Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics, and: Heidegger's Nietzsche: Being and Becoming, and: The Movement of Nihilism:

Heidegger's Thinking after Nietzsche (review)

Justin Laleh

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Volume 43, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 150-154 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v043/43.1.laleh.html

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Louis Blond, Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics. London: Continuum, 2011. 277 pp. ISBN: HB: 978-1-84706-404-2. Cloth, $120.00. Paul Catanu, Heideggers Nietzsche: Being and Becoming. Montreal: 8th House, 2010. 423 pp. ISBN: 978-1-926716-02-2. Paper, $38.00. Laurence Paul Hemming, Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridis, eds., The Movement of Nihilism: Heideggers Thinking after Nietzsche. London: Continuum, 2011. 199 pp. ISBN: HB: 978-14411-6809-2. Cloth, 65.00.

JUSTIn LALEH
It stands as testament to the philosophical richness of Martin Heideggers interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche that three new books concerning this seemingly small area of interest have so little in common. Each book has a distinct approach to the encounter between the two thinkers, which, when taken together, constitute a tableau of the current status of scholarship pertaining to Heideggers monumental reading. Framed by Laurence Hemmings introductory claim that the matter of thinking Heidegger politically is far from having been put to rest, The Movement of Nihilism: Heideggers Thinking after Nietzsche collects a series of papers devoted to the task of understanding nihilisma central concept for the later Heidegger that is intimately bound up with his interpretation of Nietzscheand its political connotations. The first chapter of the collection, Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridiss The Movement of Nihilism as Self-Assertion, assesses one aspect of Heideggers interpretation of Nietzschean nihilism, namely incomplete nihilism or destructive nihilism, from the viewpoint of the concrete unfolding of the history that lies between him and us. Heidegger is construed as a reader of Nietzsche capable of developing a schema within which we can seek justification and confirmation of Nietzsches thoughts regarding the decadent character of a nihilistic Europe. This, in turn, aids the development of an understanding of our own concrete historical condition (20). Contrasting both Heidegger and Nietzsche with modern cultural theory, Costea and Amiridis conclude that an investigation into nihilism serves to problematize contemporary cultural analysis by showing that the central character of concretized history on which such analysis is founded, namely modern man, is the very notion put in question by the arch thinkers of nihilism. Disrupting cultural theorys optimistic worldview regarding the products of modern man is seen to be a source of debate, rather than an endpoint (22). The idea that a philosophical-historical account of modernity, such as those provided by Heidegger and Nietzsche (in the polemical form of genealogy), stands in contradistinction to actual, concrete, more real history is developed from a different angle in Thomas Rohkrmers Fighting Nihilism through Promoting a New Faith: Heidegger with the Debates of His Time. Using the theme of communal faith, Rohkrmer compares Heidegger to his immediate contemporaries in order to show that he was not as unique or indeed untimely as he took himself to be. Rohkrmer does not consider this to be an act of denigration but rather an approach to the thought of Heidegger that shows the ways in which it is not as removed from todays concerns about environmentalism and fragmenting societies as we might think. By approaching Heidegger either in terms of his applicability to debates in cultural theory or in terms of his identity with his contemporaries, both Rohkrmer and Costea and Amiridis remain on the outside of Heideggers thought. In these two chapters, nihilism is first and foremost seen as a cultural phenomenon. Heideggers objection to such an idea is clear. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics he claims that

