Nietzsche was no friend of fascists.

Earlier this month, the UCL student union passed a decision to ban the Nietzsche Club, who pitched themselves as a study group for hard-to-far-right students (as many of them as there may be) interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Julius Evola. As someone who is interested in Nietzsche and Heidegger I couldn't help but take some interest in the story. There are two things that came to mind initially:

1. Regardless of how repugnant the society was it did not pose a threat of physical violence to the student body. The ban will not be effective as the Club could just be set up again under another name and there would have to be another ban and so on. This is the impotence of censorship. Censors always fail as they can only act in retrospect and by then there is no use in censorship. If it has already been said then it has little effect in imposing a restriction. The obvious exception is when speech is used to call for violence and that is a criminal matter. If we want to live in a society in which it is unlikely for such instances to arise then we want greater change than banning lists.
2. It is a travesty that Nietzsche is still, in this century, associated with the Third Reich, as if he were some kind of proto-Nazi philosopher. You only have to judge the man by his deeds, not least his written in its proper context and understanding. Nietzsche distanced himself from his own sister due to her anti-Semitism and marriage to a German proto-fascist. Likewise, Nietzsche broke off his friendship with Wagner because of his growing inclination towards Christianity, nationalism and anti-Jewish racism. He had nothing but contempt, scorn and mockery for anti-Semites and regarded himself as a man without a nation. If only Nietzsche had lived into old age and remained sane to the end we would no doubt have record of his disgust at the early rise of Fascism.

There is a third point to be made alongside these. Both the philosopher Heidegger and the composer Wagner were involved in German nationalism. In Heidegger's case, we're talking about the moves he made to try and become the philosopher of the Third Reich in a bid to oppose the technological logic of modern society. His affinity for National Socialism was cultural and intellectual. With Wagner, we have the case of a man who lived long before the rise of Hitler, but he was a nationalist and anti-Semite in his later years. He did not hide these facts. In both instances, we can praise the work of these men without condoning or excusing their prejudices. This is a point worth making, as we would be mistaken if we assumed we would have to discard Nietzsche even if the opposite were the case.

The Proper Task of Life.

 

The anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche deemed art “the proper task of life.” He had moved on much farther than the view of Schopenhauer's, where art is a means to deceive the Will and escape from the treadmill of its domination. Nietzsche advocates a radical acceptance of the imperfection of the world and this life in resistance to the otherworldly. He associates art with this embrace of the domination of the Will. This is far from a glum acceptance of a horrible existence. He wants us to rejoice in existence and laugh at the world in all of its absurdity. The knowledge of our existence beyond the precepts of religion provides us with a certain freedom. It is not that man should be freed from emotion, rather life is made meaningful by the passions - which are a source of insight, orientation and understanding. The attachments we build through our passions provide meaning, whether it be the attachments we form with people, ideals or aspirations. The creativity involved in art is particularly important here, especially the attachment forged with a work of art.

It is in this light that the Will to Power is to be understood as a celebration of the passionate life rather than in terms of metaphysics or motivation. Art is not just an escape route but an affirmation of existence, as it can even serve as the process of revaluation insofar as art allows us to participate in the nature of things. This is the development of culture out of the unfolding of human capacities. It is not simply instrumental, works of art may be seen as ends-in-themselves. For this very reason culture is not undermined by heterogeneity, far from it. It is homogeneity which leads to culture going stale and even becoming a lifeless scroll rolled up in the canon. Before you know it, we are to impart this stale culture to the next generation without reflection. Yet high and low culture are not fixed in stone. As Terry Eagleton has observed, there are works once considered canon-worthy which are much less brilliant than the early episodes of The Simpsons. Culture is not ahistorical or unchanging, it is forever transient.
 

 

Loving Decay

 

Too often culture is taken to be ahistorical and unchanging. Only for change to be received as deeply threatening to the artefacts preserved in formaldehyde by a cultural elite. To presuppose this is to accept a rather narrow conception of culture. Even still it is a widespread understanding of culture. We even find it in the work of Michel Houellebecq, a new self-styled Céline, in his nihilism. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh wanted.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific history and the material pre-conditions for the society which we inhabit. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in anhedonic distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. 

