The Will to Power as Art was a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1936-1937.
Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Tr. from the German, with Notes and an Analysis, by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Originally published by Heidegger in 1954 in Vortrage und Aufsatze, Verlag Gunther Neske, Pfullingen. Krell's translation appeared in 1984, Harper & Row.
The Eternal Recurrence of the Same was a lecture course delivered at the university of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1937.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?, which also appears in Volume Two, was a lecture to the Bremen Club on 8 May 1953, printed in Vortrage und Aufsatze (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1954), pp. 101-26, added here as a supplement to the Nietzsche material.
BIOGRAPHIC: Krell's "Introduction to the Paperback Edition" is an essay on "Heidegger Nietzsche Nazism." He examines four themes particularly relevant to the question of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and National Socialsm: "Heidegger's nationalism, his call for decision, what we might call his decisionism, his protracted and difficult discussion of nihilism, and his ambivalent position vis-a-vis Nietzsche's alleged biologism." (pp. xii-xiii)
Krell offers several conclusions regarding Heidegger and his relation to Nazism:
Introduction to the Paperback Edition ix
Editor's Preface, xxix
Plan for the English Edition, xxxv
Author's Foreword to All Volumes, xxxix
VOLUME I: THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
There are 25 chapters or lectures. Selected key chapters include the following:
4. The Unity of Will to Power, Eternal Recurrence, and Revaluation, 18.
7. Will as Will to Power, 37.
8. Will as Affect, Passion, and Feeling, 44.
10. Will and Power. The Essence of Power, 59.
14. Rapture as Aesthetic State, 92.
16. Rapture as Form-engendering Force, 115.
17. The Grand Style, 124.
19. The Raging Discordance between Truth and Art, 142.
20. Truth in Platonism and Postivism. Nietzsche's Attempt to Overturn Platonism on the Basis of the Fundamental Experience of Nihilism, 151.
22. Plato's Republic: The Distance of Art (Mimesis) from Truth (Idea), 171.
23. Plato's Phaedrus: Beauty and Truth in Felicitous Discordance, 188.
24. Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism, 200.
25. The New Interpretation of Sensuousness and the Raging Discordance between Art and Truth, 211.
Appendix: A manuscript page from the lecture course, 224.
Analysis by David Farrell Krell, 230.
Glossary, 258.
VOLUME II: THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Editor's Preface, v.
PART ONE: THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
There are 26 chapters or lectures. The following have special importance:
1. The Doctrine of Eternal Return as the Fundamental Thought of Nietzsche's Metaphysics, 5.
2. Zarathustra's Animals, 45.
12. Summary Presentation of the Thought: Being as a Whole as Life and Force; the World as Chaos, 82.
22. The Configuration of the Doctrine of Return, 166.
23. The Domain of the Thought of Return: The Doctrine of Return as the Overcoming of Nihilism, 170.
24. Moment and Eternal Recurrence, 176.
26. Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position, 198.
PART TWO: WHO IS NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHUSTRA?
Analysis by David Farrel Krell, 237.
Glossary, 282.
VOLUME I: THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Heidegger intends to give an accurate reading of Nietzsche's thinking. The lectures are based on Heidegger's apparently thorough reading of the Nietzsche published work and notes. He labors to correct readings of Nietzsche that have missed the mark over the years. His approach to Nietzsche understandably dwells on the concepts of Being and Time at the heart of Heidegger's own philosophical investigations.
Heidegger says that the main structure of N.'s major work integrates his principal concepts into a unity--(1) will to power (or will AS power, as someone said it, we think, helpfully), (2) eternal recurrence of the same, and (3) the revaluation of all values in view of the development of nihilism in western history. This integration is inferred by Heidegger from documents that did not come together in a magnum opus before N. became disabled by mental illness.
In the first eleven chapters, H. explicates N.'s concept of "will to power."
Then he turns, in chapter 12, to the function of art and the development of aesthetics. H. thus leads up to his explication of N.'s concept of "the grand style" as the ultimate in art (ch. 17). It is important in the structure of H.s series of lectures to see that he give pride of place to the concept of will to power as ART.
