When Heidegger meets Ballard...

The examples Heidegger chose are seemingly far removed from the forms of art which saturate our world today. This seems especially true when talking about JG Ballard, a science fiction writer whose primary influences include Freud and Dali. And yet it seems as though Heidegger’s view of art is highly applicable to Ballardian fiction. For Heidegger art can be identified in what it does for society and the individual. It can function to ‘found’ the world of a society and for an individual already in such a world it can ‘light up’ this world and Being itself. These are both instances of unconcealment.[1] Art can shape and even constitute the background world of meanings within which the whole experience of an age runs. If this isn’t too crude a point, I think there may be something along these lines going on in Ballard’s work. His major themes were desire and human nature in a post-industrial (sometimes post-apocalyptic) society, which are in tune with what our world has become. Not just a ‘realistic’ representation, but a hyper-real portrayal. As Will Self notes "Ballard may have started out as a science fiction writer - now his texts read as social fact."[2]

Heidegger explored a process of emergence and limit in terms of ‘aletheia’ though we shouldn’t neglect the importance of other terms such as world and earth. The use of such terms is specific, world as a “clearing of paths for the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies” – every decision is based on something concealed – whereas earth is connected to world at the same time it is ‘belligerent’ with it.[3] We may take ‘aletheia’ to signify the process of opening up (unconcealment of beings) a space of clearing as well as of change and disclosure. In conjunction to this there is a sense of veiling and self-seclusion, which is inextricably a part of unconcealment and refers to what cannot be said or thought within a particular historical epoch.[4] Heidegger went as far as to claim that “Truth, in its essence, is un-truth.” The acceptance that there is much that cannot be said within a certain schema indicates that there is a limit to any such framework of knowledge.

Heidegger points us to the peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh as the shoes disclose that which would normally go unacknowledged – specifically the world of the peasant – and even taken for granted. What the equipment, the pair of shoes are, in truth is unconcealed. In a sense it would have been remained unconscious had it not been brought forth in art. This is the truth of the essence of tools and products. It is not that the stroke of a paintbrush determines the truth. It is the work of art as an end or rather a “happening”. The role of manifestation is not to be assigned to the aspect of Dasein called ‘techne’, even as it brings forth the essence of tools and products.[5] It is the work of art itself and in that sense is a “happening of truth”. We shouldn’t take this to mean that the work of art is a form of representation; rather it opens up and portrays a world to us as viewers.

It is not that the peasant shoes are symbolic of a truth about the life of a peasant. Heidegger wants us to refrain from stating what we already know and resist any temptation to explicate it in this reading of artwork. The peasant woman wears the shoes in the field; this is where the shoes function as she is unaware of them and going about her work. In spite of the “undefined space” we encounter the peasant shoes, the lack of mud and so on, – which we might think would deprive us of any hint of the function of these shoes – Heidegger notes the ways in which the shoes reveal to us the world of the peasant.[6] There is the pervasive worry carried with the shoes as equipment which “vibrates the silent call of the earth”, while the ‘withstood want’ and the menace of death hang in the air. The shoes belong to the earth and are protected in the peasant’s world. The open region ‘happens’ in the midst of beings, in which there belongs the world and the earth that clash with one another by nature and can only emerge in the clearing as such.

Perhaps in Heideggerian terms we find a “secondary world” is disclosed in Ballardian fiction, itself a construct from the media landscape which Ballard describes as “a map in search of a territory”.[7] It is a search for something in ordinary reality which meshes with this secondary reality, only to magnify ecological disasters, violent confrontations, the personal tragedies of celebrities and politicians. And all under clean veneer of bourgeois life which isn’t quite satisfactory for white professionals. For Ballard we live in an environment saturated to the extent that we live in a “two-tier world” torn between everyday life and this media landscape. In his works there is always an ugly secret which in some way helps maintain the bourgeois veneer and in other times it helps tear it apart as in High-Rise.

The high-rise apartment building in which High-Rise is set emerges, sets its own limits and opens up a space from which the characters then emerge. They seem to be an extension of the building, the deterioration of conditions in the high-rise is matched by the descent of the inhabitants into a semi-primitive mode of living. This is the change that was set by the initial clearing that the building is in itself, the different levels of the building, its hierarchy and the trajectory of the story are a disclosure of worlds. The first ten floors are said to represent the working-class in the building, with the next twenty-five floors being the middle-class and the top five are the ruling-class. This stratified structure collapses into competing tribes, then further to disassociated hunter-gatherers and then to a battle of the sexes. This partly connects with the way Heidegger viewed art in terms of historical significance.