 

Grand Catastrophes


The cultural revolution of the 1960s had an undeniably profound impact on the people who lived amidst its birth pangs. In 1986 a film crew came to make a short documentary about the writer JG Ballard. In the interview, 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. For Ballard it was sex which played such a role in the 1960s, but now sex is no longer a new frontier and increasingly violence has become the oil which keeps the wheels turning. The media landscape of narratives thrives on sensation and requires sensation to go on, like a drowsy beast we find ourselves in need of constant electric shocks just to stay awake. Ballard suggests that the electric shocks are provided more so by violence today.

A major focus of Ballardian fiction is a secondary world which has been constructed on the media landscape of television, film, radio and the press etc. For Ballard we live in an environment saturated to the extent that we live in a two-tier world, we inhabit a dual reality. The immediate reality of everyday life and the secondary reality forged as the media acts as a map in search of a territory. It is a search for something in ordinary reality which meshes with this secondary reality, only to magnify disasters, confrontations, personal tragedies and so on. At once this secondary world is the subject matter of Ballard's novels, it is described and developments within it are predicted. Too often do we assume that the violence on television is bad for us, the truth about violence is good for us and cannot be repressed. The edge is a cautionary one, e.g. “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Slow Down!” with the paradox being Crash (1973) in which Ballard bellows “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Speed Up!” All in an appreciation of the chaos underneath the surface of modern civilisation. Ballard may have basked in the fires of this chaos, but he was ultimately on the side of it.

Living the Dirt

 

 

If we turn to the post-Beat scene of writing from the American West Coast we find another noteworthy literary creature. The poetry of Charles Bukowski stands in contrast to Houellebecq's nihilism. Bukowski's dirty realism pulsates with the same themes as Houellebecq albeit with much more in the way of exuberance. He doesn't so much languish in complacent affluence as live and breathe the filthier side of life. Bukowski remains an essentially American writer in his unabashed individualism, which serves to complement the reservoir of squalor and misanthropy in his prose. He has no coherent social message to convey only defiant exultation in the decline of civilisation. Take the closing lines of Dinosauria, We “And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard” only to add “Born out of that./The sun still hidden there/Awaiting the next chapter.” Thereby Bukowski turns the Apocalypse into another twisted turn in the anfractuous road of progress. We are to be superseded, along with the transient stage which we have made for ourselves. Perhaps Bukowski and Houellebecq share an appreciation of the flux of this world because they were both poets.

In his reasoning Bukowski derided other writers for starting out with pretentious attempts at setting a captivating scene for the readers. It was dead prose, no longer wriggling with life. Instead Bukowski went for the jugular and opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook “It began as a mistake”. He was a working-class poet, often unemployed, usually drifting and forever inebriated. He found the bottle analogous to a fine symphony - something he knew plenty about in his love of classical music. His publisher John Martin considered Bukowski the Walt Whitman of the 20th Century in putting pen to paper in the gutter. He conveyed the grittiest of experiences in his own melancholic brand of free verse. Black Sparrow Press marketed Bukowski as the poet who wrote for the average man in contemporary America. Yet Bukowski was much more misanthropic and self-centred in his alcoholism to be concerned with the wants of the masses. Even still the dirty old man chewed up Wagner and Kant only to spit them back out in his portrayals of a life lived in the darkest corners of American society.

