There are at least two opposed readings in the literature about the kind of figure that Nietzsche presents of himself as in his later works. There is Nietzsche, the metaphysician of the will to power and the eternal return, and there is Nietzsche, the sceptic, the iconoclast and the destroyer of metaphysical systems and ideas. Heidegger’s reading is probably the strongest interpretation available in support of the former, whereas Derrida’s presents a solid account of the latter.
The aim of this chapter is to provide an alternative to both of these antithetical readings. Contra Heidegger, I show that Nietzsche does not reject the notion of truth understood as the correctness of judgment on the ground of a metaphysical understanding of the world as chaos. Contra Derrida, I argue that Nietzsche does not abandon a commitment to the propositional notion of truth in favour of scepticism, irony, rhetoric or play.
Nietzsche neither rejects nor abandons the notion of truth. His critique of the will to truth involves a suspension of our endorsement of propositions in a manner similar to Husserl’s suspension of the natural attitude. But rather than disclosing the transcendental field of constituting consciousness, that suspension in Nietzsche invites the reader to engage in a practice of self-constitution in relation to the tragic insight that the propositions that we have thus far accepted as true are based on errors.
What Nietzsche proposes, I argue, is a new practice of self-discipline. Its aim is not merely to neutralize metaphysical characterizations of the world, whether as being or as becoming, as reality or as appearance. Its aim is to incorporate the insight that the totality of propositions that has defined Western humanity’s self-understanding since Plato rests on simplifications, errors or fictions. The principal question here is not Is that insight true? but, rather, What would that insight do to me, how would it transform me, if it were true? and Am I able to overcome the resistances to it? In Nietzsche’s eyes, what remains at the end of metaphysics, once the distinction between the supersensuous and the sensuous worlds has collapsed in the general insight that our most cherished and prized truths rest on illusions, is a practice that uses these so-called truths as means and tests of self-overcoming. Nietzsche is, like Heidegger, a thinker of the limit of metaphysics.
In section 2, I lay out Heidegger’s argument against Nietzsche in two texts written in the 1930s, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1931/2) and The Will to Power as Knowledge (1939). Heidegger’s argument is that, appearances notwithstanding, Nietzsche does not abandon the notion of truth as correspondence. Nietzsche rejects the commonsensical notion of propositional truth (truth is a property of propositions) on the ground that propositions cannot be in harmony with reality since the former have unchanging logical and categorial forms whereas reality has the character of chaos. Since harmony with reality is a kind of correspondence, Nietzsche’s rejection of propositional truth is based on his commitment to a certain understanding of correspondence.
In section 3, I explain that to be in harmony with reality for Heidegger/Nietzsche consists in a way of life called justice. Its aim is to construct a world of re-identifiable objects that will afford the embodied subject the means to secure its identity and permanence.
In section 4, I note an ambiguity in Heidegger’s reading and show that Nietzsche, the sceptic and naturalist remains an undeveloped aspect of Heidegger’s interpretation. In section 5, I explain in what sense Nietzsche’s thought constitutes the end of metaphysics for Heidegger and the way Heidegger proposes to defeat the anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism of late modernity.
In sections 6 and 7, I propose the alternative reading of Nietzsche briefly sketched in this introduction. In section 8, I consider whether Nietzsche’s practice of self-discipline presupposes, as a necessary condition of possibility, the forgottenness of being.
In this section, I explain Heidegger’s argument against Nietzsche in the 1930s, namely that Nietzsche remains committed to a certain understanding of truth as correspondence in spite of his apparent rejection of it. In section 3, I clarify the sense in which that correspondence must be taken in Heidegger/Nietzsche. Then, in section 4, I turn to highlight an ambiguity in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche before I present an alternative interpretation of Nietzsche on truth in sections 6, 7 and 8.
In section 5, I address what is doubtless the most contentious point in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. That is his charge that Nietzsche anthropomorphizes the world. I argue that there are good reasons for thinking that Heidegger’s charge sticks.
* * *
In a note dated 1885, Nietzsche writes:
Truth is the kind of error without which a particular kind of living creature could not live. The value for life is what ultimately decides. (Nietzsche, 2003: 16)
Heidegger cites this note in the final paragraphs of Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. He then comments:
If for Nietzsche truth is a kind of error, then its essence consists in a way of thinking that always, indeed necessarily falsifies the real, specifically insofar as every act of representing halts the continual ‘becoming’ and, in erecting its established facts against the flow of ‘becoming,’ sets up as the supposedly real something that does not correspond – i.e. something incorrect and thus erroneous.
Nietzsche’s determination of truth as the incorrectness of thinking is in agreement with the traditional essence of truth as the correctness of assertion (logos). (PM 179)
Let me begin by clarifying what Heidegger means in the passage by reference to how truth is usually thought.
Truth is ordinarily understood in two ways. Aristotle, Aquinas and others speak of truth in relation to what exists and in relation to propositions. We say, for instance, that is how things are in truth or things are in truth like that. What is meant by such phrases is that things have certain characteristics or properties that do not depend on the way we think or interact with them and that these characteristics are unchanging and self-identifying. What is meant is that they behave just as the world of being behaves in Plato. Truth in this metaphysically realist sense refers to what exists in itself and, correlatively, to what is transparent to the mind.2
Truth is also thought in relation to propositions. In this context, it is the property of the propositional content of a declarative sentence. Truth signifies the agreement of a proposition with what exists in itself.
The expression truth in Nietzsche’s assertion that truth is a kind of error can thus mean the following:
a.There is a world that exists in itself.
b.Truth is the property of a proposition.
Conversely, error can mean two things as well. As a predicate that describes how things are in themselves, it carries the sense of the unstable, the impermanent, the different, chaos or becoming. To say of the world that the only kind of power that rules in it is the ‘power of the false’ (Deleuze) is not to remove something positive from the world. It is not to add something negative to it. It is to give the world a positive metaphysical interpretation as a world of becoming.
So, for example, the body for Nietzsche represents our indelible encounter with chaos. Chaos, Heidegger explains in The Will to Power as Knowledge, is not the confused or the unordered. It is what urges and flows. It is what is animated. It is the stream of life whose order remains hidden.
Nietzsche says in a note from his late notebooks that the body is not a thing in which qualities or forces inhere. The word body designates a dynamic interaction of forces (Nietzsche, 2003: 30). He insists that the body in that precise sense must be made the basis and guideline for the interpretation of the world.