The artworks of every age lay out how that time is ready to see and value things. It is debatable whether or not it is meant that art is constitutive of a world (an ontological point) or that art unveils a world a people already has (an epistemic point). We’ll put aside this debate, but note that the epistemic and the ontological are not totally irreconcilable.[8] History can be broken down into epochs distinguishable by their particular understanding of Being which is embodied in artworks. The ‘look and outlook’ is embedded in a physical thing by the artist. It stands there for the masses and lends concrete presence to the basic values and world-view of the group. Art is world-founding for Heidegger, when a work of art happens a thrust enters history and it can first begin or begin again. So it is art which is the origin of each successive world.[9] Heidegger sometimes draws the conclusion that there is no art in the modern age. Perhaps we lack a world or our world derives its unity from another source.

The role of art is not world-founding today. Instead it reminds us of what we’re lacking and there could be a great deal of truth in that. It just unconceals the concealment we are subject to and the absence of a unifying point to what we do. At that level it may begin to put pieces of a new world in place in order to constitute the unity ours now lacks. It’s highly disputable whether or not modern art rises to even that standard. It seems possible that Ballard was engaged in the unconcealment of the concealed, only to unveil a missing unity to his audience. The role of art has been subverted to service technology and ‘enframing’, it’s much more like a resource with cultural-economic value that can be determined through comparison with other works.[10] The exceptions are in the private, which is the reason that Heidegger picked Van Gogh's painting as an unconcealment of its Being and that could not be found in the simple observing of some shoes in daily life.

The epistemic power of art is in the insight that need have no impact on the structure of one’s world, the unveiling of the structure the world has for us and the peasant woman. Heidegger may have hoped that this epistemic effect will lead to a constitutive one - the artwork lights up the world in a way that gives it a manifest unity it had lacked previously. It does so by embodying a new overall point. In High-Rise and Crash the unity is found in transgression, though it’s not less clear how this may reconstitute a world. It opens up an ideal of a different relation to equipment, the way out of ‘enframing’ and technology by beginning to construct the new world we can hope will come. As we live in the world which has been partially opened up by the artwork, we become its ‘preservers’. The temple constitutes its people's world, but the painting has the power to begin to construct a new world for us. In both instances the piece of art is a ‘becoming’ and a ‘happening’ of truth.

What are we to make of the unsettling fixation on violence in Ballard’s work with this in mind? In 1986 Ballard pointed out that the world which we inhabit requires “a certain amount of oil to make the cogs go around and keep the wheels turning”.[11] Ballard went on to claim it was sex which filled this role in the 1960s, but now sex is no longer a “new frontier” and increasingly violence has replaced it in this role. The media landscape of narratives thrives on such sensation and requires sensation to go on, like a drowsy beast we find ourselves in need of constant electric shocks just to stay awake. The electric shocks are provided by violence today. This is particular pertinent in Crash where Ballard graphically explores the eroticism of the car-crash, with a coldly surgical description of mangled bodies and twisted wreckage. This is where it seems Ballard demonstrates the absence of a unity. But there is a more direct way that the car-crash meshes with Heideggerian thought.[12]

As Heidegger notes of the hammer, the driver is hardly aware of the car in the middle of driving and its function as a means of transport is obscured. It's not just about ends and purposes, rather it is the world as equipment where we engage in tasks. The world is no neutral space of objects and subjects where interaction could take place. To see the hammer and the plank as ‘things’ is to stop hammering, the hammer is no longer just something used for a purpose along with the nail and the plank serves as a material to work with. It is almost as though the machine functions almost as an extension of the body. In order to be truly aware of the car as a vehicle we have to stop driving, or in this case we have to actually crash the car. The collision is the moment at which the head of the hammer falls off and we finally become aware of the tool as a 'thing'. The hammer is for hammering in terms of its significance for Dasein, whose concern is for its own Being, it is towards-which and for-the-sake-of-which; ultimately the hammer is for-the-sake-of Dasein.[13]

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[1] Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.294-311

[2] Self, W; Crash: A Homage to JG Ballard  –  http://will-self.com/2010/04/19/crash-homage-to-jg-ballard/#.T5AWgB4NNvk.facebook