He then establishes the discordance between art and truth (ch. 19). That leads him directly to the major contrast between the thought of Plato and the thought of Nietzsche on the relationship of art to truth (c0-24).
N. "overturns" the ideals of Platonism; this enables him to give privilege to art over truth, reversing the order of their importance found in Plato.
In overturning Platonism, H. sees Nietzsche bringing to an end the 2,000-year history of western philosophy.
VOLUME II: PART ONE: THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
In this set of lectures, Heidegger explicates Nietzsche's THOUGHT of eternal recurrence as the central, fundamental concept of his philosophy. We remember that N. is bringing to an end 2,000 years of western philosophy embedded in Christianity. He reaches for the most burdensome thought of all in order to wrench us experientially out of our conventional understanding of the nature of human experience ("Human beings are cornered in the blind alley of their own humanity." p. 99).
The thought of eternal return is one of the three points in the Nietzsche philosophy along with the will to (of) power and the revaluation of all values. Will to power is "the pervasive constitution of beings." Eternal return is "the mode of Being of beings as a whole." (p. 162) The two cannot be separated.
The thought of the eternal return of the same can occur only when one sees that "belief" petrifies life, brings it to a standstill. Knowing, creating, loving are at the center of living in the Nietzschean sense of freedom. They are impossible to achieve in the old formulations. One achieves them by thinking the thought of eternal return.
One has the thought of eternal return after one thinks of Nihilism. This evokes disgust. So does the pinched behavior of the usual human being. The will to power affords one access to the thought of eternal return. The thought of eternal return is the "thought of thoughts that leads out of disgust at Nihilism."
The thought of eternal return has no objective nature: "the truth of this thought is such only when it is OUR truth." "This thought is only when those who are thinking--are." (p. 169)
Nietzsche thus is dealing with an experiential situation, grounded in the materiality of human existence. It is impossible to know the terrible burden of the thought of eternal return until a person experiences the disgust of Nihilism. This is symbolized in the episode of the shepherd who has a snake stuck in his mouth. Zarathrustra commands him to bite the snake's head off in order to free himself. The shepherd does so and laughs, free from disgust and made over into someone who can think the most burdensome thought. In fact, the bite itself, which severs the head of the snake, IS the thought of eternal return. It is the thought that overcomes all other knowledge, which includes disgust at the contempible condition of human beings.
The right way to think the thought of eternal return has two conditions. First, one must think in terms of "the Moment" (das Augenblick). "We transpose ourselves to the temporality of action and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment." (p. 182). The Moment is that in which future and past "affront one another." (p. 98). It occurs at midday, the midpoint between past and future. That is the location of the thought of eternal return; it takes account of the coming and going that make up the eternal return. This is the "magnificent midday," the "decisive time." (p. 150)
Second, one must think the thought of eternal return "as the overcoming of nihilism." (p. 182) "We transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with nihilism." (p. 182)
So, as H. says later (p. 250): "To think return [of the eternal same] is to bite decisively into the repulsive snake of nihilism....Eternal return thus has its proper content, not in the trite assertion 'Everything turns in a circle,' but in a dual movement by which the thought recoils on the thinker and the thinker is drawn into the thought."
This requires the existential engagement of the particular person bodily; without such there is no thought, no idea. [The "eternal return of the same" thus cannot be taken as a transcendental form or idea; it must remain totally rooted in the body of the person who realizes the disgust and nausea of the nothing.]
N. dwelt on the essential nothingness as a condition to which to react. He saw chaos as a "defensive notion in consequence of which nothing can be asserted of being as a whole." (p. 92) The world becomes "something we fundamentally can not address" in totality. (pp. 94-5) Chaos is necessary but lacks order. N. expressed in a note his "profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any sort of totalized view of the world." (p. 38).
When N. said, "I no longer believe in anything," Heidegger says that he meant the following: "I will not have life come to a standstill at one possibility, one configuration; I will allow and grant life its inalienable right to become, and I shall do this by prefiguring and projecting new and higher possibilities for it, creatively conducting life out beyond itself."