What does error mean as the property of a proposition from the standpoint of the interpretation of the world as becoming?
Error in this context cannot simply mean that a proposition is not in agreement with the facts. According to the first two classical laws of thought, a proposition cannot represent anything unless it represents it as something that is identical (x is x) and non-contradictory (I cannot represent x as x and as non-x at the same time and in the same respect). If the world has the character of becoming, then the representational content of a proposition that conforms to the laws of thought will falsify the world.
Error thus means falsification, simplification, construction or creation. The representational content of a proposition arrests the flow of becoming in logical and categorial forms. That makes it possible to represent the world and talk about it (N3 95, 107, 116).
Nietzsche’s assertion that truth is a kind of error can consequently mean the following:
c.The world as it exists in itself is not a world of being but a world of becoming.
d.A proposition (owing to its logical and categorial forms) falsifies what exists in itself.
Now Heidegger argues that Nietzsche rejects b., the propositional notion of truth, on the ground of the metaphysical interpretation of the world in c. For Nietzsche, the propositional notion of truth falsifies the real because it is not in harmony with the real, which is in flux. Harmony with the real is the metaphysical standard in relation to which the propositional notion of truth is challenged. But harmony with the real is a form of correspondence. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s rejection of the propositional notion of truth is based on his commitment to the correspondence theory.
Heidegger writes in The Will to Power as Knowledge that Nietzsche’s assertion that truth is a kind of error thinks truth twice:
And each time differently, hence ambiguously: once as fixation of the constant [in a propositional content], and then as harmony with the actual. Only on the basis of this essence of truth as harmony can truth as constancy be an error. The essence of truth here underlying the concept of error is what has been determined since ancient times in metaphysical thinking as correspondence with the actual and harmony with it, homoiosis. (N3 126)
How is that harmony with reality to be understood?
Harmony with reality is not to be taken in the sense of the copy-model relation. It is not as if Nietzsche is saying that changes in the world cause replicas of themselves in the mind. What Heidegger seems to have in mind is something like the ethical idea of the Stoics of living in accordance with nature. That comes out in his discussion of knowledge, art and justice in The Will to Power as Knowledge.
Knowledge and art are, for Nietzsche, enabling conditions of human life. They are conditions under which a stable environment is secured against chaos.
Nietzsche says in a note that ‘[e]very belief is a holding-to-be-true’ (Nietzsche, 2003: 149). If I believe that the cat is on the mat then I believe that it is true that the cat is on the mat. To believe for Nietzsche is to endorse a proposition. It is to accept it as true.
Heidegger reads that passage differently. Thing-hood, inherence, causality and so on are categorial forms built in a propositional content or representation in general. Now to endorse a proposition presupposes as a necessary condition of possibility the unity of self-awareness, the identity of the I think. The identity of the subject presupposes, in turn, as a necessary condition of possibility, the identity of the object, that is, a referent that is re-identifiable as the same over time and that constitutes what the proposition is about. Heidegger claims, in this Kantian reading of Nietzsche, that to endorse a proposition presupposes the organization of the flux of stimuli in re-identifiable objects such as things, properties, causes and so on.
The sensuous crowds and overwhelms us as rational living beings, as those beings who have always already been intent on making things identical without expressly carrying out such an intention. For only what is identical offers the guarantee of the same; only the same secures constancy, while making constant effects the securing of permanence. (N3 98)
The chaos of sensations is not something that stands over against us. We ‘ourselves, as bodily beings, are it’ (N3 79). That implies that the aim of knowledge is not truth. It is to construct and endow the body of the living being with a stable structure and identity. To that end, a world of objects must be constituted by means of reason and its categories. Objects that are re-identifiable as the same afford living beings the possibility of securing their identity and permanence over time.
On Heidegger’s reading, Nietzsche is a fictionalist about truth and the categories of reason. Knowledge and truth are resources and conditions of human life. They generate a world of being and superimpose it over a world of becoming. That makes possible the preservation of human life against the onslaught of becoming both from within and from without.
It is no different in the case of art. By art, Heidegger does not mean works of different genres.
Art is the name for every form of transfiguring and viable transposition of life to higher possibilities. (N3 126)
By art, Heidegger means the drive in human life that produces sensuous appearances. Knowledge is a condition under which chaos is mastered in a constructed world of objects for a bodily subject. Like dreams are to reality, so is art the condition under which this construct of knowledge is transfigured into an aesthetic construct, a higher possibility of mastering chaos.
Like knowledge, art arrests the flow of becoming in sensuous appearances. But what it presents is not constrained by the limits of knowledge. That is why art offers human life unanticipated possibilities of self- and world-mastery.
Accordingly, art and knowledge are devoted to the same vital activity.
Art and knowledge in their reciprocity first bring about the full securing of permanence of the animate as such... . [B]oth are in essence one: namely, the assimilation and the direction of human life to chaos, homoiosis. Such assimilation is not imitative and reproductive adaptation to something at hand, but transfiguration that commands and poetizes, establishes perspectival horizons, and fixates. (N3 140)
That assimilation to chaos is the norm the living being uses to produce stable constructs of domination. That assimilation is what Nietzsche has in mind, according to Heidegger, when he speaks of Gerechtigkeit, rightness or justice, in a note written in 1884.3
Justice as a constructive, exclusive, annihilative mode of thought, arising from estimations of value: The supreme representative of life itself.
Heidegger hears in Nietzsche’s word an echo of the metaphysical notion of Richtigkeit, of truth as correctness.
Heidegger’s reading here must be taken with caution. That note on justice antedates by a year the first mention of the will to power in Nietzsche’s notebooks (see Nietzsche, 2003: 15) and its first published use by two years in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In spite of that, justice in Heidegger’s eyes embodies the essence of power.
This way of thinking [i.e., justice] is a self-surpassing, a becoming master of oneself from having climbed and opened a higher height. We call such self-surpassing heightening overpowering. It is the essence of power. (N3 146)
The essence of power consists in a mode of thought that approaches science, art, politics and religion from a perspective that is beyond good and evil. It is a mode of thought for which these practices are conditions of human life. It recognizes these practices as conditions that both preserve human life in the face of chaos and change and that enhance and intensify it by making use of chaos to its own ends.