[3] Heidegger, M: The Origin of the Work of Art, Basic Writings (edited by David Farrell Krell|2010, Routledge) pg.165-182

[4] Kul-want, Christopher: Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists (2010, Columbia University Press) pg.118-148

[5] Kul-want, Christopher: Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists (2010, Columbia University Press) pg.118-148

[6] Heidegger, M: The Origin of the Work of Art, Basic Writings (edited by David Farrell Krell|2010, Routledge) pg.146-165

[7] JG Ballard interview, Face to Face: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZPRL90hNY

[8] If we accept this dichotomy in Heidegger’s work then we should keep in mind that the multiplicity of shared practices requires unity to become a world. The artwork provides such unity, going as far as to give them a destiny. At the same time, the piece pulls together a world by the way it manifests such unity and the work of art calls attention to it repeatedly through its own conspicuous presence. This is how the epistemic meets the ontological.

Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.294-311

[9] This may demonstrate a nostalgia for the past of Greek and medieval when art was principally religious. The temple and the cathedral gave convincing embodiment to the qualities of the divine and the human. The religious nostalgia is significant given his post-monotheism and sympathy with the Pagan plethora of Greek gods that Heidegger held in common with Nietzsche. This is what oriented these societies in their worlds and this is how 'look and outlook' are shaped. Heidegger holds out with hope that art may someday play this role again.

Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.342-360

[10] Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.294-311

[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS6MWpFX_N0 – Future Now, with JG Ballard (1986)

[12] The car-crash fits in well with notions of authenticity, less so in the Nietzschean sense of a ‘becoming’ of who we are. It is more in accordance with Heidegger’s talk of being-toward-death – the path we must all walk towards it – which provides the push to extricate ourselves from the ‘dictatorship of They’. In Crash the character Vaughan is literally propelled towards death in search of sexual fulfilment. Notably the death in the opening chapter graphically sets out the risk of this adventure before we are even confronted with how the protagonist ‘got into this’ – the first car crash he survived. Authenticity is not a moral ideal here, just as for Heidegger it is a self-directed ideal and it is just one means of relating our being to Being. Inauthenticity is not excluded as a way to relate our being to Being, it’s just that there is truth in authentic behaviour. There is something amoral in both instances, yet Ballard would have agreed that the behaviour of his characters in Crash unconceal a truth about desire.

[13] Purcell, M; Levinas and Theology (2006, Cambridge Press) pg.74-78

Yell "Dasein!"

The account of being-in-the-world is significant in the part it played in the Heideggerian break from the project of Edmund Husserl and the development of phenomenology thereafter. The break itself is also a vital underpinning of existentialism, as Terry Eagleton notes “To move from Husserl to Heidegger is to move from the terrain of pure intellect to a philosophy which meditates on what it feels like to be alive.” This particular form of phenomenology might be referred to as hermeneutical in contrast to the transcendental phenomenology which Husserl promulgated.[1] In fact it has been said that Heidegger seized on the conception of phenomenology for his own ends, to the extent that the definition of “phenomenology” came to mean almost the exact opposite of the Husserlian proposal. Rather than emptying out the intentional contents of our belief system, to uncover datum, we let the things which are shared but cannot be articulated to reveal themselves.[2]

If we accept the notion of intentionality put forth by Husserl then we take consciousness as always consciousness of something.[3] So there is an internal relation between the act of thinking and the object of thought, a mutual dependence. Thought points towards some object. The mind does not passively acknowledge the world, it actively ‘intends’ the world. This is where the idealism of Husserl is quite overt, he thought it was absurd to see the world as external to thought and experience.[4] Husserl goes on to claim that the way to establish certainty is to do away with – to ‘bracket’ – everything which is beyond our consciousness. All realities must be treated as appearances in our minds, pure phenomena and this is the universal data from which we can proceed. It is universal in the sense that it has universal implications, so that the examination of what we perceive, through the phenomenological reduction, is a way to get at the universal essence of the things we perceive as well as the act of perceiving.[5]

Martin Heidegger breaks with Husserlian phenomenology with the ‘transcendent subject’ as its beginning. This is rejected as a suitable beginning by Heidegger and with it he rejected the ‘bracketing’ method. For Heidegger the subject-object distinction is an unwelcome bi-product of Cartesianism, for it is not only artificial but unsustainable.[6] We can refer to the relation between the self and the world, insofar as we must refer to that relation as a distinction in order to move beyond it. Being-in-the-world captures the involved nature of the human subject, it is not dominant as the Enlightenment thinkers had thought, but is engaged in dialogue with the world. The point is to return to a pre-Socratic position, before the dualist distinction and wherein both of which can plausibly be encompassed by Being. We inhabit a reality which we are incapable of subjecting to objectification, for we are as much constituted by reality as we constitute it.[7] So we should listen rather than speak in this dialogue. Whether or not we can charge Heidegger with idealism over this is complicated.

