Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position By Martin Heidegger Translated by David Farrell Krell Nietzsche, Volume Two, Chapter 26, pp. 198-208 . . -------In the foregoing we have attempted to portray Nietzsche's fundamental thought - the eternal return of the same - in its essential import, in its domain, and in the mode of thinking that is expressly proper to the thought itself, that is, the mode demanded by the thought as such. In that way we have laid the foundation for our own efforts to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in Western philosophy. The effort to circumscribe Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position indicates that we are examining his philosophy in terms of the position assigned it by the history of Western philosphy hitherto. At the same time, this means that we are expressly transposing Nietzsche's philosophy to that sole position in which it can and most unfold the forces of thought that are most proper to it, and this in the context of inescapable confrontation with prior Western philosophy as a whole. The fact that in the course of our presentation of the doctrine of return we have actually come to recognize the region of thought that must necessarily and preeminently take precedence in every fruitful reading and appropriating of Nietzschean thought may well be an important gain; yet when viewed in terms of the essential task, namely the characterization of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, such a gain remains merely provisional. We shall be able to define Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position in its principal traits if we ponder the response he gives tot he question concerning the constitution of being and being's way to be. Now, we know that Nietzsche offers two answers with regard to being as a whole: being as a whole is will top power, and being as a whole is eternal occurrence of the same. yet philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy have up to now been unable to grasp these two simultaneous answers as answers, indeed as answers that necessarily cohere, because they have not recognized the questions to which these answers pertain; that is to say, prior interpretations have not explicitly developed these questions on the basis of a thoroughgoing articulation of the guiding question. If, on the contrary, we approach the matter in terms of the developed guiding question, it becomes apparent that the word "is" in these two major statements - being as a whole is will to power, and being as a whole is eternal recurrence of the same - in each case suggests something different. To say that being as a whole "is" eternal recurrence of the same means that being as a whole is, as being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same. The determination "will to power" replies to the question of being with respect to the latter's constitution; the determination "eternal recurrence of the same" replies to the question of being with its respect to its way to be. Yet constitution and manner of being do cohere as determination of the beingness of beings. Accordingly, in Nietzsche's philosophy will to power and eternal recurrence of the same belong together. It is thus right from the start a misunderstanding - better, an outright mistake - of metaphysical proportions when commentators try to play off will to power against eternal recurrence of the same, and especially when they exclude the latter altogether from metaphysical determinations of being. In truth, the coherence of both must be grasped. Such coherence is itself essentially defined on the basis of the coherence of the constitution of beings also specifies in each case their way to be - indeed, as their proper ground. What fundamental metaphysical position does Nietzsche's philosophy assume for itslef on the basis of its response to the guiding question within Western philosphy, that is to say, within metaphysics? Nietzsche's philosphy is the end of metaphysics, inasmuch as it reverts to the very commencement of Greek thought, taking up such thought in a way that is peculiar to Nietzsche's philosophy alone. In this way Nietzsche's philosophy closes the ring that is formed by the very course of inquiry into being as such as as a whole. yet to what extent does Nietzsche's thinking revert to the commencement? When we realize this question we must be clear about one point at the very outset: Nietzsche by no means recovers the philosphy of the commencement in its pristine form. Rather, here it is purely a matter of the reemergence of the essential fundamental positions of the commencement in a transformed configuration, in such a way for these positions interlock. What are the decisive fundamental positions of the commencement? In other words, what sorts of answers are given to the as yet undeveloped guiding question, the question as to what being is? The one answer -roughly speaking, it is the answer of Parmenides - tells us that being is. An odd sort of answer, no doubt, yet a very deep one, since that very response determines for the first time and for all thinkers to come, including Nietzsche, the meaning of is and Being - permanence and presence, that is, the eternal present. The other answer - roughly speaking, that of Heraclitus - tells us that being becomes. The being is in being by virtue of its permanent becoming, its self-unfolding and eventual dissolution. To what extent is Nietzsche's thinking the end? That is to say, how does it stretch back to both these fundamental determinations of being in such a way that they come to interlock? Precisely to the extent that Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent; and that it is in perpetual creation and destruction. Yet being is both of these, not in an extrinsic way, as one beside another; rather, being is in its very ground perpetual creation (Becoming), while as creation it needs what is fixed. Creation needs what is fixed, first, in order to overcome it, and second, ion order to have something that has yet to be fixated, something that enables the creative to advance beyond itself and be transfigured. The essence of being is Becoming, but what becomes is and has Being only in creative transfiguration. What is