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2012. Copyright 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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contemporary philosophers of culture (including Klages, who Rohkrmer claims is the closest intellectual predecessor of Heidegger [45]) are trapped within philosophical prejudices regarding uncertainty, ambiguity, and terror. Accordingly, in professing worldviews on the basis of which they first diagnose the malaise of modern society and subsequently offer a prognosis and a cure, philosophers of culture operate from within an inherently calculative notion of history. To subject Heideggers thoughts on Nietzsche and nihilism to justification by treating his philosophicalhistorical claims as apodictic, empirically verifiable statements is always to operate from within a particular notion of history, one that seeks to think past, present, and future from within the ideal of certainty. Such an ideal, according to Heidegger, is not operative within philosophy proper. To put modern humankind into question is to open up the ambiguity of our current situation and to present the demand for thinking in essential termsterms not subject to the corollary of concrete history but instead fully determinative of any notion of it. Interestingly, at the same juncture, Heidegger describes all contemporary philosophies of culture as having a common source, namely a particular reception of Nietzsches philosophy.1 As such, for Heidegger the task of asking who we are is explicitly and intimately bound up with some form of authentic confrontation with Nietzsche. Hemming, in his own chapter, Heideggers Movement of Nihilism as Political and Metaphysical Critique, is closer to Heidegger on this matter, as is Joanna Hodge in Heidegger on Virtue and Technology: The Movement of Nihilism. Both of these chapters, in differing ways, approach the task of analyzing the movement of nihilism as a central concept in Heideggers oeuvre. Hemming conducts a propadeutic to Heideggers interpretation of Nietzsche, ultimately arguing that the task of fully understanding nihilism is distinctly philosophical-historical. As such, any reading of nihilism must remain in proximity to the demands made by Heideggers enquiry rather than function with a preestablished notion of what constitutes the remit of political thought. Working along the same lines, Hodges aim is to read nihilism in Heidegger with renewed attentiveness to the role of reading in retrieving and redeploying the meanings consigned to texts (107). Following from Taminiauxs claims that Nietzsche played a central and uniquely determinative role in Heideggers thinking from as early as Being and Time, Hodge turns her eye to the earlier Heidegger in order to sketch out the extended trajectory, covering the entire movement of his [Heideggers] thought (94) which is necessary for properly addressing nihilism and Nietzsche.2 While Hodge can only briefly lay out her claims given the enormity of such a project and the tight confines of a single article, Louis P. Blond attempts just such a project in his book-length treatise Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics. In his introduction, Blond presents his work as a challenge to mystifying accounts of Heideggers engagement with Nietzscheaccounts that dont do justice to its thoroughgoing philosophical nature. Blond plays on the character of the original German term that Heidegger uses to describe his engagement with Nietzsche, a term normally translated as confrontation (Auseinandersetzung). Rather than being a straightforwardly extant conflict of one thinker versus another, Auseinandersetzung describes an attempt at a separating out of Nietzsches thought (5). Accordingly, Blond sees this separating out as having the character of an internal conflict within Heideggers work. For this reason the task of determining and elucidating the main philosophical problems within which Nietzsche emerges as a meaningful thinker in Heideggers work takes up the majority of the text and, in so doing, places the work firmly within the interests of Heidegger scholarship. Blond painstakingly stages a series of readings of Heideggerian texts in order to fully flesh out a particular philosophical (as opposed to political or biographical) context within which he places Nietzsche. At each stage along this path Blond addresses the most relevant criticisms laid at Heideggers door and, on the whole, attempts to argue in favor of Heideggers position. The main thrust of Blonds argument is that on the matter of his relation to neo-Kantianism and

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all other aspects of transcendental philosophy, Heidegger has been, heretofore, misunderstood. Each of Blonds readings elucidates the manner in which, with increasing depth and complexity, Heidegger attempts to generate an original conception of human finitude and transcendence that does not succumb to traditional pitfalls within the history of philosophy. Blond is clear that Heidegger does not seek to completely reject the manner in which transcendence has previously been thought (especially in transcendental philosophy) but rather to transform their concepts and conceptual structures. One such concept is that of conditionality. Blond presents Heideggers inquiry into Kant as an investigation into the problem of transition between transcendental elements (158), where the problem of transition names the difficulty philosophers have traditionally faced in satisfactorily accounting for the relation between the formal structures of pure logic and the chaos of sensation, or, in terms of finitude, a conditioned series and its unconditioned condition. Taken as a fundamental problem of philosophythe question of the unity of partsBlond shows that common attempts at a solution seek to dissolve the oppositional character of dualities, either in the form of positing one as immanently inhering in the other or by importing the structure of transcendence. Blond claims that Heideggers analyses of Kant, Leibniz, and metaphysics in general, show that this serves to either ignore the problem of difference (which results in immanentism) or simply displace the disunity, resulting in the problems persistence elsewhere in a philosophical system (in the case of Kant in his admitted failure to account for representations relation to the object).3 The trajectory Blond wishes to plot focuses on Heideggers own attempts to tackle the problem of transition. Blond shows, stage by stage, how the earlier insights of Heideggers philosophical work unfold into the problem of nihilism and its overcoming and, accordingly, how these insights turn on Heideggers reading of Nietzsche. Blond thus construes nihilism as the historical movement whereby original conditionality, or humanitys essential receptiveness to being, gets covered over in favor of accounts of unity and difference that promote a self-creative notion of mans finitudeaccounts that are stuck in an anthropomorphic structure of the transcendence of the subject over objects. What Blond presents us with is a reading of Heidegger that draws out the subtleties of his attempts at transforming or overcoming the pernicious structures of transcendence in a manner that no longer thinks transcendence within the determinations and hierarchies of a subject-object schema but instead thinks transcendence from the direction of ontological differencea notion that, when taking Heideggers work as a whole, turns on nihilism. Blond considers his book to have secured the correct context from within which Heideggers Nietzsche can best be thought and at the same time to have set the appropriate trajectory along which we can start to appropriately assess Heideggers contributions to both the history of philosophy and its future. In ultimately concluding that Heidegger was successful in his attempts to move beyond nihilism, Blond shows that he is willing to be critical of Heidegger, but only once he has fully exposed himself to the demands of the task of understanding such rich and subtle philosophy. Rather than suspend his judgment of Nietzsche and limit himself to an examination of how Nietzsche appears for Heidegger, Blond dedicates an entire chapter (the longest in the book) to an analysis of Nietzsches own relation to metaphysics. Given the short space allotted to such a large subject matter, the account is compacted, forced into summarizing and generalizing, and, as a result, it falls short of the scholarly rigor demanded and maintained by the rest of Blonds investigation. This proves problematic for Blond only when he begins to assess Heideggers reading of Nietzsche in terms of the possibility of Nietzsches ability to escape the force of Heideggers argument, ultimately concluding that Nietzsche cannot. Attempting to briefly present Nietzsche independently of Heidegger and then subsequently reduce him to a position along the path toward Heidegger gives the impression that the decision to go with Heidegger was made in advance of any reading itself. Paul Catanus Heideggers Nietzsche: Being and Becoming approaches the debate from a different angle. Whereas Hemming, Hodge, and Blond seek to do justice to Heideggers reading of

