, A Critical Examination of Heidegger's and Jaspers' interpretations of Nietzsche. (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1973). Magnus, B. Heidegger's Metahistory of Philosophy: Amor fati, Being and Truth (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1970).
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• Heidegger takes as his title the heading which the editors of the 1894–1926 Grossoktavausgabe edition of Nietzsche's works supplied to part four of book three of the collection of fragments now known collectively as ‘The Will to Power’.
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• Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, (Musarionausgabe. München. 1920–29) Vol VI (Nachlass), p. 101.
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• The phrase fatality of error' is Nietzsche's (cf. WP 584).
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• Ludwig Wittgenstein:—“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” Tractatus Logico—Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) sees. 6, 44.
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• “The ‘will to power’ cannot have become” (WP 690). “The will to power not a being, not a Becoming, but a pathos,—the most elemental fact from which a Becoming and effecting first emerge—” (WP635).
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• This exclusively aggressive interpretation of the will to power still has wide currency: Professor Stern in his recent book writes, “The doctrine of the ‘will to power’ as it emerges from the convolute of Nietzsche's notes cannot be accommodated within any non-catastrophic, eudaemonic schema. Whether its notion of power is subtle or crude, concrete or abstract, it remains a doctrine of conquest and embattled domination.” (cf. Stern J. Nietzsche, Harvester Press, 1978, p. 87).
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• This description of beauty is echoed in Rainer Maria Rilke's first Duino Elegy. “Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen, und wir bewundem es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht, uns zu zerstören”, (Rilke, Gesammelte Werke, Insel Verlag, 1936. Vol 3. p. 259).
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• In his attack on Plato's view of art as mimesis, Shaftesbury presents art as a manifestation of the natural processes of Becoming and sees engagement in its creative processes as a means whereby man is able to reflectively immerse himself in and become one with the source of his being. This viewpoint anticipates Nietzsche's notion of the artistic process as a means of participating in and achieving a deliberate union with life as will to power. Despite the major metaphysical differences between the respective frameworks of Shaftesbury's and Nietzsche's thought, there are further striking parallels between central aspects of their philosophies of art which merit a comparative study. (1) Both thinkers regard the world as a work of art which ‘is’ only insofar as it is a continuous Becoming, a ceaseless forming and creating. (2) Shaftesbury and Nietzsche both look to the creative process in order to explain the world and maintain that the processes of creation are determined by inward forces. (3) Despite the neo-Platonic character of his thought, Shaftesbury's immanentist aesthetic involves an abolishment of the dualism between a divine non-sensuous realm and the sensuous sphere of nature, a stance which provides a profitable point of comparison not only with Nietzsche's claim that his philosophy constitutes an ‘inverted platonism’ (cf. Die Unschuld des Werdens, Nietzsche, Der Nachlass, ed. A. Baemler (Alfred Kröner, 1978) sec. 79) but also with Heidegger's discussion of Nietzsche's overturning of the platonic dualism. (4) Shaftesbury and Nietzsche similarly strive to justify existence in terms of what it is as an unending creative and forming Becoming. Many of Shaftesbury's views on aesthetics may be found in ‘The Moralists’, Part III in the book Characteristics, ed. J. M. Robertson (Grant Richards, 1900) Vol. II. An excellent synopsis of Shaftesbury's philosophy of art may be found in Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1961) and in his The Platonic Renaissance in England, (Nelson, 1953).
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