and what becomes are fused in the fundamental thought that what becomes is inasmuch as in creation it becomes being and is becoming. Both such becoming-a-being becomes a being that comes-to-be, and does so in the perpetual transformation of what has become firmly fixed and intractable to something made firm in a liberating transfiguration. * * The text is extraordinarily difficult to unravel.Dieses Seiendwerden aber wird zum werdenden Seienden im standigen Werden des Festgewordenen als eines Erstarrten zum Festgemachten, als der befreienden Verklarung. The oxymorons of this highly involuted sentence dramatize the inevitable petrifaction of Becoming in a metaphysics of Being. Only as permanence of presence can Becoming come to be. The wording of the sentence in Heidegger's original manuscript (1937) varies only slightly from the 1961 Neske text. yet a series of energetic lines draws the word befreienden, "liberating," into the sentence, as though to break up all such petrifaction. For the liberating trasnsfiguration of Becoming is what Heidegger elsewhere calls the most intrinsic will of Nietzschean thinking. Nietzsche once wrote, at the time when the thought of return first loomed on his horizon, during the years 1881-82 (XII, 66, number 124): "Let us imprint the emblem of eternity on our life!" The phrase means: let us introduce an eternalization to ourselves as beings, and hence to beings as a whole; let us introduce the transfiguration of what becomes as something that becomes being; and let us do this in such a way that the eternalization arises from being itself, originating for being, standing in being. This fundamental metaphysical demand - that is, a demand that grapples with the guiding question of metaphysics - is expressed several years later in a lengthy not entitled "Recapitulation," the title suggesting that the note in just a few sentences provides a resume of the most important aspects of Nietzsche's philosphy. (See The Will to Power, number 617, presumably from early 1886.)* Nietzsche's "Recapitulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power." The sense is not that one must brush aside and replace Becoming as the impermanent - for impermanence is what Becoming implies - with being as the permanent. The sense is that one must shape Becoming as being in such a way that as becoming, it is preserved, has subsistence, being, is the supreme will to power. In such recoining the will to power comes to prevail most purely in its essence. * As the note on page 19 Volume I of this series relates, Heidegger employs the "Recapitulation" note (WM, 617) at crucial junctures throughout his Nietzsche lectures. See, for example NI, 466 and 656; NII, 288 and 339; and p. 228, below. Yet the title "Recapitulation" stems not from Nietzsche himself but from his assistant and later editor Heinrich Kuselitz (Peter Gast). Furthermore, the sentences from this long note which Heidegger neglects to cite by no means corroborate the use he makes of it. The whole of Nietzsche's sketch (now dated between the end of 1886 and spring of 1887), as it appears in CM, Mp XVII 3b (54), reads as follows: To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power. Twofold falsification, one by the senses, the other by the mind, in order to preserve a world of being, of perdurance, of equivalence, etc. That everything recurs is the closes approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation. The condemnation of and dissatisfaction with whatever becomes derives from values that are attributable to being: after such a world of Being had first been invented. The metamorphoses of being (body, God, ideas, laws of nature, formulas, etc.) "Being" as semblance; inversion of values: semblance was that which conferred value - Knowledge itself impossible within Becoming, how then is knowledge possible? As error concerning itself, as will to power, as will to deception. Becoming as invention volition self-denial, the overcoming of oneself not a subject but a doing, establishing creative, not "causes and effects." Art as the will to overcome Becoming, as "eternalization," but shortsighted, depending on perspective repeating a small scale, as it were, the tendency of the whole. What all life exhibits, to be observed as a reduced formula for the universal tendency: hence a new grip on the concept "life" as will to power. Instead of "cause and effect," the mutual struggle of things that become, often with the absorption of the opponent; the number of things in becoming not constant. Inefficacy of the old ideals for interpreting the whole of occurrence, once one has recognized their animal origins and utility; all of them, furthermore, contradicting life. Inefficacy of the mechanistic theory - gives the impression of meaninglessness. The entire idealism of humanity hitherto is about to turn into nihilism - into belief in absolute worthlessness, that is to say, senselessness . . . Annihilation of ideals, the new desert, the new arts, by means of which we can endure it, we amphibians. Presupposition: bravery, patience, no "turning back" not hurrying forward. N.B., Zarathustra, always parodying prior values, on the basis of his won abundance. What is this recoining, in which whatever becomes comes to be being? It is the reconfiguration of what becomes in terms of its supreme possibilities, a reconfiguration in which what becomes is transfigured and attains subsistence in its very dimensions and domains. This recoining is a creating. To create, in the sense of creation out beyond oneself, is most intrinsically this: to stand in the moment of decision, in which what has prevailed hitherto, our endowment, is directed toward a projected task. When it is so directed, the endowment is preserved. The "momentary" character of creation is the essence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being - will to power in its supreme configuration - is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. the will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the \way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility is eternal recurrence of the same. The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment which bears the title "Recapitulation." After the statement we have