In this spirit, the thought of eternal return "fixates by determining how the world essentially is--as the necessitous chaos of perpetual Becoming."
N. rejects Heraclitus's image of the ever-flowing stream with ever-new reality. Rather, he says that "I teach you redemption from the eternal flux; the river flows ever back into itself, and you are ever stepping into the selfsame river, as the selfsame ones." (p. 146)
Heidegger explicates the symbolism of Zarathustra's two animals in his loneliness. He thinks it is important to identify the teacher of the thought of eternal return in terms of the animal symbols. The eagle and the serpent are entwined with each other. Their circling and coiling together represents the circle and ring of eternal return (past future present). The eagle represents pride, the serpent discernment or wisdom. They constitute together "the basic stance of the teacher of eternal return [ie, pride] and his mode of knowledge." They speak not in propositions but "from out of their essential natures what is essential." (p. 48).
VOLUME II: PART TWO: WHO IS NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHUSTRA?
Heidegger discusses Nietzsche as the teacher of eternal return and the overman.
He explores the basic drive of N. to free human beings from revenge: That man be redeemed from revenge. (p. 220) H. explains that N. finds that the spirit of revenge until now "was man's best reflection; and wherever there was suffering, there also had to be punishment." (p. 220) But N. found that the persecution involved in such a reflection "defies and degrades." (p. 222) It is N.'s goal to overturn this 2,000-year-old formulation through a revaluation of all values. The ill will involved in revenge, according to Heidegger, interpreting N., is "ill will toward time." (p. 224), ie, toward transiency. "Transiency is that against which the will can trake no further steps, that against which its willing constantly collides....Time, as passing away, is repulsive; the will suffers on account of it." (p. 224).
N. thought that the spirit of revenge against temporality degrades all that passes away. It finally degrades all things that pass away and elevates eternity to the highest place out of revenge. N. is determined to redeem himself from this spirit of revenge and the "eternity" it spawned.
From this determination, N. decided that he could escape the spirit of revenge by affirming transiency as a component of the eternal return. "Redemption from revenge is transition from ill will toward time to the will that represents being in the eternal recurrence of the same. Here the will becomes the advocate of the circle." (p. 226)
The overman is thus the one who overcomes the spirit of revenge in this manner. (p. 226) "The supreme will to power, that is, what is most vital in all life, comes to pass when transiency is represented as perpetual Becoming in the eternal recurrence of the same, in this way being made stable and permanent." (p. 228)
"'Eternal return of the same' is the name for the Being of beings. 'Overman' is the name for the human essence that corresponds to such Being." (p. 231)
Zarathustra experiences and seeks to teach this truth.
We still have scholars today who busy themselves with philosophy and who consider freedom-from-every-standpoint not to be a standpoint, as though such freedom did not depend upon those very standpoints. These curious attempts to flee from one's own shadow we may leave to themselves, since discussion of them yields no tangible results. Yet we must heed one thing: this standpoint of freedom-from-standpoints is of the opinion that it has overcome the one-sidedness and bias of prior philosophy, which always was, and is, defined by its standpoints. However, the standpoint of standpointlessness represents no overcoming. In truth it is the extreme consequence, affirmation, and final stage of that opinion concerning philosophy which locates all philosophy extrinsically in standpoints that are ultimately right in front of us, standpoints whose one-sidedness we can try to bring into equilibrium. We do not alleviate the ostensible damage and danger which we fear in the fact that philosopohy is located in a particular place--such location being the essential and indispenable legacy of every philosopohy--by denying and repudiating the fact; we alleviate the danger only by thinking through and grasping the indigenous character of philosophy in terms of its original essence and its necessity, that is to say, by posing anew the question concerning the essence of truth and the essence of human Dasein, and by elaborating a radically new response to that question. (Volume II, p. 118)
Table Talk Fourteen deals with similarities between Nietzsche's thought of eternal return of the same and Zen satori or enlightenment. References to Heidegger abound in that talk.