Justice in this sense, Heidegger writes, is ‘the ground of the possibility and necessity of every kind of harmony of man with chaos’ (N3 149). To be in harmony with chaos does not mean to be in accord with the facts. It is a way of life that consists in stabilizing chaos in constructs of domination. It is a way of life that aims at self- and world-mastery.
That is why it requires the thought of the eternal return of chaos. It is its greatest antithesis and it is only against that obstacle that this way of life, justice, can flourish. Nietzsche writes in a note that Heidegger cites:
Life itself created the thought which is most burdensome for life; it wants to surpass its greatest obstacle! (N3 214)
Justice is a mode of thought and a way of life that posits its own greatest obstacle – the thought of the eternal return of chaos – to surpass itself and overcome the levels of stabilization it designs. In learning to master itself and the world against that obstacle, the will to power ‘is continually under way toward its essence. It is eternally active and must at the same time be end-less’ (N3 210).4
I explained in section 2 Heidegger’s argument against Nietzsche, his claim, namely, that Nietzsche’s rejection of the correspondence theory is merely apparent and is based on a commitment to an understanding of it as harmony with reality. In section 3, I explained what that harmony with reality amounts to. In this section, I highlight an ambiguity in Heidegger’s reading. Heidegger presents Nietzsche as an idealist and naturalist. In addition, Nietzsche, the sceptic and naturalist remains undeveloped in Heidegger’s interpretation.
In the next section, I turn to the most controversial aspect of Heidegger’s reading. That is his reading of Nietzsche as anthropomorphizing the world. I argue that this reading is not without justification.
* * *
There is a notable ambiguity in Heidegger’s presentation of Nietzsche in The Will to Power as Knowledge and in European Nihilism, the lecture delivered the year after in 1940.
On the one hand, Heidegger casts Nietzsche as the last great idealist of the German philosophical tradition starting with Kant. Nietzsche is seen as someone who believes that the immutable world of speculative and moral facts, Truth with a capital letter, is a value posited by and for human life and that this world has, in consequence, no veritable mind-independent reality.
That is how Heidegger aims to protect Nietzsche from naturalizing and biologizing readers like Alfred Baeumler and other Nazi ideologues. For instance, Heidegger says that against the realist notion of truth as ‘copying and imitating something at hand’, Nietzsche opposes ‘the nature of positing, poetizing, and commanding’. Heidegger adds two pages later:
Nietzsche thinks the ‘biological,’ the essence of what is alive, in the direction of commanding and poetizing, of the perspectival and horizonal: in the direction of freedom. (N3 120, 122)
Freedom has here the Kantian sense of self-determination. Heidegger wants to say that Nietzsche completes Kant’s critique of theocentric metaphysics by ensconcing himself more deeply than anyone before him in an anthropocentric metaphysics.
So little is Nietzsche’s thinking in danger of biologism that on the contrary he rather tends to interpret what is biological in the true and strict sense – the plant and animal – nonbiologically, that is, humanly. (N3 122)
On the other hand, however, Heidegger does not deny Nietzsche’s naturalist thrust against idealism.5 Heidegger’s reading of art and knowledge as conditions of human life places Nietzsche squarely in the context of evolutionary epistemology and aesthetics.
Besides, as we have seen, Heidegger does not underplay Nietzsche’s talk of life as chaos and of chaos as ‘the name for bodying life’, of ‘life as bodying writ large’. Or again, Heidegger refers to Nietzsche’s inversion of the pre-eminence of reason to the pre-eminence of the body in section 22 of European Nihilism titled The End of Metaphysics.
What would the end of metaphysics signify from the standpoint of Nietzsche as naturalist?
No doubt, it would signify the end of idealism, that is, the devaluation of the value ascribed to man in modernity as the focal point around which the world is organized, as the subject for which there is a world, as the legislator of the norms of truth, goodness and beauty, as the telos of history and progress – in short, the devaluation of all those ways of thinking that posit the human being at the centre of things and that are, accordingly, anthropocentric.
That devaluation is hinted at in the way Nietzsche’s discourse imperceptibly moves from talking about human life to talking about life in general. In that move, the human being, conceived as a rational animal, as a body endowed with a soul and spirit, and thus granted infinite value, disappears. It reappears as a finite mode connected with an infinity of other finite modes, each of which constitutes a perspectival variation on a singular cosmic force, the will to power.
How is the propositional notion of truth as error and as a falsification of life to be understood from this angle, if this falsification can no longer be seen as the result of a human agency, if human agency must, in turn, be seen as an error and falsification of life? Who or what falsifies life?
Nietzsche writes in a note dated 1885:
‘Truth’: in my way of thinking that does not necessarily mean an antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental cases only the relative position of various errors. (Nietzsche, 2003: 35)
Truth is thought as the antithesis of error in the principle of bivalence. By denying that, Nietzsche denies that there is a literal or strict sense to the words truth and error. Isn’t that Nietzsche’s ultimate post-metaphysical and anti-idealist gesture, that is, to reduce the idea of error to a metaphor, to an image for a world without vertical antitheses and ontological hierarchies, a world without distinction between high and low, good and evil, God, man and animal?
Heidegger does not appear to acknowledge that aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. He seems to take Nietzsche far too literally and far too seriously. Nietzsche’s playfulness is conspicuously absent in his reading. Nietzsche remains a metaphysician in Heidegger’s eyes, indeed, the last great metaphysician of the West.
Heidegger interprets the way Nietzsche shifts from talking about human life to talking about life in general accordingly, that is, as establishing a metaphysical thesis rather than as a gesture that takes us beyond metaphysics and idealism.
In Nietzsche’s thinking life is usually the term for what is and for beings as a whole insofar as they are. Occasionally, however, it also means our life in a special sense, which is to say, the being of man. (N3 15)
Life interpreted as will to power signifies at least two things for Heidegger:
a. Anthropomorphism
It makes explicit the anthropomorphism that has been lying dormant since the beginning of modernity with Descartes who introduces self-consciousness as a basic condition of the knowledge of being.
Descartes argues in Meditations on First Philosophy that self-consciousness is the first principle in the order of knowledge. That means that human I-hood must be presupposed at the basis of the representation of the world.