Beautiful Chaos


As Ballard was the middle-class doctor who ventured into bohemian territory after the death of his wife, Bukowski yearned for a normal life and Houellebecq accepted that it would never be found. With Chuck Palahniuk it seems more so that there is more joy to be found in the absurdity of modern society. Picking fun at society by highlighting its more obscure and obscene side is not a new method for satirists. Neither are the themes developed in Palahniuk's work particularly earth-shattering. If you haven’t read Chuck Palahniuk then you should rush out and obtain, possibly by violent means, a copy of Survivor (1999) or Fight Club (1996) as soon as possible. He originally set out to emulate much more conventional modes of writing, but ended up in Tom Spanbauer's workshop. There Chuck took on a radical minimalism which has become the form for the transgressive content of his novels. Though transgressive in content Palahniuk's corpus contains thematic links reaching back to the origins of English literature. You can find courtly love in the deliberate variations made on the boy-meets-girl frame of events in his writing. The foreground stories with their dysfunctional and deranged characters falls against a background worth further examination. Fight Club is not just a tale of madness, or even the love story concealed within it, there is the emergence of an anti-capitalist terrorist network working to bring down America's credit system.

Unlike Houellebecq and Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk is not a nihilist for he still clings to modernism and romanticism at heart. He may have much more in common with the existentialist tradition. He sets out to carve out a unique place as a writer, dismissing the likes of Martin Amis as a purveyor of “beautifully padded sentences”. It is not enough to try and posture as a living classic as Amis and McEwan does. To put it as Chuck has “We're living in a different world than Charles Dickens lived in”. A radical minimalism strips down the prose for all to view, but this is not a reductionist task as the battle is to build deep layers into the narrative in themes, allusions, symbolism and ideas. To this end Palahniuk may have recycled old themes and fed them into his projects. The mission of dangerous writing is to seek out and cover those aspects of life most uncomfortable, embarrassing and unsettling for us to confront. That is the locus of transgressive fiction and its purveyors. This is the flux of culture before our eyes.

Only a God can save us.

 

For Heidegger the gods will save us once we welcome them back into our world, when we've gotten past this technological stance which stifles us. You could take this as an expressed acceptance of the futility of all struggle. There can be no way out of the hegemony, all we can do is wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’. Thus ‘only a God can save us.’ Žižek sees this as one of many reactions by the Left to the hegemony of global capitalism and its indestructibility. The capitalist system can't help but tend towards moral relativism and secular pluralism, but this goes further as value is just commodity and purchase the system is totally atheistic and nihilistic. In these terms capitalism is insufficient for Being, it has no real space for it other than as a thing to be commodified and exchanged at a price. All the while capitalism denies our essence and fails to even understand itself. It has to hide behind words like ‘free-enterprise’ and ‘democracy’ for fear of being recognised for what it is.

It was Rosa Luxemburg who predicted that the capitalist system would collapse once expansion and growth ad infinitum had become an impossibility. The only possible limit to the infinite growth paradigm could come in its most thorough dominance in the world. If the world went capitalist then the parasite would soon have to face the real possibility of its own demise. With this in sight, it would take a global push to tip the system over. Today we find, as Bauman put it, capitalism has learned to create “host organisms” and onwards the parasite strives. This is nothing unusual, Karl Marx never foresaw the possibility of the capitalist system buying-off socialism with social democratic reformism. For Heidegger the answer to the technological nightmare, which engulfs us, was to be found in neither capitalism nor socialism. Notoriously Heidegger joined the Nazi Party after Hitler was rushed into power in 1933 and went on to betray his former mentor Edmund Husserl.

In his day Martin Heidegger drew a distinction 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 the far-right equivalent of ultra-leftist position 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 renounce National Socialism was to point to its “failure” to emerge as a genuine Third Position to American capitalism and Russian 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 provide an answer to the nihilism of modern man as technological, value-creating and subjectivist. After all Fascism was something of a last-ditch attempt on the part of capitalism to purge itself of immense contradictions.

In Living in the End Times Žižek writes about the poetico-military complex with regard to Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and the anti-Tutsi writer Hassan Ngeze in Rwanda. These were sincere and terrible poets, not simply corrupt politicos, who held up material to be manipulated as part of the riling up of jingoist sentiments. It this which was so instrumental in Yugloslavia as nationalism first began to appear on the scene in the 70s and 80s. Karadžić as a kind of parallax, homicidal poet from one angle and spiritual healer from another. Dragan Dabić provides the ideological key to Karadžić. Žižek reminds us of Lacan's thesis "truth has the structure of a fiction". The talk of setting free the individual's cosmic energies that link us all to the cosmos leads us to the Pagan conception of life as cosmic and its sanctity - which means that the blood of innocents will soon be flowing in the streets.