We could run with the view that Heidegger is an extreme idealist going by what he tells us about Reality, which is composite of: the Being of beings and Being as the pure presence-at-hand of Things. Robert Solomon argues that the dichotomy of idealism versus realism is insufficient for the bold moves Heidegger made. The problem is with the labels themselves as Heidegger should not be seen as a philosophical opponent of realism.[8] By realism here we designate the view that there is a reality which can be known, which Heidegger does not deny, whereas idealism is the view that we can only know the products of our own minds. This is the reason that it has often been said that Edmund Husserl is an idealist.

There is a sense in which the world refers to being-in-the-world for Heidegger, at the same time being-in-the-world refers to Dasein and care is its primordial structural foundation.[9] For Heidegger it is not that the concept being-in-the-world can be simply sliced into easily digestible components. Heidegger goes as far as to claim that care encapsulates Dasein in its’ entirety. It is not meant in the usual sense of caring for something, even indifference to something counts as a part of care.[10] Dasein must deal with the world as it is being-in-the-world, without the world there is no subject and without the subject there is no world. Sartre would say Dasein is “condemned to be free”, but it is important to add that it is ‘condemned’ as it is ‘thrown’ into a world which has already set the ready-at-hand equipment and the paths we can take. For this reason Heidegger is closer to Nietzsche than Sartre on the question of free-will. We are not totally free individuals in a leveled world from which we are only floating through, but we are embedded and engaged without a choice in the matter. When we talk about being-in-the-world we are talking about a future-directed agent in its aware of possibilities in the situations it is involved in. It can encounter objects when lost in activities and this may be the way that we ‘flee from being’ which we might think of as ‘bad faith’ since Sartre.

For Heidegger we are ‘thrown’ into the world, so we take hold of ourselves locked in a particular cultural and historical context. We cannot choose the circumstances under which we have to care and act.[11] The self is definitively in time and we never live in the moment.[12]This is where authenticity enters as the manner of the relation of beings to Being, it can be authentic or inauthentic. Robert Solomon specifies Heideggerian authenticity as about lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, which captures the definitive path provided by death accurately. For Heidegger when we face the inevitably of our impending death it can provide the force necessary to extricate ourselves from the ‘dictatorship of They’.[13] Authenticity is self-directed rather than a moral ideal, though it is given preference by the existentialist tradition. The way that we can relate our being to Being is where freedom comes in and the strong focus of the existentialists on freedom may be pinpointed in exactly this relation.

At this point we should go back to the Heideggerian break, as it is important to stress, as Hubert Dreyfus does, that the break with transcendental phenomenology to establish hermeneutical phenomenology is not simply attributing a primary status to practical activity. Rather it is Heidegger’s position that the relation between a self-sufficient mind and an external world cannot be understood as detached contemplation or practical activity – as we have already seen, the separation itself is a problematic assertion. Nor should we take practical activity or contemplation to be specific to such a relation. The Heideggerian strategy is a reversal of priorities, now it’s doing over knowing and not knowing over doing. The point of this is to clear the ground for the question of the way of being of intentionality. It is not a dichotomy between practical and theoretical forms of intentionality. Heidegger wanted to burst out of the tradition. He aimed to overcome the subject-object distinction in all domains and move on from the old account of intentionality altogether.[14]

Heidegger accepted that there is an intentional directedness to human activity, but rejected the Husserlian view that the mind is directed towards an object which mirrors an object in the external world. Practical engagement is important, though we have to go above and beyond practical activity to raise the question of Being. The problem is the gap which is allowed to open up between the subject and object, the directedness which Husserl puts forth is meant to resolve this problem. But it just exacerbates the problem as it maintains intentionality as a feature of mental states. Intentionality is not mental, as it is for Husserl, it should not be attributed to consciousness but Dasein – which is being-in-the-world – and in that sense refers to human activity at a more general level in that the practical intention goes through the thing we use towards the purpose of the activity.[15] The directedness is in the embedded nature of being-in-the-world, it is a part of the human existence and undoubtedly an aspect of the dialogue between the human subject and the world (if we must refer back to that troublesome distinction).