already cited - "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being - that is the supreme will to power" - we soon read the following sentence: "That everything reverts is the closes approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation." It would scarcely be possible to say in a more lucid fashion, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought which Nietzsche's philosphy things without cease. (During our discussion of the plans for Nietzsche's magnum opus (see page 160, above), several students noted that whereas sketches for such plans from the final year of Nietzsche's creative life (1888) mention Dionysos in the titles of their projected fourth and final books, our lecture course up to now has said nothing about this god. Nevertheless, we ought to pay close attention to the phrases that follow the god's name in these titles: "philosophy of eternal return," or simply "philosophos." Such phrases suggest that what the words Dionysos and Dionysian mean to Nietzsche will be heard and understood only if the "eternal return of the same" is thought. In turn, that which eternally recurs as the same and in such wise is, that is, perpetually presences, has the ontological constitution of "will to power." The mythic name Dionysos will become an epithet that has been thought through in the sense intended by Nietzsche the thinker only when we try to think the coherence of "will to power" and "eternal return of the same"; and that means only when we seek those determinations of Being which from the outset of Greek thought guide all thinking about being as such and as a whole. (Two texts which appeared several years ago treat the matters of Dionysos and the Dionysian: Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, 1933; and Karl Reinhardt, "Nietzsche's 'Plaint of Ariadne,'" in the journal Die Antike, 1935, published separately in 1936.)* * The paragraphs contained within parentheses appear as an indented extract in the Neske edition as they do here. Heidegger's original manuscript from the summer of 1937 does not show these paragraphs. Surprisingly, there is no extant, Abschrift or typescript of this course; nor is the typescript that went to the printer in 1961 available for inspection. As a result, the date of the passage remains uncertain. My own surmise is that Heigegger added the note not long after the semester drew to a close, the reference to students questions and to those tow works on Dionysos that had "recently" been published make it highly unlikely that the note was added as late as 1960-61. The works Heidegger refers us to are of course still available - and are still very much wroth reading. Walter F. Otto, Dionysos: Mythos and Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1933): Reinhardt's "Nietzsche's Klage der Ariadne" appears now in Karl Reinhardt, Vermachtrus der Antike Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophie und Geschichtsschreiburg, edited by Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandernhock & Ruprecht, 1960), pp. 310-33. See note 20 of the Analysis, p. 275, for further discussion of the Reinhardt article. Nietzche conjoins in one both of the fundamental determinations of being that emerge from the commencement of Western philosophy to wit, being as becoming and being as permanence. that "one" is his most essential thought - the eternal recurrence of the same. Yet can we designate Nietzsche's way of grappling with the commencement of Western philosophy as an end? Is it not rather a reawakening of the commencement? Is it not therefore itself a commencement and hence the very opposite of an end? It is nonetheless the case that Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of Western philosophy. For what is decisive is not that the fundamental determinations of the commencement are conjoined and that Nietzsche's thinking stretches back to the commencement; what is metaphysically essential it the way in which these things transpire. The question is whether Nietzsche reverts to the incipient commencement, to the commencement as a commencing. And here our answer must be: no he does not. Neither Nietzsche nor any thinker prior to him - even and especially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel - revert to the incipient commencement. Rather, they invariably apprehend the commencement in the sole light of a philosophy in decline form it, a philosophy that arrests the commencement - to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail Nietzsche himself quite early characterizes his philosphy as inverted Platonism; yet the inversion does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic position. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic position, Nietzsche's inversion represents the entrenchment of that position. What remains essential, however, is the following: when Nietzsche's metaphysical thinking reverts to the commencement, the circle closes. yet inasmuch as it is the already terminated commencement and not the incipient one that prevails there, the circle itself grows inflexible, loses whatever of the commencement it once had. When the circle closes in this way it no longer releases any possibilities for essential inquiry into the guiding question. Metaphysics - treatment of the guiding question - is at an end. That seems a bootless, comfortless insight, a conclusion which like a dying tone signals ultimate cessation. Yet such is not the case. Because Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position is the end of metaphysics in the designated sense, it performs the grandest and most profound gathering - that is, accomplishment - of all the essential fundamental positions in Western philosophy since Plato and in the light of Platonism. It does so form within a fundamental position remains an actual, actuating fundamental metaphysical position only if it in turn is developed in all its essential forces and regions of dominion in the direction of its counterpositon. For thinking that looks beyond it. Nietzsche's philosophy, which is inherently a turning against what lies behind it, must itslef come to be a forward-looking counterposition. Yet since Nietzsche's fundamental position in Western metaphysics constitutes the end of that metaphysics, it can be the counterposition. for our other commencement only if the later adopts a questioning stance vis-a-vis the initial commencement - as one which in its proper originality is only now commencing. After everything we have said, the questioning intended here can only be the unfolding of a more original inquiry. Such questioning must be the unfolding of the prior, all-determining, and commanding question of philosphy, t he guiding question, "What is being?" out of itself and out beyond itself. Nietzsche himself once chose a phrase to designate what we are calling his fundamental metaphysical position, a phrase that is often cited and is readily taken as a way to characterize his philosphy armor fati, love of necessity. (See the Epilogue to Nietzsche contra Wagner; VIII, 206).