To convey the way Karadžić saw Bosnian Muslims, Žižek refers us to a favourite Chinese proverb of Karadžić's "He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them." But this does not adequately capture the postmodern brand of nationalism to which Karadžić subscribed. And so he goes onto include a telling excerpt from a poem Karadžić wrote called 'For Izet Sarajlić'. It features the line "People nothing is forbidden in my faith" and this is the permissive spirit of postmodern nationalism, which seeks to liberate us from political correctness and multiculturalism. In this post-political era, there is no other way to mobilise the masses for a public cause and the only dominate calls are for us to enjoy ourselves. The majority of us are 'moral' in that we cannot slaughter each other out of disgust at such conduct and so a 'sacred' Cause is necessary to render killing acceptable to us.

It is in such poetry and violence that we regress from the Christian love of the neighbour to the Pagan past of putting our tribe before all the others. It may be presented as a defence of Christian values, but it is the greatest threat to the Judeo-Christian legacy in Europe. As Žižek notes it goes against the universalism of the Holy Spirit, to which we each have immediate access to as individuals irrespective of their place in the social order. Who else may we add to this catalogue? There is, of course, the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who gave a speech at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. We might even include DH Lawrence, as he was on the radical Right and moved from Christian theology to Pagan mysticism. Then there's Eduardo Limonov who founded a neo-fascist movement in post-Communist Russia. In the bombardment of Sarajevo, Eduardo Limonov visited with Karadžić and was filmed taking a turn firing into the streets below them with a rifle.

The poet Eduard Limonov had returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union having spent almost 20 years in exile in America. Limonov was appalled to witness the reign of Boris Yeltsin as the Kremlin sought to impose Western-style capitalism with "shock therapy" as the means to this end. This would be a disaster as Limonov was convinced American capitalism was no different than Soviet totalitarianism, it was just more sophisticated in its oppression. He decided to take drastic action and founded a political party to recapture the original aims of the Bolshevik Revolution and integrate it within a modern nationalism. It would be the National Bolshevik Party that is now the embodiment of the resurgent nationalism which have sought to put a stop to the Russian process of 'modernisation' since the 1990s. The drink-sodden Yeltsin and the gang of free-marketeers around him practically destroyed Russia only to give way to Putin in the end.

Then there is Heidegger who had planned to lecture on Nietzsche and Hölderlin in 1944-45 but the trajectory of the war demolished these plans. Before that he had lectured on Hölderlin already at the beginning of the Nazi era when he himself was a member of the Party. The hymns selected were Germania and The Rhine, note the obvious nationalist connotations. For Heidegger the dilemma of Western existence had manifested itself in Germany, the land of the middle. He saw the question of Being and the matter of German identity as entwined. The Germans are the most metaphysical people in these terms and if Europe isn't going to go down the path of annihilation then this decision can only come through the development of new, spiritual forces from the centre. Nietzsche had diagnosed the condition, Hölderlin had the cure for it. The way to open the question of Being and the new and deeper way of being German. This is could very well have been the way Heidegger had wanted to be the philosopher of the Third Reich.

What undermines this neat pattern is that National Socialism may have found Pagan blood myths useful at times Hitler did condemn Pagan cults in 1938. This is because Fascism has few consistent and universal characteristics other than a reactive spirit and a pathological Judeophobia. More generally, this may just be the instances of that Fascist tendency to aestheticise politics. We shouldn't forget that our concerts are modeled on Nazi rallies. This tendency remains alive and well in the National Bolshevik Party that Limonov has led for the last 20 years in Russia. Many of its members came out of the Russian avant-garde music scene which had resisted communism as it scoffed at the West. Originally the avant-garde was on the side of the revolutionaries in 1917 until it was suppressed at the appearance on the scene of socialist realism under Stalin. It only resurfaced in the 1960s during the Khrushchev thawing period, then it became an expression of resistance under Brezhnev and when the Wall fell the artists prescribed Nazism as a positive vision.