In the attempt to overcome the old notion of intentionality Heidegger opens up a new kind of intentionality. Similarly with Heidegger’s ‘confrontation’ with Friedrich Nietzsche – who he deemed responsible for the ‘end of metaphysics’ – could only be conducted within the framework of another metaphysical system just as Nietzsche had opened up a metaphysics of becoming in the attempt to overcome metaphysics.[16] Even the conscious attempt to overcome a philosophical tradition fails to do so insofar as it may succeed, but in doing so reconstitute the system that was meant to be overcome. It may even be that the move Heidegger made to critique Cartesianism and ultimately transcend the subject-object distinction might have only perpetuating, or more accurately, recreated the old distinction in the act of trying to sweep it away. The account Heidegger provided of being-in-the-world is important as it is part of the philosophical project through which he attempted to radically reorder philosophy as it has been since Socrates. This is the greater importance to which the significance the concept has in relation to existentialism and phenomenology is just an addition.

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[1] Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1983 | Second Edition, 1983) pg.47-57

[2] Dreyfus, Hubert: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (MIT Press, 1991) pg.30-39

[3]  Becker, Oskar: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Elveton, RO: The Phenomenology of Husserl (Chicago Quadrangle Books, 1970) pg.60-71

[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein (who had a great deal in common with Heidegger in his later philosophy) was perplexed by the very notion of an external world and what it is supposed to be external to specifically. Heidegger had this in common with Wittgenstein as he conceived of being-in-the-world to signify the human existence as bound up with reality, both as constitutive and constituted by it. So the suggestion that there is a world ‘out there’ which can be analysed is quite strange from this perspective. Whereas Husserl concedes that there is a world external to thought and experience insofar as objects can transcend our consciousness.

[5] We might be drawn to Hume’s sceptical view that there could be more than just the experiential, but we cannot know if there is. The difference is that for Husserl it is not that these things are beyond our knowledge; rather we should exclude them in order to get back to the things themselves. But it should be noted that this kind of phenomenology is not another form of empiricism.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#UniIma

[6] In a way Descartes held that we can step outside of being-in-the-world where an object can be placed before a subject. For Heidegger it is important to reject the Cartesian tradition because it seemed utterly hopeless to him. This might explain why he avoided talk of subjectivity as well as consciousness and the mind without the use of his own meta-language. Note that Heidegger saw our basic experiences as a holistic and unified experience of our being-in-the-world. Descartes propagated dualism, which posited a mind-body separation which can both be encompassed by Being for Heidegger. Cartesianism is a road with a dead-end for Heidegger, the separation between being-in-the-world and something else (e.g. consciousness and the external world) leads us to paradoxical ways of thinking. To understand Dasein is to understand the world and it works both ways, Dasein and the world are a unified phenomenon according to Heidegger. So the self cannot exist independently of the physical world, there can be no Dasein without the world and no world without Dasein.

Solomon, Robert: Lecture Fifteen; Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4MAYguC1Mc

[7] Eagleton, Terry: Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1983 | Second Edition, 1983) pg.47-78

[8] Solomon, Robert: Lecture Fifteen; Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4MAYguC1Mc

[9] Dreyfus, Hubert: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (MIT Press, 1991) pg.238-246

[10] In Goethe’s Faust the role of care is important as it refers to the burdens of worry and the world explicitly. Heidegger uses care in a much more radical way, it is not only about ends and purposes but about the world as equipment where we engage in tasks. The world is not a field of objects and subjects which might interact. To see the hammer and the plank as ‘things’ means that we would have to stop hammering, the hammer is no longer just something used for a purpose along with the nail and the plank serves as a material to work with.

Incidentally, for Nietzsche Goethe was an example of the Übermensch and the Will to Power who exercised all of his talents, ‘created’ himself as a unified being through his art and he experimented in life – taking jobs as a civil servant and a lawyer, as well as a playwright and a poet. As a writer he flirted with many styles and his works are voluminous. In Nietzsche’s terms the passion for life is the greatest of passions and Goethe was passionate at a creative and spiritual level. Nietzsche describes Goethe as “not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.”