Once the I think is posited as the ground of knowledge, the traditional concept of the subject, understood as a support or underlying thing, is restricted to human self-awareness. To be a subject henceforth means to be a human agent. And that, in turn, means to be the ground and first principle of knowledge and truth.
From that moment on, it is no longer possible to identify the ground of knowledge with truth in the divine intellect. The ground of knowledge is the human I, and that I is an entity that is identical to itself through time, that unifies its experiences and that is aware of doing so.
No doubt, that notion of subjectivity as agency does not come to light before the Kantian revolution. Descartes has a contemplative rather than a constitutive model of awareness. Nevertheless, Heidegger sees it as anticipated by Descartes’s notion of the Cogito.
The consciousness of things and objects is essentially and in its ground primarily self-consciousness; only as self-consciousness is consciousness of ob-jects possible. For representation as described, the self of man is essential as what lies at the very ground. The self is sub-iectum. (N4 108)
The mind is a basic condition of the knowledge of being in Descartes. It becomes a basic condition of being in Leibniz. Being is conceived not only as representation and perception but also as striving or effort (conatus seu nisus), a striving to exist, to become actual and effective. With Leibniz, subjectivity is for the first time introduced as a constituent feature of being.
That is the historical setting that makes possible assertions in Nietzsche such as a ‘quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect – more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 45).
Does that interpretation of force as will in Nietzsche invite an understanding of the world in the image of the human being, such that anything that lives is now seen as driving, willing or effecting?
It can hardly be doubted that Nietzsche’s discourse unsettles the received interpretations of the human being. In fact, his aim in The Gay Science is to remove all human projections and anthropomorphisms from nature and ‘naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature’ (Nietzsche, 2008: 110). What reason could Heidegger have for saying that Nietzsche’s discourse seeks ‘the true and the real in the absolute humanization of all beings’ (N4 83)?
As Heidegger sees it – and, I think, he’s right about this – anthropomorphism (the world posited in the image of man) and anthropocentrism (man posited at the centre of the world) do not result from ascribing to the human being an exorbitant value. It follows, conversely, that it is naïve to think that anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism can be removed from the world simply by reducing the value of the human being to nil in an unbounded nihilism or, what amounts to the same thing, in a doctrine of scientific materialism, as in Ray Brassier (2007) for example.
Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism are offshoots of the modern understanding of being as subjectivity. If to be is to be an object for a subject, and the human being is the subject par excellence (on the ground that the self-consciousness of the human being is the foundation and first principle in the order of knowledge), then it is not surprising that we have been witnessing, since the Kantian revolution, the rise of an unrestrained anthropomorphism, of worldview philosophies that posit the human being at the centre of things and, more generally, of philosophies of the human subject.6
That is why Nietzsche’s discourse is not critical enough. On what basis is the concept of the subject restricted to the self of the human being?7 What makes possible the interpretation of being as subjectivity (the forgottenness of being)? Nietzsche does not ask these questions. The alterity of being in relation to entities remains unthought. That unthought constitutes the limit of his discourse. His discourse speaks from it and on the basis of it.
b. Value thinking
Heidegger also understands the will to power in Nietzsche as a principle of evaluation that arises once the distinction between the supersensuous and the sensuous worlds has collapsed and fallen to the ground. That principle interprets all that exists as conditions of human life.
These conditions are of two kinds. They either preserve human life against the onslaught of chaos or they enhance its mastery over chaos. In both cases, all that exists is made tangible as a value that preserves or fosters human life.
That is what Heidegger has in mind by the end of metaphysics in European Nihilism. Nietzsche does not spell its demise. The interpretation of all that exists as will to power means that a particular kind of thinking comes to dominate as the sole and exclusive thinking about the world. It is a thinking that is through and through human-centred. It perceives anything that exists as a value that serves to preserve or improve the biological and social existence of the human being. It is a thinking that is set on managing the human being and the world understood as a vast network of resources.
Metaphysics completes itself in that thinking in antithetical senses of the word. That completion, in other words, is Janus-faced:
1.On the one hand, it means that the forgottenness of being finds its first and lasting expression in the belief that there is nothing to the word being. As Nietzsche puts it, being is ‘the last wisp of evaporating reality’. An age whose thinking and activities are centred on the human being believes that the word being is without meaning. That lack of meaning, moreover, does not perplex us. The fact that we do not have a clear understanding of what that word signifies does not distress us. It leaves us indifferent.8 That indifference is something that is, in turn, forgotten.
That is what Heidegger means by nihilism. It does not mean the devaluation of the uppermost values as in Nietzsche. It defines an age in which there is nothing to being.
2.Metaphysics completes itself in the thought that there is nothing to being. A reflection on that thought, however, can awaken another kind of thinking beyond nihilism and value thinking. The completion of metaphysics also points in the direction of what Heidegger calls meditative thinking in the Discourse on Thinking.
The thought that there is nothing to being or that being is without meaning can be rephrased this way: being is nothing. No doubt, that phrase can be interpreted in a number of ways.
One way to interpret it is as follows. The terms that we use to describe entities cannot be used to describe being. Understanding it this way, we advert to the fact that being is other than entities.
Let us assume, in addition, that entities are made intelligible and manifest by reference to the present and its modalities (see Chapter 3.2). It follows that being, which is distinct from entities, cannot be understood by reference to a modality of the present. The alterity of being in relation to entities is the alterity of a past or future in relation to the present. In order to think of that alterity, we must cease thinking with the traditional predicates of being, since they are modifications of presence and are designed to think entities.
That is what Heidegger attempts to do in an essay written in 1944/6, Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being. Being, understood as the appearing of entities, is approached with a new vocabulary. It is conceived as a promise (Versprechen), as an absence (Ausbleiben), or as a secret (Geheimnis).
Three consequences follow from all this:
(a)The reflection on being as nothing calls into question the modern understanding of being as subjectivity and, more broadly, the understanding of being as presence or actuality.
The Classical Greek notion of being as presence, and its subsequent interpretations in the history of Western thought up to and including Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return and will to power, feeds on the confusion between being and entities. To think being as nothing is the first step towards recognizing the difference between being and entities. It is to think being as singularity, that is, as an event that is without precedent in the totality of entities. It is to think at the limit of Western thought.
(b)That reflection thinks the world, beyond anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, by reference to the being of entities. It calls into question the idea that the human being is the zero-point, the centre of orientation or the origin of meaning of the world.