In 1917 Rosa Luxemburg reflected that the time of pogroms against Russian Jewry has been brought to a close - principally by the October Revolution - before adding "I can sooner imagine - pogroms against Jews in Germany." At the time of Luxemburg's death, at the hands of the Freikorps, Heidegger was working under Husserl at Freiburg. By then the First World War had ended, with millions slaughtered and Germany left vanquished. Heidegger had served, albeit in a limited capacity, as a soldier and this he shared with the future Fuhrer along with the year of his birth. Luxemburg had been incarcerated for her firm opposition to the imperial bloodbath and amidst the confusion Rosa reached out to Benito Mussolini, who she assumed was still the socialist editor of Avanti! - little did she know that Mussolini had been kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party by then for his support of the war. This is where the defeats of the Left converge with the opening for Fascism.

It would be tempting to go off on a tangent about the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and the politics in which he engaged personally, specifically National Socialism. That would be pushing things as Heidegger at most leaves the door open to fascism, there is nothing inherently fascist about his philosophy. As Robert Solomon notes, it might be more constructive to engage with the world as it is today. There is a sense in which everything is reduced to the same level in consumerism, as with technology and money, whereby human beings are cut-off from the world and each other. Ultimately, this leaves human beings diminished as technology and money reduce the world in its immediacy - a leveling effect which has become the primary source for alienation in the modern world. In a way Heidegger returned to the pessimism of Schopenhauer in his last days.

Heidegger's last writings are dominated by his own particular notion of releasement, which could be seen as a way of thinking and living that has turned away from willing. This comes across as Schopenhauerian, though it may have been the Taoist influences on Heidegger by that point. When it came to the return of the gods, Heidegger found Nietzsche's programme for overcoming nihilism unsatisfactory. Nietzsche wanted to place the Übermensch where God once stood as a central pillar of values. Once the old myths underpinning our superstructure begin to give way, we must find new ideals in order to advance beyond what humanity has been thus far. In this Heidegger sniffed out the Will to Power which has been responsible for the destruction of values in the first place. It was not new forms of domination that can save us, but rather a humbling to power as we await the return of the gods. Maybe what we need is a bit more Nietzsche than Heidegger in this regard.

Condemned to Freedom.

No Excuses.

As we will see the Sartrean conception of freedom is quite distinct, even from the rest of the existentialist line of thinkers, from its psychological starting-point to its moral outgrowth. The starting-point Sartre takes with consciousness marks him out from his precursors, Nietzsche saw consciousness as quite overrated.¹ There is an interesting convergence between the particular route Sartre would eventually take on moral questions and the critique of traditional morality Nietzsche had put forth in the late 19^th Century. Not to mention the highly different ideas of selfhood which emerge from Sartre's framework and from Nietzsche's thought-processes. To both the authentic self is something that has to be created through a rejection of the inauthentic, which may be constituted as a set of social norms or moral values.² We will explore Sartre's view of human freedom with critical reference to Nietzsche where the conception seems to fall short of its aims.

The notion of consciousness as freedom is the vital element of Sartre’s existential phenomenology.³ It fits in with his general project that places freedom as the central dimension of human existence. This is where the existential themes of responsibility, commitment and notions such as bad faith and authenticity fit into the picture as well. The modes whereby we may relate our being to Being can be authentic and inauthentic. For Heidegger there was more truth in authenticity as it was a self-directed rather than a moral ideal. This is where freedom enters with the existentialist focus on the actions we undertake and, by extension, the way we choose to undertake them. Sartre went as far as to claim that the actions which we undertake can have consequences that we did not foresee and which we are responsible for insofar as we are solely responsible for own actions. The motivations we may hold are irrelevant insofar as they may provide ‘excuses’ which allow us to avoid our own responsibility. This is the reason that we fear and often shirk from the acceptance of our condition as radically free.⁴