Nietzsche, Friedrich; Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Hollingdale, RJ; Introduction and commentary | Penguin Books, 1968) pg.102-104

Solomon, Robert: Lecture Sixteen; Heidegger on the World and the Self.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPlZCkh0AE0

[11] Heidegger seems to take a very similar response to the question of free-will as that of Karl Marx (someone he no doubt detested for political as well as philosophical reasons). We might think in particular of Marx’s words “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” This is where Heidegger is actually closer to Marx than he is to Sartre.

Marx, Karl: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings vol.2 (Edited and introduced by David Fernbach, Verso, 2010) pg.143-150

[12] Solomon, Robert: Lecture Sixteen; Heidegger on the World and the Self.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPlZCkh0AE0

[13] Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.125-145

[14] Dreyfus, Hubert: Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (MIT Press, 1991) pg.40-54

[15] As Harrison Hall points out, using the most famous example, the hammer has perceivable properties which go unrecognised when the hammer is being skilfully employed and only arise when we take a timeout from the task to think about the hammer. The attention is aimed at the work and the ultimate end, but not the equipment which enables us to do so. The function of the hammer is in the practical activity to which it is used and that is definitive of their being. We can spot this network of relations essential to their instrumental nature whenever the task breaks down. We find that the ready-to-hand tools are always pointing towards an end, which we assign in the task.

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger: Hall, Harrison: Intentionality and World pg.123-139

[16] Sluga, Hans: Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.110-113

Confronting Nietzsche.

 "Nietzsche has destroyed me." - Martin Heidegger

It is important to remember that Martin Heidegger had read Nietzsche before the 1930s; it was only after he broke with Being and Time that Heidegger turned to Nietzsche once more. The Heidegger of Being and Time had no interest at all in Nietzschean philosophy when it came to metaphysics and art, but more specifically the critique of nihilism. The ‘confrontation’ with Nietzsche was brought on by the dynamics of Heideggerian thought as well as the demands of the time. According to Hans Sluga, we can safely say that Heidegger learned three major lessons from this ‘confrontation’ with Nietzsche: metaphysics, politics and the situation in the modern world. Heidegger focused mostly on Nietzsche as a metaphysician above all else, though this focus did shift over time it remained largely the same.

For Heidegger the thoughts Nietzsche had on art illuminated the precarious nature of metaphysical thinking. Sluga stresses that Heidegger turned to Nietzsche after he became interested in art, which could not be an extension of Being and Time. Heidegger concludes that the views of art Nietzsche held are an inverted Platonism, as art remains semblance and retains its opposition truth. Art is the supreme configuration of the Will to Power.[1] Art can be understood in relation to the artist, the creative forces undertaken.[2] Metaphysics from Plato onwards leads to a conclusion, which Heidegger thought was imminent and he held up Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West. Sluga points out that this is quite problematic.

The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is symptomatic of how difficult it is to escape from metaphysics and that there is a valid focus behind the errors of metaphysics. In the work of Nietzsche the search for the nature of beings as a whole, a metaphysics of becoming behind which remains the question of Being – as this question is almost approached through the eternal recurrence of the same.[3] The problem is that the focus on the question of Being is never confronted head-on, as the question is forgotten it haunts the tradition of metaphysics. The task of overcoming of metaphysics ensnares oneself in metaphysics.[4]

Heidegger went as far as to see Nietzsche’s doctrines of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch as part of a metaphysical system.[5] The doctrine of eternal recurrence points to the question of Being, as Nietzsche approximates Being through the eternal recurrence of the same and the Übermensch is important in relation to the recurrence.[6][7] Nietzsche wrote “To impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme will to power… That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being: high point of the meditation”. Heidegger maintained that the eternal recurrence of the same is illusive insofar as it is “wrapped in thick clouds – not for us, but for Nietzsche’s own thinking”. But he insisted that it is to be seen as Nietzsche’s attempt to deal with the being of Being. For Heidegger the fact that the eternal recurrence of the same is difficult to grasp is matched by the difficulty to grasp the being of Being.