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Nietzsche, Catanu is more concerned with doing justice to Nietzsches deep doctrine of Becoming (xi). Accordingly, and in direct opposition to Blond, Catanu devotes the majority of his book to Nietzsches notion of becoming in order to develop an account rich enough to surpass the supposed limitations of Heideggers interpretation. In taking up the problematic elements of Heideggers reading, Catanu forwards a novel thesis: Heideggers attempt to systematize Nietzsches thought via a single idea (will to power) was well motivated but didnt go far enough, as it lacked sufficient strength to render the entire Nietzschean corpus coherent. It is thus Catanus thesis that Nietzsches philosophy can be explained entirely in terms of this concept [Becoming] (7). Presented firmly as a piece of Nietzsche scholarship, Catanus text addresses a large number of Nietzsches texts and varying Nietzsche interpreters from both the analytic and the continental traditions, as well as tackles Nietzsches relation to Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Hegel, and Gadamer in some depth. The result is a remarkably rigorous and thorough text that pursues its goal with a singular focus. Catanu considers Heidegger to have incorrectly pegged Nietzschesnotion of becoming to a notion of permanencea misreading we are told hinges on Heideggers centralization of the will to power and insistence that an inner teleology is at play in Nietzsches thought. On this account Heidegger refuses to see that becoming is configured as a dynamic strugglehe unifies that which maintains itself in difference. At this point Catanu steps right into the conceptual schemas and debates that Blond deals with in great depth, as he invokes Kant in order to explain Nietzsches position, claiming that, with his understanding of the relationship between being and becoming, Nietzsche offers a reformulation of the dualism between the thing-in-itself and appearances. He suggests that Nietzsches reformulation is distinctive owing to its removal of teleology from either side of the oppositional relationship, which shows that nihilism turns on the manner in which this relation is thought. As such, nihilism cannot be overcome by simply uniting Being and Becoming and negating their difference (369). Catanu forwards the following as a position contra to Heideggers: Nietzsche must be read with Kant and against Kant, as the concept of becoming possesses some transcendental features that make any experience of becoming itself possible (391). When read in comparison to Blonds more attentive Heidegger analysis, one can see that Catanu succumbs to the following two pitfalls: he commits Nietzsche to overcoming the problem of transition in the second manner laid out by Blond (i.e., not immanently but transcendentally), and he fails to correctly locate the Nietzsche engagement within Heideggers work. Read in the appropriate context, it is as a result of his disruption of Kantianism that Nietzsche arises as a figure in Heideggers philosophy in the first place. Although this fact does not necessarily put pressure on Catanus reading of Nietzsche, it certainly does render his conclusions regarding Heideggers successes and failures as an interpreter problematic. In attempting to do justice to Heidegger, Blond fails to provide the balance suggested by his title. In doing justice to Nietzsche, Catanu suffers the same fate: he does not genuinely present Heideggers Nietzsche. While each certainly has its own merits, neither of these treatises manages to traverse the battle lines of the Heidegger-Nietzsche conflict unscathed, as it seems that neither Blond nor Catanu are capable of resisting the temptation to mete out justice to either Heidegger or Nietzsche. When considering this engagement, the most profound challenge is to remain open to ones own philosophical prejudices. That the problem of philosophical prejudice lies at the very heart of the Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche only serves to heighten the difficultyand maybe even the ironyof attempts to compare the two thinkers within the framework of justification. Perhaps Heideggers own efforts can begin to take on their own peculiarly Nietzschean character when formed around the following: We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves,so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? (GM P:1).4 University of Warwick j.laleh@warwick.ac.uk

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NOTES
1. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001), 18c. 2. See Jean-Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), chap. 6. 3. Blond references Kants letter to Herz dated 21 February 1772. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).