The Life of the Mind (60 page)

But the point is that Nietzsche, who knew and estimated Epictetus very highly, did not stop with the discovery of the Will's mental omnipotence. He embarked on a construction of the given world that would make sense, be a fitting abode for a creature whose "strength of will [is great enough] to do without meaning in things...[who] can endure to live in a meaningless world."
⁴⁶
"Eternal Recurrence" is the term for this final redeeming thought inasmuch as it proclaims the "
Innocence
of all Becoming"
(die Unschuld des Werdens)
and with that its inherent aimlessness and purposelessness, its freedom from guilt and responsibility.

"Innocence of Becoming" and "Eternal Recurrence" are not drawn from a mental faculty; they are rooted in the indisputable
fact
that we indeed are "thrown" into the world (Heidegger), that no one has asked us if we wished to be here or wished to be as we are. For all we know or can ever know, "no one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment." Hence, the basic insight into the essence of Being is "that
there are no moral facts
at all," an insight Nietzsche, as he said, "was the first to formulate." Its consequences are very great, not only because Christianity and its concept of a " 'moral world-order infects the innocence of becoming by means of 'punishment' and 'guilt' [and therefore can be seen as] a metaphysics of the hangman," but because, with the elimination of intent and purpose, of somebody who can "be held responsible," causality itself is eliminated; nothing can be "traced back" to a cause once the
"causa prima"
is eliminated.
⁴⁷

With the elimination of cause and effect, there is no longer any sense in the rectilinear structure of Time whose past is always understood as the cause of the present, whose present is the tense of intention and preparation of our projects for the future, and whose future is the outcome of both. Besides, that time construct crumbles under the weight of the no less factual insight that "Everything passes," that the future brings only what
will have been,
and therefore that everything that is "deserves to pass away."
⁴⁸
Just as every I-will, in its identification with the commanding part of the two-in-one, triumphantly anticipates an I-can, so expectation, the mood with which the Will affects the soul, contains within itself the melancholy of an
and-this-too-will-have-been,
the foreseeing of the future's past, which reasserts the Past as the dominant tense of Time. The only redemption from this all-devouring Past is the thought that everything that passes returns, that is, a cyclical time construct that makes Being swing within itself.

And is not Life itself construed so, does not one day follow upon the next, season succeed season by repeating itself in eternal sameness? Is not this world view much "truer" to reality as we know it than the world view of the philosophers? "If the motion of the world aimed at a final state, that state would have been reached. The sole fundamental fact, however, is that it does not aim at a final state; and every philosophy and scientific hypothesis ... which necessitates such a final state is
refuted
by this fundamental fact. I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; Becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing); the present must absolutely not be justified by reference to a future, nor the past by reference to the present...." Nietzsche then summarizes: "1. Becoming does not aim at a
final state,
does not flow into "being.' 2. Becoming is not a merely
apparent state;
perhaps the world of beings is mere appearance. 3. Becoming is of [equal value at] every moment ... in other words, it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it ... is lacking.
The total value of the world cannot be evaluated."
⁴⁹

In the turmoil of aphorisms, remarks, and thought-experiments that constitute the posthumous collection entitled
The Will to Power
the importance of this last passage, which I have quoted at some length, is difficult to spot. Judging by internal evidence, I am inclined to think of it as Nietzsche's last word on the subject; and this last word clearly spells a repudiation of the Will and the willing ego, whose internal experiences have misled thinking men into assuming that there are such things as cause and effect, intention and goal, in reality. The superman is one who has overcome these fallacies, whose insights are strong enough either to resist the promptings of the Will or to turn his own will around, redeem it from all oscillations, quiet it to that stillness where 'looking away" is "the only negation,"
⁵⁰
because nothing is left but the "wish to be a Yes-sayer," to bless everything there is for being, "to bless and say Amen."
⁵¹

Neither the word "willing" nor the word "thinking" occurs in Heidegger's early work before the so-called reversal
(Kehre)
or "turn-about" that took place in the mid-thirties; and Nietzsche's name is nowhere mentioned in
Being and Time.
⁵²
Hence Heidegger's position on the faculty of the Will, culminating in his passionate insistence on willing "
not
to will"—which of course has nothing to do with the Will's oscillation between
velle
and
nolle,
willing and nilling—arises directly from his extremely careful investigation of Nietzsche's work, to which, after 1940, he returns time and again. Still, the two volumes of his
Nietzsche,
which were published in 1961, are in certain respects the most telling; they contain lecture courses from the years 1936 to 1940, that is, the very years when the "reversal" actually occurred and therefore had not yet been subjected to Heidegger's own interpretations. If in reading these two volumes one ignores Heidegger's later re-interpretation (which came out before the
Nietzsche),
one is tempted to date the "reversal" as a concrete autobiographical event precisely between volume I and volume II; for, to put it bluntly, the first volume explicates Nietzsche by going along with him, while the second is written in a subdued but unmistakable polemical tone. This important change of mood has been observed, as far as I know, only by J. L. Mehta, in his excellent book on
The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
,
⁵³
and less decisively by Walter Schulz. The relevance of this dating seems evident: what the reversal originally turns against is primarily the will-to-power. In Heidegger's understanding, the will to rule and to dominate is a kind of original sin, of which he found himself guilty when he tried to come to terms with his brief past in the Nazi movement.

When he later announced publicly—for the first time in the
Letter on Humanism
(1949)
⁵⁴
—that there had been a "reversal," for years in fact, in a larger sense, he had been recasting his views on the whole of history from the Greeks to the present and focusing primarily not on the Will but on the relation between Being and Man. Originally during those years, the "reversal" had been a turning against the self-assertion of man (as proclaimed in the famous speech delivered when he became rector of Freiburg University in 1933
⁵⁵
), symbolically incarnated in Prometheus, "the first philosopher," a figure nowhere else mentioned in his work. Now it turned against the alleged subjectivism of
Being and Time
and the book's primary concern with man's existence, his mode of being.