Hans Sluga notes that the Heideggerian view of Nietzsche’s politics stands in distinct to Karl Jaspers and Alfred Baeumler. Karl Jaspers portrayed Nietzsche as an opposed German nationalism and anti-Semitism as he was in his lifetime. On the other hand, Alfred Baeumler was out to use Nietzsche as the intellectual harbinger of the Third Reich.[8] By contrast Heidegger saw Nietzsche as “anti-political” as well as a potential source to construct a refined national and social identity for Germans. The ‘confrontation’ with Nietzsche provided a means to attack the existing system safely, on the grounds that it was linked to an empty will to will and, by extension, haste to further technological advancements.[9] This preoccupation with identity came out of the way Heidegger viewed his country.[10]Heidegger saw the question of Being in connection with German identity, with Nietzsche and Hölderlin serving as a guide to what exactly it is to be German.  For Heidegger the future of Germany and the West is “determined” by Nietzsche and Hölderlin, so the philosopher of the godlessness and worldlessness of modern man belongs with the poet of the homecoming. To come home means to face the question of Being.

Martin Heidegger abandoned the project to determine the “essence of being German” through Nietzsche and instead he opted to reiterate his own thinking without nationalism, as Heidegger claimed after the war, as society supplanted the nation. Heidegger saw Nietzsche as diagnostic and symptomatic of the modern pathologies, just as the belief in historical progress became predominant in the world it was Nietzsche who pointed to a prevalent destruction. The metaphysics of becoming was in touch with the spirit of the times, with specific regards to technology where Nietzsche had foresaw man’s domination of the world. For Heidegger there is a sense in which Nietzsche reveals the core of technology which had led to Being as in calculation and the rule of reduced being by mathematically structured technology.

Heidegger went on to designate Nietzsche as the philosopher of “the struggle for the unlimited exploitation of the earth as the sphere of raw materials and fort he realistic utilisation of the ‘human material’, in the service of the unconditional empowering of the will to power”. Sluga points out that this interpretation appears ignorant of the Will to Power as a fundamental aspect of the world and living things. The world as a ‘monster of energy’ which has no beginning nor end, subject to contradictions and concord, while it affirms itself, destructive and self-creating as Dionysus had.[11] This view is lost as Heidegger reflects critically on Nietzsche’s work. But as Nietzsche is the philosopher of technology, for Heidegger, this critique is of the ideas of the modern age. By extension, Sluga argues, we can include the Third Reich, as well as other political conceptions of the time, as subject to this critique. The nihilism of modern man is revealed in the work of Nietzsche.[12] For Heidegger, Nietzsche saw an awful lot more than we can see, but it was never a clear picture and fell far short of capturing all that there is to see.

"I am not a man. I am dynamite." - Friedrich Nietzsche

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[1] The Will to Power has less to do with aristocratic status, militarism and power over people than it does with notions of self-discipline and personal restraint. ‘Power’ is meant in the strict sense of self-mastery and the discipline of the powers of thought, imagination and creativity. It might also be understood in terms of self-esteem, not just feeling good in the superficial sense but being energised by your own ideas and talents. It is about confidence and capability.

Solomon, Robert; Lecture 13, Nietzsche: Übermensch and the Will to Power – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWlV9sP8n0

[2] Nietzsche thought art had to be “grasped in terms of the artist” – no doubt beings had to be understood in terms of “self-creating” as well – the work itself constitutes a countermovement to nihilism and ultimately it is worth more than “truth”. In Nietzsche’s words art is “the most perspicuous and familiar configuration of the will to power”.

Sluga, Hans: Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.110-112

[3] By the early 40s Heidegger found it possible to summarise the core of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of becoming: the Will to Power, nihilism, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch and justice. He noted importantly that every term “names at the same time what the others say. The naming of each basic word is exhausted only when one also thinks with it what the others say”.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.106-110

[4] This would mean that Heidegger is also a metaphysician insofar as he criticises Nietzsche – for his failure to confront the question of Being – within the terms of another metaphysics. The critique of Nietzsche along these lines relies on the distinction between Being and beings, which could be seen as metaphysical concepts. Ironically, Heidegger became trapped in metaphysical thinking in holding up Nietzsche as bringing metaphysics to an ‘end’.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.110-112

[5] For Heidegger the Übermensch casts Nietzsche’s metaphysics in a new light as Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence of the same became of central importance. Thus Spoke Zarathustra “thinks this thinkers one and only thought: the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same” and “the eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing,” e.g. the Will to Power.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.106-110

[6] The Übermensch is master morality spiritualised by 2,000 of slave morality, he is the master of his powers and abilities, he aspires to excellence and ideals which are very much his own. The Übermensch is free of resentment and regret to the extent that he can say emphatically and without hesitation in the face of eternal recurrence, the notion that he would have to live his life over and over again endlessly, “Yes! Gladly I would accept this!”