(c)That reflection thinks the human Dasein, beyond its traditional notion as the rational animal, as an ecstatic openness that shelters being in an entity.
Sein ist Schein. Being signifies appearing, coming-to-presence, Anwesen. It is the light that suddenly breaks into entities. It differentiates them against each other and makes them visible in their outline and contours. It articulates their intelligibility through a play of contrast and difference. But that light is not itself an entity. It has neither contour nor outline that would enable us to describe it against something else.
Exposure to that light, if that were possible, would be exposure to nothingness, anxiety, death or loss of self. Language and meaning would fail in such an experience. Entities would lose their outline and contour. They would press upon the human Dasein in their entirety in their undifferentiated presence. All that would remain tangible is the sheer fact that they are.
That is why the veil is necessary. Being hides and shelters itself in entities so that the human Dasein can speak with others about things. Put differently, that light is manifest to the human Dasein as an absence or lack in the midst of entities that can be neither suppressed nor filled.
Heidegger identifies that lack with distress (Not) in Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being (N4 244). It is a distress that remains in reserve beyond the present.
Far from being reducible to a conscious state, distress is always already there in an anteriority that is more ancient than the first wakeful state of the human Dasein. It constitutes a throwness that cannot be retrieved in a project or it lies ahead of every project as the limit of the possible, as the possibility of the impossible. Like a trauma, it resists language, meaning and presence.
In sum, that reflection on being as nothing with these three consequences prepares and anticipates meditative thinking for Heidegger. The latter is a thinking that dwells ‘on what lies close’ and ‘what is closest’, ‘upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history’ (DT 47). It prepares a thinking of the fourfold with the idea of being as an absence or lack in the midst of entities, that is, with the idea of the thing that gathers together the four folds of the world, the gods, the mortals, the sky and the earth.
I showed in section 2 that Heidegger contends that Nietzsche rejects the notion of truth as correctness of representation on the ground of a positive metaphysical interpretation of the world as a world of becoming. Propositions cannot be in harmony with the character of the world as chaos owing to their logical and categorial forms, which are unchanging. In consequence, we must reject the notion of correspondence that pertains to the truth of propositions. But harmony with the real is a type of correspondence. So Nietzsche’s rejection of truth as correctness is a function of his commitment to a certain understanding of truth as correspondence.
Heidegger cashes out that idea of harmony with chaos as a way of life called justice. It is a way of life that aims to construct a world of re-identifiable objects so that the embodied subject can secure its identity and permanence in the face of the eternal return of chaos.
The problem with Heidegger’s reading is, I think, that it is too coherent or too systematic. It focuses solely on Nietzsche, the metaphysician and system builder, the heir of Spinoza or Leibniz, at the expense of other possible, and doubtless contradicting, figures in Nietzsche’s text.
Derrida et alia have stressed, against Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of the will to power and the eternal return, the element of play, irony and rhetoric as another strategy that Nietzsche deploys to deal with our commitment to truth (see Derrida, 1979).
The problem with Derrida’s reading is its excessive focus on play and irony, on Nietzsche, the sceptic, the iconoclast, the destroyer of metaphysical systems and ideas. It makes Nietzsche out to be a thinker devoid of a substantive philosophical project.
In the next section, I intend to propose a different reading of Nietzsche that steers clear of both of these two extremes. I believe that Heidegger is wrong to think that Nietzsche must be committed to b. and c. in section 2, namely, that there is a world that exists in itself and that this world has the character of becoming, in order to reject the propositional notion of truth as correctness. That is not to say that this rejection must then follow from a sceptical attitude, that is, an attitude of irony and playfulness.
As I see it, Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth, in works published after Beyond Good and Evil (1886), particularly in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (1888), involves a suspension of our commitment to truth in a manner similar to Husserl’s notion of the suspension of the natural attitude. However, that suspension in Nietzsche does not disclose the transcendental field of constituting consciousness. It invites the reader to engage in a practice of self-constitution before the tragic insight that the meaning and value of the world rests on irremovable errors. That is the new type of ascesis of the will that Nietzsche is looking for beyond the ascetic ideal and nihilism in his final works.
Contra Heidegger, Nietzsche does not reject the propositional notion of truth as correctness on the basis of a metaphysical understanding of the world as will to power. He asks his reader to suspend her natural commitment to truth. To neutralize that commitment also entails the suspension of metaphysics. It prohibits us from accepting as true any characterization of the world, including any way of life that aims and claims to be in harmony with reality.
Nietzsche is not left without a substantive philosophical project in the absence of a metaphysical thesis about the world. In Nietzsche’s eyes, what remains once metaphysics and idealism are suspended is a project of self-fashioning and self-overcoming. That is what I intend to show in the next section. In section 8, I consider whether that project presupposes as a necessary condition of possibility the forgottenness of being.
What is the ascetic ideal? It is a practice in which the self denies its earthly life for the sake of eternal happiness, or in which it seeks freedom from earthly pain and misery. In its undisguised form, the ascetic ideal is a practice of self-renunciation for the sake of what has unconditional worth, truth being the first of such things.
The three great slogans of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche tells us, are poverty, humility and chastity (Nietzsche, 1989: 108). The ascetic man speaks of himself with nausea and pity, two emotions whose combination in a single will produces one of ‘the uncanniest monsters: the “last will” of man, his will to nothingness: nihilism’. That man says to himself: ‘“If only I were someone else” [. . .] “but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I ever get free of myself? And yet – I am sick of myself!”’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 122) The ascetic man is the type of man who is not content with his lot and who copes with it by blaming himself for his discontentment (the ascetic priest turns the direction of ressentiment inwards: it is my fault I suffer, not yours [see Nietzsche, 1989: 127]).
Nietzsche dispels the illusion that modern science constitutes an antidote to the ascetic ideal. Science exposes man to a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness’. It forces him to denounce as an offence against scientific truth the belief in his dignity and absolute value, the belief in the freedom of his will as the sign of his noumenal nature. That ‘will to self-belittlement’, that ‘hard-worn self-contempt of man’, has been the straightest route to ‘the old ideal’.
Moreover, science’s general renunciation of all interpretation – which is to say, of ‘forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting’ – betrays as ‘much ascetic ideal as any denial of sensuality’. What constrains the man of science is ‘this unconditional will to truth, [which is his] faith in the ascetic ideal itself’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 151, 155–6).