When we look at Sartre’s conception of freedom we have to keep in mind that his body of work was a reaction to Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. As part of Sartre’s reaction to Heidegger he reverts to some extent back to Husserl – in that the focus of phenomenology should be consciousness – and brings with him modified vestments of Cartesianism which Heidegger wanted to ‘throw out’. This conception of freedom is predicated on consciousness as nothingness because freedom is consciousness it is detached from the causal forces of the external world. At the same time, there is literally nothing which traps the self ‘inside’ consciousness because there is nothing there.⁵ Nietzsche had noted that this particular kind of selfhood is detached from the world of causes and that it meshes well with the purposes of morality for this reason. Sartre may not have disagreed, his notion of consciousness precluded it being determined.

The Ethics of Ambiguity.

It may even be that this version of selfhood was put forward to generate a particular kind of moral conduct. It certainly led Sartre in a particular direction. In an attempt to craft an evaluative moral code Sartre reached out to Kantianism with which he was very familiar. The aim was to get away from the instability inherent in the radical subjectivism that seemed to be built into existentialism. Even as Heidegger preferred authentic modes of being over inauthentic modes. It's all too clear that authentic behaviour can have consequences of the moral and immoral kind. The amorality of authenticity in Heidegger’s work meant that there was nothing about it which ruled out Heidegger dabbling in the politics of the Third Reich at a moral level. This was something that had to be rectified for the philosophers who emerged on the other side of WW2. Especially for the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who had been embedded in the French resistance.

Sartrean thought seems far removed from Kant at the outset. It may testify to the need for a kind of moral realism, even as Sartre rejected Christianity and traditional modes of morality he found that he had to go back to Kant in the end. It was the categorical imperative which interested Sartre, it stipulated that there are objective demands on us. It is an impersonal moral duty which takes two forms and we have access to it through reason. Firstly, that we should "act only on a maxim or rule that you can will to be a universal law". And secondly that, we should "treat others as an end in themselves, as opposed to a means to an end".⁶ The imperative is relentless in its universalism, cutting through all wants, desires and circumstances. This may seem completely at odds with Sartre's framework. But the emphasis in his conception of freedom on responsibility is compatible with Kant's insistence on universality.

To put it simply, when we act as individuals we act as we would expect others to act and this is the key to morality for Sartre.⁷ This is consistent with the Sartrean notion of freedom insofar as it can be seen as an extension of the claim that we are responsible for the extent that we act in accordance with our evaluative capacities. It could be seen as built on Sartre's idea of radical choice, which comes out of Nietzschean influences on his thinking. It was Nietzsche who put forward the suggestion that we create values. There aren't actually any out there for us to latch onto as the myths which supported our values are destroyed in nihilism. The only way out is to put man where God once was.⁸ For Sartre we have to choose rather than create our values and this begins with a radical choice, the act which opens up a new space of moral conduct. But it seems that the universality Sartre wants to go for would have the effect of instituting conformity at a self-directed level.⁹ This would seem to be too tight a constraint on Sartre's radical notion of freedom. Then again it has always been the case that this tradition has given preference to certain behaviour and attitudes, we can see this in Nietzsche's own favouritism for master-morality.

The Radical Self.

Perhaps then the emphasis on universality is what's wrong here and not the framework itself. Instead morality may be about particularity, it always boils down to a matter of interest.¹⁰ But it's unclear where this takes us, if anywhere else other than a return to the instability of moral subjectivism. It may be more in accordance with the creation of values rather than the simple choosing of them. Nietzsche would prefer to confront us with the idea of the Eternal Return of the Same than a set of duties.¹¹ The Eternal Return functions as a test for one's attitude towards life and our ability to live as ourselves without any evasive behaviour. The test is to imagine that you would have to live your life as it has gone so far and as it will go on over and over again indefinitely. So any moment of life is one which we could dwell on for all eternity. To meet this test is to affirm life and to failure is something quite pathetic. In part this functions to push us. Eternal Recurrence can force us in part to accept life as imperfect it is, so that we can 'become' who we are.