Solomon, Robert; Lecture 13, Nietzsche: Übermensch and the Will to Power – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWlV9sP8n0

[7] For Nietzsche a great example of the Übermensch and the Will to Power was Goethe who exercised all of his talents, ‘created’ himself as a unified being through his art and he experimented in life – taking jobs as a civil servant and a lawyer, as well as a playwright and a poet. As a writer he flirted with many styles and his works are voluminous. In Nietzsche’s terms the passion for life is the greatest of passions and Goethe was passionate at a creative and spiritual level. Nietzsche describes Goethe as “not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.”

Nietzsche, Friedrich; Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Hollingdale, RJ; Introduction and commentary | Penguin Books, 1968) pg.102-104

[8] Effectively Baeumler continued on the track which began with the proto-Nazi Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who took over her brother’s works and set out to appropriate these works for the Nazi movement. Baeumler set out to explore Nietzsche as a metaphysician, who laid the groundwork for National Socialism in his metaphysical doctrines. Baeumler dismissed the doctrine of eternal recurrence as “mystical” and saw it incongruous to the Will to Power, whereas Heidegger (who was heavily influenced by Baeumler) insisted that the Will to Power and the eternal recurrence of the same were part of a coherent metaphysical conception. It was because of Baeumler’s political project that the notion of eternal recurrence had to be dismissed, as it clashed with the political Nietzsche.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.106-110

[9] Heidegger distinguished between National Socialism as it existed at the time as opposed to the idealised vision which had not been realised. Heidegger may have been indulging in a far-right parallel of ultra-leftist ‘comfortable resistance’ which retains a certain distance from power and real decisions in its criticism of the established order. The farthest Heidegger went, in later life, to repudiate Nazism was to point to its “failure” to emerge as a genuine Third Position from American capitalism and Soviet communism. In an interview for Der Spiegel, Heidegger makes it clear that he regards each of these systems as determined by ‘planetary technology’. The implication being that there has not yet been a thorough attempt to move beyond technology and establish a genuine alternative. This is where the idealised vision of National Socialism would come in as opposed to the regime established in 1933.

Der Spiegel interview with Martin Heidegger (September 23^rd 1966) - http://lacan.com/heidespie.html

The Philosophy Book (Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2011), Slavoj Zizek, pg.326

[10] In Heidegger’s own words Germany is “the land of the middle” where “Our people, as standing in the centre, suffers the most intense pressure”. He goes on to say “Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation – precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, spiritual forces from the centre”.

Sluga, Hans; Heidegger’s Nietzsche pg.112-116

[11] Nietzsche posits the Apollonian against the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. Dionysian is a frenzied and orgiastic sense in which we feel ourselves as part of life flowing through us. He compared the Dionysian with intoxication as in a euphoria or ecstasy of sorts. It is the means by which one can escape from reality, but not into fantasy as with the Apollonian. Rather the Dionysian is about forgetting yourself, not the world, to experience a more mystical communal union. But the Dionysiac energies are dangerous, grotesque, cruel, sexual and wild. It is difficult to find meaning or beauty in a world of such destructive energies, though it is not on the road to nihilism for Nietzsche. Culture has emerged as attempts to refine this life force in a chaotic world driven by this force.

Dionysian – frenzied and orgiastic sense in which we feel ourselves as part of life flowing through us

Jackson, R; Nietzsche the Key Ideas (Hachette UK, 2008) pg.42-45

[12] This would probably refer to the Last Man, a concept introduced by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in contrast with the Übermensch. Unlike the Übermensch – the point of which was to rouse enthusiasm in the town’s people for the possibility of overcoming themselves – the Last Man is presented to get the town’s people to be disgusted with themselves; to awaken them to the stupidity and philistinism pervasive in their world. Robert Solomon describes the Last Man as “the ultimate bourgeois consumer and coach potato without any aspirations. The Last Man is content, comfortable and satisfied with the way of the world and life as it is.”

Solomon, Robert; Lecture 13, Nietzsche: Übermensch and the Will to Power –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZWlV9sP8n0