Nietzsche concludes the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals with the following task he assigns to his philosophy of the future.
[Philosophers] are all oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification. [Because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal] truth was not permitted to be a problem at all... . From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth.
The will to truth requires a critique – let us thus define our own task – the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question. (Nietzsche, 1989: 152–3)
What does it mean to critique the will to truth or to call the value of truth into question?
Nietzsche can be interpreted as saying that he is not attacking the concept of truth per se but only a particular meaning of it. Thus Maudemarie Clark argues that Nietzsche challenges the metaphysical notion of truth (correspondence with a thing-in-itself) but not the commonsensical notion of truth (correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs) (Clark, 1991: 30–1).
In contrast, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche challenges the commonsensical notion of truth but not the metaphysical one.
However, neither of these two proposals quite captures what Nietzsche has in mind in that passage.
No doubt, Nietzsche’s emphasis is less on truth itself than on the will to truth or on its value. To question truth from the perspective of its value for life is to ask about the purpose for which we are committed to it: it is to bring into focus our natural and immediate trust in truth. That trust is both natural and immediate because it constitutes the very structure of belief and we are never without beliefs.
Every belief is a holding-to-be-true. (Nietzsche, 2003: 148)
There is no instance in which I believe that p but don’t accept p as true. To subject my will to truth to a critique is to turn that structure into a theme. But that I cannot do unless I suspend every belief within me, that is, unless I choose to no longer participate in accepting-p-as-true. Nietzsche is not asking us to reject this or that theory of truth. If a belief by its nature purports to represent what is the case, then he is asking us to assume an attitude of neutrality with respect to what is the case.
It might be asked how that neutrality fits with Nietzsche’s claim in a note written in 1881 where he says that we are ‘to look into the world through as many eyes as possible, to live in drives and activities so as to create eyes for ourselves’ (Ansell Pearson and Large, 2006: 239). That passage and its cousin in the Genealogy (see Nietzsche, 1989: 119) seems to suggest the contrary of what I am saying, namely, that Nietzsche is saying that we are to enter into and explore perspectives in order to know the world.
I am not sure that Nietzsche is interested in knowing what there is. After all, if neither the self nor the world has a nature that waits to be discovered, as Nietzsche believes, then there is nothing for us to know. What I take Nietzsche to be saying in the 1881 note is that perspectives, drives or passions are conditions of our human, all-too-human knowledge. To explore these perspectives, to enter into them is to expose the errors and simplifications on which our knowledge rests. My claim is that, in order to explore such perspectives and become attentive to the conditions of knowledge, we must assume an attitude of neutrality with regard to what our knowledge represents about the self or the world.
How else could Nietzsche claim to engage in a critique of the will to truth? For this critique to be critical rather than dogmatic, it must be immanent rather than transcendent. That means that it is not entitled to appeal to facts that are external to the will to truth, to such facts as that ‘this world is the will to power – and nothing besides!’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 550). Nietzsche’s critique precedes by right the assertion of any such fact.
Moreover, to assume an attitude of neutrality with regard to the representational content of propositions is by necessity to bring within the scope of one’s critique all theories of truth, all beliefs about what truth might consist in, including metaphysical and commonsensical notions.
The problem with both Clark and Heidegger’s readings is that they do not take seriously enough what it means for the reader to raise that question, what she is called upon to do in posing it: ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth?’ If ‘the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 161) as a problem, then that consciousness can no longer take that will for granted. It can no longer allow it to present facts about the world. Instead, it must subject to a critique the source of all truth-taking. That is the type of life that evaluates things as being thus-and-so in moral and cognitive practices.
Let me consider this from another angle. Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science:
If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science – the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation – would be utterly unbearable. (Nietzsche, 2008: 163)
The most extreme form of nihilism for Nietzsche arises not with the recognition that the world is meaningless (passive nihilism) but with the recognition that the meaning and value of life depend on fictions that we must accept as true (active nihilism). It arises with the general insight into error as a necessary condition of consciousness. Nietzsche continues in the note where he defines the structure of belief:
The most extreme form of nihilism would be that every belief, every holding-to-be-true, is necessarily false: because there is no true world. Thus: a perspectival illusion whose origins lie within us (inasmuch as we have a constant need of a narrower, abridged and simplified world)
– that the measure of force is how far we can admit to ourselves illusoriness, the necessity of lies, without perishing.
To this extent nihilism, as the denial of a true world, of a being, might be a divine way of thinking. (Nietzsche, 2003: 148–9)
Note that the focus in this and in the preceding passage of The Gay Science is not on the truth of that insight, but on how to endure it. That is highly significant. In submitting our will to truth to a critique, what Nietzsche is calling for is a revaluation of our attitude towards knowledge and truth. If we take deep pleasure and interest in deception and in being deceived in viewing a work of art, why can’t we affirm the same pleasure and interest in viewing the errors and deceptions on which our conscious life rests?
Nietzsche is not committed to the paradoxical claim that it is true that error is necessary. Rather, he is committed to shifting the focus away from such metaphysical and epistemic questions as Is error a character of how things are in themselves? and How can I know that? to the ethical question How can I live with that insight?, or better, What would that insight do to me, how would it affect and transform me, if I was to accept it as true?
To place truth in the service of life, to ask about its value for life, is already to address truth from a post-metaphysical perspective. It is to address it from the perspective of a practice of self-discipline that uses its own will to truth as a test and means of self-overcoming.
Randall Havas has argued in Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge that what Nietzsche means in his talk of the will to truth gaining self-consciousness is our becoming aware of its historical character (Havas, 1995: 163). He contends that the modern man of knowledge tends to deny that his commitment to truth is the product of religion, morality and philosophy since he holds that it constitutes a radical break with the past. By acknowledging its historical character, however, he affirms its necessity for him, and in doing so, he recognizes that it is of a piece with what he overcomes. In this way, Havas maintains, Nietzsche means ‘to strengthen, not to weaken, our commitment to truthfulness’ (Havas, 1995: xvii).
It is difficult to reconcile that reading with Nietzsche’s claim that what distinguishes late modernity is the recognition that our commitment to truth depends on our need for error. Such recognition can surely not result in strengthening our commitment to truth. Indeed, not much sense can be made of the Nietzschean problematic of the necessity of lies on Havas’s reading. Havas is right to insist that Nietzsche is not saying that our commitment to truth is to be overcome in favour of another one (Havas, 1995: 162). But that is because that commitment is to be put in the service of a different end than that of knowledge.
