Nietzsche's Legacy

He who sees me, knows me,
he who knows me, names me
The homeless man.

* * *

No one may dare
Question me where
My home is.
I am simply not confined
To space and fleeting time.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, "Without a Home")

Nietzsche once said that he fought so fiercely with Socrates because the Greek philosopher always stood so close to him. I have come to form a similar relationship with Nietzsche. Consequently, this book was conceived with Nietzsche antagonistically in mind. During its gestation, Nietzsche prodded and poked and pried, like the mischief maker who tripped up the tightrope walker and cautioned Zarathustra. Heidegger also established this sort of relationship with Nietzsche. He was both excited and worried by Nietzsche's mischief. For this reason, Heidegger's characterizations and criticisms of Nietzsche are at times unfair. His accolades, at other times, seem exaggerated. In any case, Nietzsche serves as the subject of the greatest single share of Heidegger's published work. He is a crucial figure who receives the epithets, among others, of the "last German philosopher," the "only essential thinker after Schelling," and the "West's last thinker" (SAG 474; ST 3; WCT 46). Nietzsche, Heidegger states, was the first to recognize and the only philosopher to think through to its awesome conclusions the role of nihilism in the history of humankind (WCT 57). Heidegger also claimed that his lecture courses on Nietzsche, beginning in the mid-1930s, marked "for all who could hear at all" his initial "confrontation" with National Socialism (OGS 53). More generally, Nietzsche is held responsible (or coresponsible with Hölderlin) for the Kehre in Heidegger's thought. In short, Heidegger's struggle with Nietzsche largely defines the development of his thought. One must pass through Nietzsche, Heidegger insists, if one is to come to terms philosophically with modernity and its aftermath.

Many believe that coming to terms with the politics of postmodernity also requires a passage through Nietzsche. Yet if one sets out with a democratic destination in mind, the passage becomes an uneasy affair. Those who take on this challenge generally celebrate aspects of Nietzsche's iconoclasm while redirecting its ruthlessly aristocratic force to other purposes. Anyone so engaged, however, must worry about joining the ranks of those Nietzsche considered his "worst readers ... who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole." Indeed, those who once approached Nietzsche with a political purpose diametrically opposed to that which I have in mind—the Nazi sympathizers of the 1930s and 1940s—did plunder him unscrupulously. Today the political theorist's choice of Nietzsche as a mentor or companion is more honorably based on the importance of his philosophic deeds. Nietzsche is acknowledged as constituting a radical break in the history of thought, thereby opening new vistas in the realm of political life.

The results obtained so far in this area of philosophy have been strikingly limited. The reason has to do with a commonly held premise regarding the nature of Nietzsche's philosophic achievement. Nietzsche is generally understood as the destroyer of metaphysics and the saboteur of any ethics resting on metaphysical foundations. As a means of introducing Heidegger's thought, I shall argue that this position obscures as much as it reveals about Nietzsche and saddles one with what might be called the postmodern political dilemma.

Nietzsche's Rupture

Writing to his friend Paul Deussen on September 14, 1888, Nietzsche made the claim that his recent works had "split the history of mankind in two halves." A month later, shortly before his mental collapse, Nietzsche frenetically began to write his literary autobiography, Ecce Homo. Here the phrase describing his historically unique and cataclysmic role would again appear, among Nietzsche's many claims for himself, in the section "Why I Am a Destiny." An "event without parallel" that set its discoverer "apart from the whole rest of humanity" is announced. Specifically, Nietzsche claims that his "uncovering" of Christian morality has broken human history in two. Christian morality, Nietzsche accuses, evidences the enfeeblement of basic instincts to the point where worldly life becomes depreciated. It is a form of ressentiment. In an effort to take revenge for the pain and unpredictability of life, the Christian moralist indignantly strikes out against it, attempting to control life's fractious power and harness its mysteries by means of an ethical code. Appeal to this code both justifies and promises compensation for the moralist's worldly impotence and suffering.

The early Greeks, Nietzsche argues, had a much healthier, more worldly, and consequently less decadent culture. Yet we must surpass even the Greeks' tragic heroism, he believes, to survive the looming menace of modern nihilism. Nietzsche's promotion of the life-affirming god Dionysus, in lieu of "the Crucified," is meant to constitute the world-historic onset of a new age. It is to initiate the transformation of thought, such that great thought might grasp and overcome nihilism, as well as the transfiguration of culture, such that great culture might foster a breed of human beings capable of harboring such thought. The revived tragic and heroic affirmation of life, not its resentment-induced calumny and morality-ridden bureaucratization, would constitute the future of humanity—if humanity were to have a future.

Though Nietzsche's world-historic aspirations proved overly ambitious, his crucial position within the history of thought remains intact. Yet for the most part, and increasingly so, the rupture Nietzsche is celebrated for occasioning is not that between Christian morality and its aftermath. This breach has been surpassed in significance by Nietzsche's detonation of metaphysics. Nietzsche originally viewed his attacks on the metaphysical foundations of modernity as skirmishes that prepared the ground and readied the warrior for the approaching war with Christian morality. Yet in the midst of contemporary cultural diversity and religious entropy, the significance of Nietzsche's holy war is lost on many of his readers. The more amorphous fissure between the modern and the postmodern has become his most celebrated handiwork.

The break between modernism and postmodernism, somewhat contrived in form...