The Life of the Mind (61 page)

Heidegger's strictly phenomenological analyses of the Will in volume I of his
Nietzsche
closely follow his early analyses of the self in
Being and Time,
except that the Will takes the place ascribed to Care in the earlier work. We read: "Self-observation and self-examination never bring the self to light or show how we are ourselves. But by willing, and also by nilling, we do just that; we appear in a light that itself is lighted by the act of willing. To will always means: to bring oneself to one's self.... Willing, we encounter ourselves as who we are authentically..."
⁶⁵
Hence, "to will is essentially to will one's own self, but not a merely given self that is as it is, but the self that wants to become what it is.... The will to get away from one's self is actually an act of nilling."
⁶⁶
We shall see later that this return to the concept of the self of
Being and Time
is not without importance for the "reversal," or "change of mood," manifest in the second volume.

In the second volume, the emphasis shifts decisively from the thought of "Eternal Recurrence" to an interpretation of the Will as almost exclusively will-to-power, in the specific sense of a will to rule and dominate rather than as an expression of the life instinct. The notion of volume I, that every act of willing, by virtue of being a command, generates a counter-will
(Widerwillen)
—that is, the notion of a necessary obstacle in every act of willing, which first must overcome a non-willing—is now generalized into an inherent characteristic of every act of making. For a carpenter, for instance, the wood constitutes the obstacle "against which" he works when he forces it to become a table.
⁶⁷
This again is generalized: every object by virtue of being an "object"—and not merely a thing, independent of human evaluation, calculation, and making—is there to be overcome by a subject. The will-to-power is the culmination of the modern age's subjectivization; all of man's faculties stand under the Will's command. "The Will is to will to be master....[It is] fundamentally and exclusively: Command....In the command the one who issues the command obeys ... himself. Thus the commanding [self] is its own superior."
⁶⁸

Here the concept of the Will indeed loses the biological characteristics that play such an important role in Nietzsche's understanding of the Will as a mere symptom of the life instinct. It is in the nature of power—and no longer in the nature of life's superabundance and surplus—to spread and expand: 'Tower exists only insofar as its power increases and insofar as [the will-to-power] commands this increase." The Will urges itself on by issuing orders; not life but "the will-to-power is the essence of power. This essence, and never a [limited] amount of power, remains the goal of the Will, inasmuch as Will can exist only in relation to power. This is why the Will necessarily needs this goal. It is also why a terror of the void essentially permeates all willing.... Seen from the perspective of the Will...[nothingness] is the extinction of the Will in not-willing.... Hence...[quoting Nietzsche] our will 'would rather will nothingness than not will.'...'To will nothingness' here means
to will ... the negation, the destruction, the laying waste
" [italics added].
⁶⁹

Heidegger's last word on this faculty concerns the Will's destructiveness, just as Nietzsche's last word concerned its "creativity" and superabundance. This destructiveness manifests itself in the Will's obsession with the future, which forces men into
oblivion.
In order to will the future in the sense of being the future's master, men must forget and finally destroy the past. From Nietzsche's discovery that the Will cannot "will backwards," there follow not only frustration and resentment, but also the positive, active will to annihilate what was. And since everything that is real has "become," that is, incorporates a past, this destructiveness ultimately relates to everything that is.

Heidegger sums it up in
What Is Called Thinking?:
"Faced with what was,' willing no longer has anything to say.... The 'it was' resists the Will's willing ... the 'it was' is revolting and contrary to the Will.... But by means of this revulsion, the contrary takes root within willing itself. Willing ... suffers from it—that is, the Will suffers from itself ... from ... the by-gone, the past. But what is past stems from the passing.... Thus the Will itself wills passing.... The Will's revulsion against every 'it was' appears as
the will to make everything pass away,
hence to will that everything deserve passing away. The revulsion arising in the Will is then the will against everything that
passes—everything,
that is, that comes to be out of a coming-to-be, and that
endures
" (italics added).
⁷⁰

In this radical understanding of Nietzsche, the Will is essentially destructive, and it is against that destructiveness that Heidegger's original reversal pits itself. Following this interpretation, technology's very nature is the will to will, namely, to subject the whole world to its domination and rulership, whose natural end can only be total destruction. The alternative to such rulership is "letting be," and letting-be as an activity is thinking that obeys the call of Being. The mood pervading the letting-be of thought is the opposite of the mood of purposiveness in willing; later, in his re-interpretation of the "reversal," Heidegger calls it "
Gelassenheit,
" a calmness that corresponds to letting-be and that "prepares us" for "a thinking that is not a willing."
⁷¹
This thinking is "beyond the distinction between activity and passivity" because it is beyond the "domain of the Will," that is, beyond the category of causality, which Heidegger, in agreement with Nietzsche, derives from the willing ego's experience of causing effects, hence from an illusion produced by consciousness.

The insight that thinking and willing are not just two different faculties of the enigmatic being called "man," but are opposites, came to both Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is their version of the deadly conflict that occurs when the two-in-one of consciousness, actualized in the silent dialogue between me and myself, changes its original harmony and friendship into an ongoing conflict between will and counter-will, between command and resistance. But we have found testimony to this conflict throughout the history of the faculty.

The difference between Heidegger's position and those of his predecessors lies in this: the mind of man, claimed by Being in order to transpose into language the truth of Being, is subject to a
History
of Being
(Seinsgeschichte),
and this History determines whether men respond to Being in terms of willing or in terms of thinking. It is the
History
of Being, at work behind the backs of acting men, that, like Hegel's World Spirit, determines human destinies and reveals itself to the thinking ego if the latter can overcome willing and actualize the letting-be.