Although the alternative to moral universality seems flawed and impractical, much more in line with being-toward-death than any code of conduct, it seems clear that the venture into Kantian ethics may have been a poor manoeuvre on Sartre's part.¹² Freedom may be the primary dimension of human existence for Sartre, but its symptoms include abandonment and responsibility. Existence itself is factical because we are transcending beings, the way we exercise our freedom can transform the circumstances under which we live. We can remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our ideas, in doing so our facticity is recreated. And yet we are condemned to restlessness where we are never satisfied with our accomplishments. Each instance of facticity cannot be taken on its own to represent who we are, for we still have the capacity to act once again and redefine ourselves. The real problem may lie with the elements of Cartesianism that Sartre brings into his framework.

As it's not clear that the certainty which Descartes attributed to consciousness characterises it at all. For Nietzsche knowledge involves a finite entity with finite abilities engaged with a world of infinite becoming. The extent to which 'I' can refer to something autonomous and total is highly suspect, as Cartesian selfhood relies on an unsustainable dualism which cuts mind from body. Similarly Sartre cuts the world from consciousness. Descartes would have placed consciousness at the centre of his notion of selfhood and we can pick up an element of this in Sartre too. But Nietzsche did not reject the notion of a self. For Nietzsche the self is indistinguishable from the person and the body, which are in turn embedded in a socio-cultural context and inseparable from all sorts of contingent natural forces.¹³ Thus the importance of culture in Nietzschean thought. The self is always contextualised and cannot be broken-off from the world, to pretend it can be completely detached is illusory.¹⁴ The self is not 'I' rather 'I' is just the development of the self.

1 Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 2/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GaO7wvRLsU

2 Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.125-145

3 Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

4 Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.37-46

5 Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

6 Kant offered four examples of the categorical imperative in play: we should not commit suicide, we should not break our promises, we should be lazy but develop our talents and we should not ignore the happiness of others but help them.

7 Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.140-143

8 Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.324-325

9 It could be argued that Sartre never really found an easy way to adapt existentialism for the moral and the political. Simone de Beauvoir may have come closer to a practical ethics, the ambiguous condition of the human being as a part of a world that their consciousness is not. It is this ambiguity which makes ethics difficult for existentialists, de Beauvoir's answer was to insist that 'every man needs the freedom of other men and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant'. Human freedom presupposes the possibility of inter-subjectivity, taking the individual to the social realm.

Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.143-145

10 Sedgwick, PR: Nietzsche, The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2009) pg.69-72

11 Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 3/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skKQHGTdFE&feature=related

12 Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.40-46

13 The limits of knowledge are what give it meaning and concreteness to knowledge. It is absurd to claim that ‘I think’ has any immediate identification with thought. The neglect of human capacities for creativity by this conception is intolerable, such capacities are not extensions of a ‘pure intellect’ above the body. Rather the self and the intellect can be best grasped in the drives of the body. The individual as a nexus of drives, instincts and passions is central to Nietzsche’s vision, with the self as the realm where such drives can be refined.

Sedgwick, PR: Nietzsche, The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2009) pg.137-142

14 The talk about free-will confuses causes and effects, we shouldn't talk about our behaviour as though there is first an act of will (cause) and then comes an action (effect). As every effect must have a cause we might say that the preceding cause is a mental one to action, but for Nietzsche there is just action. We just do things most of the time, it is only every so often that we have to push ourselves and will something. Most of our lives are not so reflective and deliberative, we just do things because of the kind of creatures we are. It is a matter of necessity. This is consistent with Nietzsche's attitude towards consciousness, which Sartre seems to elevate by contrast. Nietzsche puts aside the focus on justifying actions in favour of explaining actions in terms of motivation and who we are. Character is constituted by a set of automatic actions which we cultivate.

Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 2/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GaO7wvRLsU

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