Tracy Strong’s reading of what it means for the will to truth to gain self-consciousness in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration is closer to the reading offered here. He says that this is the consciousness that there is no truth and that we should continue to seek it.
Since Nietzsche has refused the succor of the realm of theoretical reason, the problems of truth must be found in practical reason. This latter, now detached from any possible link to a purer world, is a human responsibility: the contradictions are ours, and not just inherent in the relations between the theoretical and practical world. (Strong, 1988: 77)
As I see it, however, the question of truth for Nietzsche is addressed in the context of an ethics of self-constitution rather than in that of practical reason. Nietzsche’s epistemology concludes with the thought that the categories of reason are fictions that have been employed in the formation of the human, all-too-human. It culminates in a consideration of the effects of truth on the self, of the way the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world have shaped us.9
Let me clarify this by considering what Nietzsche is doing in On the Genealogy of Morals. How are we to read his description of the slave revolt in morality in the First Essay, for example, or his account of the origin of the bad conscience in the Second Essay? Does Nietzsche claim to be describing historical facts or empirical origins?
And yet, how could they be taken in that way when Nietzsche asks his reader, in the final paragraphs of the Genealogy, to call the value of truth into question? Doesn’t that question cast an uneasy light on everything he has been telling us about morality, the bad conscience and the ascetic ideal up to that point?
Strong puts his finger on how to approach that problem when he remarks the following:
What Nietzsche comes to see in the course of his investigations is that illness he diagnosed – the development and triumph of nihilism in Western culture – goes far beyond a temporary aberration. It will not be possible to simply tell people what is wrong, for the very manner in which they understand the world will not permit them to understand the problem at hand... . No matter how good or complete the account of what has happened, unless a change in the manner of understanding is provoked, the account will remain merely a museum. (Strong, 1988: 31)
That rightly suggests that what Nietzsche tells us is not to be taken from a third person standpoint as a series of objective facts. But how is that change in our way of understanding to be accomplished? Through a kind of exercise, an exercise of the will to truth.
Nietzsche’s discourse on slave morality (say) has no representational content or truth-value. It is more of the order of a biographical narrative that shapes our self-understanding than a statement about what is the case. The entire force of this discourse concentrates itself in the kind of obstacle it presents to our self-understanding. Its language, style and content are meant to bring about ‘a new series of experiences’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 261), that is, they are designed to create a context of meaning in which to interpret who we are, or better, how we have become who we are. Nietzsche remarks early on in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life:
A historiography could be imagined which had in it not a drop of common empirical truth and yet could lay claim to the highest degree of objectivity. (Nietzsche, 1997: 91)
A context of meaning like his discourse on slave morality might be called objective in the sense that it provides the reader with an anchor for making sense of her past and present behaviour without itself, however, being either true or false.
For Nietzsche, the narratives that constitute our self-understanding – the Platonic or Judeo-Christian accounts of man and the world – allow us to make sense of what we do and believe, but they don’t represent facts (although they claim to). Strong remarks:
Nietzsche ... thinks that societies dwell in the metaphors men take to be true since they have been so ‘worn out’ that they no longer appear as human creations. (Strong, 1988: 38)
There is no good reason to read Nietzsche’s narratives on slave morality or on the origin of the bad conscience otherwise than as metaphors in that extended sense. The question we must ask in reading them is not Is it true? but What if I were to accept it as true? What if I were to see my actions and beliefs as manifesting slave morality? What effect would that have on my self-understanding? The question for Nietzsche is whether his reader has the strength to incorporate such contexts of meaning as he designs in the Genealogy and elsewhere and whether she is able to endure the light they shed on her actions and beliefs. That, I take it, is the experimentation with truth that he calls for in Beyond Good and Evil. What is at stake for Nietzsche is the kind of effects that our commitment to the truthfulness of certain narratives has on the self.10
Nietzsche’s concern with that kind of exercise and discipline of the will is not limited to the will to truth. There is first his description in the Second Essay of the training and education that gives rise to the sovereign individual. The question here is how to breed an animal with the right to make promises (Nietzsche, 1989: 57).11 That question is at the heart of Nietzsche’s thought at the time, as two notes written in 1887 demonstrate. He says in the first one,
I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening; a gymnastics of the will ... One should even devise tests for one’s strength in being able to keep one’s word. (Nietzsche, 1968: 483)
The second note says,
What has been spoiled by the church’s misuse of it:
1.Ascesis: one no longer really dares to point out the natural usefulness of ascesis, its indispensability in the service of educating the will. Our absurd world of educators ... believes it can make do with ‘instruction’, with dressage of the brain; it lacks even the concept that something else must come first – education of the will-power. Examinations are set in everything except the main issue: whether one is capable of willing, entitled to promise: the young man finishes his education without having so much as a question, a curiosity about this highest value problem of his nature.
In the Second Essay, Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual as a person who gives his word reluctantly and slowly, whose trust is ‘a mark of distinction’, since it is something that can be relied on. He knows himself ‘strong enough to maintain it in the face of accidents’. His is a ‘proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility’. The ‘consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case ... become instinct, the dominating instinct ... this sovereign individual calls it his conscience’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 59–60).
Nietzsche has most likely in mind the famous story of the Roman consul Regulus, as Cicero tells it in On Duties. Captured by the Carthaginians in the First Punic War, Regulus was sent to the Senate after having sworn an oath that he would come back to Carthage unless certain noble captives were returned to the Carthaginians. He went to Rome and pleaded that the captors not be returned to the enemy. His authority prevailed. The captives were held back, and he returned to Carthage, knowing fully well that he was going to a cruel death. Cicero (1928: 43) tells us that in all this, Regulus thought that his oath should be kept.