At first glance, this may look like another, perhaps a bit more sophisticated, version of Hegel's ruse of reason, Kant's ruse of nature, Adam Smith's invisible hand, or divine Providence, all forces invisibly guiding the ups and downs of human affairs to a predetermined goal: freedom in Hegel, eternal peace in Kant, harmony between the contradictory interests of a market economy in Adam Smith, ultimate salvation in Christian theology. The notion itself—namely, that the actions of men are inexplicable by themselves and can be
understood
only as the work of some hidden purpose or some hidden actor—is much older. Plato could already "imagine that each of us living creatures is a puppet made by gods, possibly as a plaything, possibly with some more serious purpose," and imagine that what we take for causes, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, are but "the strings by which we are worked."
⁷²

We hardly need a demonstration of historical influences to comprehend the stubborn resiliency of the idea, from Plato's airy fiction to Hegel's mental construct—which was the result of an unprecedented re-thinking of world history that deliberately eliminated from the factual record everything "merely" factual as accidental and non-consequential. The simple truth is that no man can act alone, even though his motives for action may be certain designs, desires, passions, and goals of his own. Nor can we ever achieve anything wholly according to plan (even when, as
archōn,
we successfully lead and initiate and hope that our helpers and followers will execute what we begin), and this combines with our consciousness of being
able
to cause an effect to give birth to the notion that the actual outcome must be due to some alien, supernatural force which, undisturbed by human plurality, has provided for the end result. The fallacy is similar to the fallacy Nietzsche detected in the notion of a necessary "progress" of Mankind. To repeat: " 'Mankind' does not advance, it does not even exist.... [But since] time marches forward, we'd like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward—that the development is one that moves forward."
⁷³

Certainly Heidegger's
Seinsgeschichte
cannot fail to remind us of Hegel's World Spirit. The difference, however, is decisive. When Hegel saw "the World Spirit on horseback" in Napoleon at Jena, he knew that Napoleon himself was unconscious of being the incarnation of the Spirit, knew that he acted out of the usual human mixture of short-term goals, desires, and passions; for Heidegger, however, it is Being itself that,
forever changing,
manifests itself in the thinking of the actor so that
acting and thinking
coincide. "If to act means to give a hand to the essence of Being, then thinking is actually acting. That is, preparing [building an abode] for the essence of Being in the midst of entities by which Being transposes itself and its essence into speech. Without speech, mere doing lacks the dimension in which it can become effective and follow directions. Speech, however, is never a simple expression of thinking, feeling, or willing. Speech is the original dimension in which the human being is able to respond to Being's claim and, responding, belong to it. Thinking is the actualization of that original correspondence."
⁷⁴

In terms of a mere reversal of viewpoints, one would be tempted to see in Heidegger's position the justification of Valéry's aphoristic reversal of Descartes: "'
L'homme pense, donc je suis'—dit Vunivers
" ("Man thinks, therefore I am, says the universe").
⁷⁵
The interpretation is indeed tempting since Heidegger would certainly agree with Valéry's "
Les événe-ments ne sont que Fécume des choses
" ("Events are but the foam of things"). He would not agree, however, with Valéry's assumption that what really is—the underlying reality whose surface is mere foam—is the stable reality of a substantial, ultimately unchanging Being. Nor, either before or after the "reversal," would he have agreed that "the new is by definition the perishable part of things"
("Le nouveau est, par définition, la partie périssable des choses").
⁷⁶

Ever since he re-interpreted the reversal, Heidegger has insisted on the continuity of his thought, in the sense that
Being and Time
was a necessary preparation that already contained in a provisional way the main direction of his later work. And indeed this is true to a large extent, although it is liable to de-radicalize the later reversal and the consequences obviously implicit in it for the future of philosophy. Let us begin with the most startling consequences, to be found in the later work itself, to wit, first, the notion that solitary thinking in itself constitutes the only relevant action in the factual record of history, and second, that thinking is the same as thanking (and not just for etymological reasons). Having done this, we shall try to follow the development of certain key terms in
Being and Time
and see what happens to them. The three key terms I propose are Care, Death, and Self.

Care
—in
Being and Time,
the fundamental mode of man's existential concern with his own being—does not simply disappear in favor of the Will, with which it obviously shares a certain number of characteristics; it changes its function radically. It all but loses its relatedness to itself, its concern with man's own being, and, along with that, the mood of "anxiety" caused when the world into which man is "thrown" reveals itself as "nothingness" for a being that knows its own mortality—'"
das nackte Dass im Nichts der Welt,
" "the naked That in the Nothingness of the world."
⁷⁷

The emphasis shifts from
Sorge
as worry or concern with itself to
Sorge
as
taking
care, and this not of itself but of Being. Man who was the "caretaker"
(Platzhalter)
of Nothing and therefore open to the disclosure of Being now becomes the "guardian" (
Hiiter
) or "shepherd" (
Hirte
) of Being, and his speech offers Being its abode.

Death,
on the other hand, which originally was actual for man only as the utmost possibility—"if it were actualized [for instance, in suicide], man obviously would lose the possibility he has of existing in the face of death"
⁷⁸
—now becomes the "shrine" that "collects," "protects," and "salvages" the essence of mortals, who are mortals not because their life has an end but because to-be-dead still belongs to their innermost being.
⁷⁹
(These strange-sounding descriptions refer to well-known experiences, testified to, for instance, by the old adage
de mortuis nil nisi honum.
It is not the dignity of death as such that puts us in awe but, rather, the curious change from life to death that overtakes the personality of the dead. In remembrance—the way living mortals think of their dead—it is as though all non-essential qualities perished with the disappearance of the body in which they were incarnated. The dead are "enshrined" in remembrance like precious relics of themselves.)