To put the matter in a rough and oversimplified way: while Heidegger had always been concerned with "the question of the meaning of Being," his first, "provisional," goal had been to analyze the being of man as the only entity that can ask the question because it touches his own being; hence, when man raises the question What is Being?, he is thrown back upon himself. But when, thrown back upon himself, he raises the question Who is Man?, it is Being, on the contrary, that moves into the foreground; it is Being, as now emerges, that bids man to think. ("Heidegger was forced to move away from the original approach of
Being and Time;
instead of seeking to approach Being through the openness and transcendence inherent in man, he now tries to define man in terms of Being."
⁵⁶
) And the first demand Being makes of man is to think out the "ontological difference," that is, the difference between the sheer isness of beings and the Being of this isness itself, the Being of Being. As Heidegger himself states it in the
Letter on Humanism.:
"To put it simply, thinking is thinking of Being, where the 'of has a double meaning. Thinking is of Being, insofar as, being brought to pass by Being, it belongs to Being. At the same time it is thinking of Being insofar as, belonging to Being, it listens to Being."
⁵⁷
Man's listening transforms the silent claim of Being into speech, and "language is the language of Being as the clouds are the clouds of the sky."
⁵⁸

The "reversal" in this sense has two important consequences that have hardly anything to do with the repudiation of the Will. First, Thinking is no longer "subjective." To be sure, without being thought by man, Being would never become manifest; it depends upon man, who offers it an abode: "language is the abode of Being." But what man thinks does not arise from his own spontaneity or creativity; it is the obedient response to the command of Being. Second, the entities in which the world of appearances is given to man distract man from Being, which hides behind them—very much as the trees hide the forest that nevertheless, seen from outside, is constituted by them.

In other words, "Oblivion of Being"
(Seinsvergessenheit)
belongs to the very nature of the relation between Man and Being. Heidegger now is no longer content to eliminate the willing ego in favor of the thinking ego—maintaining, for instance, as he still does in the
Nietzsche,
that the Will's insistence on the future forces man into
oblivion
of the past, that it robs thinking of its foremost activity, which is
an-denken,
remembrance: "The Will has never owned the beginning, has left and abandoned it essentially through forgetting."
⁵⁹
Now he desubjectivizes thinking itself, robs it of its Subject, man as a thinking being, and transforms it into a function of Being, in which all "efficacy rests ... flowing from there towards the essent
[das Seiende
]," thereby determining the actual course of the world. "Thinking, in turn, lets itself be claimed by Being [that is the actual meaning of what happens through the es-sents], in order to give utterance to the truth of Being."
⁶⁰
This re-interpretation of the "reversal," rather than the reversal itself, determines the entire development of Heidegger's late philosophy. Contained in a nutshell in the
Brief über den Humanismus,
which interprets
Being and Time
as a necessary anticipation of and preparation for the "reversal," it centers on the notion that to think, namely, "to say the unspoken word of Being," is the only authentic "doing"
(Tun)
of man; in it, the "History of Being"
(Seinsgeschichte),
transcending all mere human acts and superior to them, actually comes to pass. This thinking reminisces insofar as it hears the voice of Being in the utterances of the great philosophers of the past; but the past comes to it from the opposite direction, so that the "descent"
(Abstieg)
into the past coincides with the patient, thoughtful expectation of the arrival of the future, the "
ave-nant."
⁶¹

We start with the original reversal. Even in the first
Nietzsche
volume, where Heidegger carefully follows Nietzsche's descriptive characterizations of the Will, he uses what later appears as the "ontological difference": the distinction between the Being of Being and the isness
(Seiendheit)
of entities. According to this interpretation, the will-to-power signifies the isness, the chief mode in which everything that is actually
is.
In this aspect, the Will is understood as a mere function of the life process—"world comes into being through the carrying out of the life process"
⁶²
—whereas "Eternal Recurrence" is seen as Nietzsche's term for the Being of Being, through which time's transient nature is eliminated and Becoming, the medium of the will-to-power's purposiveness, receives the seal of Being. "Eternal Recurrence" is the most affirmative thought because it is the negation of the negation. In that perspective, the will-to-power is no more than a biological urge that keeps the wheel rolling and is transcended by a Will that goes beyond the mere life instinct in saying "Yes" to Life. In Nietzsche's view, as we saw, "Becoming has no goal; it does not end in 'Being.'...Becoming is of equal value at every moment: ...in other words, it has no value, for there is nothing by which value could be measured and in respect to which the word 'value' would make sense."
⁶³

As Heidegger sees it, the real contradiction in Nietzsche is not due to the seeming opposition between the will-to-power, which, being goal-directed, presupposes a rectilinear time concept, and Eternal Recurrence, with its cyclical time concept. It lies, rather, in Nietzsche's "transvaluation of values," which, according to Nietzsche himself, could make sense only in the framework of the will-to-power but which he nevertheless saw as the ultimate consequence of the "Eternal Recurrence" thought. In other words, in the last analysis, it was the will-to-power, "in itself value-positing," that determined Nietzsche's philosophy of the Will. The will-to-power finally "evaluates" an eternally recurring Becoming as the sole way out of the meaninglessness of life and world, and this transposition is not only a return to "the subjectivity of which the distinctive mark is evaluative thinking,"
⁶⁴
but also suffers from the same lack of radicalism characteristic of Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, which, by putting things upside down or downside up, still keeps intact the categorical framework in which such reversals can operate.