Secondly, Nietzsche refers to Julius Caesar in Twilight of the Idols as the type of individual who defended himself against sickliness and headache with ‘tremendous marches, the simplest form of living, uninterrupted sojourn in the open air, continuous toil’. One would have to find the highest type of free man, he continues in another note, where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome:
Five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of servitude. This is true psychologically when one understands by ‘tyrants’ pitiless and dreadful instincts, to combat which demands the maximum of authority and discipline toward oneself – finest type Julius Caesar. (Nietzsche, 1990: 96, 104)
These examples make clear that the goal of this practice of self-discipline is not ataraxia, a state of mental tranquility, as it is for the Stoics and Epicureans. It seeks peace neither in nor from this world. Displeasures are not avoided because they count as harmful or bad. Suffering is not denied and does not lead to self-denial. Displeasures and suffering are met as resistances that have to be made serviceable. They are sought out as incentives for gaining a greater measure of control over oneself and for training and exercising the will.12
In Nietzsche’s eyes, the greatest and most difficult challenge that faces the modern human being is the extent to which he is able to remain well disposed towards himself with the insight into error as a necessary condition of conscious life. The assertion that truth is a kind of error can be seen as a challenge to the reader in Nietzsche’s final texts. It is a challenge designed to initiate an exercise of the will. How will the reader encounter that proposition? She will no doubt encounter it at first as something that she will immediately and naturally refuse to believe, as a ‘questionable’ and ‘dangerous’ proposition that threatens her participation in daily life, as a resistance that must be overcome. Far from bringing the reader in harmony with becoming, that proposition is meant to force her to consider whether she has the strength to incorporate it as a habitual outlook on life, whether she can view life from the tragic standpoint where its meaningfulness depends on errors that she has accepted as true. To engage in that type of exercise would be to move in the direction of a critical ethos in which the history of truth would vanish into a final and lasting epoché.
Does that practice of self-discipline presuppose, as a necessary condition of possibility, the forgottenness of being?
No doubt, that practice takes place by suspending metaphysical characterizations of the world as being or as becoming, as reality or as appearance. But that suspension doesn’t entail that it operates without some understanding of being. Put differently, as long as something shows up in that practice and is intelligible to it, there prevails an understanding of being.
How do things show up in that practice? They show up as appearances. We are asked to incorporate the insight that the propositions that we have hitherto accepted as true are based on errors. Such things are called seemings. They pretend to be real, or they seduce us into the belief that they are real when they are not. Such things are distinguished from realities.
What else should be understood by appearance in this context?
Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s note on truth with which I began this chapter at the end of his 1936 lecture, The Will to Power as Art. Nietzsche says in the note:
Truth is the kind of error without which a particular kind of living creature could not live. The value for life is what ultimately decides. (Nietzsche, 2003: 16)
Heidegger’s interpretation of that note in that lecture is markedly different from his argument in Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1931/2) and The Will to Power as Knowledge (1939). The section in which Heidegger cites the note in The Will to Power as Art is titled The New Interpretation of Sensuousness and the Raging Discordance between Art and Truth. Heidegger’s question is how the constitution of the sensuous should be understood in the context of Nietzsche’s overturning of Platonism.
The overturning of Platonism involves the revaluation of the hierarchical structure that orders the supersensuous and the sensuous. For Plato, the supersensuous is the world of unchanging truths or Forms. The sensuous is the world of seemings. Since seemings are pale reflections, shadows or copies of truth, the sensuous is secondary or dependent on the supersensuous. The supersensuous renders it intelligible and brings it about. For Platonism, the supersensuous is of more value than the sensuous.
Heidegger focuses, throughout his lecture, on Nietzsche’s phrase that art is worth more than truth. That phrase enacts in nuce the overturning of Platonism.
Once Platonism is overturned, the sensuous is no longer conceived as a copy of the supersensuous. The sensuous is what gives birth to the supersensuous. Citing Nietzsche’s note above, Heidegger remarks that truth refers to a vanishing appearance that has been fixed and made constant. That is how the supersensuous arises.
Truth does not become a non-being in Nietzsche’s overturning of Platonism. It is a kind of appearance that Heidegger qualifies as mere appearance, bloßen Scheins. It is a seeming that is necessary for life.
What makes possible appearance in general? There would be neither seemings nor realities, neither appearances nor truths, neither the sensuous nor the supersensuous unless something showed up and came to light. On Heidegger’s reading, the perspectival for Nietzsche is what, in advance and before every ontic determination, makes possible light and appearing. The perspectival is appearing proper, the bringing-to-appearance of what there is.
aller Anschein und aller Scheinbarkeit nur möglich ist, wenn überhaupt sich etwas zeigt und zum Vorschein kommt. Was ein solches Erscheinen im voraus ermöglicht, ist das Perspektivische selbst. Dieses ist das eigentliche Scheinen, zum sich-zeigen-Bringen. (N1 215)
Heidegger cites one of Nietzsche’s notes in which he writes that Schein is ‘the actual and sole reality of things’. That does not mean, Heidegger says, that reality is something merely apparent. It means that to be is to be perspectival. It is to bring something to appearance, to let shine, to let it, an entity, shine in itself.
das Realsein ist in sich perspektivisch, ist ein zum-Vorschein-Bringen, ein Scheinenlassen, in sich ein Scheinen; Realität ist Schein ... Die Realität, das Sein, ist der Schein im Sinne des perspektivischen Scheinenlassens. (N1 215)
Being in Nietzsche means appearing in the sense of perspectival letting-appear.
The thrust of Heidegger’s interpretation in this final section of the lecture is not merely that it presents Nietzsche as a proto-phenomenologist. Heidegger seems to be suggesting that Nietzsche’s interpretation of the will to power as art recovers a sense of being, beyond its forgottenness, as light, appearing or disclosure.
Does this mean that Nietzsche’s text recognizes, however obliquely, the alterity of being in relation to entities? Schein properly means light, radiance or appearance. That is presumably to be taken in the verbal sense as the articulation of the intelligibility of entities, as their coming-to-appearance, rather than in the nominal sense, as referring to a thing that appears.
Schein in that verbal sense vanishes, however, with truth understood as the drive to arrest and fix what flows and moves. Truth turns the movement of appearing into a thing that endures and is constant. Truth in Nietzsche, Heidegger says, means a true being (wahrhaft Seiendes). And that means, in turn, something constant and fixed (Beständiges, Festgemachtes) (N1 214).
Is it as light and appearing that the practice of self-discipline understands being? Perhaps. In the final analysis, however, one thing is certain. This is that Heidegger’s Nietzsche, whatever else that figure may signify, is as protean as Nietzsche. That figure is not reducible to the last great metaphysician of the West. She also thinks from the finitude of philosophy.