* Yet the phrase expresses Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position only when we understand the two words armor and fatum - and, above all, their conjunction - in terms of Nietzsche's ownmost thinking, only when we avoid mixing our fortuitous and familiar notions into it. * The text Heidegger refers us to begins as follows: I have often asked myself if I am not more profoundly indebted to the most difficult years of my life than to any of the others. What my innermost nature instructs me is that all necessity - viewed from the heights, in terms of an economy on a grand scale - is also what is inherently useful: one should not merely put up with it, one should love it. . . Armor fati: that is my innermost nature. Nietzsche repeats the formula twice in Ecce Homo (II, 10, and III, "Der Fall Wagner," 4); the first time as the ultimate explanation of his "discernment": "My formula for greatness in a human being is armor fati - love of necessity: that one does not will to have anything different, neither forward nor backward nor into all eternity. Not merely to bear necessity, though must less to cloak it - all Idealism is mendacity in the face of necessity - but to love." Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (II, 10 and III, "Der Fall Wagner," 4) Nietzsche had first cited the formula six years earlier, at the outset of Book IV of The Gay Science, as the very essence of affirmation: "I want to learn better how to see the necessity in things as what is beautiful - in that way I shall become one of those who make things beautiful. Armor fati: let this be my love from now on!" And he had written to Franz Overbeck, also in 1882, that he was possessed of "a fatalistic trust in God" which he preferred to call armor fati; and he boasted, "I would stick my head down a lion's throat, not to mention . . . " The fullest statement concerning amor fati, however appears as WM, 104) (CM, W II 7a (32), from spring-summer, 1888) Although the note as a whole merits reprinting, and rereading, the following extract contains the essential lines. Nietzsche explains that his "experimental philosophy" aims to advance beyond nihilism to the very opposite of nihilism. "to a Dionysian yes-saying to the world as it is, without reduction, exception, or selection; it wants eternal circulation - the same things, the same logic and dialogic of implication. Supreme state to which a philosopher may attain; taking a stand in Dionysian fashion on behalf of existence. My formula for this is armor fati. Amor - love - is to be understood as will, the will that wants what ever it loves to be what it is in its essence. The supreme will of this kind, the most expansive and decisive will, is the will as transfiguration. Such a will erects and exposes what it wills in its essence to the supreme possibilities of its Being. Fatum - necessity - is to be understood, not as a fatality that is inscrutable, implacable, and overwhelming, but as that turning of need which unveils itslef in the awestruck moment as an eternity, an eternity pregnant with the Becoming of being as a whole: circulus vitiosus deus. Armor fati is the transfiguring will to belong to what is most in being among beings. A fatum is unpropitious, disruptive, and devastating to the one who merely stands there and lets it whelm him. That fatum is sublime and is supreme desire, however, to one who appreciates and grasps the fact that he belongs to his fate insofar as he is a creator, that is, one who is ever resolute. His knowing this is nothing else than the knowledge which of necessity resonates in his love. The thinker inquires into being as a whole and as such; into the world as such. Thus with his very first step he always thinks out beyond the world, and so at the same time back to it. he thinks in the direction of that sphere within which a world becomes world. Whenever that sphere is not incessantly called by name, called aloud, wherever it is held silently in the most interior questioning, it is thought most purely and profoundly. For what is held in silence is genuinely preserved, as preserved it is most intimate and actual. What to common sense looks like "atheism," and has to look like ti, is at bottom the very opposite. In the same, wherever the matters of death and the nothing are treated. Being and Being alone is thought most deeply - whereas those who ostensibly occupy themselves solely with "reality" flounder in nothingness. Supremely thoughtful utterance does not consist simply in growing taciturn when it is a matter of saying what is properly to be said; it consists in saying the mater in such a way that it is named in nonsaying. The utterance of thinking is a telling silence.* Such utterance corresponds to the most profound essence of language, which has its origin in silence. As one in touch with telling silence, the thinker, in a way peculiar to him, rises to the rank of a poet, yet he remains eternally distinct form the poet, just as the poet in turn remains eternally distinct from the thinker. Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy; everything in the demigod's sphere turns to satyr-play; and everything in God's sphere turns to . . . to what? "world" perhaps? * Erschweigen, an active or telling silence, is what Heidegger elsewhere discusses under the rubric of sigetics (from the Greed sigao, to keep silent). For him it is the power "logic" of a thinking that inquires into the other commencement.